Maggie scarcely remembered stumbling from the shop and the brief walk to her car. She tried to ward herself, but shook so badly, she couldn’t concentrate. She’d wanted to calm the shop girl down, but she’d been so distraught, she hadn’t had anything to offer. The young woman, who probably wasn’t a minute past twenty, had snapped up her phone and said she was going to call a constable. Maggie told her not to bother, that it wouldn’t make any difference.
“Och, and it’s like that is it?” the girl had said, curving her fingers in a sign to ward off evil.
“Och, and that’s how it is,” Maggie repeated dully as she unlocked her car and got inside. She locked her door and felt like a fool. If Rhukon and his cronies could nab Lachlan, what hope did she have? A locked car door wouldn’t even slow them down.
Maggie slid her iPhone from her bag and brought up its memory. She stared at her grandmother’s number—and at Chloe’s. It didn’t take a genius to decide Chloe couldn’t help, not from thousands of miles away. Shame swept through her, making her feel ill. Gran was right. She really was stubborn, and she’d done an incredibly thorough job of shutting herself off from everyone who’d ever cared about her.
Maggie closed her eyes for a moment, girding herself. She swallowed hard and tapped her grandmother’s number.
“Yes?” Annoyance underscored that one word.
Maggie opened her mouth, but the only thing that came out was a croak.
“Margaret. Whatever is the matter? Say something. I’m still stuck in this goddamned airport. They’ve lined us up like terrorists and are interviewing us separately.”
Maggie choked back a sob. She hadn’t felt this helpless since her parents died. Around a tongue that felt thick and uncooperative, she managed, “It’s okay, Gran. I’ll—”
“From the catch in your voice, I’d say something is definitely not okay. What the fuck happened? Don’t beat around the bush.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, followed by another. Maggie wanted her grandmother’s arms around her, needed her witch magic to set the world right again. “First,” she said shakily, “if I get out of this, I’m going to beat a path to coven headquarters and sign that blasted pledge—with blood. This psychiatry fellowship in Scotland was a stupid idea.”
“Hush! You have no idea who might be listening.” A shock radiated through the cellular lines, stinging Maggie’s fingers.
Damn!
She switched the phone to her other hand and flexed her reddened fingers. “That hurt. If I can’t say anything, how can I tell you what happened?”
A sharp intake of breath. “Never mind, Maggie. I can pick it up in...other ways.” A minute ticked by before Mary Elma spoke again. “So he disappeared about twenty minutes ago?”
Maggie nodded, and then remembered Gran couldn’t see her. “Yes.”
“I know you’re not astute in certain, um, methods, but can you sense anything?”
“No. Earlier, when we were driving here—”
“Where’s here? Are you home?”
“I’m in Fort William, not all that far from home. Maybe an hour. It’s about sixty miles.”
“Earlier, when you were driving there, what?”
Maggie leaned forward. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her first two fingers. Conversations with her grandmother were often like this: odd and disjointed.
“Maggie?” Mary Elma’s tone was so severe, it surprised her.
“I felt something dark and unsettling following us.”
“Do you feel it now?”
Well, do I?
Maggie did her best to send her nascent power outward. “I don’t think so.”
“You have to do better than that. When you were getting all those worthless years of medical training, what would your professors have said if you told them you weren’t sure about some deadly illness?”
They would’ve chastised me just like you’re doing now.
“Point taken. Look, Gran. I’m scared. I’m running on almost no sleep. I’m not thinking very straight. I’m so far out of my depth I should pack up my things and go home, except that’s not an option.”
“What do you want to do?” A sly undercurrent underscored Mary Elma’s question, but for the life of her, Maggie couldn’t pin it down.
“I have to help him. He’s in trouble.”
“That was the right answer, child. By God, I think I finally found the key to getting you to accept your destiny.”
