Knight of Pentacles (Knights of the Tarot Book 3) (2 page)

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As the sputtering engine gasped its last, Jenna Cameron set her forehead against the steering wheel and groaned. Could this day get any worse? As if it weren’t enough her world had turned upside down, now her car decided to quit in the dead of night on a desolate stretch of road with no bloody cellular signal.

If not for the dream she’d had last night, she’d be Mrs. William Comstock right now, on her way to the honeymoon cottage she’d rented with the man she’d waited five long and frustrating years to marry.

The thought of William sent a chill through Jenna. In the dream, she’d seen herself driving off the edge of a cliff. She was married to William and utterly miserable. As her car soared over the edge of the precipice, she heard her mother’s voice. “The right man is out there, waiting for you to find him. But it will never be if you bind yourself to a man you don’t love.”

As soon as she awoke, she rang William. When she told him about the dream, he said, as she’d secretly hoped he would, “I was willing to overlook that your mother was a witch because I believed your father had safely guided you away from the path of darkness, but now I see that, like her, you have been led astray. I pray someday you will embrace the Light of God, Jenna. I truly do. But, for now, I cannot risk my own immortal soul by marrying someone so susceptible to the darkness.”

William, a Presbyterian pastor like her father, blamed everything he did not understand on the devil.

As relieved as Jenna was to have escaped, the sudden change of course had thrown her life into chaos. Expecting to be married, she’d given up her job and flat in Edinburgh and, consequently, was left with no source of income and nowhere to live.

So, she was on her way to the rented cottage in Rosemarkie, a small seaside town on Scotland’s Black Isle. Since she couldn’t get her deposit back, it seemed like a good idea to use the cottage to reflect and regroup.

Coming all this way alone had suddenly lost its appeal, but here she was—and wallowing in self-pity was not going to solve anything. According to the Google map she’d printed out, she wasn’t far from her destination. She might as well suck it up and walk the rest of the way. When she got there, she could ring a garage about her car.

Grabbing her purse, her forest-green wool cloak, and the battery-powered torch she kept in the glove box, she climbed out of the car and set off along the rural tree-lined road, which was dark and a little spooky. No cars passed her in either direction. Crickets chirped all around and small rustlings from the surrounding woods startled her sporadically. Senses alert, she stopped repeatedly to check her mobile for a signal.

Her heart pounded and, despite the chill in the air, she was sweating under her cloak and sweater. The only good thing she could say about her present predicament was that her fear of being torn to pieces by wild animals had temporarily eclipsed her other worries.

She didn’t know how long she’d been walking when she came to an old stone bridge. Just beyond was a sign. She shone the beam of her torch at the words carved into the wooden plaque.

Faery Glen.

Jenna took heart. She’d read something about the glen on the website for the cottage, so she shouldn’t have much farther to go. Unfortunately, she needed to pee rather urgently. Might there be somewhere to go in the glen?

Venturing into a forest in the middle of the night might not be the smartest thing she’d ever done, but her bladder was bursting and she wasn’t about to tinkle by the side of the road. Just because no cars had gone by since she’d started walking, didn’t mean one wouldn’t appear the moment she dropped her knickers. Besides, there was a carpark abutting the glen, so there might be a public lavatory there as well.

Up above, the sky was an indigo canvas splattered with specks of white, some larger than others. She crossed the small asphalt lot. Finding no bathroom, she squatted in the bushes. When she’d finished her business, she shone the torch into the glen. Everything outside the beam was pitch black. Water ran somewhere nearby. Thirst drew her down the footpath. All that crying had made her as parched as a dry sponge.

I’ll only go a little ways, find the stream, and take a wee sip.

The hollow clomp of her footsteps disturbed the silence as she crossed a wooden bridge. On the other side, the path curved sharply. In a clearing just beyond the turn were the falls. In the silver light of the full moon, the cascading water reminded her of the bridal veil she might never get a chance to wear.

Then, she saw him. A man in the pool below the falls. He was stark naked, soaking wet, and had his back to her.

Alarm electrifying every nerve ending, she stepped back into the shadows. Her first thought was that he might be a homeless man who’d taken refuge in the woods. He had a beard and long hair, so it seemed the most logical explanation. Her next thought was that he might be performing some sort of ritual. She was on the Black Isle, after all, in a place called Faery Glen on the night of a full moon, so his being a New Age warlock or druid didn’t seem all that infeasible. A long shot, perhaps, but not meters outside the realm of possibility.

When curiosity overrode her apprehension, she stepped closer to get a better look at him. The moonlight bathing his glistening physique revealed a tall, slender frame with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a shapely bum. Wetness and poor lighting made telling the color of his hair impossible. Light brown, maybe, or dark blond. She started a little when he bent over and shook his head like a dog. As he threw it back, he raised his muscular white arms to push the clinging wet hair off his face.

Despite her long engagement and having achieved the ripe age of twenty-five, she’d never seen a naked man before. Not in the flesh, anyway, and watching this one bathing in the wild was making her feel things she shouldn’t. The prospect of being caught spying on him was even more unsettling.

Ducking behind the thick trunk of the nearest tree, she watched as he continued his bath. Drunk on a tart cocktail of shame and lust, she took in the graceful slope of his shoulders, the long muscles supporting his serrated spine, and the alluring dimples just below the small of his back. His beautiful form and the way the moonlight sparkled on the droplets clinging to his skin made her pulse race and her knees weaken.

A strong urge to touch him welled up inside her. How badly she wanted to run her hands over every glistening curve and indentation of his manly form—both for prurient reasons and to absorb some of his confidence the way plants absorbed sunlight. As exposed as he was to the elements, he seemed admirably comfortable in his skin.

She’d never felt that at ease with herself, even when alone. All her life, she’d been made to feel inferior. As much as she didn’t want to believe that she was, part of her did.

