One was tall and gangly, with the look of a teenager still sorting out his growth spirt. Yet he must have been thirty, with a short, scrubby beard more like he’d forgotten to shave in a few weeks than like a fashion choice. The other was of medium build, red-head, with a full-grown badger slung across his shoulders and a glove on his hand meant for a small bird of prey to land on. They wore unassuming hiking boots and pants, a walking stick each for rough country, light rucksacks, and the one with the badger pulled off sunglasses to reveal piercing, ice-blue eyes. Only the animal around his neck seemed not to see or hear me.
After recent downpours through September in the Highlands the river roared, much closer to the bridge than it probably had been all summer. Even so, I had no trouble hearing when the gangly one asked in undisguised consternation, Who the hell?
Who do you think I am?
Should I be afraid of them? After Paris and our suspicions about them, surely I should be. Now talking to me in a scry in this way? This particular way that I’d only ever known the time I’d gone scrying after a vampire who had used his psionic powers to communicate with me?
Yet … I didn’t feel scared. I felt safe and held and loved, consumed with the power Kage and Jason gave me while my physical body basked in the connection and pleasure.
A bloody meddler, he answered. What do ya want?
Only a word. Could we meet face to face? You’re in the Highlands right now, aren’t you?
What’s it to ya?
I’m trying to find out about some things. I’ve heard through the community that you’re powerful mages. Maybe we could help each other?
We don’t need any help.
How do you know without knowing what I can offer?
Finally the red-head shifted, turning more fully to face me on the mossy old bridge, and spoke up. Why meet in flesh when you can tell now what you’re after? Why not tell us now unless you’ve a reason for secrets? Why, if you’ve a reason for secrets, would we meet at all?
He had a quick way about his words, or thoughts, that blurred together until that last sounded like, “meetatall.”
To make sure of ourselves, I answered. We can’t trust a meeting in a scry, can we? Do you talk with others like this often?
The tall one answered. Only each other. Don’t need yer barging.
If you don’t want my barging in with scries, it’s all the more reason to meet in person. Where would you like to meet?
She’s presumptuous, eh? Piss off.
Everyone needs a network. Surely you’re curious to talk. You must know I have a good reason to go through all the trouble.
They regarded me in silence for a moment while the water roared and Jason and Kage kissed me.
I’ll buy you a drink, I said. Or dinner? Just to talk. Your reputation precedes you.
They glanced at each other.
From this spot the nearest town is exactly twenty kilometers. We’ll be there tonight for a bite and ale. Make it yer treat and we’ll spare ya a gob.
Thank you. Which town is that?
He grinned. Have a squint. If ya can’t even find the bridge to answer yer own question, why should we say where to go?
The badger man’s mouth also twisted up in a malicious smile, then the two men walked away, leaving me to turn in all directions, struggling to memorize the spot and the old bridge while Jason distracted me back into my own body.
Faie? I should ask one more question. Just…
Instead I rocked through an orgasm with Jason and Kage as wrapped around me as air and blood, all the time while I held the trance, placing myself back in the grove. Here, one after the other took their places, giving in a steady stream of not only their semen but their power: transferring that over to me.
Surging up from that, riding along on their energy, I stepped from the grove into the forest and held up my palms. These turned green and soft with a mossy light as I extended my warmest welcome to the elemental spirits.
We seek you. We seek answers to save you, and us. We know what is happening to you, but not who is doing this. If you know any more now than when last we spoke, please come to us, share, and we can help each other. We will not let the faie be destroyed. Help us if you can. If you know. If you can guide us once more. Thank you.
The green light grew, blistered, intensified, and faded in the quiet grove, leaving soft white light of an early morning fog, rapid breathing, hushed sounds from outside, and Jason and Kage kissing me and each other in our sudden stillness.
How had I lost the place? Natural consequence of burning their energy from all three of us? Or had they answered me by pushing me out: Don’t ask, don’t seek us, we’re hiding.
I couldn’t tell—skin damp with sweat, dazed.