“Fine.” Maggie batted exasperation to a back burner. It was an indulgence she couldn’t afford. “What do I do in the meantime?” Crap! I sound like a ten-year-old. “How do I keep myself safe until you get here, so you don’t have two of us to hunt down?”
“Fort William, eh?” Mary Elma murmured. “Give me a moment. Stay put, and I’ll call you back.” The display flared Call Ended. Maggie stared at the phone in her hand. And waited. Her eyelids felt ridiculously heavy. When she realized they’d drifted shut, she forced them open. It wouldn’t do to fall asleep. Rhukon nearly made off with her in a dream. She’d have to be a bigger chump than she already was to make that mistake again.
Just when she’d decided to wait outside the car in hopes fresh air would keep her awake, the phone trilled. Maggie punched Answer. Before she could get the whole of hello out, her grandmother cut in, “I’m texting you an address. Go there and wait for me.”
“But who is it and—?”
The screen flashed. Mary Elma had disconnected. The phone chimed its text tone. Maggie was so tired the letters and numbers blurred, so she made them larger. Clicking keys, she fed the address into the phone’s navigation system. Ever obliging, it spit out a list of directions.
For a moment, she considered ignoring Mary Elma’s edict. The least her grandmother could’ve done was talk with her, tell her where the hell she was sending her. “This feels like Mission Impossible where the tape self-destructs right after I hear the instructions,” she muttered. Seized by sudden panic, Maggie stared at the phone, but the directions were still on its display.
Guess that settles it.
She turned the key in the ignition and headed north toward the far end of Loch Linnhe. As she drove, she forced herself to breathe deep, cracking a window for more healing air. It took a while to locate the indicated address. As frequently happened with the map system in the phone, it sent her on a wild goose chase, and she had to retrace her steps a couple times.
Finally, she found the place and got out of her car. A whitewashed cottage was set at the end of a long, brick walkway. Wild roses grew over a fence that was falling down in places. The flowers smelled wonderful, lush and heady. Who the hell had her grandmother sent her to? Would they simply accept her as blood kin of one of the most powerful witches on Earth?
May as well find out.
She got her bag and locked the car, then marched up the walkway. Maggie walked for a long time. Much longer than it should’ve taken. At one point, she turned around and stared at her car. Her eyes said it was only fifteen yards away. Her legs told a different story.
Aha! This is another witch’s house. That must be it.
She thought about the tricks various relatives used to camouflage their dwellings and meeting places. Problem was she’d never developed her magic sufficiently to defeat another witch’s casting. She walked for a few more minutes and turned to look at her car. It hadn’t moved, so obviously neither had she.
Anger sparked. She was too tired to play games. She sat on the bricks and reached for her phone. In that moment, the darkness she’d sensed earlier rolled over her in a cloud and tightened, obscuring the brightness of the midday sun. Panic threw her heart into overdrive. She heard herself panting, her breath hoarse in a too-dry throat. Maggie pushed to her feet and ran toward her car. If nothing else, she could put distance between herself and what threatened her.
“Enough. Stop where you stand,” a woman’s voice cracked like a whip in her head.
Maggie tried to keep going, but couldn’t. It was as if her legs were stuck in deep mud. “Please,” she moaned. “If you’re going to help me, for Christ’s sake do it now before I get swept off to wherever Rhukon’s taken Lachlan.”
“Pull yourself together. Turn toward the house.” Maggie’s body spun of its own volition. Fear turned her belly to water. She clapped a hand over her mouth and forced herself to take shallow breaths, afraid she’d heave her breakfast onto the tidy bricks.
“Look at the house. Really see it.” Sounding less harsh now, the voice held an almost hypnotic quality.
Maggie focused on the house. The white cottage was gone. In its stead stood a three-story stone manse with ivy crawling up its sides. From the looks of it, it had been there for hundreds of years.
“Now that you see it, walk toward it. The house will let you inside.”
