The night had turned quiet, the air as cold and sharp as the blade I pressed against the stranger’s skin. I didn’t dare move, hardly dared to breathe, as I stared at him.
I had a knife at a man’s throat. What was I doing?
Kael prowled closer, his steps slow and calculating, as if he wasn’t quite certain what the man lying in front of me was capable of doing. His face was hard as he knelt beside the man, gaze flicking between the knife to my face with a silent question. Was I all right holding the knife? I was, I realized, and that was slightly disconcerting.
“Who are you?” Kael asked.
The gaunt man, with his skin tinted gray, remained silent. The thinness and colorless complexion of his face made him seem older than what I assumed. He shifted under my touch, and I pressed the blade harder onto his throat.
Kael tried a different question. “What do you want?”
His voice was low, growling.
There was something strange about the eavesdropper’s appearance. In addition to looking as if he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, his clothes were tattered and torn. His bony knees peeked out from holes in his faded jeans. He had to be freezing beneath the light jacket hanging loose on his thin frame.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Who are you?”
The man remained silent.
Kael’s nostrils flared, muscles jumping in his jaw as he ground his teeth. He wasn’t going to tolerate silence long. I couldn’t bring myself to let the blade of my knife cut the man, but I dug my fingers into his shoulder. Perhaps the sharp bite of my fingernails would persuade him to talk before Kael tore into him with the claws of his jaguar.
I knew he had heard valuable information. We couldn’t risk letting this man go without knowing his intentions.
“Who are you?” I pressed again.
His eyebrows pinched in, and his lips mashed together.
I tightened my grip on his shoulder. The magic that churned beneath my skin began to hum. He had to say something. Though I had a sinking feeling he had something to do with the mage, I had to be sure.
My hands tingled. Magic spilled from my fingertips and onto his shoulder. It crawled onto his skin, where his veins began to protrude across his skin like blue spiderwebs. His mouth opened and closed as if he were a fish above the water’s surface. The man’s eyes watered, and a taut moan squeezed up his throat.
“Olivia.”
Kael’s voice broke through a fog I hadn’t realized I’d been trapped in. I blinked and pulled my hand from the man’s shoulder. I glanced up at the shifter, his steady gaze unreadable.
Wordlessly, he turned his attention to the eavesdropper. “If you do not begin speaking, my friend here is going to release some real power on you.”
My gut twisted. Had I just tortured the guy? I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I’d only wanted answers. I had to get this magic under control before I did something I would regret.
Sweat glistened on the man’s forehead. He stammered, struggling to string words together. When he finally spoke, his voice cracked with thirst.
“My master sent me to find you, to see if you pursued him.”
I glanced at Kael. The mage had people following us?
“He hoped you would follow him,” the man rasped, “and that, before you found him, you would remember.”
“Remember what?” I asked.
The man twitched, eyelids fluttering. At first, I thought it must be a nervous tick, but he didn’t stop. He began to jerk violently, arms and legs thrashing.
Kael and I got to our feet and stepped back. My eyes widened. Blood trickled from the corner of the man’s mouth and ears. Then, as suddenly as the fit started, he stilled. He somehow looked thinner, paler. In the light of the nearby streetlight, his eyes were glassy.
My heart raced. Had I done that? I clutched my hand to my chest. I hadn’t been touching him, though.
“Is he…dead?” I asked.
“A puppet,” said Cordelia as she came up behind me. Had she been watching the entire time? Her steady gaze was locked on the body at our feet.
“A puppet?” Kael rumbled.
“Poisoned with a yearning to deliver the message to Olivia and nothing else. He’d been driven to the point of exhaustion and starvation. The mage’s doing, most certainly.”
The blood dripped from the man’s lips to the cold sidewalk.
“But it’s barely been two days since the mage stole the key,” I said. “He wouldn’t have gotten in this state in such a short amount of time.”
The witch pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders. “The mage’s dark magic would work quickly. This man didn’t have a prayer.”