When Kage moved on from kissing my eyelids I blinked and turned my face to make sure of the continuing mass of fog. We’d only been several minutes, though it felt like hours.
“Able to scry?” he murmured. “Get anything?”
“I need to sketch. Jason? My notebook is there on top of my bag. I’ll forget the details if I don’t get a sketch down. Thank you. Can you two get dressed? And make sure about the others getting ready? We have places to be.”
Chapter 18
Fog was so thick along the coast it was slow going on those winding, narrow roads. It took us an hour from the campsite to reach the general area of Cimbayrel. Another half hour to find parking that would eventually lead to walking out to the site. This was only after we stopped in a village bakery to ask about the place and load up on sausage rolls, sweet pastries, cream buns, and I don’t know what all. All on Gabriel’s dime and I felt rather guilty just buying the largest decaf they had and a croissant. I wished they had brownies.
We had to ask because, though Gabriel and I both tried our phones now, we couldn’t even get a map to load.
I did have a returned voicemail from Si that I couldn’t check. Managing to call Stefan, I was cut off while we’d hardly broached the subject of legitimacy of conversations in scries—much less advice.
Was it simply poor connections? Or possible that magic could interfere like this? I couldn’t tell. Would have been a good question for Stefan.
Melanie had also left a voicemail which I couldn’t get. I was able to open texts to see she was worried, scared, meaning to get a ticket to fly home to visit our dad in Kansas City. She wanted to make sure I was all right first. I tried a text and it wouldn’t send. Tried to call and it wouldn’t go through.
I’d already warned her we’d be out of touch. And I’d told her to go. She didn’t want to leave me here, or even didn’t want to leave the wolves, now her friends. When I could, I’d call and tell her to get moving.
Also a slew of texts from Rowan, Gavin, maybe Preeda or others back home wondering what had become of me—none of which I looked at or opened. Melanie had Isaac’s number as a backup. I could try her on his phone if mine kept being a jerk. Only … should I?
I turned it off and asked the two middle-aged ladies in the bakery—who’d already pointed us toward Cimbayrel—if they knew of any forested trails by a river with an old wooden footbridge.
Sipping flaming coffee, I showed them my sketch over the counter. They puzzled at it, retreating to the back to ask a baker, then calling Jim over from the window seat where he enjoyed his tea and a newspaper.
Jim was an elderly man who didn’t seem to be able to hear much of the question, but also studied my sketch with much interest, asked if I’d done it, and kept me in a shouted conversation for ten minutes about how Scotland used to be all forested but had been ravaged, all the trees wiped out with demand for timber, which was why there were so few proper forested areas left. He talked as if it had happened in the 1990s, rather than hundreds of years ago. Then he started rattling off names of what sounded like all the Scottish rivers he knew, told me I didn’t sound like I was from around these parts, and Andrew finally took pity and came to fetch me.
Isaac already knew that mature forests like
the one I’d seen were scarce here. A large river with sloping ground also narrowed the field. It didn’t narrow the field enough, though.
One thing at a time.
I’d made a list for the day and tomorrow. We had only these two days before the autumnal solstice celebration back in Brethgillian. Not that I wanted to be there. Showing ourselves to a whole bunch of casters when we were supposed to be in hiding? If we could avoid it, we would stay away. Which meant finding this bridge and the wild mages by this evening.
After a horribly long time waisted in the bakery we got back on the road and made our way to Cimbayrel in the still heavy fog. Or, rather, a sign for Cimbayrel. We parked, the three motorcycles pulling up against the caravan, and took a minute just to find the trailhead to walk out. That was how intense the white fog remained.
Gabriel, Jed, and Andrew threw their helmets into the Jeep and grabbed a bag of sausage rolls as we found the trail.
Gabriel had eaten a couple, Zar had eaten nothing that I’d seen, but the rest kept going with the absent enjoyment of a human eating potato chips. Only these sausage rolls were about six inches long and chunky, a mass of crisp pastry and seasoned meat that, to me, you could serve with a salad and drink and call a complete meal. They’d bought the bakery out.
