Aye, he had.
And he couldn’t believe he’d stooped so low.
He loved cats.
Truth be told, where animals were concerned, he had more in common with his animal-loving cousin Grim than he cared to admit. Any beastie, furred, feathered, scaled, or finned, he cared about them all. A reason he was now creeping along beneath Seacliffe’s stout curtain wall, looking for a hidden door he hoped to the gods he’d find. A secret entrance marked by a stone that, so Lady Alanna, resembled the hawkish face of scowling seabird.
She’d revealed the secret with tear-shimmered eyes, begging him to hurry lest her aged cat fret too much over her absence. More damning still, she’d pleaded with him not to harm the cat. Callum frowned, remembering her fear, sure the memory of Dunwhinnie in a pool of blood, was a reason she’d think him brutal enough to harm her pet.
A man bold enough to slay an earl had to be a craven.
He knew he wasn’t – or was he?
Fuming, he fisted his hands as he stalked along the wall, his gaze on the stones.
They all looked the same.
“And you’re an arse, MacCulloch,”he muttered, glad at least that the clouds had parted, letting the moon bathe the high stone wall in silvery light.
Still…
While moonlight would help him spot the frowning-bird stone, it also made him just as visible.
That wasn’t good.
The last thing he needed was to run into Grim and his Mackintoshes. Worse, the Stewart rowdies who’d no doubt report back to their royal kin that he’d left Lady Alanna alone on the high moors, nothing but two ratty plaids from the Skerries and few stale bannocks to sustain her.
He doubted the Crown would be pleased that he’d abandoned her to fetch a cat.
Only Grim would understand.
But given the gravity of their mission, even his cousin would be grieved, vexed as surely as the piercing-eyed, fierce-faced bird stone looming just ahead.
Praise the gods.
Quickening his steps, Callum gripped his Thor’s hammer and sent a quick thanks to the gods.
Then he pressed two fingers against the bird’s eyes, just as Lady Alanna said to do. Blessedly, the thick stone door eased open, its grinding screech low enough to be drowned out by the wind, and the roar of breakers crashing against the rocks so far beneath the castle’s cliffs.
As the lady promised, stone steps wound upward. Dark, dank, and musty, the only light spilled down from narrow slits carved at intervals in the stair tower’s walls.
Eager to be done with his mission, Callum climbed the steps round and round, counting each landing until he reached the fifth – the one, so the lady, where he’d find her bedchamber by the light beneath the room’s closed door.
Gubbie, apparently, didn’t care for the dark.
For that reason, perhaps, wall sconces burned low along the yawning passage, a boon that made it easy to spot the telltale golden line beneath a fine oaken door a bit farther ahead down the corridor.
Moving with a speed and stealth he’d learned as a youth in the Skerries, he was at the door and inside the room before a less-skilled soul could’ve blinked.
Unfortunately, he seemed to be alone.
An aged, decidedly plump gray cat was nowhere to be seen. Nor did he hear any furtive scurrying. Not even the low, unmistakable snores of a sleeping beastie.
Too bad for Gubbie, he’d known more than a few cats in his time.
And so, again using his ability to move as silently as thought, he went straight to the massive four-postered bed. There, he dropped to his knees to peer beneath the high mattress and right into the old cat’s round, glowing eyes.
“There you are, eh?” He spoke softly, using the tone he wended on all cats.
