Highland Shifter

by Catherine Bybee

  “I don’t know what—”

  He slapped the words out of her mouth. She tasted blood.

  “You flew to Scotland, checked into the hotel, and were back in the States within a few hours, calling the office from your apartment. How did you do that Helen?”

  Her mind scrambled for a way out of his grip. Dammit, she should have learned to light the man’s ass on fire so she could run. Simon! He would know what to do. The sisters and all their magical mojo would know how to get the hell out of this impossible situation.

  “That’s not possible. I was in Scotland.”

  “Briefly.”

  “Let me go,” she begged.

  “Not until you tell us how it works.”

  Us? Who the hell was us?

  “How what works?”

  He moved his hand holding the taser a few inches from her skin and squeezed the button.

  Nausea burned in the back of her throat. She struggled with the restraints binding her hands. If she had her hands free…

  “It was an accident. It only works for me,” she finally said.

  He pressed his lips to her ear and leaned his frame into hers.

  Every muscle in her body held perfectly still.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  He pulled in a deep breath, as if drawing her scent into his body before pushing away.

  A long-suffering breath escaped her lungs when his body heat no longer mingled with hers. With some distance, her mind scrambled again. Behind him, a hallway loomed. Her voice echoed around her, giving the illusion that the house was empty. She moved her feet out in front of her, restoring some of her circulation.

  “I don’t know if I can get it to work again,” she lied.

  “Pain is a great memory aid.”

  She could get it to work. A little blood, a simple chant. Then, pop, she’d be back in Scotland.

  She closed her eyes and relief swelled in her chest. She’d be back in Scotland and away from Philip.

  “If it only works for me, why commit a felony to understand its secrets?”

  Philip glanced up at the ceiling. “A felony? Huh, guess you’re right about that. Must run in the family.”

  Helen pulled her feet under her and started to inch up the wall.

  The snap of the taser kept her seated. She’d need her hands free to touch the stone and move time. Being unconscious would nix her escape.

  “This isn’t like you, Philip. You’re not your brother.”

  Slowly his eyes drifted to hers and dark spears of anger rolled off him.

  “What do you know of my brother?”

  God, why had she said that? “I- You said something once…I think.”

  He shook his head. “Try again, Helen, that lie doesn’t work.”

  “I’m not sure where I heard it then.”

  “I never speak of Malcolm. There are no family photos around for anyone to see.”

  Malcolm? Where had she heard that name before?

  “You’re not him,” she insisted. “You don’t want to hurt me.”

  He reached her in two long strides and pulled her to her feet with the edges of her shirt. His whole body pushed against hers, pinning her to the wall. The hard line of his cock slammed against her stomach and a completely new set of fears washed over her. Memories of old men in foster homes swam into her memories. She’d always managed to get away from them. She’d get away from Philip.

  “I don’t know about that. Your skin trembles and the stink of fear dripping from your pores…” He ground his hips into her.

  “No,” she whispered. Simon. Please help.

  With one hand, he reached up and circled her neck with long fingers. “Tell me how it works.”

  She nodded. “I’ll show you.”

  His fingers squeezed.

  “I need my hands free.”

  She coughed and tried to back out of his hold.

  “If you’re lying…”

  “I’m not.”

  His hands left her neck and dipped down the front of her blouse and around the swell of her breast. She closed her eyes and blocked the feeling. He kept moving until his hands wrapped around her waist and pulled her away from the wall.

  His nose nuzzled her neck as he reached behind her.

  “No.”

  He laughed. Like lightning, he twisted her around, pressed her chest against the wall, and wrestled the tape from her wrists.

  Her skin burned as it tore and bled from the abuse.

  “Slow movements, Helen.”

  It was a warning. Not that she needed it.

  It took him a moment to move away from her, making her wonder if his motivations for her abduction were changing.

  With him a few inches away, she wasted little time rubbing her bloody wrists against her palms. She closed a fist around her pendant and felt it warm. Only me. She pleaded in her brain.

  “Turn around,” Philip barked.

  He hadn’t moved far enough away, she realized. The chances of him traveling with her were too high. “You need to give me some room.”

  One step back was all he allowed.

  “Show me.”

  “It might not work.”

  “Show me.” His jaw tightened.

  “Fine.” She glanced up and down his frame. “You’re too close, but it’s your funeral if you get caught in the current. It doesn’t hurt me, but it burns what’s around me.”

  He gave her two more steps of freedom.

  It would have to do.

  She started in a silent whisper. “In this day and in this hour—”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “I ask the Ancients for this power.” Though she spoke louder, she didn’t think Philip picked up every word.

  The hair on Helen’s head started to swirl with the force of wind picking up in the room. Flames started to spark around her.

  Philip twisted around, then pinned her with a glare. “What the fuck?”

  “Take me now across the sea,” she said louder over the noise of the room.

  Philip stepped forward and Helen lifted a hand up in an effort to stop him from coming closer. A zap of electricity flickered from the vortex starting to engulf her body and slammed her enemy against the far wall.

  “Back to Simon’s family.”

