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“She’s a witch.”
John chuckled heartily. “They all are, son. Each and every one.” John picked up one of his fishing lures. The black fly fluttered in his fingers, its wings desperate for freedom. “Don’t you worry now.”
“I—I need to get back.”
“You need to sleep,” John said, toying with the fly. “Sleep and don’t give her a thought. One woman’s the same as another. She’s only trying to trap you. Remember?”
“No.” The fly, alive in his father’s fingers. No, no, not his father’s hand. Too narrow, too long. His father had workingman’s hands, calloused, honest. “No,” Cal said again, and as he scraped back his chair, he saw cold fury light his father’s eyes.
“Sit down.”
“The hell with you.”
“Calin! Don’t you speak to your father in that tone.”
His mother’s voice was a shriek—a hawk’s call to prey—cutting through his head. “You’re not real.” He was suddenly calm, deadly calm. “I reject you.”
He was running down a narrow road where the hedgerows towered and pressed close. He was breathless, his heart hammering. His eyes were focused on the ruined walls of the castle high on the cliff—and too far away.
“Bryna.”
“She waits for you.” The woman with the straw hat over her red hair looked up from her weeding and smiled sadly. “She always has, and always will.”
His side burned from cramping muscles. Gasping for air, Cal pressed a hand against the pain. “Who are you?”
“She has a mother who loves her, a father who fears for her. Do you think that those who hold magic need family less than you? Have hearts less fragile? Needs less great?”
With a weary sigh, she rose, walked toward him and stepped into the break in the hedge. Her eyes were green, he saw, and filled with worry, but the mouth with its serious smile was Bryna’s.
“You question what she is—and what she is bars you from giving your heart freely. Knowing this, and loving you, she has sent you away from danger and faces the night alone.”
“Sent me where? How? Who are you?”
“She’s my child,” the woman said, “and I am helpless.” The smile curved a little wider. “Almost helpless. Look to the clearing, Calin Farrell, and take what is offered to you. My daughter waits. Without you, she dies this night.”
“Dies?” Terror gripped his belly. “Am I too late?”
She only shook her head and faded back into air.
He awoke, drenched with sweat, stretched out on the cool, damp grass of the bank. And the moon was rising in a dark sky.
“No.” He stumbled to his feet, found the sweater clutched in his hand. “I won’t be too late. I can’t be too late.” He dragged the sweater over his head as he ran.
Now the trees lashed, whipped by a wind that came from nowhere and howled like a man gone mad. They slashed at him, twined together like mesh to block his path with gnarled branches armed with thorns. He fought his way through, ignored the gash that sliced through denim into flesh.
Overhead, lighting cut like a broadsword and dimmed the glow of the full white moon.
Alasdair. Hate roiled up inside him, fighting against the love he’d only just discovered. Alasdair would not win, if he had to die to prevent it.
“Bryna.” He lifted his head to the sky as it exploded with wild, furious rain. “Wait for me. I love you.”
The stag stood before him, white as bone, its patient eyes focused. Cal rushed forward as it turned and leaped into the shadows. With only instinct to trust, he plunged into the dark to follow the trail. The ground trembled under his feet, thorns ripped his clothes to tatters as he raced to keep that flash of white in sight.
Then it was gone as he fell bleeding into a clearing where moonlight fought through the clouds to beam on a jet-black horse.
Without hesitation, Calin accepted the impossible. Taking the reins, he vaulted into the saddle, his knees vising as the stallion reared and trumpeted a battle cry. As he rode, he heard the snap of a cloak flying and felt the hilt of a sword gripped in his own hand.
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