Then what? Was he going to kill her or maim her?
She was afraid, deathly afraid, but another emotion began to stir in her. She was a Cameron of Craigmyle. A Cameron would be ashamed to die like a wee cowering beastie. If she was going to die, she would do it with honor.
Brave words for a girl whose one aim was to find a place to hide. If only her cousins were here!
The stone dike rose from the blanket of snow like the outer wall of a Roman fort. The breath was rushing in and out of her lungs, and she bit down on her lip to smother the sound. As she climbed the dike, her hand searched frantically for a loose stone, anything that she could use as a weapon. There was nothing.
She scrambled to the top of the dike and turned to face the devil who was pursuing her. Crouched almost double, trying to make herself as small as possible, she waited.
Wait! Wait! Hold steady!
He was closing in, making no effort at concealment. She saw a shadow emerge from the gloom. Rising to her full height, she gave a ghostly screech and launched herself at him.
She’d taken him by surprise. She heard the whoosh of air from his lungs as her body collided with his, felt the jar on her wrist as she punched him with her fist. But he had a knife. When she sensed it descend, she rolled and felt the blade glancing off her shoulder. She ignored the pain and raised her head to snap at him with her teeth. He loomed above her, with the knife raised to finish her off. Her screech of terror came out a moan. Around her, the ghosts of the auld stane began to howl their lament. Something—a man? a beast?—crouched above her, wailing like a banshee, then everything faded as she sank into a well of darkness.
Gavin tossed and turned on his lumpy bed. His recurring dream was full of images of murder and mayhem. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, obliterating the light of the moon. He could hear the wail of the North Sea as its breakers dashed against the rocky shore. He knew the time and place. His grandmother, Lady Valeria, the celebrated witch of the northeast, had summoned her three grandsons and entrusted each with a prophecy. To fail meant death, not to him, but to the one he had been sent to save.
“Look to Macbeth,”
his granny had whispered on a painful breath.
“That’s where your fate lies
.
You stand on the brink, Gavin
.
Fail Macbeth, and you will regret it to your dying day
.
”
The image shifted. He was in a cemetery, standing by an open grave; his only companions were the stone angels that stood vigil and the black, prancing horses with their black plumes, the horses that conveyed the dead to their final resting place.
His heart was beating like a bird trapped inside his chest. He didn’t want to be here. He wanted sunshine glinting off the distant mountains and the smell of heather in his nostrils. But he couldn’t leave. He felt as though he’d taken root on that spot at the edge of the grave, waiting for his worst fears to be realized.
He saw a movement from the corner of his eye. A young woman was running for her life. He could feel the stitch in her side and the cramped muscles in her calves. The moon came out from behind a cloud, momentarily blinding him. When his vision cleared, he saw that it wasn’t a cloud that had moved. It was the shadow of a man, pursuing the woman uphill toward the “auld stane,” the old stone, where they once burned witches.
The scream of an animal in pain pierced his mind, and he wrenched himself from his nightmare. “Macduff!” he said aloud. The scream came again, and he shook his head to clear his mind. Where was his dog? All he remembered was that Macduff hadn’t come home last night.
With the vision of his dream still fresh in his mind and the piercing howl ringing in his ears, he threw back the covers and flung himself out of bed. Panicked, he began to pull on his clothes.
He saw her in his mind’s eye, lying facedown in the snow. Someone was hovering nearby. Macduff was there, keeping the scoundrel at bay. On that thought, he dragged open the door of his snug abode and plunged into a blinding snowstorm. A name drummed inside his head, but when he tried to call out to her, the wind swallowed the sound. It didn’t matter. He knew where she was. The auld stane was now a favorite picnic spot overlooking the Dee valley. Few were aware of its gory history.
Macduff howled again, like a cub crying for his mother. Gavin’s feet had never moved faster as he plowed through the snow to answer that call, but he was aware that time was passing. It would take him a good five minutes, maybe longer to reach the witches’ stone, and in this freezing weather, she could have slipped into a coma. He’d seen it before with climbers he’d rescued from the peaks. Some recovered; others did not. How long had she been out there?
It never occurred to him that he was accepting his psychic powers as though he’d been using them all his life. He didn’t debate whether or not he was hallucinating. His power had come to him full-blown. He was like one of the wizards of old—a seer of Grampian.
He found them at the bottom of the dike. Macduff was nudging her, turning her face away from the snow. It came as no surprise to Gavin to see that it was Kate Cameron whom his dog had rescued.
“Good dog,” he said, sinking to his knees beside Macduff.
When he put his cold cheek to her lips, he could feel the shallow tremors of each uneven breath she exhaled. Her skin was ice-cold, and he stripped out of his coat and wrapped her in it before lifting her into his arms. All the while, however, he was straining to hear any little sound that might indicate that the villain who had done this to her was still close by.
Macduff led the way, by turns growling and whining.
“You did well,” Gavin told him. His dog had stayed to watch over the girl when he might have gone chasing after the man who attacked her. “I think you may have saved her life.”
Macduff licked his fingers, or he tried to, then he bounded down the slope toward their cottage.
Once there, Gavin set her down gently on the pallet bed in the kitchen. Though there was a small bedroom with a proper bed next door, it had no fireplace and was as cold as an icehouse, too cold, in Gavin’s opinion, for man or beast.
The first thing he did was stir the embers of the fire and blow it to life with the bellows. As soon as a flame appeared, he added a couple of birch logs and used the poker to angle them to catch the flame. That done, he lit the ubiquitous oil lamp on the kitchen table and then turned to look at Kate. Only then did he realize how cold he was. But first things first. He had to see to the girl.
