Ever My Love

by Lynn Kurland

  He forced himself to stop before he finished that thought. The past didn’t want her, it wanted him. He was the one who had reasons to be there, not her. She was safe. She had perhaps become lost in the forest. Hopefully she’d had the good sense to put on a coat before she’d gone for a stroll. Her gear was still on the table, but he couldn’t find her phone or her keys. Those were good signs.

  He left the cottage, locking it behind him with the spare key he found hanging by the door, shoved the key through the crack under the door, then turned toward the woods and made use of skills he didn’t usually need in the present day.

  Her tracks were fortunately not washed away by rain and he followed them without delay. He would definitely be having a word with her about wandering off in the dark. He felt fairly safe in the forest at night, but he had five years of practice avoiding things he didn’t want to encounter—

  He came to a halt, then looked down. Her phone lay there, along with her keys.

  Her footprints simply stopped.

  He wasn’t sure he hadn’t made some sort of sound of distress. He supposed if he’d been a different sort of lad, he might have investigated further, but he was who he was. And because he was who he was, he was acutely familiar with the capricious nature of the MacLeod forest.

  Aye, he could guess well enough where she’d gone. What he didn’t want to think about was what she’d found on the other side of those trees.

  He picked up her phone and her keys, then turned and sprinted for home.

  Chapter 15

  Emma decided that it was past time she started getting organized. The first thing she was going to do was make a list of things to accomplish, perhaps in a series of cheery notes made to herself. It would feel like she was some sort of 1920s movie star with an assistant whose sole purpose was to remind her to take care of daily tasks. She considered for a moment or two, then decided what would be the first item on her list:

  Don’t visit any medieval movie sets.

  That certainly would have taken care of her current problem. If only she’d made that note before she found herself trapped on one of those sets.

  She examined what had led her to her current and quite unfortunate locale and decided that perhaps her first mistake had been thinking a little after-dinner walk in the forest would be a good idea. Obviously nothing good happened in the woods near her temporary house after dark.

  Her second mistake had been neglecting to dress for unexpected adventures. She hadn’t really paid all that much attention to what she was wearing, but it was obviously not the kind of thing that fit in with half a dozen very burly guys in ratty plaid blankets. She would have complimented them on that truly authentic look they’d had going, but she realized very quickly what her third and potentially fatal mistake had been.

  Not learning Gaelic.

  She suspected that she wouldn’t have had to even learn very much of it. All she needed was to be able to say I’m not a witch in the local vernacular. If she ever had a do-over of her life, she would insist that Bertie Wordsworth, chauffeur and international spy, teach her teenage self more than just a few swear words to use in London. Hell, she suspected the man could curse in a dozen languages with absolutely no effort at all. Surely he could have drummed up a few Gaelic slurs for her.

  None of that was of any use to her at the moment. All she could do was try to keep up with the guys in kilts who didn’t seem to have all that much patience for her. She stumbled to a halt, though, in spite of herself. The sun was coming up over the mountains and it was highlighting the castle that sat in a meadow in front of her.

  The men said something, pointing at her as they did so. She was relieved that they hadn’t done anything worse to her than shoot her suspicious looks while making what she had to assume were gestures to ward off any evil she might be about to lay on them, but perhaps her good fortune was about to end. Before she could decide which way might provide the best escape route, one of the men had taken her by the arm and—after crossing himself repeatedly—started hauling her toward the meadow.

  She thought it wouldn’t be inappropriate to indulge in feelings of alarm. The suspicious looks she was getting were turning into something entirely different, something that said she was absolutely not going to be welcomed into the castle with open arms. She only would have been surprised if she hadn’t been tied to a stake and surrounded by kindling. She wondered if things could possibly get any worse.

  She reminded herself that that was a terrible question to ask.

  Her escorts stopped and a pair of them pointed across the meadow. Emma strained to see what they were looking at, then regretted it. She was so tired and frightened and desperate to convince herself that she was trapped in some sort of hideous night terror that all she could do was stare dumbly at the figure sprinting their way. She had no idea where he’d come from, though she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that he’d brought a box of matches with him.

  He joined the group without delay and was greeted with backslaps and friendly sounding ribbing. That was definitely a step up from how she’d been received. He was obviously a popular guy.

  He was also none other than Nathaniel MacLeod.

  There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that it was him. He was ignoring her, though she couldn’t say she blamed him for it. She had shut a door in his face, and that after having given him a very chilly shoulder through dinner and after-dinner conversation the night before. He’d deserved it, the jerk. At the moment, though, she decided he deserved a friendly thank-you before she hightailed it out of Scotland. She needed to get across the border before she found herself caught up in another similar nightmare.

  But she wasn’t sure she was going to have time for that.

  She didn’t manage to catch her breath before two men had taken her more securely by the arms and were escorting her toward the castle. Nathaniel, or the man playing the Nathaniel MacLeod part in her nightmare, had still not looked at her, though he was certainly having himself a decent chat with a man who looked to be the head of a raiding party.

