“I’m telling you, it’s nothing like that, Harper. I’m not approaching her. I’m not going anywhere near her. Not anywhere. Believe me.” He met her gaze almost fiercely, his expression uncharacteristically hard and taut. “I didn’t come here for that,” he told her.

Behind the dripping lenses of her spectacles, Harper’s quick eyes narrowed. She held him then with such a slow, gimlet scrutiny that Storm at last averted his face from her. He frowned miserably into the blizzard.

But when Harper spoke again, her tone had softened. She had long since satisfied herself that there was nothing malevolent in the man. Indeed—she was forced to admit it now—she was developing a definite fondness for him. “All right,” she said, more gently. “Why did you come here, then?”

Fighting down a violent shiver, he made a clipped gesture before hugging himself tightly again: he was trying to indicate the vista of crumbling stones, the blizzard-whipped church, even the invisible moor around them. The usual—puzzling—melancholy of his eyes was plain to see. And his tone too, Harper thought, had become wistful. “I told you—it’s England. I’ve been making movies about this place my whole life. Places like this. I mean, look at it, the whole country, it’s a movie set, I swear.”

“Mm. Yes.” She followed his gesture with a thin smile. “Some of us rather prefer to think of it as a fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war—but yes, a movie set, all right. And so?”

Storm still gazed visionary at the place, with those sad eyes of his. Gazed at a spot where a small elm bent and swayed in what seemed like mourning over the cornice of a decaying crypt. “So, to me, this is where the ghosts live.” He murmured it, almost to himself. The snow streaking his face with wet, his watch cap sodden, his anorak sodden, flattened, the puff gone out of it.

Even Harper now, statue that she was, had begun to feel the shivers rising from her depths. And still she stood, her wrinkled hand frozen to the dragon head of her stick, the stick planted in the gathering snow, the snow eating through her boots, through her cape, through her Borsalino. And still she stood motionless, watching the graveyard wall through her streaked lenses, watching the snowy mound that was the venison bait.

“I came here,” Storm said, “because I wanted to see—”

“Shh!”

He stopped. Harper had gone electric, tensed. The two of them listened, their faces tilted into the blizzard’s teeth. There seemed to be something … They listened, vying with the storm.