Stranded By The Highlander: A Scottish Time Travel Romance-Highlander Forever Book 2

by Preston, Rebecca

  Enough of this. Time to get to the surface and figure out what is actually going on. She was worried about her mental health, about her tank supply line, and about the cave-in that had nearly had her trapped and drowned in the cave… she needed to have a good long sit, something to eat, and she wouldn’t say no to a drink, either. The adrenaline had faded a little now that she was out of the immediate danger, but she wouldn’t feel properly safe until her feet were on dry land again. So turning herself toward the surface, she began to swim, her light shining through the cold water.

  But that wasn’t all the light shone on. As Nancy swam for the surface, she recoiled in complete disbelief as she found herself face-to-face with what looked for all the world like a dinosaur.

  Chapter 4

  The first thing she noticed about the creature were its eyes. They were dark, and close, set in a lizard-like face, with two slits for nostrils like a snake’s. The head was long and sleek, the grey skin on its surface like that of a dolphin, and a part of Nancy felt a strange urge to reach out and touch it to see if it was warm, like a mammal, or cold, like a lizard. Or a dinosaur, she thought remotely, complete terror somehow managing to make her feel calm. This looked like a dinosaur. How bizarre, a rock formation that looks like a dinosaur.

  No — not a rock formation. Rock formations didn’t tilt their heads to the side — and sure enough, this creature was inspecting her with what looked, for all the world, like actual curiosity glinting in those dark, close little eyes. It snaked its snout closer to her, as if to get a better look, and she realized that it’s great, smooth head — at least the size of her torso, if not bigger — was set atop a long, sinuous neck that extended off into the darkness of the murky water. With a hand that felt like it should have been trembling, but was remarkably still and controlled, Nancy raised her light to the level of the creature’s face, trying to get a better look at it… or if she was honest, trying to figure out what kind of optical illusion it was. Because it couldn’t be real. Glowing figures was one thing, but she could not and would not accept that she was hallucinating some kind of dinosaur in a flooded quarry. James would never let her hear the end of a dream like this.

  But the light seemed to disagree with the creature. And far from disappearing in a puff of smoke, as she’d quietly hoped would happen, the creature simply turned and swam away. She caught a glimpse of a set of flippers, and an impossibly huge body, all sleek and gray like the monster’s head had been … and then it was gone, disappearing rapidly into the dark water. She floated in the water for some time, her mind racing as it tried and failed to come up with a logical explanation for what she’d seen. Hallucination? Surely a hallucination… but how, when she felt so clear and lucid, and when it had been right in front of her, as plain as the nose on her face?

  No. I need to get to the surface. Need to figure out what that could have been… because she knew a lot about aquatic life, and not even the biggest water-dwelling lizards and snakes she knew about had anything on the creature she’d just seen. This dive was getting strange and stranger… and more frightening, if she was honest. Deeply, deeply frightening, and not in a way that her training was helping her with. Training was useful for high-tension situations like the cave-in, or like a faulty air mask, or minor catastrophes like that. It didn’t cover coming face-to-face with a dinosaur… or turning up in a body of water that had nothing to do with the body of water you’d entered. Because the more she swam, the more she had to accept that she just wasn’t in the quarry anymore. This was different… this was some kind of very deep, natural lake. Thankfully, she was getting toward the surface, so at least the air supply issue would be solved. But what kind of problems were going to be awaiting her up there?

  Eventually, her head broke the surface of the water… and she blinked in confusion as she looked around. To add to her concerns and confusion, the water that surrounded her wasn’t illuminated by the gentle touch of the midmorning sun… instead, it was choppy and bleak, and her light was the only reason she could see it in the first place… it was the middle of the night! Dark as anything — she peered up at the sky, hardly believing it was true. How could it be the middle of the night? How, when her air tank was half full (she’d checked before surfacing) and they’d gone down midmorning? Either she had the most efficient set of lungs on the planet (not far from true, she thought with a burst of pride… but still, they aren’t this good!) or something very, very strange had happened.

  Alright. So the facts were these: she’d swum into a cave. There’d been a cave-in. She’d swum out of the cave. On the way, she’d been disoriented by some strange lights… a hallucination, she’d assumed, but could some part of it have been real? Could she have somehow been moved from the cave to another body of water? Because here she was, and even a quick scan of the surface of the lake she was in confirmed that she wasn’t in the quarry anymore. Above her, a blanket of stars… and a full moon, shining down, offering a little bit of illumination beyond the scope of her little diving light. Was it even a full moon? She couldn’t remember. Mom would have known, she thought crossly… she was always into all that supernatural, spiritual stuff.

  Still, full moon or no, new lake or no, Nancy knew she had to get to the shore. She’d pulled the mask off her face and disconnected her air supply quickly, more out of habit than anything, so she still had a half tank of air. Thankfully, she wasn’t going to need it. Scanning the surface of the water, she soon made out what direction the shore lay in… there was a little light (another light in the distance, she thought with some suspicion) that indicated that there was some kind of structure not far from here. About a mile, maybe more… and she may have been cold, tired and deeply confused, but one thing Nancy Kane had never had trouble with was swimming. She dropped into an easy freestyle stroke, eating up the distance, her fins helping her slice through the water effortlessly. It wasn’t long before she was moving into shallower water, and soon enough she felt the sandy bottom of the lake rise up to meet her. Not sandy, so much as pebbly — she wrinkled her nose at the feeling of the rocks against her body, and quickly gathered her feet under her, rising to stand. It felt good to have solid ground under her feet again, for all that she’d always preferred the water.

