by Ann Gimpel
Arlen marshaled power, lobbing it back at the witch. Relief strengthened his aim—and his power. Katerina wasn’t the diabolical creature he’d painted her. She’d been dragged here, which meant if he hadn’t thrown caution to the winds and plunged into the vortex, she’d have been trapped in a time warp.
Trapped with no way back.
He’d bet his last pound note she’d have had no idea how to return to modern Scotland. Fueled by fury, he pounded the upstart witch who’d kidnapped Katerina. Long-forgotten Gaelic chants burst from him, magic meant specifically to annihilate witches. Giving no quarter, he piled blow after blow until her form first became insubstantial, and then blew apart.
He was sucking air like a bellows, and fury still reigned. He had questions. A whole piss pot of them, and by God, Katerina would sit still until every single one had been answered.
Not now. Not tonight. I’m too angry to be rational.
“Not sure what I expected,” he growled, “but a simple thank-you would be appreciated after all the work I went to locating you.”
“Arlen?” Her voice quivered, and he wanted to scoop her up and crush her against him, but it was a very bad idea.
“And who the bloody fuck else would split the veils of time to go after you? Christ, but ye’re a daft one, wench. How in the hell did ye get yourself into this mess? Nay, don’t answer that. ’Twas your witchy ancestor pulling on blood ties to bind ye here. She told me as much when I staked a claim to you. Do ye know what year this is?”
She bristled. “Aye, that I do, laddie. Close enough, anyway. I heard men returning from something, like as not a hunt. Their speech was a dead giveaway.” She aped his brogue—and his Gaelic. “Ye have no right—”
“I have every right.” Arlen took a deep breath, one that scoured the bottom of his lungs. The lass was scared, but like a cornered animal, she was standing her ground.
He was proud of her. Bit by bit, he felt the anger start to bleed out of him. He’d return them to their own time, but first he’d extract a promise or two. It was manipulative of him, but if he waited until they stood on the soil she’d left, she might not be as willing to agree.
Did she know what she was?
It seemed inconceivable she didn’t, but she hadn’t exactly embraced her kinswoman’s presence. Not the way she’d been cowering from ten feet away. Her lineage opened her to enormous risk, and he couldn’t let her leave his side until she understood everything.
A grim smile formed. He held the best bargaining chip of all—her safe return. Although exploitation ran counter to his forthright nature, he fully intended to maximize his slender advantage. The world did not need any more Roskelly witches.
Maybe he’d been lucky and caught this one before she made a full commitment to evil.
Chapter 5
The Next Morning
Katerina rolled over in bed and stifled a groan. Everything hurt, but at least she’d slept well. She didn’t remember much after Arlen walked them to the nearby hotel, also named Inverlochy Castle, and booked them a suite. He’d shoved her into the bedroom, told her he’d sleep on the pull-out couch, and shut the door.
Her stomach growled, but it had every right to. She hadn’t eaten anything beyond the cinnamon bun she’d bought yesterday morning. Planting her feet on the floor, she raked her hands through her hair and stood. A shower would help clear her fuzzy head, plus she didn’t smell all that swift.
By the time she was toweling off in a steamy room filled with the geranium scent of custom-milled soap and shampoo, she felt almost human.
She wound her wet hair in a towel and got back into the same clothes she’d worn the day before. They were streaked with dirt and ripe from fear sweat, but all she had. She’d just finished lacing her boots when a knock on the bedroom door was followed by, “I heard the shower. Are you decent?”
Kat walked briskly to the door and opened it. “Decent as I’m likely to get,” she countered.
“Excellent. Mind if I shower? I ordered breakfast for us. A full Scottish affair, so I hope you like blood sausage.”
“As long as it comes with coffee, I’ll eat damn near anything.” She moved aside, feeling suddenly shy as she recalled her flip offer to have sex with him—and his refusal. “I’ll be in the front room.”
“Lass.”
“Yeah?” She angled a sidelong glance his way.
“Remember your promise.”
