Chapter 7

Imogen stood on the edge of a castle courtyard that should have looked familiar—and unfortunately did in a sort of disgustingly filthy way—held on to her phone for security, and tried to make sense of what was happening to her.

Her choices were limited. While it would have been nice to have believed she was caught in an exceptionally realistic dream or a fantastically vivid hallucination, she had to rule both those things out. She was awake and she was in full control of her faculties. What she could believe, however, was that she had been drugged. She wasn’t sure when it had happened, but obviously she should have known better than to trust an impeccably dressed noblewoman she’d met inside a shop selling witches’ paraphernalia. Maybe it had been a delayed reaction to that sludge she’d drunk in Curiosities in Plaid the day before.

Or perhaps it was just one of her siblings behind her current misery. Her family was different, there was no getting around it. Her father was brilliant, always sitting on piles of money made by taking over and destroying whatever company had caught his roving eye. Her mother was brilliant in an entirely different way, having an encyclopedic knowledge of every political happening over the past hundred years in any country one cared to quiz her about, but possessing absolutely no social skills at all.

How her parents had managed to produce five children was a mystery, but four of them were overachievers to an embarrassing level with devious minds bent on tormenting the weakest of the pack, who of course happened to be her. She was the youngest child, possessing absolutely no desire to put on panty hose and swim with corporate sharks, with only her wits and an uncanny ability to smell trouble to keep her from being completely at her siblings’ mercy. She wondered how it was she’d managed to emerge from that group with any part of her soul left intact.

Her current situation was one they definitely could have planned.

She would have called any one of those siblings to tell them exactly what she thought of them, but she’d already discovered that she had no signal. That in itself was odd because she’d specifically made sure she could be reached anywhere.

She leaned against stone that looked about how it had looked the day before and stared glumly at her surroundings. She had to believe she was trapped on a movie set because it was the only thing that made sense. That also made her situation slightly easier to accept than trying to come up with some otherworldly reason as to why she seemed to be losing her mind. She took a deep breath and forced herself to admire her surroundings.

Whoever had decorated the set had done an amazing job of it. The whole place looked as if it had been dumped back in time. Someone had put up some sort of blacksmith’s shop where the tea shop had been. The chapel was in the same place, which made sense given how hard it would have been to move all that stone. There were some useful additions by way of stables and a small, overrun garden, and what was perhaps a training field of sorts for the very fragrant extras she’d already encountered inside the gates.

She considered the actors she’d encountered outside the gates. They were a different story, though she would admit she hadn’t paid very much attention to them short of threatening to have them fired for participating in such a terrible practical joke.

She nodded to herself. It was a joke of course, unless...

Unless she’d been dumped into some sort of reality show. She was tempted to consider that seriously, though she couldn’t imagine why anyone would have chosen her for that sort of thing. She was a nobody in the film world and not really anybody anywhere else.

Well, except for the fact that the tone-deaf son of the executive producer of her current gig had been trying to hit on her for the past year. She had honestly hoped that escaping into the wilds of Scotland might be what saved her from having to listen to any more of his suggestions for ever-more-serious commitments. She hadn’t even gone for coffee with the guy; she wasn’t at all ready to be talking about picket fences and the number of children he wanted.

She glanced to her left. The teenager she’d been using as a crutch was still hovering about twenty feet away from her, watching her nervously. She couldn’t bring herself to be rude to him—he had let her lean on him to get back inside the castle after all. She smiled at him. He looked at her warily in return.

“I won’t have you fired,” she promised.

That didn’t seem to leave an impression, but then again he looked fairly stressed. Maybe his dream was to be a leading man and he was trying not to blow any sort of impression he could be making. She couldn’t blame him.

Her ankle finally stopped throbbing enough that she could think straight, which unfortunately left her little choice but to take a good hard look at her surroundings. She eased around the corner to the front of the castle and perched on the edge of the stairs. It left her feeling a little more exposed than she was comfortable with, but she had to get off her foot for at least a minute or two.

She almost couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Whoever had been hired to transform the castle into a medieval abode had done an amazing job. She wasn’t sure if her director would have been pleased with the serious lack of hygiene—a period piece notwithstanding—but there was no denying it looked damned authentic. It smelled damned authentic as well.