  But where on Earth am I? Here she was, standing on a pebbly beach by a lake in the middle of the night. Being from North Carolina, she’d had plenty of experience with lakes… but this one just didn’t seem familiar at all. If she hadn’t known any better, she would have expected she’d been teleported somewhere completely new… could she have had some kind of terrible lapse of memory? Had a whole chunk of her life been erased, between getting trapped in the cave and surfacing in this strange, dark lake? Did she actually have a whole dive team somewhere, maybe sitting in a boat, waiting for her to swim back to them? She even turned, scanning the surface of the lake that stretched out behind her, its far shore too far for her eye to make out — not at this time of night, at any rate. If there was a boat out there waiting for her, she couldn’t see it from here.

  And the cold was becoming a problem. Drysuit or not, she needed to get inside… get her hair dry, maybe get the suit off and get some warmer clothes on. She wasn’t dressed for the middle of the night, and she certainly wasn’t dressed for a place so bitingly cold as this one seemed to be. (How had that happened? Why did she seem to be in a completely different climate to North Carolina?) Where am I? Where am I going to get hold of a change of clothes? In the middle of the night, no less.

  Nancy’s mother had always told her that she could rely on the kindness of strangers. It was a joke, or half a joke, at least… a quote from an old play that Nancy had never seen or read. But Nina Kane had always been like that… mysterious, vague. You could never tell whether she was messing with you or imparting serious wisdom. She always claimed to be a witch, but she did it with a twinkle in her eye that said she wasn’t serious… but then what was the meaning of the Tarot readings she did so regularly, her fascination with herbs, her
odd collection of stones that she carried in her pockets? Occasionally, Nancy would see her mother writing on scraps of strange paper, which she’d then burn in the old fireplace, a strangely ritualistic attitude to her movements.

  “Wish you were here, Mom,” Nancy murmured to herself, her voice sounding strange and too loud in her ears as she stood on the shore. It was often like that, after a dive… you forgot that you had a voice, and it felt strange in your head. She worked her jaw a little, massaging the skin at her temples, trying to bring herself back into surface-world mode. Her mom had always been so good at making friends with people. They’d go for a walk to the park and within ten minutes of Nancy playing on the swings, her mom would have three new friends among the other mothers watching their children play.

  If Mom were here, she’d march Nancy right up off the beach and into a house. By morning, she’d have a lifelong friend. Taking a bit of courage from the fact that her DNA was at least half her mother’s, Nancy gathered herself and headed up the beach. There was a little jetty sticking out into the lake, with a small boat moored beside it… that meant there was bound to be a house further up. The light she’d seen from the water was a curiously old-fashioned lantern suspended on a post at the end of the jetty, beaming its light out for all to see. Curious, that. What was the point of lighting a lantern like that, in the middle of the night?

  But that was the least of the strangeness she was about to encounter, Nancy realized as she reached the edge of the rocky beach and moved onto grass. Here, she paused for a minute to take off her fins, now that there was soft grass to walk on — they didn’t inhibit her movement too much, but they did look a little silly. Made her walk like a duck — her father had always laughed at her as a child, when she’d insisted on wearing her fins around. Part of her mermaid phase — even before she’d gotten her heart set on finding mermaids, she’d desperately wanted to be one, and had felt that if she spent enough time wearing her fins, maybe she’d turn into one. Maybe they’d simply merge with her feet, spread up her legs, and voila — instant mermaid.

  “You can be anything you want to be, my darling,” was all her mother had said, lifting her daughter in her arms and spinning her around. “Anything you put your mind to.”

  “The girl can’t shapeshift,” her dad had said quietly, his eyes twinkling as he looked at his wife. No matter how exasperated he grew with her more mystical practices, Dad had been head over heels in love with his wife since the minute he’d laid eyes on her.

  “Not with that attitude,” Mom had said archly, then ushered her away to draw pictures of the kinds of mermaids she’d make friends with once she had grown her tail.

  Nancy missed her mother, standing there shivering by the side of what looked like a dirt road, her fins in one hand. But no sense wallowing in self-pity. There was a little cottage on the other side of the dirt road, quaint and curious, for all the world like some kind of medieval house brought back to life. But it looked inhabited — there were boots on the little porch, and a fresh-looking stack of firewood, and (most promising of all) an orange glow coming through the window.

  Taking a deep breath, Nancy set out across the road, hoping that whoever lived in the cottage wouldn’t mind a middle-of-the-night visit from a very confused scuba diver.