Kat rolled her eyes. “No concerns on that front. You couldn’t pry me out of this room with a crowbar. I want to know what happened to me yesterday.”
He offered a tight smile and walked past her. The bathroom door snicked shut, and she strode into the suite’s living room, closing the bedroom door to offer him as much privacy as she could. The suite had been a blur the previous night, but this morning she looked it over. Furnished in late nineteenth century antiques, it reflected understated good taste, the décor more British than Scottish. Until she glanced at the modern rug masquerading as a genuine Oriental when it was probably made in a Chinese factory a few years back.
A fireplace graced one end of the room. When she looked more closely, she noted it burned real logs. For some reason, that pleased her. The electric or gas varieties held a far different feel than the real thing. The room’s phone rang. She picked it up and was told their breakfast was right outside the door. A quick peek through the round hole at eye level revealed a smiling busboy wheeling a cart.
Kat let him in and scrambled in her bag for a tip. As soon as he left, thanking her profusely, she poured herself a cup of coffee. A teapot also sat on the generous tray the busboy had placed atop a table under the room’s tall dormer windows.
The welcome smells of hot food brought a rush of saliva to her mouth, but she wanted to wait for Arlen, so she made do with coffee. It was black, bitter, and tasted as if the beans had been freshly ground.
The bedroom door opened, and Arlen emerged. Wet hair framed his face, and his chin was stubbly with dark whiskers. He’d left his jacket off, and a navy blue, stretchy shirt clung to shoulders slabbed with muscle. Trousers rode low on his slender hips, and for a moment she had a tough time breathing. She’d thought him attractive, but he oozed a raw masculinity that made her want to run her hands through his thick mane, and a bunch of other places too.
“You didn’t have to wait on me, lass. You must be fair starving.”
She shrugged. “I wanted to. Come on. Sit and we can eat.”
For a time after they tucked in, neither of them even attempted conversation. He’d ordered four breakfasts of fruit, yogurt, bacon, sausage, baked beans, sautéed mushrooms, eggs, tomatoes, blood sausage, and buttered scones. By the time three had disappeared, she set her fork down.
“Had enough?” He quirked a dark brow.
“More than enough.” She offered him half a smile. “At home, I have fruit and coconut yogurt before I go out for a run.”
“Then you won’t mind if I finish the last plate?”
“Not at all.” She poured herself a cup of fresh coffee and waited until he was done eating. Unlike her with her preference for coffee, he’d washed down his meal with the entire pot of fragrant, black tea.
“Much better.” He pushed his chair back and eyed her. Something about his expression made her nervous, and the bargain she’d struck pricked her. So did his prediction that her worries about mental illness would become laughable—once she discovered the truth.
She sat straighter in her chair. “I’m ready for, erm, whatever you have in mind.” Because she was edgy, she kept on talking and clicking things off on her fingers. “One, we’ve rested. Two, we’ve eaten. Nothing is left beyond the one-on-one time I promised.”
“True enough, lass.” A corner of his mouth twisted downward. “We can begin this discussion here, but we’ll run up against checkout time.”
Her eyes widened. “But that must be two hours from now.”
“Aye.”
She raked curved fingers through her still-dam
p hair, tossing it back over her shoulders, and waited. She’d keep her end of this bargain, by God. And then she’d go back to San Francisco and put this intimidating chapter of her life a long way behind her. So far behind, she might never visit Inverlochy Castle again. She may have had a momentary fascination with the mechanisms of time travel, but it faded fast. She was doing fine, thank you very much, at studying the past without actually being there.
“How much do you know about magic?”
His voice jarred her out of her thoughts. “What kind of question is that? It’s not real.”
A muscle twitched beneath one of his eyes, and the line of his jaw tightened. “Suppose it was. What do you know about it?”
“Next to nothing,” she admitted and stopped shy of adding it was a waste of time to learn about something that didn’t exist.
“I take it you didn’t realize your grandmother was a witch, and a rather infamous one at that.”