As she sat there, she realized she was looking at the wrong things. Walls and manure spread around were great, but the courtyard was filled with all kinds of people who were really doing a bang-up job of living the medieval dream. In fact, there were a couple of groups of them right there in front of her, just ready for her to observe them at close range.

It didn’t take her long to realize what she was seeing was a thrown-together production of West Side Story, with two groups of guys facing off about twenty feet in front of her. She knew which group belonged to inside-the-castle versus outside-the-castle mostly because of the way they were dressed. The inside guys were definitely less well-groomed. Their leader was standing in front of the ragtag group having himself a really good scratch. She shuddered and turned her gaze elsewhere.

The other guys looked like extras from a high-budget medieval set. Their clothing was very nice, their faces washed, and their posture ramrod straight. Their leader...

Oh.

Him.

She realized with a bit of a shiver that it had been that guy there to catch her. She wondered how she could have been so distracted that she’d missed that view.

The teenager stalking her had his hand on her shoulder suddenly, which made her realize she had almost fallen off the steps. Well, in her defense, the leader of the cleaner group of extras was exceptionally... well, exceptional.

She had dated her share of toads, really. She wasn’t sure why she attracted such jerks, but there you had it. Her dating life was, in a word, awful. That said, she certainly hadn’t come to the UK to date. She was there to do a job brilliantly so she could climb to ever higher heights of filmmaking happiness. Still, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a look at that guy standing over there, just as sort of an academic exercise. She settled more comfortably on her step and looked at him from a casting director’s perspective. If she had been looking for a leading man for a major movie, she would have stopped her search and considered her star found.

He was standing in front of his little group of extras, looking rather lordly and in charge. He had well-fitting clothes, nice boots, and a sword that she supposed he at least knew how to pretend to use. He was tall and filled his costume out in a way that was muscular without being indicative of too much time spent at the gym.

She studied his face. Now, that was a face the camera would have loved. Not pretty, but instead absolutely stunning with just the right amount of cheekbone definition to provide angles for the lighting guys to get excited over. When she escaped the set and sued whoever was responsible for her current trauma, she would definitely keep that guy out of the carnage.

She wondered if he might be interested in going out for a coffee.

Just looking at him made her feel a little breathless, which wasn’t at all useful at present, so she left him taking care of his medieval-looking business and concentrated on her own problems. She wondered why no one seemed willing to at least give her the odd, conspiratorial wink to let her know that it was all just an elaborate prank, but maybe there was a casting director hiding in the ranks, looking for the next big star. She couldn’t imagine she was being considered for that role, which meant that she had probably just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That realization was enough to leave her breathing a bit easier. She might have been trapped on a movie set, but she had a step to sit on and it wasn’t raining. It could have been much worse.

She looked at the kid standing close by. Maybe he was there to keep an eye on her and keep her from wandering off where she wasn’t supposed to be. She considered the possibilities of that for quite a while before she decided that whatever he was, he might be bribable. All the more reason to make friends with him.

She scooted over on the step and patted the place next to her. The kid eyed her warily, then perched next to her with the enthusiasm of a bird sitting next to a chops-licking feline. She smiled reassuringly.

“I’m Imogen. Who are you?”

He looked momentarily perplexed, then seemed to get what she was saying. “Bartholomew.”

Of course he was. “Thank you, Bartholomew. What’s your job here?”

He frowned, as if he simply couldn’t fathom what she might possibly be saying. She gave him time to think about it, giving him the occasional encouraging nod.

“Do,” she repeated finally. “Here. On set.”

He was still looking at her as if she were the one who was absolutely crazy, which she supposed might have been part of the story arc. Woman out of her depth being driven crazy by the people around her as they treated her like she was the one who was nuts. Genius. Maybe the best thing she could do was try to frustrate that plan.

“I think I’ll go have a look around,” she announced, glancing at him to see how he was taking the news.

He was, unsurprisingly, still looking at her as if he couldn’t understand a thing she was saying. He also looked a little nervous. Maybe he was afraid if he did the wrong thing, he would get canned after all.