She had no sense of propelling her limbs forward, but she moved inexorably closer to the house. The nearer she got, the more her sense of danger retreated. It wasn’t dark anymore. The Scottish sun felt warm and welcoming once again. Somehow, never mind how, the good magic was strong enough to push Rhukon’s aside. Maggie floated up a dozen steps and collapsed on the far side of a carved, wooden door that swung open to admit her and slammed shut in her wake. Sobs raked through her as she lay prostrate on a shiny, hardwood floor.
“For the love of Pete,” a strident voice right next to her said, “if your kinswoman told me what a ninny you were, I wouldn’t have been so quick to say I’d help. Get up and tell me what that mess in my yard was all about. Who in blazes is after you?”
“American?” Maggie pushed herself to a sit and stared at a buxom woman of about five-foot-eight. She was dressed in a floor-length denim skirt and a green T-shirt with a witch atop a broomstick. Beneath the picture were the words, My Other Car is a Broom. Bare feet with bright red toenail polish peeked from beneath the skirt. Red curls stuck out from her head in all directions before trailing down her shoulders and back. A pair of sharp, brown eyes radiated displeasure. The woman looked to be in her forties, but looks were often deceiving with witches. Power flowed around her like a gown. She fairly crackled with it.
“Once upon a time I lived in the States, but that’s not important.” The woman hunkered next to Maggie and laid a hand over hers. Maggie felt the spell, welcomed it because it cleared her head and settled her stomach.
“Thank you.”
“I’m Mauvreen, and you’re welcome. Come into the parlor and have some tea and biscuits. You can tell me what’s got Mary Elma so fired up.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “After that, you’ll sleep for a spell. You need it. You’re dead on your feet, woman.”
****
Lachlan flung magic about himself, but it didn’t even slow his descent. One moment, he’d been kneeling and lacing a boot. The next, something slammed into his body out of nowhere and shoved him down into darkness. He hadn’t had even a moment’s warning it was coming. The sense of falling was absolute and disorienting.
“Kheladin.”
“I canna help. Something shackles my wings.”
His next thoughts were for Maggie, and he sent a mental entreaty to every Celtic god close enough to listen to keep his mate safe from harm. A bone-crackling thud sent pain ripping through him. For long moments, he was afraid he’d broken something and would need to cast magic to heal himself. He stretched his arms and legs experimentally and blew out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
Thanks be to the gods, I only got the wind knocked out of me.
Lachlan pushed to his feet and summoned his mage light. It took more effort than he thought it should, but it finally sputtered to life. He gazed at his surroundings. Stone walls stretched as far as he could see on both sides of him. A low stone ceiling dripped water. Red eyes stared at him in the reflected glow from his light. Rats.
What was this place? He bent closer to examine the stonework. Clearly manmade. Someone had carved this tunnel, or at least reinforced it so it wouldn’t collapse. Corridors led in either direction.
Where am I?
Recognizing the stupidity of racing off half-cocked, he forced himself to catalog what he knew, which wasn’t much. He felt for Maggie’s energy but couldn’t sense her at all. Maybe that was a good thing, unless the same magic that captured him had dropped her in a totally different location. Mage senses on full alert, he turned in a circle, emitting power like a dowsing rod. Though he took his time, Lachlan didn’t know any more when he was done than when he began.
He turned his mind inward to the dragon. “Do ye recognize aught?”
“Nay. Mayhap if we traded places...”
“There isna enough space. We’re in some sort of underground tunnel system. I’ll mark where we are and walk in one direction until either we’re above ground or hit a dead end.”
“Canna we use magic to leave here?”
Lachlan considered it. The prospect was tempting, but the problem about using magic to travel was he needed a firm destination in mind and some sort of connection with it. He could try for Maggie’s home but didn’t want to rain disaster down on her. If he weren’t careful, Rhukon, or whoever the author of the current disaster was, would snare her too.
If they hadn’t already.
“Do ye think the black wyvern is responsible for this?” Lachlan asked sidestepping Kheladin’s query about magic for now.