Who was he? Had he chosen the mage as his master, or had it been forced upon him? It hit me then, as I stood with a shifter and a witch in the darkness, that we were standing over a dead body.
I glanced around. The last thing we needed was for someone to call the police. My gaze fell to the man’s jacket as if I could see the fingerprints I had left there.
“I will get rid of him,” Cordelia said. “You need to hurry if you have any hope of catching the mage before it’s too late.”
So many questions burned in my mind about my magic and the crazy visions, but it appeared I would have to find the answers elsewhere.
“Thank you so much for your help, Cordelia.”
She gave me a small smile and a nod.
What was she going to do with the body?
Before I could ask, Kael grabbed me by the elbow and quickly towed me to my car. He seemed eager to put distance between himself and the witch.
“Stop manhandling me.” I jerked my arm from Kael’s grasp. “Or next it’ll be your throat I set my knife against.” I wiggled Chaucer in front of his face.
Kael scoffed, unfazed. He opened the door for me, waited for me to settle into my seat, then shut my door before rounding the front of the car. How was it that one second he seemed ready to physically haul me to Scotland, and the next he was being a gentleman? The guy was an enigma. Were all shifters like this?
We passed buildings and sidewalks as we made our way to the airport. I tried not to think about the possibility of anyone else trying to follow me.
“Why did you call me Livvie?” I asked in the silence.
I got a shoulder shrug in answer.
I rotated my knife in my hand, studying the dark grains in the handle as we waited at a stoplight. “No one has ever called me Livvie besides my dad.”
“You must have been really close to him,” Kael said quietly.
“Yeah, I was.”
Kael took a turn to the left, making the final stretch to the airport. “What happened to him?”
“His wretched car wouldn’t start. Instead of calling a cab or asking for a ride like a normal person, he decided to get out his old bike and head to campus his own way.” I paused, a tightness in my chest. “He was struck as he crossed the road. I was on a dig in Mexico at the time.”
Kael was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry.”
I shoved my knife back into my bag. “He died being his normal, stubborn self, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing in the first place. It was the way he would have wanted to go.”
“It sounds like you.”
“No,” I said as we pulled into the airport. “When it’s my time, I want to see it coming.”
It was a sixteen-hour flight to Inverness, Scotland. I slept on the flight, cramming myself next to the window in an attempt to not fall asleep on Kael. I still woke with my head lolling onto one of his broad shoulders. He hadn’t seemed to mind. Thank goodness I hadn’t drooled.
I was still exhausted as we boarded a bus that would take us on a two-hour ride to Kinloch Hourn. It was there we would find Aileen, the witch who would hopefully help us find the second key.
A sense of excitement rippled through me as the countryside ambled past us. It always did when I found myself in a land steeped in rich history. The archeologist in me yearned to explore crumbling castles, ancient abbeys, and secret ruins.
The wistful wanderings of my mind were interrupted twenty minutes into the ride by Kael’s loud snoring. It was borderline snarling. I was glad there were only a couple of other people on board. They cast a couple of annoyed glances our way but didn’t say anything.
The bus finally arrived at our destination with loud, squealing brakes. The doors at the front opened, and I didn’t miss the opportunity to jab Kael sharply in the ribs to wake him. He jolted upward with a mumble and looked at me with bleary eyes. His hair was rumpled on one side, sticking up in all directions like one of those crazy-furred guinea pigs. I stifled a laugh as I nudged him, jerking my head toward the front of the bus.
“Come on. This is our stop.”
Kinloch Hourn was a small village. It consisted of narrow roads lined with small, white-washed houses and low stone buildings. The large hills of the highlands crowded the entire area like earthen sentinels, the peaks and lowlands alike wreathed in mist. Despite the ages, it seemed just as wild and ancient.
Shifting my bag onto my shoulder, I gripped the handle of my suitcase. It jostled and bounced along the uneven road as we made our way to what appeared to be a pub of some sort. There were a pair of young men outside, laughing over some joke about an old man and a blonde.