“Pfft.” She rolled her eyes. “First off, there’s no such thing as witches. Secondly, great-great grandmother is more like it, and she was always…odd. It’s where I got the idea mental illness runs in our family. No one would ever say much about great-great-grannie. I figured she shamed them somewhere along the line.”
He narrowed his dark eyes to thoughtful slits. “How old were you when she died?”
“Around ten, why?”
“Didn’t anyone in your family find it unusual she’d managed to live so long?”
Katerina winced. She’d asked that question more than once and been hushed for her efforts. “Eh, she couldn’t have been as old as all that. No one lives much past 115.”
Arlen steepled his fingers, resting his chin on them and regarding her with a direct stare, one she couldn’t look away from. “If ’tis the same Rhea Roskelly as I battled last night, she was born in 1723. She has links to that time period, and ’twas why ’twas easy for her to draw you there.”
The meal Kat had just consumed curdled in her stomach, feeling like an unwieldy brick. “Not possible,” she managed in spite of a suddenly uncooperative tongue.
“Aye, lassie. Not only is it possible, ’tis true. I forced your kinswoman to give me her name, and there was only one Roskelly witch named Rhea, so it must be her.”
Kat felt reality slipping away. In a frantic effort to reestablish control, she asked, “What do you mean forced?”
“Names have power. Once I wrested her name from her, it became possible to strongarm her into leaving.”
“But she’s dead. Dead. How could she be anything but a pile of bones in her grave?” Kat folded her arms across her body, holding herself so she wouldn’t splinter into a million pieces.
Arlen got to his feet and pushed the window open. Chilly air blasted into the room. He stopped next to where she huddled in her chair and offered a hand. “Come sit on the divan, lass.”
It was couched as a suggestion, but she recognized it as an order. Normally, she’d have told him to pound sand, but she was so far out of her league, she stumbled upright and walked to the larger of two sofas set at right angles to one another.
He nodded approvingly and sat catty-corner from her. “Good choice.” He placed a hand atop one of hers. “For now, your only task is to hold an open mind and listen.”
“But what if I have questions?” she sputtered, irritated at being relegated to silence.
“I’ll answer every single one, but you need the whole picture first. ’Twill save time.” He pressed his lips into a concerned line. “None of what I say will fit with your worldviews. You will want to chalk me off as deranged, but I assure you I’m not.”
Yeah, sure, dude. It’s what they all say. No one is ever guilty in their own eyes.
“All right. Let’s get on with things.” Kat winced. She’d sounded downright hostile, but she was teetering on the edge of terra incognita, holding herself on the familiar side by the thinnest of threads.
“Nice” and “terrified” didn’t make particularly good bedfellows.
He pinned her with the same expression that had unnerved her earlier. “This first bit of time, I’ll be sharing information. None of it will make much sense, but keep listening, anyway.” He moved his hand from where he’d placed it and folded both of his in his lap, fingers laced.
“Two nights ago, I sensed evil stalking you in the lecture hall. It was what made you feel so…off. At the time I had no idea what it was, or if you had created it or were being victimized by it.” A ghost of a smile flitted across his chiseled lips. “I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit to bouncing back and forth betwixt those two poles.”
“What do you mean sensed evil?” She sucked in a breath. “Sorry. You said not to ask questions right away.”
“So I did, lass, but that one feeds nicely into what I was about to say next.” He unclasped his hands and spread long, shapely fingers in front of him. “I’m a Druid and quite old. Older even than your kinswoman.”
Kat’s eyes widened; her heart beat faster, and she drew back, muttering, “Not possible.”
“Aye, lassie, not only possible but true. This isn’t about me, though. ’Tis about you.” He lapsed into Gaelic. “After I left you at the King’s Arms last night, I called a meeting of those like me. Luckily, one of my order is a librarian specializing in antiquities. She reminded me about the Roskelly witches and even drew a rough genealogy chart. According to her, Rhea was the last known Roskelly witch.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Kat managed to spit out. Her throat was painfully dry, and a lump had materialized dead center in her throat.