Mesmerized by the man in the pool, she went on watching. Something told her he was like her mother. Esoteric rather than religious. Open-minded instead of rigid. Accepting, not judging. She couldn’t say how or why she sensed this about him. She only knew she felt it deep down in some instinctive part of her psyche.

Hope fluttered in her heart. Could he be the one her mother spoke of in the dream? Scoffing at her romantic delusions, she smashed the thought with the rock of reason and headed back to the footpath.

The moon had gone behind a cloud and the glen was darker than before. Even with the aid of the torch, she could only see a step or two in front of her. All at once, the wood seemed haunted. Eyes watched from behind every tree. Nothing looked familiar. The hairs on the back of her neck prickling, she shone the beam right and left, unable to recall which way she’d come.

Choosing a direction, she hurried down the path a little way, searching the illuminated shrubbery for anything familiar. Gnarled roots reached out to trip her. Branches clawed at her face and hair. Spider webs endeavored to ensnare her.

An owl hooted, shattering Jenna’s courage along with the silence. As fear flooded her system, she broke into a run. Heaven help her. She was lost in a dark wood inhabited by God alone knew what.

Over the pounding in her ears, her rational mind whispered, “You are acting like a complete imbecile. There are no creatures more terrifying than badgers in these woods.”

Returning to her senses, Jenna slowed to a walk and threw a backward glance toward the waterfall. The man was just a man, and his reasons for bathing in the falls were no business of hers. Extreme fatigue coupled with the emotional distress of her cancelled wedding, looming poverty, and unresolved car trouble had robbed her of her logic. She was quite sure that, in the sobering light of morning, she would look back on this momentary episode of madness and have a good laugh. Right now, however, she just wanted to find that bloody cottage and put herself and this crappy day to bed.

After walking in circles for another half hour, she sat down on a rock she’d passed several times and opened her handbag. As she felt around for the directions, her fingers grazed an item she’d forgotten all about in her anguish. Her mother’s scorched grimoire. On a whim, she’d put it in her purse, thinking she might finally summon the courage to look through its pages.

When she’d first saved it from the fire, she couldn’t understand the words and drawings inside. It seemed to be written in gibberish and glyphs. A cipher to protect dark secrets, no doubt. Later, after her father, who’d set the fire to burn his late wife’s Pagan books, frightened Jenna with his talk of Satan, she grew too afraid to look again. Not sure what to do with the book, she hid it in the back of a drawer and eventually forgot all about it. A few days ago, she came upon it while packing up her flat.

I cannot risk my own immortal soul by marrying someone so susceptible to the darkness.

And she could not give up all hope of happiness by marrying a man who condemned who she really was. Her gifts, God bless them, had saved her from following in her mother’s tragic footsteps.

Leaving the spell book for later, Jenna studied the map under the beam of her torch. The cottage, to her relief, was hidden in the trees a few yards ahead. Numb and leaden-limbed, she found her way there and, after struggling for a minute with the combination lock-box, released the key.

As she opened the front door, the disagreeable smell of mildew rushed out to greet her. Too tired to care about the mustiness or anything else, she threw her purse on a chair, kicked off her shoes, and curled up on the sofa under her cloak. Moments after shutting her eyes, she tumbled into a deep and dreamless slumber.

Chapter 2

In olden times, the maidens of Rosemarkie decorated the pools of Faery Glen with flowers to entice the faery who lived there to keep the village’s water supply clean. Now, they brought Axel other oblations, many of which they left in an abandoned well near a curve in the footpath. Today, he discovered something in the rotting wooden bucket that had been illegal in the Viking enclave in the north of Scotland where he grew up.

Love poems.

In his day and age, suitors who wrote such intimate verses were presumed to know their subjects more intimately than the rules of courtship permitted—a presumption that often resulted in the poet’s death at the hands of the lady’s male relations.

Hence, the ban on romantic couplets kept the murder rate down.

Since the sonnets he had found in the well were penned by a woman he did not know, he could see no harm in reading her lovely, albeit melancholy, verses.

Sensing a hovering presence, Axel looked up from the page to find a dark-haired lad of no more than eighteen years of age standing over him. The fact that the lad was stark naked and sexually aroused might have alarmed him were he not accustomed to seeing many such “gillie-wet-foots” in the halls of Castle Le Fay—more often than not in some lewd pose with one of the ladies of the court.

To avoid looking where he would rather not, Axel locked gazes with the young man and waited for him to state his business.

Without delay, the page said, “Her Majesty requests that you attend her at once, my good knight.”

He could guess what the queen wanted. She had not summoned him since just before he had granted Sir Leith MacQuill the favor of petitioning an audience with Herself. Since his friend had not returned this way, Axel could only presume he was chained in the dungeon, awaiting his fate as Avalon’s Samhain tithe to Madoc Morfryn, the Dark Lord of the Thitherworld. The thought of Leith’s imminent demise gave Axel some pain. Though his fellow knight’s visits had been few and far between in recent years, he would miss the possibility of company.

Axel nodded toward the open book in his hand. “Tell her I shall attend her as soon as I have finished this verse.”

“With all due respect, my lord, my instructions were to bring you to her at once.”

“That being the case, I would never dream of keeping Her Majesty waiting.” Axel offered the page a tight-lipped smile. “For we live for her pleasure and must not make her unhappy.”

Marking his place, he got to his feet and set the book on the table beside the chair. Having done nothing wrong, he had no reason to fear the summons. So, why had his wame grown as hard as a millstone?

He followed the page to the chamber at the back of the cave where the portal was located. They passed through, coming out in a clearing surrounded by tall trees. The sky was clear and deep blue and the temperature was moderate. A slight breeze brought the perfume of sun-warmed wildflowers to his nostrils.