I walked carefully in their midst while Isaac and Kage took the lead. The trail was no more than sporadic grass, stone, or mud.
With this new place we had to find, I wasn’t sure we should be poking about at the coast at all. That clue had been lingering for weeks. Why chase it right this minute? What if we found the circle? What did it mean? If reavers were being summoned here, it wasn’t as if we would stumble into the culprits right now. I had reason to believe those culprits were currently roaming a fog-free forest somewhere south of here with a badger and a bird for company.
A sea breeze stirred through all the white. Surely fog was moving on. It slid across us in leisurely fashion, dampening skin and clothes.
Andrew shoved a paper bag under my nose. “Get enough, darling?”
Usually Zar’s job, checking that I had enough to eat. Like rubbing it in that Zar had, with terrible abruptness, ceased talking or interacting with anyone unless absolutely necessary.
I told him I was fine, then, “What is that sound?”
“Waves,” Isaac said up ahead. “We’re right above the sea. Walking along the edge.”
I stopped dead. “We are?”
Jed, who’d been munching another roll, ran into me and I staggered. Andrew grabbed my arm, stopping me from falling. When I turned, winded and rubbing my still bruised arm where Andrew had caught me, Jed was staring at me, half a sausage roll lifted to his chin. He seemed so taken aback, you’d have thought I was the one who’d whipped around and punched him.
“Hey—” Andrew snapped his fingers.
Jed looked at him.
Andrew rolled his eyes.
Jed glanced at me and finally mumbled, “Sorry…”
“Don’t do that,” I told Andrew.
“Me?”
“What’s wrong?” Isaac, Kage, and Jason had turned back.
“You said we’re walking along the cliff? Which side?”
“It’s there on our right.” Isaac indicated and, only when I looked and paid attention to the ground could I see the strip of green and brown shrouded by white turning into nothing but white. The edge of a deadly cliff was ten feet to my right. There was nothing between us: no rocks, no fence, no lighthouse or warning sign. There was grass, slick mud, a cliff.
Heights are not one of my top fears. My original scry of a stone circle had been high above water just like parts of the Cornish and Scottish shore. That wasn’t the problem. What freaked me out was that I hadn’t known and, frankly, that no one had told me.
If you had asked me a minute before, “How far from the shore do you suppose you are?” I’d have said something like, “Oh, I don’t know. Half a mile maybe?”
Even when Isaac had said that was the sound of waves, it had sounded so far away in the vast distance ahead, that it still hadn’t crossed my mind we were above it. Turns out it was incredibly far away. Straight down.
I hurried back from that thing, moving off to the left, heart hammering. “Please don’t assume I can hear the way you do. I had no idea.”
Andrew, after mashing up the empty paper bag and stuffing it into a pocket of his cargo pants, took my right hand to keep walking, while Jed also walked on that side.
What were we doing out here? Yes, all the fog messages and literal fog seemed like an opportunity for some reason. But after the scrying this morning? We should be on the road and looking for a fogless forest by now.
It gradually dawned on me that they had lost the trail, paused and muttering ahead. We weren’t even heading for the standing stones. Which compounded my points—unvoiced as they were.
“This is nuts,” I muttered, then louder to those ahead. “Let’s go back. It seemed like it made sense—fog, circle, all that. But we’re grasping at straws. And dangerous ones.”
“Almost there,” Kage said bracingly. “Must have to turn in. Won’t be right on the edge.”
“It might be,” Isaac said. “Shore erosion.”
“Zar?” Kage called, looking around. He had trouble spotting Zar trailing up behind us through the fog. “In pictures of it, is it on the cliff edge?”
“No,” Zar said flatly.
“Close?”
“Fairly.”
“Can you give an idea?” Kage was getting irritated.
“I don’t know. Farther in than the willow grove is wide.”
“That’s a piece.” Kage looked around. Isaac and Jason had already started in to our left.
Still creeped out from the cliff, I wished more and more that we could go.