Arlen cocked his head to one side. “I’m not certain. There could have been other Roskellys we’re not aware of, but more likely none of the female members of your family had sufficient power to join their ranks.
“Allow me a brief digression.” At her nod, he went on, “The witches ye’re familiar with, the ones who practice Wicca and cavort during Beltane, haven’t enough power to do much with. Your assessment of them as not being ‘real’ is accurate. But those aren’t the only witches. The Roskellys manipulate black magic. They’re powerful seers and mages and sorcerers, who’ve even been known to raise the dead.”
“How?” The single word tore out of her, and she gripped the arm of the sofa, burrowing her fingers into the soft leather.
“They feed off human misery, using its power to augment their own.” He sat back, his appraising gaze never leaving her. “How are ye doing so far, lass?”
She didn’t have to dig very deep to come up with an answer. “Not very well. I thought Aleister Crowley was a sick madman, a wannabe serial killer.”
Arlen’s lower lip twitched. “If ye add magic to the mix, he was all those things, yet he’s as good a representative as any of the type of witches your kinswomen were.”
“Aw shit. None of this is real. It can’t be.”
“The vortex ye fell through to transit time was real enough.”
Her head snapped up. “What vortex? One minute—or hour—I was cataloguing Cameron bones. When I emerged, everything had changed, and I was in the 1700s.”
He developed a thoughtful expression, forehead creased into a forest of wrinkles. “Rhea must have adopted a different tactic with you, so as not to alarm you. Perhaps she didn’t want you to panic and fight her spell.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
He glanced at a watch strapped to his wrist. “Not now, but in a few hours, could ye call your people and ask them about your great-great grandmother?”
Kat shook her head. “I could, but it wouldn’t do any good. Mom’s the only one left. Well, her and her older sister. Both of them clam up like sphinxes whenever I ask anything about the family tree. A while back, I got interested in ancestry.com, but they were so dead set against it, I let it go.”
“And now ye ken why. From what ye’ve said, I’m certain they know far more than they’ve let on, but they’re not at issue here. Ye are.”
“It’s the second time you
’ve said that.”
“Aye, ’tis. The short explanation is ye may well be the first female in your family line in two hundred years to hold sufficient magic to become a Roskelly witch.”
An unpleasant laugh burst from her, followed by another and another until hysteria loomed.
He closed a hand over hers again, squeezing hard. “Get a grip on yourself. Now.” The words held something beyond their mere utterance because the weird pressure in her chest lessened, and she gulped air.
“That’s better. Keep breathing, nice and even,” he instructed.
Somewhere along the line, he’d reverted to English, and she’d missed the transition. “What happened just now?”
“What else?” Something harsh rode beneath his words. “Your great-great-grannie hasn’t given up.”
“I don’t understand.” Fear lodged behind her breastbone like an ice pick. “You got rid of her yesterday.”
Arlen let up on the pressure on her hand. “Nay. I merely sent her away. As you pointed out, she’s already dead. Gives her certain advantages the rest of us lack.”
Kat clamped her jaws firmly. “If I have this…power you claim, why hasn’t it ever manifested?”
“Good question. Means you’re thinking and not just reacting.”
Breath whistled through her clenched teeth. “Thanks. I think, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“Have you ever known something will happen before it does?”
“Um sure, but so does everyone else.”
“Ye’ve trained yourself to believe that”—the Gaelic was back—“but ’tisn’t true.” He continued, his tone relentless. “Have ye found things others have lost? Have ye ever followed inner voices telling you to do something, and discovered later the advice was sound?”
Kat held up a hand. “All right. Stop there. I’ve had my share of unusual experiences, but I read up on them, and I’m far from the only one who occasionally stumbles into paranormal land.”
“’Tisn’t the stumbling, but the frequency and how well ye control the results.” He steepled his fingers. “Like all other traits, magic exists on a continuum. Yours is strong. Sitting here next to you, I sense it because I know what to look for and I’m trained in that regard.”