  As the world fell away, Philip’s face lost all expression.

  Helen lifted her middle finger in a silent wave goodbye.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Simon found her car only blocks away from Mrs. Dawson’s home. He shifted from falcon to wolf in an effort to pick up Helen’s scent. It didn’t work. Wherever she’d gone, it wasn’t on foot. Pavement didn’t lend itself for leaving marks in the road to follow. A big drawback of this century as far as Simon was concerned.

  He took to wings again and searched the road for any sign at all. As the sun dipped over the horizon and the heat left the surface of the earth, part of his soul drifted with it.

  He hadn’t protected her. His new family. Searching for love never entered his mind since becoming a man, yet he’d found it with Helen. Found it only to lose her. Maybe if he’d told her that she might be carrying his child she’d have acted with more caution.

  What ifs and maybes would plague him until he found her. But where was she?

  As he made his way to Mrs. Dawson’s home, he plotted the demise of Philip. The man Simon knew in his gut was behind Helen’s disappearance. The warrior in him wanted to call the man out, finish him with a clean swipe of his sword. After he found Helen of course, but finish him in the end.

  They’d call Simon a murderer.

  He’d call it justice.

  Then he’d be forced to return to the sixteenth century or live in the twenty first as a wanted man. No, he couldn’t risk that.

  Helen might not want to return to his time.

  The question was, could he return without her?

  * * * *

  Philip’s cell phone was at his ear as he made his wa
y out of the vacant house. The shaking of his knees pissed him the fuck off. The lying bitch vanished into nothing. Nothing!

  He made it to his car and squealed out of suburbia. In minutes, he’d managed to get the night guard at the prison to put Mal on the phone.

  “Well?”

  “She disappeared, again.”

  Mal pushed out a breath. “How?”

  Philip picked his words carefully. Knowing the guards would listen to every word.

  “I’m not sure. She held it…” Philip didn’t speak of the rock, assuming Malcolm would know what it was. “Then spoke to the air. Asked for power.” He sounded crazy, he knew.

  “Back up, she said what?”

  “Something about asking for power.”

  “You’re not making a whole hell of a lot of sense, Phil, how about from the top.”

  Philip slammed his fist against the steering wheel as he sped through a red light. “She said, I ask for this power. Send me across the sea, back to Simon’s family.”

  There was a long pause. He thought maybe the phone went dead.

  “Mal?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Did you get that?”

  “Yeah. I got it. What happened then?”

  That’s where he was fuzzy. “I don’t know. A fucking hurricane inside the house shot out of nothing and poof. She was gone.”

  “Like magic on a stage?”

  “Without the mirrors.” Philip pulled into the back lot of his warehouse and shoved the car in park. Anyone checking for Helen would go there first. Philip needed to grab a few things and disappear for a while. He didn’t even know why. It wasn’t like Helen had a ton of family searching for her the first time she disappeared. Chances were Mrs. Dawson wouldn’t ask about her so soon. Still, the way his skin itched he knew he needed to skip town for a couple of days. Then it dawned on him…if Helen could vanish as quickly as she had, she could return just as quickly. Lead the police to the house he’d kept her. His DNA was probably littering the place.

  Sonofabitch! What had he done? And why?

  “If you figure it out,” Philip said to his brother. “You need to come back for me.”

  Mal chuckled. “If I ever make parole, I’ll come to you. Where else would I go?”

  The line clicked and went dead.

  * * * *

  Helen slumped to the ground the minute the wind stopped blowing and sat on the tips of her toes. She wasn’t sure where she’d land, but wasn’t going to be unprepared for an attack.

  The familiar stone walls of the Keep, and the moist, dark interior met her senses.

  Behind her, someone took in a sharp breath.

  Helen peered into the dark for the source of the sound.

  “Helen?”

  Tara. Thank God.

  Helen lowered her hands, not even realizing she’d placed them in front of her face defensively.

  Tara and Lora sat up in bed, poised for flight.

  When everyone in the room recognized a lack of threat, Helen moaned. All the adrenaline and fear of the last few hours threatened to manifest into a scream.

  “Oh no. What happened?” Lora’s voice penetrated her thoughts and a warm arm covered her trembling shoulders. The two women helped Helen to her feet and to a chair by the fire.

  Tara pushed a glass of water into her hand. Helen took it and greedily quenched her thirst. Lora’s fingers brushed over what Helen was certain were bruised and bloody features on her face.

  “I’m okay.”

  The worry in the ladies eyes, however, didn’t fade.

  “Everyone else is fine.”

  Tara’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Then what happened?”

  Helen thought of Philip, his hands on her body, the stench of his breath against her face.

  A small knock sounded on the door of the tower room.

  Lora hurried to it, opened the door quickly, and let Ian in.

  Ian stared, his fists clenched at his side. “Are you sure you’re okay, lass?”

  Helen nodded, not quite used to the fact that Lora and Ian could talk to each other without voicing the words aloud. Lora had obviously called him to the room with their special bond. “Bruised, but not broken.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “I should have listened to Simon. He was right.” After a deep breath, Helen detailed Philip’s abduction, his crazed behavior.