“Jed?” Kage turned once more. “What are you doing like that? You find it.”
Everyone else looked at Jed as well. Jed scowled. Unshaven and dressed in his usual black, from jacket to motorcycle boots, it struck me what a perfect villain he made looming there in the fog. I hoped he was starting to disbelieve that about himself.
“Could you?” I asked. “In fur? You could find the stones by … smell or something?”
“Find the trail that worms walk to reach it,” Kage said. “Even from days ago. Doesn’t seem much visited. Hear the breeze on stones and feel currents change in his whiskers too.”
“Then that’s a wonderful idea. We’ll take your things. Just roll up your clothes in your jacket. You can ride in the caravan and someone else will take the bike for a while, okay?”
Jed didn’t need telling twice.
In a minute he was ranging off into the fog to our left and ahead while we followed slowly. He was out of sight for longer than I’d anticipated. So long I felt a foolish urge to whistle for him. No one else seemed concerned and, sure enough, Jed loped back before long.
He took the lead, trotting slowly out in front while the wind picked up and the fog finally started moving. It would clear and burn off soon enough.
Not soon enough to save us from nearly walking headlong into a great stone like a floor-to-ceiling bookcase suddenly bursting from the white. We almost had a new pile up.
Off to our right stood another, more slender, and another stood to the left beyond this one. More than that it was hard to see—the far stones invisible and the near ones playing peek-a-boo as the breeze gusted and changed our perceptions every second. One moment Isaac, five feet from me, was crystal clear, then gray, clear again, then almost vanished.
This change in the wind and fog made the stones seem to be moving, almost as if they ran around us, playing a giant’s game of musical chairs.
I found it unsettling, the whole place making my skin crawl. Now that we found it, I still just wanted to get away.
We had to at least try to look around. These were our first standing stones since Stonehenge—where we’d met Rowan and certainly brought more leads and help along the way.
&nbs
p; “Jed? Will you please scent all around? Any trace of … I don’t know… Shifters, vampires, reavers, anything noteworthy? I’ll see if I can detect any trace of recent magic. And the rest of you, maybe check the stones? And ground inside? Any marks, carvings, runes? If Calum and Frim, or any casters, have used this circle we might find something.”
“Does it look familiar?” Jason asked. “From your visions?”
“Maybe…? I can’t tell like this. The setting might be right. And the stones I’ve seen seemed large like these. It could be.”
“Then it was never about Cornwall at all?” Kage asked, again disgruntled.
“Of course it was about Cornwall. We found help there, leads, more information. Even if what I saw at the start was in Scotland, and all of this has brought us here and this is the very ground where reavers are spawned, that doesn’t mean we didn’t need Cornwall. You can’t discount one thing just because you have something else. I wish I could see it clearly… Wait…” I looked around. “Come on. Jed, you too. Everyone come back for a minute. I’m going to try something.”
The energy was already there, my pack around me. Besides, the wind was there. An eager gust whipped off the sea, blazed before us, lashed the stones, and I realized it was doing no good at all, only drifting in more fog off the water.
I stepped forward, throwing out my arms to cast it back the other way, calling in a southern wind to shove a patch clear around us.
With a whoosh the tides turned, the wind bellowed, and the standing stones were clear before us. The day in this one spot even lightened as the sun nearly reached us with the thinned fog above.
I felt breathless after the twisting blasts in my face. And yes, as I discovered with a fresh rush of adrenaline, it was true. This was the stone circle I had first scried back in July. Also, there was someone standing at its center.
Chapter 19
I jumped, flinging up my hands, magic ready, terrified in that flash as I imagined how the wild mages had tricked me, how Calum and Frim were right here, ready to unleash their spells and reavers on us.
Then Jason grabbed my shoulder with a reassuring squeeze. Just as quickly I saw it was not a person. It was another stone. This one, at the heart of the circle, was much smaller than the rest. It turned out to be rather thin and oblong when seen from other angles. Like a very thick tabletop set on end, or a very massive tombstone.
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