by Donna Grant
Malcolm liked Fallon MacLeod instantly. Fallon was a good man who was a perfect match for Larena in every way. MacLeod Castle became a haven for Warriors and Druids who stood against Deirdre.
Malcolm dropped his head back against the tree and grimaced. How he’d eagerly gone to the castle, excited to see a place so full of magic. Only he’d nearly been killed. That’s when the castle became a reminder of what Malcolm’s life could have been. The sadness of what it was, was a daily reminder.
Without the use of his right arm, Malcolm was inadequate in battle. The fact he wasn’t a Warrior relegated him to remain behind. With the women. Where they, as Druids, would protect him.
It’d been too much for a man who was reared to protect others. Malcolm began to despise everyone in the castle. It wasn’t fair or rational, but those had been his feelings.
Then he became a Warrior. He went from fighting against evil to fighting for it.
He wanted to say that was when his soul died, but Malcolm knew that happened when he, as a man with only one good arm, couldn’t find his place in the world.
“A shitty world it is too,” he murmured. “And still no place for me.”
CHAPTER
TWO
Evangeline Walker parked her Renault and sat in the car outside the rented house. She had just forty-eight hours before her two-week lease was up.
She moved every few weeks. Maybe she was being paranoid in thinking there were people searching for her, but she knew what she’d seen when she discovered someone had hacked into her Web site. A site that spoke of the Warriors and Druids.
Most of the pages had been left alone, but whoever had hacked the site made sure to dig up her information from the page talking about the necklace.
She touched the piece of jewelry hidden beneath her shirt. It wasn’t just any necklace, but a magical one. It had been kept in a secret vault in Edinburgh Castle by the king for years until he had it—along with dozens of other magical items—moved to London.
Those items were separated into three shipments. Two traveled by land, and one by sea. One of the shipments journeying by land never made it to London. Instead, the contents were buried beneath the ground in a temple meant to keep them hidden for eternity.
“All but one item,” Evie said.
She licked her lips and grabbed her things before exiting the car. The groceries and her purse were dumped on the counter when she entered the house.
Evie looked around and felt her soul sigh in resignation. It was plain and neutral in every sense of the word. Perfect for a rental, but it had no style, no flair.
This constant moving was taking a toll on her. She hated it. Then there was Brian. There was only so much moving around she could do because there was no way she was leaving her brother behind.
She pulled the frozen dinner out of the bag and set it on the counter. It looked as horrible as it had in the store, but the money was running low and beggars couldn’t be choosy.
“Bugger it.”
She missed her nice dinners in the city where the food was as enjoyable as the atmosphere. Though she wasn’t the worst cook in the world, it was more difficult to prepare a meal for one than to buy the frozen dinners that had as much taste as her rental.
Evie walked into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. She braced her hands on either side of the sink and looked at herself in the mirror.
She almost didn’t recognize the person staring back at her. Is this what paranoia did? The dark circles beneath her eyes, lines bracketing her mouth, the furrows deepening on her forehead. How would she look in a year, if she made it that long?
“Am I being paranoid? So what if someone wants to know about the necklace. I put the information up there to see if Druids would recognize it.” She rolled her eyes. “Why did I put it up? How stupid could I’ve been?”
She’d known in her gut it was a bad idea, but the need to see if there were other Druids in the world had been too much. Surely she couldn’t be the last.
It had been that need, that curiosity that made her toss aside reasoning and choose to post the details of the necklace. Well, some of the details. She left out the fact that it held a spell her family had guarded for generations.
The necklace could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. She pulled it out from beneath her shirt and held it in her palm.
It no longer resembled the pendant it had been when it was lost. Now it looked like any Celtic cross, but it had enough spells on it to keep it hidden from anyone searching for magical items.
With a sigh, she dropped the cross so that it bounced against her before she dried her face. The sound of Brian’s special Doctor Who ring tone filled the stillness of the house.
Evie rushed into the kitchen and grabbed her purse. She reached for her mobile phone and smiled when she read her little brother’s message of “Checking in.”
It made her feel better if she heard from him every day. There would be no talking between them since Brian had been born without that ability. Sign language and texting were what kept them connected.
“Thank God for texting,” Evie said as she drafted a response.
Each day when his classes ended he would text. As a teenager, he no longer told her all that happened during his day, but occasionally his excitement over a girl would show through his words.
She was looking forward to his winter break so they could spend some time together, but then she worried about where they would go if she still felt the need to stay on the move.
Unfortunately, Brian wasn’t in the mood to talk and returned a curt message. Evie tossed aside her phone and plopped down on the hard cushion of the couch with a sigh that seemed too loud in the quiet house.
She’d had a good job as a software designer. It paid well and gave her flexibility when it came to Brian. Evie thought back to when she learned her mother, who she hadn’t seen since she was five, died and left her custody of a three-year-old half-brother.