Macduff had never left her side. His stare was unwavering, as though willing her to open her eyes. When Gavin knelt beside him and began to examine the unconscious girl, Macduff retreated to the foot of the bed. It didn’t take long for Gavin to assess her injuries. There was a superficial wound on one shoulder that had bled profusely but not enough to make her unconscious. His fingers found a bump on the back of her head. Was it enough to cause a concussion?
How long had she been left lying in the snow? And why was she wearing nothing warmer than the dress she’d worn tonight?
This wasn’t the time to speculate. Time was of the essence. He had to warm her and bring her out of her coma.
He began at once by removing her soaking-wet dress, uncaring of the rips he made. Not a sound came out of her as he rolled her from side to side. He was just as ruthless when he removed her underthings. Fabric ripped or fell apart in his hands. He didn’t care. The one thought that possessed his mind was that he had to bring her back to consciousness before it was too late.
Inwardly, he was cursing himself. He should have taken his premonition more seriously. Because of his wavering, he’d left the girl unprotected. It wouldn’t happen again.
When she was down to bare skin, he slipped one of his own shirts over her inert form, then angled it down so that he could examine her shoulder. It was just as he thought, a superficial cut that required little attention except a bandage to stem the flow of blood if she should move in her sleep. There were no bandages, so he used a clean neckcloth instead, then he wrapped her in a blanket and covered her with the bedclothes. Her hair was wet, too, so he toweled it as dry as he could make it, then fetched a dry towel and fashioned it into a turban to keep her head warm. Next to the fire, there was a kettle of water warming nicely for his morning shave. He poured the warmed water into a mug and forced it past her lips. She coughed and swallowed, but she did not waken.
He felt her skin, just a brush of his hand against her cheek, and he was shocked to see that his fingers were trembling. He’d met the woman—a girl, really—for the first time yesterday, but he knew instinctively that they were fated . . .
It took him a moment before he could complete the thought, that he’d known instinctively that their fates were intertwined. He hadn’t chosen her. She’d been chosen for him.
Are you the one?
There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in his mind now that she was the girl in the prophecy. Her name was Cameron, but names could be changed to protect the innocent.
He turned away and began to peel out of his own wet clothes. There was a pulley in the cottage for drying laundry on rainy days. After lowering it, he gathered up both sets of garments and spread them out to dry on the slats, then raised the pulley so that their wet things fluttered just above his head.
When he next looked at the bed, Macduff was on it, nestled close to the girl. Macduff, as near as Gavin could make out, was a cross between an English sheepdog and a wooly mammoth. He made a fine blanket. Gavin didn’t know his dog’s pedigree, because Macduff had come to him as a stray. If any two characters were fated to meet, it was Macduff and he, but which of them was the master was difficult to tell. Macduff had a mind of his own.
“You kept her warm,” Gavin said, “didn’t you, boy, while you waited for me to reach her?”
No response from Macduff, not even a twitch of his tail. He was exhausted as well.
Heaving a sigh, Gavin added another two logs to the fire. This was going to be a long night. He never wore nightclothes to bed, but for the girl’s sake, he slipped into a fresh shirt and drawers, then dragged on a pair of dry trousers. After fetching a spare blanket from the icehouse bedroom and wrapping himself in it, he hung the kettle on its hook over the fire to bring the water to the boil. Only then did he pour himself a generous measure of whiskey and settle himself in the chair beside the fire to watch the girl.
It would have been better for Miss Cameron if he’d taken her to the hotel, but the heavy fall of snow made that impossible. Besides, it was pitch-black out there, and even with Macduff to guide them, it would have taken a long, long time. And who knew whether the man who had attacked her was not waiting his moment to finish what he’d started?
The thought prompted him to retrieve his revolver from the dresser drawer and check that it was ready for use. Having done that, he thrust it into the waistband of his trousers and took his chair again.
Six months ago, he hadn’t known much about firearms. All that changed when he and his brother Alex had been on the run from a mob of terrorists who had tried to kill them. Now he regarded his revolver as one of his dearest friends.
Then why hadn’t he taken it with him when he’d rushed to Miss Cameron’s aid? Panic, he supposed. His dream or vision was still fresh in his mind.
The first order of business, he reminded himself, was to get her warm and bring her back to consciousness. He sipped his whiskey slowly as thoughts came and went. He’d always considered himself a man of reason and intelligence. However, according to his dear departed granny, he was also a seer and possessed gifts beyond his imagining.
He drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. What did he have to lose? He closed his eyes and focused his thoughts on the woman in his bed.
The voice was calm and soothed her fears. It wanted her to emerge from the screen of darkness she was hiding behind. It wanted her to return to the land of the living.
A layer of darkness peeled away, but that was as far as she was willing to go. For a little while longer, she wanted to hide in the cocoon she had made for herself. There was no cold here, no pain, and no shame.
Where had that last thought come from?
She gave a little shiver and turned into the woolly blanket that she was snuggled against. A warm tongue licked her face, and she smiled involuntarily. The voice spoke to her again. It was a lovely sound and brought to mind the hot chocolate she used to spoon into her mouth when she was a child. A spoon made the chocolate last longer.
“You’re safe now,” the voice told her. “My dog found you. He won’t let anything happen to you, and neither will I. No need to be afraid of me. We met at Juliet’s wedding reception. I’m Gavin Hepburn, and I have a place on Feughside, on the other side of the Dee. I want you to wake now.”
She remembered Gavin Hepburn. He was a character from a gothic novel. If he went away, she would be lost. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
She moved restlessly and reached for him. He didn’t disappoint her. His warm hands closed around hers. The voice was speaking to her again. She didn’t understand the words, but she heard the compassion behind the velvet. She did not care if she never wakened, just as long as she heard his voice.