  Maybe he was indeed indulging in a little payback by having a little joke at her expense with his buddies. They would get inside the castle and he would break character. For all she knew, she had just become an extra in a movie.

  She really should have dressed the part.

  Unless her part was woman being dragged into a castle and summarily dumped into a dungeon. For that, she was apparently dressed just fine.

  She realized that was the case only after she’d landed in the castle’s dungeon, having gotten there by way of a hall that definitely wasn’t boasting electricity or a good cleaning service. She had to admit that Nathaniel had made a few feeble protestations as the trapdoor had been opened, but he’d backed off with surprising alacrity and let her be tossed into that pit. The floor was squishy, which she didn’t want to think about, and it smelled like a sewer, which she couldn’t help but think about.

  She realized she was in shock. Maybe that should have been clearer to her much sooner, but as she stood in that freezing hole, up to her ankles in muck she didn’t want to examine, she realized she was on the verge of hysterics. If she could have caught her breath long enough to have hysterics, that was.

  All she could do was stand there and hyperventilate.

  She did that for a very long time.

  In fact, time ceased to have any meaning for her. She thought someone might have tossed food through the bars of the grate above her, but she wasn’t sure and she wasn’t about to go digging for it. She stood where she’d been dropped, with her arms wrapped around herself, and concentrated all her energies on not screaming.

  • • •

  The sounds of the hall above her were things she learned to identify as time wore on. Laughter, the barking of dogs, the occasional ring of swords. At one point, she began to wonder if she had simply lost her mind.
She had been out for a walk, but it had been dark. Maybe she had given herself a lobotomy on a branch and she just hadn’t noticed.

  Maybe she was hallucinating. After all, she had had dinner in Patrick MacLeod’s medieval-looking castle the night before, never mind that it was definitely a smaller place than the one she was in currently. Maybe someone had shot her up with something and she was in a full-blown, drug-induced stupor.

  Or maybe she was trapped in some sort of sci-fi time warp where men dressed in medieval clothing, there was no central heating, and gorgeous neighbors wandered in and out of her reality as if they didn’t find anything wrong with the same.

  She tried to cling to the nightmare explanation, but that became increasingly hard to buy into as the day wore on.

  All she knew was that if she ever got back home, she was going to get the hell out of Scotland.

  She paused and gave that a bit more thought. Perhaps she needed to get out of the UK entirely. England had Stonehenge, Ireland had leprechauns, and heaven only knew what Wales had going on. She needed to get herself somewhere where nothing unusual happened, like Ohio. Somewhere in the middle, where she would be safely far away from anything but bucolic farmland and maybe a few raw dairies.

  Oh, but Children of the Corn. Where had that been filmed? If she were going to find herself being sucked into virtual reality movie sets, that was definitely one she didn’t want to be visiting. Kansas was out as well, so maybe flyover territory wasn’t the place for her. Maybe Hawaii was the place for her. Nothing odd happened in Hawaii, did it?

  She realized she was babbling inside her head, but she figured that was better than babbling out loud, though she wasn’t sure she wasn’t doing that as well. She gritted her teeth to stop that and wondered if she might be losing her mind for real.

  Scotland. What in the hell had she been thinking?

  She realized that there weren’t any more sounds coming from upstairs. That was made substantially easier, she had to admit, by the lack of crazy going on inside her head. She didn’t dare hope that maybe the director had called cut for the day, because that would mean someone on the crew had forgotten they’d dropped her down into hell.

  She could hear something dripping. It might have been her tears. She didn’t want to think about whether or not it could have been blood from some dead body she might or might not have been sharing her cell with.

  The faintest of lights appeared above her, slowly, as if it had been dawn breaking. She looked up and held her breath as the grate was lifted off silently and carefully. It occurred to her that she probably shouldn’t have been looking upward, on the off chance that someone was only lifting the grate to dump something foul on her, but she was honestly too destroyed to care.

  A hand was suddenly there in the semidarkness, reaching down toward her.

  She didn’t have to think twice. She grabbed that hand with both hers and jumped. She hooked her leg over the lip of the pit only to realize that she had been standing in the same place for too long and her feet were asleep. Her rescuer, if that’s what he was, grabbed her before she collapsed back into the hole, then held her steady until she nodded.

  Her rescuer Nathaniel MacLeod, that was. She would have staked her life on it.

  He put his finger to his lips and looked at her pointedly. Well, she wasn’t about to argue with that. She nodded and tiptoed with him past snoring guards and through the great hall that was equally full of snoring guys in rustic kilts.

  They almost made it.

  Someone stepped in front of them right by the door. Emma would have cursed, but she was too busy wondering if there might be a sword she could fall on instead. She listened to Nathaniel banter in a friendly whisper with the man there, listened to a bit of negotiation, then didn’t object to the ogling the man did of her before Nathaniel winked at him and pulled her out the front door.