“Pardon me.” Kael stepped up to them, his own large canvas bag heavy in his hand. “We’re looking for the bed and breakfast?”
They pointed us in the right direction, which turned out to be a mile out of town. Luckily, neither of us minded walking. Kael peered into every dip in the grass and glared at every rock.
Was he always this paranoid?
Birds chirped in scraggly brush beside the road that was little more than dirt and loose stones. The waters of the Loch Hourn were still in blues and grays beneath an overcast sky that threatened sharp wind and rain to come. In the distance, a few deer, with their crooked antlers spreading wide, crossed a meadow.
I was a bit annoyed at the shifter stalking beside me, staring down every patch of weed and mossy stone walls. He was killing my mood.
“Look, I know we’re on a mission to track down a powerful mage of darkness and recover a relic that unlocked some crazy inside of me, but seriously, could you lighten up a bit?”
“This isn’t a field trip, Olivia.”
“Well, it’s not a funeral, either.”
“There it is.” Kael pointed to the bed and breakfast, effectively axing any further argument.
The bed and breakfast was a little place with stone walls and a sharply pitched roof. Smoke wound skyward from a chimney, and square windows glowed with soft light. I gave a little sigh, imagining myself reading a book by the fire and sipping a cup of tea.
“It looks charming,” I said wistfully.
Kael rumbled again that we weren’t on a vacation.
“How do you manage to get through life with such positivity and joy?” I asked sweetly.
He sighed and didn’t deign to answer.
I opened the gate, and we walked to the front door. A cast iron bell hung beside the door. I pulled the string before Kael could start banging on the door. The resulting clang echoed around us, seeming to bounce off the hills themselves.
The door opened, revealing a woman with dark curly hair and blue eyes. She glanced behind us curiously, then swept her gaze to me.
“Can I help you?”
“Are you Aileen?” I asked.
“Yes.” The witch shifted her weight. “I’m sorry, but you have to reserve a stay here. I’m not scheduled to receive visitors for a couple more months.”
“We aren’t here to stay in your lovely…what I mean is, we came here to speak with you.”
Aileen’s eyes narrowed past me and toward Kael. Her nostrils flared, a sharp glint in her eye. Could she sense he was a shifter?
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.” Just as she started to close the door, a cat slipped out. “Nutmeg, get back here!”
The cat trotted right over to Kael, peering up at him with her striped face.
He crouched and scooped up the cat. It instantly started purring as Kael scratched it behind the ears and under the chin. Her head bumped against his cheek, tiny claws digging into his jacket as she climbed farther onto his shoulder.
Both me and Aileen gaped at Kael. The man was snuggling a cat.
“Nutmeg,” Aileen started, “is a great judge of character. I suppose if she likes you, then you may come in for a short visit.”
The witch let us in and showed us to a quaint and cozy living room with fat chairs and sofas spilling with small pillows and throw blankets. She gestured for us to sit in a pair of plain wooden chairs. Clearly, she didn’t want us getting too comfortable. She settled on a pale green sofa across from us.
“What do you want with me?”
“We were sent here by Cordelia.”
A slight widening of eyes was the only effect my words seemed to have on Aileen. She waited quietly.
“We are here for a relic,” Kael explained. “A key, to be specific.”
Aileen went very, very still.
My wrists pulled down to the arms of the chair and my ankles pressed back against the wooden legs. I pulled but there was no use.
What was going on?
Beside me, Kael’s chair groaned as he wiggled and jerked against his own invisible bonds.
Aileen didn’t break her stare. The room grew darker, shadows creeping out of the corners and out from under the furniture. My breath rose in wisps, goosebumps prickling across my skin.
Something broke from the darkness behind me and another from behind Kael. The shadowy forms stopped beside Aileen, and when they turned around, I saw they were women. Their faces were cool, void of emotion.
“What is this, sister?” the woman on the left asked. “Have you invited thieves into our midst?”