Imogen tested her ankle and decided that it could definitely be walked on presently and iced later. She used Bartholomew to get fully to her feet, patted him on the shoulder, then eased past him to head inside the great hall. It seemed like the best place to start an investigation. She would walk around casually and keep a weather eye out for extension cords leading to hidden cameras.

The occupants of the inside seemed to have decamped for more interesting locales outside, because she had the whole place to herself. The floor was just as disgusting as she remembered it being and the place smelled just as bad. Obviously there was a terrific set designer at the helm, someone Imogen decided she would show mercy to when she was suing the whole crew for pain and suffering.

She paused in the middle of the floor and turned in a circle, looking for things that might give some indication that there were practical jokers in the area. Maybe that wouldn’t be as straightforward as she had hoped. It was a castle, after all, and she supposed it hadn’t been originally plumbed for running water or built with electrical conduits in mind. But she didn’t even see anything on the walls except a few rather ugly tapestries and a few sconces holding torches. There was a large fire pit in the middle of the hall. Not even a fireplace set into the wall to possibly conceal a sibling or two.

She looked at the high table for a minute or two, then frowned. There was still no sword there. She walked over to the table, then peered over it to see if she might have knocked it over in her enthusiasm. No, there was definitely no sword hiding there, or under the table, or behind the tapestry that hung in tatters behind the high table. There was, however, a bit of a hole in the floor where she could easily imagine a sword once residing.

That was definitely weird.

She forced herself to remain calm and think about where the sword might have gone. There had certainly been no lack of them outside with those extras. She supposed it might have been far-fetched to think that the sword might have opened some trapdoor that she’d fallen through and clunked her head on long enough for some set decorating to go on, but she realized she was starting to get a little desperate for answers. Or maybe she was getting desperate for something to eat.

All she knew was that she was never going to enter another reputedly haunted castle ever again.

She decided abruptly that the sword had to be the key. Obviously someone had scampered off with it leaving no one but her own sweet self to go after it and get it back. She hadn’t survived a fifty-three-hour trip to the UK only to get sidetracked by a few bad apples with rotten senses of humor. The only thing that made sense to her was the trapdoor idea and obviously the trapdoor was only going to be activated when the sword was jammed into the floor.

There, that seemed reasonable. She nodded to herself as she walked back across the floor. The door to the hall was still open, so she stepped out into the grayness of a day that looked like it was about to threaten more rain, wished she’d bought a different coat the day before so she didn’t have to keep wearing the one she was wearing with her personal advertisement on the seat, and took a hard look at what was going on.

Well, there were swords aplenty and no lack of stunt guys who seemed to know how to at least wear them. The leaders of those two groups seemed to be thinking about actually drawing their swords and putting them to use, if the tone of their conversation was any indication. She was half tempted to point out that they were putting on a really good show for people who were so well hidden as to possibly be off at lunch, but given how serious they looked, she supposed they wouldn’t listen to her.

She supposed they also wouldn’t listen to her if she told them that maybe drawing their swords and hacking at each other was a potentially very dangerous activity. She analyzed their technique based on the best of the stuntmen she had seen over the course of her rather long career as a movie-set grunt and decided that in this, at least, those two knew what they were doing.

She watched dispassionately for quite some time, deciding at one point that there might be a correlation between how nicely a character was dressed and how well he could wield his sword. The guy with smudges on his cheeks wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t even close to his lordly opponent’s standards.

The languages they were speaking were also odd. Although her graduate degree had involved enormous amounts of French, it had been mostly a reading sort of French, not a speaking sort of the same. The nicely dressed guys were speaking French among themselves, though with an accent that made her head hurt. The other guys... well, she had no idea what they were speaking. It could have been Anglo-Saxon for all she could make of it. All she knew was that the next time she found herself trapped in some sort of horrible reality show, she was going to demand a translator.

The fight continued, if a fight it could be called. Without warning, a sword went flying up into the air. She watched it flip end over end on the way up, then continue the spinning at a much slower pace on the way down. It was odd how the closer a sword came to one’s face, the bigger it looked. She realized it was going to hit her approximately three seconds before she felt as if her head had just split open.

And that was, she suspected as she felt herself fall into blackness, the end of her brush with reality TV.