At eighteen, the last thing Evie wanted was to be responsible for herself, much less anyone else. But one look at Brian, and she hadn’t been able to turn him away.
Their road had been a rocky one, but somehow they’d managed to muddle through it all. Evie couldn’t imagine her life without him now.
She looked out her window to the views of the Cairngorm Mountains and the mist that settled over the peaks, which was the only saving grace to the rental. The mountains, called Am Monadh Ruadh, meaning “the russet-colored mountain range” for the way the pink granite turned russet in the setting sun, were magnificent.
“Come to usssssss.”
The rocks were calling to her. For as long as she could remember the rocks and stones spoke to her—and she to them. But these were louder, more insistent. They were unrelenting and adamant.
How much longer could she ignore them?
As it was, she’d awakened the previous night to find herself standing outside facing the Cairngorms. Never had she sleepwalked before, but it seemed these stones did something to her.
“What do you want?” she asked them.
“You. Come to usssss, Evangeline.”
“Not now.”
“Yessssss. We need you. You’ll be safe here. Hidden.”
It didn’t matter how far she was, the stones were louder than any others before. She’d always heard them, but before they’d just whispered her name.
Now they clamored for her to come to them.
“Am I in danger?”
“Come to usssss,” they insisted.
The same conversation had taken place between them for the last week. Part of her wanted to go. She wished to see these stones and find out what they sought from her. The fact they promised she’d be safe was an added benefit.
Evie scooted down on the sofa until her head lay on the armrest while the stones continued to call for her. She watched the sun sink in the sky and light it a magnificent golden tangerine before she rose and fixed her tasteless frozen dinner.
As much as she wanted to talk to them, she couldn’t chance it. She’d probably done too much by telling them she was traveling when she first left.
No one believed her.
Was she that awful of a liar? Or just a person who was too predictable?
Evie exited her e-mail and checked her Web site. The hits to her site had been growing for the past three years, but there had been a spike over the last few months.
It was that spike that had her checking to see just who was visiting. The fact she had been hacked and had difficulty discovering who had done it was what kept her on the run.
The necklace was supposed to remain hidden, never to be seen in case someone sought to use it. Despite her knowing that, she needed to know if there were other Druids. What was a picture of a necklace anyway?
She made the choice to put it onto the Web site because she instinctively knew that if there were other Druids out there they would recognize it as a magical item.
It hadn’t taken long for e-mails to show up asking about the necklace. She easily put them off, but then came the hacking.
That’s when the fear settled in her gut and grew with every hour. There were no e-mails demanding to know more about the necklace, but when the hacker managed to somehow go through dozens of firewalls and traps to discover her name, Evie knew real terror.
The hacker seemed to be a professional one minute with the ease and simplicity of how they got into her site, but then in the next instant, some of their keystrokes looked amateurish. As if they wanted her to catch them.
It had been enough to scare her into removing the page talking about her necklace weeks ago. Yet they continued to come back and get past every trick she knew to keep them out.
“Who are you, and what do you want with me?” she asked the computer.
She drummed her fingers lightly on the keys and tried to think of another way to find out who her hacker was.
“If only I knew magic that would help.”
As if on cue, an instant message window popped up. Evie’s heart began a slow, hard pound as she read the message aloud.
“Would like to talk to you.”
She swallowed hard and squirmed on the sofa. “Just what do you want to talk about?”
Evie quickly typed in the words and hit enter. In a matter of seconds the reply read: “You mentioned a necklace on your site before you removed the page. Would like to discover what you know of it.”
She snorted. “As if I’d tell you everything.” She took a second to think of a reply and then started typing as she said, “I only know what I had on the site after finding the picture of the necklace.”
The cursor blinked, waiting for a response. Minutes ticked by with nothing. Could she have gotten them off her trail? She wanted to know why they looked for information on the necklace, but it would be a huge chance if she began asking.
Evie waited, and as she did, she realized the connection was still in place. She quickly switched screens and began to trace it to the source. If the person wouldn’t tell her who they were, she’d find out on her own.
Every time she figuratively hit a wall, she tried a different route. And yet, blocks repeatedly came up to stop her. It took another five minutes before she was able to pull up the location of the server.
When she saw it was routed through about a dozen countries, Evie knew she was in big trouble. She immediately disconnected the instant messenger and put in several more rounds of firewalls on her site.
Whoever this was wasn’t playing. They knew she had information. And they wanted it.
Just how badly they wanted it and to what means they were willing to go to get it was what had her on edge. No longer could she afford to wait for the remainder of her two days at the rental. She had to leave that night.
Hours later Evie rubbed her tired eyes as she sat on the bed. It felt as if the entire Sahara desert had taken up residence in her eyes. Lack of sleep and ages on the computer had only made things worse.