  Chapter 5

  But what on Earth was she going to say to the cabin’s inhabitant, or inhabitants? It was the middle of the night, the blanket of stars above her told her that… how was she going to explain what she was doing out here? Especially when she hardly understood it herself. Hi, I was underwater exploring a cave and somehow, I got so turned around and lost that it’s … nighttime now? How did that work? Had there been some kind of catastrophic event that had blocked out the sun somehow? No — it was definitely nighttime. The way the cabin was all closed up and cozy told her that.

  Well, whatever was going on, Nancy didn’t want to deal with it by herself anymore. She was cold from the water and the frosty air, she was tired from the dive and the after-effects of the adrenaline of getting separated from her team, and she wanted to sit down by a fire and talk out what the hell was going on. She just hoped that whoever lived in that little cabin was the helpful sort. Nancy looked up and down the dirt road, a little surprised to find that this was the only cottage in view. That seemed strange… such a beautiful place, with such a nice view of this pristine lake, surely there would have been enough demand to build a few more cottages like that. But it was the only one. Only a small place — maybe one bedroom plus a sitting area, definitely not a multi-story affair like the ones that she’d seen out in the country in North Carolina.

  And there was something… medieval about it, too. Something about it put her in mind of a witch’s cottage in a storybook. Smoke curling out of the chimney, emanating from some magic broth being stewed… the walls built, irregularly, of stone, something about them suggesting strongly that each stone had been laid by hand and not by machine… Nancy smiled to herself a little, indulging the fantasy. She’d always quietly wished that witchcraft was real. Her mother, of course, had promised her that witches were real when she was a girl… but she’d learned fairly early on that her mother was a whimsical woman who tended to romanticize the world maybe a little more than she should have. Her father had never outright disagreed with her mother, but he had certainly steered her onto a less fantastical path than her mother would perhaps have preferred.

  Nancy crept up the wooden steps that lead onto the porch of the little cottage, stepping gingerly to avoid splinters. Thankfully, the steps felt like they were in good repair — soft and smooth under her feet, perhaps varnished or preserved somehow. She moved past the lantern that was hanging from a hook in the roof of the balcony and gathered herself, ready to apologize profusely to whoever opened the door for waking them at such a bizarre hour of the night. What time was it, anyway? She hoped there’d be a clock inside that she could discretely check.

  The door was made of old wood, and it made a pleasantly resonant sound when she tapped on it with her knuckles — realizing as she did that, she was still wearing her diving gloves. Well, it was cold — better to keep them on until she could get next to a heater or something. She waited for a long moment, listening hard at the door for any signs of people moving about inside — were they asleep, perhaps? Would she have to knock again? The rest of the world seemed eerily silent, with no distant sounds of traffic to disturb the silent night. It was rather beautiful out here, she thought, glancing behind her at the deep, black waters of the lake she’d emerged from. Her apartment in Raleigh was nice enough, but always noisy with traffic, even late at night. Whoever lived here probably slept incredibly well every night. An unexpected feeling of jealousy blossomed in her chest.

  She could hear something inside — the distant sound of footsteps, possibly? And a voice — definitely a voice, mumbling away to itself. The door was too thick to make out individual words, but someone was definitely coming to answer the door. Nancy took a step back, realizing at the last moment (and far too late to do anything about it) that she was still wearing most of her scuba gear… and that included her mask and goggles.

  The door swung wide. Nancy looked into the cottage — and then down, to meet the belligerent gaze of the shortest woman she’d ever met in her life. Gray hair, tethered in a loose braid that hadn’t succeeded in keeping a wild nest of flyaways from springing free and framing the woman’s wrinkled little face. Bright, keen eyes peered out at Nancy from their nest of wrinkled skin. She was wrapped in some kind of ancient dressing gown, gray in color and dragging on the floor, which she had clutched around herself to keep out the cold — despite the blast of heat that had emerged from the cottage as the door opened. It was clear that the heaters were all running on full power, Nancy thought with amusement.

  But before she could even open her mouth to introduce herself, the woman had sprung into action. She yelled something in a language Nancy didn’t recognize, and in a movement that was much quicker than her advan
ced years would have seemed to allow for, she lunged toward the side of the door, where she seized what looked like a long wooden stick, slightly curved, and polished — about the length and appearance of a walking stick, but a lot more solid than a walking stick. More like a weapon… like the batons old-fashioned cops carried in movies. To Nancy’s shock, the woman pointed the stick at her and took a menacing step toward her, still speaking in the strange language. It sounded beautiful… and oddly familiar.

  “Sorry, I don’t — sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying?” Nancy tried to say — and then realized that her mask was still in the way, obstructing her speech. She reached up, pulling it free from her head, and took her goggles off too, for good measure. The cold night air hit her face and she winced a little, but when she looked down at the little old woman again, she seemed to have calmed down a little. She was still holding the stick, but her expression had changed from outright hostility to a wary kind of curiosity.

  She spoke again, the same strange, lilting language… it sounded like something Nancy had heard in a dream or something. Familiar, but impossible to understand. She shrugged a little helplessly, her fins and her mask in one hand, the tubes that connected them to the air tanks on her back now dangling.

  “Sorry,” Nancy said again, beginning to worry that this woman whose evening she had thoroughly interrupted didn’t speak English. “I can’t understand … Do you speak English?”