  Ian listened from a distance. Lora held her hand and Tara stroked her shoulders.

  “All of this in only a few hours?” Ian asked.

  “What do you mean? We’ve been in my time for four days.”

  “You’ve only been gone half a day for us.”

  Helen shook her head. “We wanted to arrive back in my time close to when I left. That didn’t happen. I thought the stones moved you at your will.”

  “The Ancients have the ultimate power over the stones. There must be a reason for the delay on your end and the quick return on ours,” Lora said.

  “Has the fighting started here?”

  “No,” Tara told her.

  “A few of our enemy’s men were captured, but nothing else has happened.”

  Helen shivered. “With Philip acting like his homicidal brother Malcolm, and all the crap going down here, I don’t know where to go.”

  Tara squeezed her shoulder.

  Ian snapped his head up. “What name did you say?”

  “Philip, my boss.”

  “Not that one.”

  “Ah, Malcolm? That’s Philip’s brother. The one in jail for murder.”

  Helen could see the wheels of thought twisting in Ian’s head. “Malcolm?”

  “Right. Why? Does it mean something to you?”

  “Mayhap. Tell me again, from the beginning, everything this Philip said to you.”

  This time when Helen relayed the traumatic event, Ian sat on the edge of a table and appeared to hold his breath with the anticipation of her words.

  “Philip knew about the necklace, but not its true power.”

  “That’s what I got out of it. He kept talking about himself in the plural sense. We need this and us that. He’s crazy.”

  “Mayhap. Or, he’s Druid as is his brother.”

  “You think? I never noticed anything special about him. He’s charismatic, seems to get what he wants in life, but other than that…nothing.” Outside of the past few hours, Helen would bet money Philip wasn’t capable of hurting anyone.

  She’d have been wrong.

  “I didn’t know I had a gift until I came here,” Tara offered. “This guy could be just as clueless.”

  “He didn’t act clueless.”

  “And he was after the necklace.”

  “No, see, I didn’t feel that. He didn’t try and get it off my neck. He had plenty of opportunity when I was out to hack it off had he wanted to.”

  Lora lifted her gaze to her husband. “He might have gotten a hold of one of the other stones in the future.”

  Every nerve ending in Helen’s body sparked. The hair stood on her arms. “Yes. Of course, that has to be it. His brother is in jail and not going anywhere according to Jake. Malcolm could use the stone and escape.”

  Ian rubbed his jaw. “The man leading the warriors against us…his name is Malcolm.”

  “Oh, God. I led him right to you.”

  Ian waved her concerns away. “He was here long before you, lass. Even if it is the same man, his actions are not your fault.”

  Helen stood on unsteady feet. “I’ve got to go back, stop Philip from telling his brother anything.”

  Lora grasped her hand. “You need to rest. You appear about to fall over.”

  “Lora’s right, Helen. Besides, there’s no way to undo what’s happened. The Ancients warned us about traveling in time to change the past,” said Tara.

  “But Simon and the others. They don’t know what happened to me. They’ll be—”

  “Worried sick, I know. Relax. They can always return here using Cian’s knife
.”

  With a frantic shake of her head, Helen debunked that plan. “No, they can’t. Cian’s knife wasn’t in his pocket when we landed.”

  “What about Amber’s stone?”

  “It’s still there.”

  “Then they have a way.”

  Tara draped a blanket over Helen’s shoulders. The weight of the fabric felt safe and her body started to melt into the thought of sleep. Damn she was tired. More than she’d ever been in her life.

  “One night. We’ll have a clearer vision of what to do in daylight.”

  “My wife is right, lass. Besides, if Simon were to see you now, he might find himself in the jail you speak of.”

  “I look that bad?”

  Tara offered a bleak expression. “You don’t look good.”

  Helen let out a small chuckle, which quickly moved to tears.

  Tara wrapped her arms around her. “It’s okay. We’re here.”

  “I thought he was going to kill me.” Rape me.

  “He didn’t.”

  Helen grabbed hold of the other woman and let the emotion of the day roll over her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The first time his cell phone rang, Philip ignored it. In the pre-dawn hours, he removed his car off the highway and onto a desert gravel road. The location looked as if it was used by weekend dirt bike riding families who camped unplugged from the rest of the world. Suited him. He didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to talk to a soul. He stepped outside his car long enough to piss before crawling into the passenger seat. He glanced at the blinking green light on his phone and gave in.

  The message was from the night guard at the prison.

  Malcolm was missing and they knew Philip had spoken to him earlier that night.

  “Come in on your own, or we’ll come in search of you. Your choice.”

  It was a threat.

  Philip buried his face in his hands. “Better fucking come back for me, Mal. You better fucking come back.”

  In the last hour, a bone-deep peace he’d lived with all his life had vanished. Maybe it was the connection with his brother, maybe it was reality being a bitch and taking a massive sized chunk of his ass in a bite. Whatever it was, Philip knew his life wouldn’t be the same. “Should have known that when I yanked Helen from her car.” Yeah, he’d known then his life would alter forever.