The rain began in the middle of the night. She watched it roll down the window in the hopes it would slack off enough for her to get on the road.
She was a horrible driver. In all actuality, she should never have gotten a license to drive. She’d bought her Renault because she loved the older cars, but the dings and scrapes on her beloved car were all her doing.
Evie glanced through the bedroom door at the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It read 3:52. She jumped up, grabbed her purse, locked up, and ran to her car.
Earlier, she’d loaded her two suitcases into the trunk so she could leave at a moment’s notice. Every vehicle light that came into view was sure to be the unknown hacker she feared would locate her.
Evie sat behind the wheel and thought of her life as it stood. She had done exactly what her grandmother had cautioned her not to do—show the world the necklace.
It had been a stupid decision, all because she wanted to find other Druids. Now she couldn’t shake the feeling she was being tracked. Because the necklace had to stay hidden, Evie was on the run.
It wouldn’t do any good to hide the necklace, not if the hacker found her. Evie imagined she could withstand torture, but it wasn’t as if she knew for certain. She could design amazing computer software, but surviving torture hadn’t been part of her courses at university.
Running wasn’t her only choice. She could return to her flat and her job and wait for the hackers to find her. It was a choice she contemplated every damn day.
But the promise to her grandmother kept her from taking the easy road and handing the necklace over.
Evie started the car and put it in reverse. She pressed the accelerator, but in her haste, she turned the wheel too soon and backed into the picket fence surrounding the yard.
“Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered as she put the car in drive and pulled forward.
Normally, she would have gotten out and seen to the damage, but there was an urgency she couldn’t shake to get as far from the small cottage and Aviemore as she could.
On her second try, she backed out of the drive and only heard the screech as the wood of the fence scraped against the car.
Then she was on the road. At this hour, few people were about, which made driving a little easier. The rain, however, added a different, unpredictable complication.
She had great eyesight. Except at night. At night in the rain it was almost like she was blind. What Evie could see was so blurry and distorted she couldn’t pick out a tree from a sheep if her life depended on it.
Evie gripped the steering wheel with both hands, sitting forward so that she looked like one of those little old ladies peering through the steering wheel as they drove ten miles per hour.
She choked on a laugh when she looked down to find she was driving ten miles an hour.
“I’m a ninety-year-old woman in a twenty-eight-year-old body. It’s no wonder I’m perpetually single.”
She sent up a hasty prayer that she was able to keep the car on the road and not hit anyone. With no idea of where she was going, Evie found herself following the road that led her deeper into the Cairngorms.
The thick tree limbs that hung over the road blocked some of the rain, but not enough. She took the sharp left and drove over a bridge.
At the next right, she was going slowly enough to miss a fox that ran across the road by mere inches.
Evie felt the adrenaline pump through her at the near miss. With her entire body shaking, she started driving again. She’d gone less than three miles when the trees thinned out in a section and the rain came down harder.
She squinted through the deluge and windshield wipers that were going as fast as they could and still didn’t clear the window enough for her to see.
So she never glimpsed the deer wa
lking across the road.
CHAPTER
THREE
Malcolm once more squatted near a tree downwind as he watched the herd of red deer. The rain cloaked his position as the deer looked around for what hunted them. He might not need to eat as a Warrior, but his form was still human and did weaken if he skipped too many meals.
But it wasn’t hunger that had him tracking the animals through the night. It was the chase, the hunt.
The kill.
He called to his god. In the next heartbeat fangs filled his mouth and long, maroon claws extended from his fingers. Lightning singed along his fingers as he welcomed Daal. His enhanced senses picked up an approaching car. And a wisp of magic he wished he didn’t recognize.
The deer’s ears twitched in the direction of the vehicle. Malcolm shifted so he could see the advancing headlights through the rain and trees.
He looked at the deer to find them hurrying across the road. Malcolm summoned his power, making lightning fork from the sky and land behind the last of the deer. It startled them enough to get them running.
Everything would have worked had the car not sped up. Malcolm pulled back his lips in a grimace when the vehicle turned the curve and headed straight for three deer that were still crossing the road.
He stood at the feel of the same stunning magic from earlier, startling the deer and sending them scattering through the forest. Malcolm sent another bolt of lightning behind the remaining deer, but their gazes were trapped in the car’s headlights.
With a curse he rushed onto the road, but too late the woman spotted the animals and jerked the wheel of the car.
Tires screeched on the wet pavement and slid on a patch of water. Malcolm could only watch as the car careened off the road and flipped repeatedly, the crunch of metal loud and ominous in the rain as it rolled down the hill.
For a moment, he simply stared at the car, which had landed upside down. He was unsure of the need pounding through him to check on the Druid. It wasn’t her beauty that called to him, though she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.