  He was silent until they reached the eaves of the forest.

  “Can you run?” he said, so quietly she almost missed it. Fortunately for her, he said it in English.

  She tried to answer, truly she did. It came out as more of a sob, but she supposed she didn’t need to apologize for it. She was damned lucky to just be alive, she suspected.

  He was fast, she would give him that, but she was motivated by terror. She ran with him as if every terrifying creature from every decent horror movie ever made was behind her, just waiting for her to slow so they could finish her off.

  Someone leaped out in front of them. Nathaniel drew the sword from the scabbard on his back and ran that same blade right through the gut of the man standing there. The man gurgled something, then fell. Nathaniel pulled his sword free, wiped it on the man’s clothes, then resheathed it.

  Emma turned and threw up. She thought it might have been the most sensible thing she’d done in at least a week.

  She was still heaving when Nathaniel took her hand and pulled her back into a stumbling run. She didn’t argue, because she suspected that might be what saved her life. She ran with him until she felt something shift as surely as if it had been a barrier she’d run through. She continued to run until she saw her house there in front of her.

  Nathaniel slowed, stopped, then leaned over and sucked in air. She was gasping, but she supposed that was less from running than it was from horror. She realized she was also still dry heaving.

  She wasn’t sure how long they both stood there, breathing and heaving respectively, before she thought that if she didn’t get in the shower, she would really lose it.

  “Thank you,” she managed.

  He didn’t say anything, but she honestly hadn’t expected him to. He walked with her to her door, pulled her keys from under a rock, then opened her door for her. He reached in and turned on the lights.

  Her phone was on the table. She didn’t remember having left it there, which meant someone had found it and put it there for her. She suspected she might know who that someone might be.

  Nathaniel handed her the keys to her house as he eased past her. He built a fire in her stove, then turned and walked over to the door.

  “Lock up,” he said without looking at her. Then he left her house and pulled the door shut behind him.

  She supposed she deserved that. After all, she’d been the one to shut the door in his face the day before. Or had that been two days before? That she didn’t know was more alarming than she wanted to admit.

  She stood in her kitchen and shook until she couldn’t shake any longer. She stripped, opened her door long enough to throw her clothes outside where she wouldn’t have to either look at them or smell them, then went and got in the shower.

  It had been a dream. She’d been caught up in a terrible dream that was now made only marginally better by standing in a shower and trying to get rid of the smells that clung to her.

  By the time she got out she was warm and pruny, which she thought was a vast improvement over cold and smelly. She dried her hair, put on her pajamas, then went to stand in front of the stove. She considered tea, but decided she wasn’t up to it.

  She heard her phone beep at her. She turned and looked at it. The number of people who had that number were two—Nathaniel and Patrick—unless she wanted to count that weird local number that ended in 1387.

  She laughed a little in spite of herself, then stopped immediately when she realized how unhinged she sounded.

  1387. Was that where she’d gone? Was that where Nathaniel went? If that was the case, no wonder he didn’t like dates.

  She took a deep breath, flexed her fingers briefly to bring some feeling back into them, then reached for her phone and checked her messages.

  Text me if you like.

  She wasn’t sure what she liked. She wasn’t even sure if she trusted herself to do anything but stand and shake inside a kitchen that belonged to people who had been kind to her for no reason besides their own generosity.


  Highland magic?

  She looked at her phone and wondered just what in the hell she was supposed to say to Nathaniel MacLeod. Thanks for the rescue? Nice seeing you in native dress?

  She laughed. Well, she tried to laugh. It came out as something that sounded not just slightly unhinged, but completely unhinged. It was ridiculous, the past twenty-four hours she’d just experienced. Maybe it had only been twelve. It was daytime outside and she had walked into the forest the evening before. It was sort of hard to pin down the precise length of time spent in hell, but maybe that was something she could work out later. The one thing she knew was that she would never look at a blade the same way again—

  She attempted a scoffing noise. Of course she would continue to look at swords and daggers, because she liked the way light danced against metal. What she had been through was a complete hallucination brought on by the experiences of the previous handful of days. She nodded to herself over that, then forced herself to stop nodding before she made herself dizzy.

  She had been in a castle for supper and all that history had somehow gotten inside her head and she’d gotten lost in some sort of vivid dream. Sleep paralysis and that sort of thing. Her nighttime troubles were nothing more than mentally wandering around places that felt real but hadn’t been.

  Unless she had stepped into a kind of crazy that was so far past any reasonable amount of crazy that it found itself in some sort of alternate dimension.

  Highland magic . . .

  She had to have something normal happen to her. Maybe that normal would happen in Nebraska. She’d been born in Nebraska, or so she understood, though her parents had only been there long enough for her father to settle his grandfather’s estate and make off with as many spoils as possible. Maybe she needed to get back to her roots.

  She picked up her phone, considered, then made a decision.

  I’m packing.

  The return text was swift.