Snorting, whuffling dragon laughter filled his mind. “Who else? He doesna like to lose, and we made him look like a fool in front of his cohorts.”
“Can ye sense him—or the red—anywhere near to us?”
Kheladin was silent so long, Lachlan started to ask again, when he heard. “’Tis strange. I doona sense either Connor or Rhukon, yet I do detect other dragons. Many dragons. Just as it was afore Rhukon captured us in the sleeping spell.”
“Ye must be mistaken. How could that be?”
“I doona know, yet I trust what my magic tells me. Pity ye canna let me look for myself.”
“As soon as I get us above ground,” Lachlan promised. Confusion jockeyed with uncertainty. He didn’t know what had happened, but he had to act—and quickly before whatever attacked them struck again. He and the dragon were vulnerable in the relatively narrow tunnel—open to strikes from both sides. It wasn’t a defensible position. The warrior in him knew it.
Since one direction seemed as good as the other, he started walking. If the earth beneath his feet trended downward, he’d retrace his steps and go the other way. He walked for a long time. Lacking any other way to mark his progress, Lachlan counted steps. He’d reached six hundred thirty when the tunnel’s floor developed a definite slope to it, an upward cant.
He dared to let himself hope he’d chosen wisely. Before Rhukon ensorcelled him, Lachlan always considered himself a lucky man and a blessed one. Now he wasn’t so certain. With effort, he pushed his doubts and fears aside. They wouldn’t help him, wouldn’t return him to Maggie’s side.
After fifteen hundred steps, the air began to smell cleaner, less dank. The rats, constant companions on his journey so far, thinned out, apparently preferring the darker, damper segments of the tunnel. Either his mage light was getting brighter, which meant his magic was strengthening, or...
He doused the light and shut his eyes to defuse the afterimage. When he opened them, his mouth split into a grim smile. Daylight. It was a way yet, but it spilled into the tunnel and provided pale illumination.
After close to three thousand steps, he marched from the tunnel into a thick forest. “Okay,” he murmured, borrowing one of Maggie’s words. “I’m out, but this forest could be anywhere.”
He cast magic about himself, hunting for anything living and gasped. Kheladin had been right. There were dragons here, along with wolves, bears, coyotes, and a few, isolated pockets of people. He headed for the closest place he sensed men. They’d tell him what he wanted to know. In less than half an hour, he came upon a clearing with a small house. Not knowing whether he’d be seen as friend or foe, Lachlan cloaked himself with magic and approached carefully but stopped long before his presence might’ve alarmed the people he saw milling about. The dwelling’s mud and stone walls and thatched roof answered his questions more poignantly than any person could have. If that weren’t enough, a horse burdened with a plow yoke corroborated the unpleasant truth.
Lachlan faded back into the forest, the dragon clamoring in his mind. “Kheladin. Be quiet. We’re back in the sixteen hundreds. Or maybe it’s the fifteen hundreds or fourteen hundreds.”
“How—?”
“I doona know, and it doesna matter. Rhukon went to great lengths to separate me from Maggie, so he could sidestep the prophecy.” He pounded a fist into his thigh, cursing his own stupidity and inattention, and sank into the dirt at the base of a large tree. If he’d been at the top of his game in that blasted store, and not thinking about burying his cock in Maggie, he might not be in this predicament.
He thudded his fist into packed earth and then did it again and again until his hand ached. Lachlan marshaled his weary mind. Right now he was reacting, when what he needed to do was think.
The Morrigan must be mixed up in this. The Celts mastered time travel eons ago.
“Maggie.” Her name leapt from his mouth in a breathy whisper, half entreaty, half prayer. “How will I ever get back to her?”
“If we’re really back in our own time, let me out. I can find our castle from the air.”
Lachlan recognized a good idea when he heard one. He’d barely stripped off his clothes when he felt himself shift.