Return of the Highlander (Immortal Warriors) (2 page)

Late Summer
Drumaird Cottage
Present day

“I’m waiting for Maclean.”

Bella was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming, but it seemed so real. She was standing in the ruins of Castle Drumaird and there was someone with her, an old, old woman with a green plaid or arisaid wrapped over her white hair, her skull-like face peeping out. It was a hag, a creature common in Scottish myth and folklore. Bella had dreamed about her before, but she had always been on the fringes of the dream, a distant figure who watched but did not speak. This time she was center stage.

“He’s been away for two hundred and fifty years, and now he’s almost home. At last this day is come.”

The hag leaned closer and Bella flinched. This was definitely no living creature, despite the rasp of her sour
breath. No woman could neglect her skin care quite this badly.

“With him comes danger for us all, but redemption, too, if he is brave and lucky. Aye, he is coming.” Her voice grew sly. “Braw, handsome Maclean. Soon, soon….”

Bella was waking up.

But the hag’s face was pressed up against hers and would not go away. “You must beware, Arabella Ryan,” it whispered.

“Of Maclean?”

The hag breathed a laugh. “Och, no, but there is danger. The door has been breached and
she
doesno’ know it yet.”

“She? Who are you talking about?”

“She! The
Fiosaiche
. The door has been breached and the creatures of the between-worlds can come through. You must beware especially of the
each-uisge
, the water-horse. It will harm ye if it can.”

Bella’s eyes opened and she groaned. What a weird dream. Her dreams had been particularly vivid lately, but this one hadn’t really seemed like a dream at all.

He is coming….

Bella shuddered. She eased her toes onto the floor by her bed and whimpered. It was cold. Make that freezing. The Highland version of central heating had failed to come on again.

Moving quickly, she snatched up her sweater and pulled it over her head, wincing when her long dark hair became tangled. She slipped on her red woolen coat, and wrapped it around her, ignoring the way it stretched over her rounded hips and large boobs. She
wasn’t a small girl and never had been. Bella was voluptuous, a look that was very much out of fashion these days, but she had been born this way and usually it didn’t bother her. Except that, recently, she had begun to feel more self-conscious about her size than ever before.

Brian’s doing.

There were warm socks on the chair and she pulled those on, too, and then her sweatpants. Better, but it was still icy. Her breath was forming her own personal cloud in front of her as she made her way down the narrow, creaking stairs and into the kitchen.

At least the fire in the Aga was still alive and well. It had taken months of her landlord’s patient instruction, but Bella felt as if she had finally mastered the difficulties of getting peat to burn properly.

Bella reached out her hands and felt the warmth. She sighed and drew a chair up close, enjoying the sensation of thawing out.
Much better.

Except that now the worries that had kept her awake most of the night returned. First in line was:
Where is Brian?
They’d argued last night and he had walked out and he hadn’t come back. At first she thought he was sulking at the local pub—but the local pub was in Ardloch, a two-hour trip on winding roads through the hills. Or he had gone over to Gregor’s place—their landlord had a farm on the road to Ardloch and kept his sheep on the moorland around Loch Fasail—but Gregor and Brian didn’t get on that well. Then she thought he might have gone back to Edinburgh to his friends’ home, to soak up their sympathy. Bella knew that Hamish and Georgiana had never liked her—they
made it plain enough that they considered Brian was doing her a favor by staying with her.

“Well, the three of them deserve each other. Good riddance!”

Did she really mean that? With a sigh, Bella stepped across to the small window above the sink and peered out. Her car was there, parked in front of the cottage, but not Brian’s. As much as she sometimes wished Brian gone, being all alone here was unsettling. For a moment the view distracted her, the sweep down to Loch Fasail, the desolate lake; the stark beauty of the surrounding rocky hillsides with their skirts of heather and gorse. The sun was awake and shining, but there were clouds hovering, as they always were in this northwestern part of Scotland.

Loch Fasail was famous for its unpredictable weather.

She and Brian had been arguing a lot lately. She didn’t like to admit it aloud, but things between them hadn’t been good for a long while. Bella had hoped that living out here with no distractions would bring them together, but so far that wasn’t so. Once Brian had seemed so exuberant, so much the extrovert—a big bold lion to her scholarly mouse. They were opposites attracted.

But recently the scholarly mouse had discovered that the gap between what Brian wanted her to be and what she was had widened. He was dissatisfied with Bella’s weight, her appearance, her career…everything. And where once she might have made an effort to change herself to gain his approval—well, she’d loved him, hadn’t she?—now she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The
love had withered into mild affection and irritation, and then…What
did
she feel for Brian these days? More often than not he simply made her angry. She was usually a good-natured person, not easily upset, but even Bella could only be pushed so far before she exploded. The thing was, Bella could please herself or she could please Brian, but she didn’t think she could please them both.

Not any longer.

Bella looked back at her life with a sudden, painful clarity. As a child she’d been a victim of her parents’ bitter marriage breakup.
Victim
, such an awful word, but a six-year-old doesn’t have much say in what happens between the adults in her life. They’d ended up with joint custody, but as the years went by her English mother met another man, remarried, and made a new family, and Bella ended up with her father, a U.S. diplomat. She’d lived in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris, the great cities of the world, and none of them had been home.

Her childhood had made her self-sufficient, and despite what others saw as her air of fragility, Bella did not consider she needed looking after. She was lonely, but she’d always been alone. Despite a succession of nannies and housekeepers, Bella had only ever had herself to rely on. And her imagination.

