She rolled her eyes at herself. Admittedly, there was something about the woods she was standing in that was, well,unusual, but it was the sort of unusual that no doubt accompanied anywhere that found itself in Scotland. She took hold of her inclination to have a peek at things she should probably have left alone and started to give it a stern talking-to, then she blew out her breath. She knew she was going to have a friendly little look at what was going on, so there was no reason to tell herself otherwise. If she found something odd, she would just turn and run like hell. That useful plan made, she continued on silently, then came to a halt at the edge of a clearing with far less grace than she might have hoped for on another day.
No, it hadn’t been her phone making that ringing noise.
It had been the guys with swords in front of her making that ringing noise.
She had to reach out and put her hand on a tree, not necessarily because she wanted to lean on something, but because she was having a difficult time trying to decide what she was looking at and she needed something real to hold on to. She couldn’t say for certain, but it was reasonable to suppose the guys in front of her could have been either actors on a movie set or a reenactment group taking things way too far.
Or they could have been hallucinations.
It was tempting to really give that idea the nod of approval it deserved. There was even a mist surrounding the men fighting there, as if they were truly part of some sort of group that existed only in her dreams.
Scotland in my dreams.She’d actually thought that, hadn’t she? Maybe she needed to be more careful in the future with what went on inside her head.
The battle, if a battle it was, was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Actually, that wasn’t completely accurate. The filthy clansmen shouting, the men dying, and the metal swordsclanging were everything she’d ever seen in movies, only this was a hundred times more intense—
A dark-haired man stumbled suddenly out of the fog. He caught sight of her, then stopped so suddenly, he almost lost his footing on the slick forest floor. He was covered in what looked like blood, but surely it was just some sort of stage stuff, or something he’d bought down at the local costume shop.
It looked real, though, and so did he.
If she was hallucinating, she found she didn’t want to disturb it. She stood, frozen in place, and tried not to breathe too loudly. If she kept very still, she might get a decent look at her companion before he disappeared.
He was beautiful, and she could say that as someone who had spent her share of time dispassionately judging the models she’d drawn in numerous art classes. His face was planes and angles, but in such perfect symmetry that she almost took her phone out and grabbed a picture so she could do his features justice once she had a pencil to hand. He was much taller than she was, likely a trio of inches over six feet, and looked as though he spent a fair amount of time working out—though she supposed that came less from time spent at the gym and more from time spent with, well, a sword.
Good heavens, she was losing her mind.
His eyes were green. She could see that from where she stood.
He looked as if he’d just run into a wall, but perhaps that expression of surprise was what most hallucinations wore when they found themselves facing a human. It was the only explanation she could come up with on short notice, and it seemed reasonable enough to her.
“Damn it to hell,” he blurted out.
She listened to him add several other things she didn’t quite catch, though she had to admit he had a very lovely accent.
Yes, she was indeed losing her mind. It was the only thing that made sense.
He stepped backward, then ducked. She knew why, because she’d heard the whistle of sword coming his way as well. She clapped her hands over her eyes because, really, the last thing she wanted to see that morning was some guy meeting his end on the end of a sword. She waited for the sound of a swordwhistling through the air, or a scream, or yet another crisply enunciated curse.
But she heard nothing.
She took her hands away from her eyes, then blinked a time or two.
The glade was empty. Well, it was empty except for a bit of mist and the sound of rain falling lightly against the last of fall’s leaves. What she should have said was that it was missing every last one of the men she had just been looking at not a handful of moments before.
She felt something slide down her spine that wasn’t quite terror but really couldn’t have been called anything else. She stood there, frozen in place, her fingers digging into the bark of that tree, hearing that man’s voice ringing in her ears.
Then she turned and ran.
It was certainly the most sensible thing she’d done all year. She ran until she burst out of the forest, then she kept running until she had flung herself inside her car. She locked the doors, turned the car around, and drove like a madwoman back to the village.
Her teeth were chattering and her hands on the wheel were extremely shaky, but that was just because she was cold. She hadn’t just seen anything odd. Perhaps she’d had a waking dream brought on by truly the worst cup of breakfast tea she’d ever had in her life. And those things that she’d found to accompany that tea? Awful. She wasn’t sure what to call them, but she suspected that not even smothering them in chocolate would have redeemed them from their resemblance to sawdust. The hot breakfast downstairs hadn’t done anything for her except convince her that she wouldn’t be signing up for it again.
She reached the village without getting lost, no mean feat considering her state of mind but perhaps less impressive than it might have been if there had been more than one road leading into and out of the most substantial nod to modern civilization in the area. She parked, locked her car, then wasted absolutely no time in going straight up to the turret room in her hotel. She locked the door, crossed over to stand in the middle of that room, and shook.
She shook until she thought maybe her trembles came less from terror and more from a serious dip in her blood sugarlevel. She reached for her phone to see what time it was, only to realize she didn’t have her phone. She looked around her frantically, then looked out her window to see if she’d dropped it in the front garden. Her case was royal blue and white so it surely should have stood out against the grass—
She forced herself to think about where she’d been so far that day. She’d had it on her way into the forest, but she’d had it in her hand, not in her coat pocket. She remembered reaching for that tree, but couldn’t remember if she’d been holding on to her phone as well or not. It was possible she’d dropped it on the floor of her rental. Heaven knew she’d been concentrating on other things besides setting it carefully down somewhere safe.
She forced herself to leave her room and retrace her steps back to her car. She searched the whole thing thoroughly, but found nothing but those damned maps that had caused her so much trouble already. She straightened, stood next to her car, and let out a deep, shuddering breath. There was absolutely no way in hell she was going to go back to that haunted forest and look for it at the moment. Not when it was cloudy and gloomy and probably going to get dark at the most inopportune moment possible.
