Chapter 11
Gohaime, gel.
Emma stood at the window of her hotel room and looked down at the people walking along the street below her. It was such a normal thing to be doing, that walking, yet all she could think about was what she’d seen in a forest two hundred miles away.
She had come to pull sea and sky and water into her soul so she could then pour them into metal. She had absolutely not counted on encountering any sort of metal that would be sharp enough to save her life.
She had felt the weight of a dying enemy against her back. There just weren’t too many ways to spin that to make it seem like something else besides the truth.
And the truth was what she needed to find out before she went crazy from thinking it was all in her head.
She had watched Nathaniel’s hand the afternoon before as he’d been fiddling with his keys at the reception desk and wondered if that hand was the same one that had wielded the sword that had saved her life. She’d listened to him discussing accommodations with the lad behind the counter and tried to imagine that voice gasping out a plea for her to get the hell home. It was too bad she hadn’t paid better attention to both while she’d been in the forest.
As it was, the best she could do was replay the sound of that voice and the touch of that hand in her mind and soul until she thought she would go crazy.
She had distracted herself well enough the day before bydriving with Nathaniel to Edinburgh in a car that had to have cost him a cool half million dollars if it had cost him a dime. She wasn’t unaccustomed to her father’s ridiculously expensive cars, but it had been a pleasure to watch a man drive a car he was obviously half in love with.
Hard not to like him for that.
She had balked at the price of her room, but he’d casually set his keys down in front of her without looking at her. She had assumed it wasn’t so she would take them and make off with his car—though she’d been tempted—but instead so she would remember that he could afford to put her up for a couple of nights. Having him also scribbleNo strings attachedon the front of a brochure about the castle and slide it her way had pretty much sealed the deal.
“You can buy me breakfast,” he’d said as he’d handed her the key to her room.
She hadn’t argued. She had quite happily taken a gloriously decadent nap, enjoyed a lovely dinner, then shivered through a ghost tour conducted in temperatures that left her feeling extremely glad she was safely locked in the twenty-first century instead of freezing in a different, less-well-heated century.
She had woken that morning with plans to make very good use of her phone. If there was something unusual going on in Nathaniel’s neck of the woods, she was going to figure it out sooner rather than later. Bertie the spy would have been proud.
She sat down near the window, grateful for a rainy day that didn’t interfere with her screen too much, and started her search.
Benmore’s tourist website yielded all kinds of information about things to do in a charming Scottish village, but there was certainly no banner running across the screen indicating that there were paranormal deeds going on in the vicinity. She did find a studio run by a guy named Bagley where an interested party could indulge in fencing if desired, but that didn’t seem all that unusual. She filed the name away for future reference, then dug a bit deeper.
It took her almost half an hour of following obscure links to random places before she let out her breath and congratulated herself on the fact that she wasn’t crazy.
There was a discreet mention of a school specializing inswordplay run by one Ian MacLeod. There was also a single reference to wilderness survival being taught at that school by someone named Patrick MacLeod.
Bingo.
She knew she was making a bit of a leap by assuming that the school’s Patrick MacLeod was the same one she knew, but it was a leap she was willing to make for the moment. She supposed he and Ian could be just business partners, but they also could have been relatives. She supposed in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was what they were doing.
She continued her search, but found absolutely nothing else about the place. She supposed that if it was a school geared toward teaching people how to use swords and survive in the wild, maybe the men and women interested in that sort of thing didn’t particularly want to advertise their enthusiasm for the same.
Especially if they were indulging that enthusiasm in a different century—
She stopped herself before she finished that thought. Ian and Patrick MacLeod, if they were the MacLeods who lived around the corner from her, were probably just heavily into history. If they did run a training camp, who was to say they didn’t set up the occasional reenactment scenario to go along with their curriculum? Were they like Civil War reenactors, only pretending to fight a different war in a different century and on Scottish soil?
Was that what she’d seen?
And was Nathaniel MacLeod part of that?
She poked around a bit longer, but found only references to the village. From what she could see, it was nothing more than it seemed: a tiny town trying to band together to preserve a fragile economy. She had her own fragile economy she was trying to preserve, so she understood.
Oddly enough, there was nothing on the village calendar that hinted at anything out of the ordinary. No medieval fairs, no buddies getting together midweek for a little battle action, no covens of warlocks dressed in kilts.
She set her phone down and leaned back in her chair to let the details filter through her mind without trying to force them into any sort of pattern. Nathaniel hadn’t said anything about hanging out with Patrick or his brother or whoever else mighthave been family there in the forest. She definitely remembered Patrick having said that he didn’t know Nathaniel past his reputation of being the rich but perfectly harmless recluse up the way.
Unless they were all up to something they didn’t want anyone, including her, to know about.
She let that thought continue on into the garbage can of ridiculous theories. Maybe Patrick was busy with his family and had a commanding sort of presence because his brother was the laird. Maybe Nathaniel was just a private sort of guy indulging in some serious national pride and he didn’t want anyone knowing what he was up to.