At thirty-two years of age, she’d taught herself to harness that imagination and make a modest living from it. Bella was a writer, and she knew she was a good writer, but she also accepted that her books had a limited market. She wrote about the lesser characters of
history, not the great kings and queens but those who lived and died in their shadow. People didn’t flock to buy her stories of obscure historical figures, no matter how well written, as they did thrillers about serial killers. But still she loved what she did. She wouldn’t change it.

Brian had seemed to understand that. He’d promised to take a six-month holiday to allow her to work on her book, to put her first for once, but she realized now that whatever he might say, his needs and wants would always take precedence over hers, and he simply could never imagine it otherwise.

As for the core of loneliness deep at her center, few people even knew it was there. Brian hadn’t filled it.

Maybe no one ever would.

The Highlander was walking. It hadn’t taken him long to get into his stride, that loping walk that seemed to cover miles of rough country and tire him very little. He had found the old road over the pass and followed it down into the long glen that led the way north to Loch Fasail and Castle Drumaird. He met no one.

He felt as if he were all alone in the world.

The
Fiosaiche
’s words repeated in his head. Had he really been asleep for two hundred and fifty years? It was several lifetimes. What had he done to deserve such a fate?

But instead of answers, his mind was full of shadows.

At least he had remembered his name. It was Maclean. They called him the Black Maclean, because of his hair, but he had been baptized Morven. Only his
mother called him that and he had long ago ceased listening to her. Aye, he was the Black Maclean, and it was a name to be reckoned with.

He tried to remember more, his thoughts running backward from the cathedral and the
Fiosaiche
. Tunnels of blackness, and wails and screams from the souls and creatures who dwelled there. The between-worlds, the place of waiting. And then back again, and misty mountains and his heart thudding as he ran. Snatches of fighting and shouting. Running hard with his men. He had the brief and tantalizing memory of a great and bloody battle. There was a woman with hair like gold and a pale, angry face—his wife maybe? And then back even further to his home, Castle Drumaird, and the peaceful splendor of Loch Fasail. Isolated, a world of its own, where he ruled absolute.

His thoughts came to a halt as he looked about him again, suddenly uneasy. Surely there had been more folk about when he came this way before? Crofters and villagers and shepherds. And the road was different now. Hard and black, it stretched before him across the moor.

The sound came from behind him, in the distance. A low roar, quickly growing louder until it vibrated through the road beneath his feet and into his body itself. He could see it against the purple heather. A shining black monster with glowing eyes. It ran toward him faster than the fastest horse. Maclean threw himself into the bracken that grew in the dip by the road, and rolled down a slope and into a puddle.

The monster rushed past, the heat and the stink from it making him cough and choke. And then it was gone, vanishing into nothingness, and silence reigned again.

He picked himself up. He was trembling, but he stopped it and held himself proud. His kilt was damp and there was mud down one bare leg, but he was unhurt. He knew he needed to get home as soon as possible. Home to Castle Drumaird, where all would be familiar and safe. Where he could feel like himself again.

He might recall very little of his former life, but surely a mere two hundred and fifty years would not make a deal of difference? Scottish history stretched back, timeless and bloody, into the darkness of prehistory. What was two hundred and fifty years? he asked himself a little desperately. No time after all. He would return, the chief of his clan, and they would accept him as they had always done. Whatever it was the
Fiosaiche
had in mind for him could wait.

Maclean set off again, but now he walked beside the black road, and he kept his ears open.

Standing outside the cottage, Bella breathed deeply, drawing in the chill air and opening her mind to the lonely beauty about her. There was a sense of timelessness here. This part of the Highlands was particularly isolated, too far from tourist attractions for most holidaymakers and too difficult to reach for the weekenders. Even the climbers and the fishermen were all heading back to their lives in the more populated areas of the south. Brian had gone; she was alone. And yet—she closed her eyes—there was an air of expectation, a breathless sense of waiting, a feeling that anything was possible.

Bella had never felt she had a real home, not in the sense of truly
belonging
to a place. For her the pull of
Loch Faisal was irresistible. Her heart had been captured from the day she arrived. She knew she could not stay in this place forever, but she could dream, couldn’t she? Pretend she’d been transported back into the distant past. Of course, on a more practical level, there was still the need to buy food and the other necessaries of modern life. Gregor sold her milk and eggs and butter from his croft, and she had a small vegetable garden to one side of the cottage—what used to be called a kaleyard—but if she wanted anything else she had to drive the two hours to Ardloch.

She looked up in surprise.

There was a pony approaching by the path around the loch. With its shaggy golden coat, it looked used to being free. Certainly this was no child’s pampered pet. Bella stood and watched as it came closer. The pony drew to a halt about thirty yards away and stood completely motionless, staring back at her.

Bella frowned. Was it really a horse? There was something odd about it. The shape of the nose, the elongated body…a wrongness that puzzled her. The way it was observing her was almost human. It trotted closer still and she realized its eyes were green. A clear bright green.

Deep inside her, in a place she had not known existed, fear stirred. A primitive superstitious dread passed down from her ancestors.

But even as she took a step backward, she found she didn’t need to run. The pony had already turned about on its sturdy legs and galloped off with its tail streaming out behind it. Bella watched it go with a relief that seemed excessive under the circumstances. Was it
Gregor’s pony? Bella had not heard him speak of one, and this pony was so strange and wild. If she believed in myths like the water-horse, then she might almost think…

Beware especially of the each-uisge.

The dream returned to her; the hag’s words rang clear in her head.

The door has been breached.

But Bella quashed them, refusing to take any of it seriously. This isolated place could make you begin to believe the unbelievable if you weren’t careful. The
each-uisge
was a creature of Scottish folklore, like the hag, and it lived in lochs and deep pools, changing from a horse or a pony into a beautiful young man or woman. It lured its prey to the water and drowned the unlucky victims, before feasting on their flesh. Animal flesh, human flesh.