Page 5 of Proven By The Highlander (Highlander Forever #15)
CHAPTER 5
L eanne stared at Caelan for a long moment, waiting for him to reveal that he was joking. She needed to stop doing that, she reflected vaguely. He hadn’t told a single joke since they’d met… it was just that the information he kept revealing was so ridiculous that part of her was waiting for all of the hidden cameras to be revealed. But this wasn’t a prank, was it? This was… this was something else. And as ridiculous as it was, and as much as part of her wanted to dismiss it all as a hallucination or a particularly vivid dream, she just couldn’t.
“That’s Loch Ness,” she said finally, gesturing behind her to where the lake was just visible through the trees. “As in, Loch Ness in Scotland. That Loch Ness.”
“Aye, that’s the one.”
“I guess that makes sense,” she said faintly, fighting a sudden feeling that she was about to pass out. If he noticed her swaying, he didn’t say anything, but he did reach into his rucksack to dig out a blanket. “It’d be pretty crazy if there was a monster in two lakes in Scotland.” The Loch Ness Monster… of course. It had been one of the first cryptids she’d read about, and she’d been delighted and bemused in equal measure by all the furor that had gone up over the creature. People had been searching for it for decades, convinced it was there by photographs, not all of which had been confirmed as fakes… but Leanne hadn’t gotten too deep into the evidence. She’d liked the idea that a dinosaur had somehow survived to the present day, as one of the theories insisted. “So — you know the Monster? You’ve seen it too?”
But an odd shadow had come over Caelan’s face, and he cleared his throat sharply, tossing the blanket across the fire to her and shifting his own weight until he was lying back down by the fire, the cloak around his shoulders. “I’ll take you to the Keep tomorrow,” he informed her brusquely. “Once it’s light enough to travel.”
“The Keep?”
“They’ll know what to do with you.” He cleared his throat again, shifting until he was lying on his back with his face toward the sky. “I won’t be able to go in with you, I’m afraid. I’m on watch.”
“On watch for what?” Leanne frowned. Was that why he kept glancing over his shoulder? At first she’d assumed his wary disposition had something to do with the strange woman who’d emerged, soaking wet and barefoot, from the forest… but even once he’d grown accustomed to her presence, she’d noticed him casting constant wary glances around them. Even now, she could see his gray eyes flicking over toward the lake behind them, something suspicious and guarded on his face.
“For monsters,” he said softly, and as ridiculous as it was, she heard the unmistakable ring of truth in his voice. He believed what he was saying. “For creatures that would do harm to the people of our world.” His eyes flicked again to the water, and she felt a shiver run down her spine as she thought of the great beast she’d encountered. She remembered how she’d felt when it first looked down at her, wondering whether the creature was about to eat her… how grateful she’d felt when instead it had delivered her safely to shore. But now, her uneasiness was a lot stronger than that gratitude.
“Monsters? Are there more?”
“Oh, aye.” He rubbed his face tiredly. “It’s a longer story than I’ve time or aptitude to tell, but you’ve a right to know some of what you’ve been caught up in, lass. The glowing figures who brought you here, the ones you thought were a dream? They’re called the Sidhe. They may be a dream, but they’re the kind that’s very real, too. That’s how you got here… they pulled you from your world and they delivered you here to ours.”
Sidhe… it was a beautiful word, and a strange one, though it had the ring of distant familiarity. Back when she’d been reading about the Loch Ness Monster, she’d read some Scottish folklore, trying to get a sense of what might have informed stories about the creature. It hadn’t been particularly useful for her understanding of the Monster, but the tales had been interesting. “You’re telling me that faeries brought me here?”
He glanced across the fire at her, a quirk of his eyebrow revealing that he was impressed she’d made the connection. “Do you find that hard to believe?”
“I find all of this hard to believe,” she pointed out, gesturing at his horse, his rucksack, the fire, the night sky above her. “That’s not going to stop me trying to piece it all together.”
The hint of a smile on his features. “Good attitude. And yes,” he continued, returning his gaze to the sky above them, where more moonlight was filtering through to light his features. “Faeries, or the Fae. The Seelie Fae, to be specific.”
“You’re on guard against the faeries who brought me here?”
“No. The Seelie Fae are … well, not allies to humans precisely, but at least somewhat sympathetic to us. The Unseelie Fae are their enemies… and ours.” He tapped the crossbow at his side, and she looked at it curiously. “They’re powerful, but we know their weaknesses. Iron, fire… sometimes sunlight, depending on how strong the creature is. And they’re stronger and weaker at different times of the year, too.”
Leanne was nodding along, filing the information away, quietly surprised that she hadn’t already had some kind of complete breakdown yet. Faeries, then. Of course. What else would make sense of the ridiculous series of events that had befallen her other than magic? Hadn’t she always nursed a secret fascination for magic, for mythology, for cryptids and creatures that the rational world said couldn’t possibly exist? And faced with the choice between believing what was happening to her was magic or refusing that and trying to find a rational explanation instead… well, she didn’t like the sound of it. Too hard. And she was far too tired.
A question occurred to her then, and she looked up quickly. “What about the Loch Ness Monster? Is she an enemy, or a friend?”
“We both ought to get some sleep,” Caelan said abruptly, cutting off the end of her question as he turned over and drew his cloak more tightly around his shoulders. He tossed his rucksack to her, and she set it down by the fire as a pillow, wrapping herself in the warm if scratchy blanket he’d thrown her earlier. Her pajamas were mostly dry now, and she could feel the warmth returning to even her extremities… a short spell by the fire had worked wonders. The ground beneath her was hard and the rucksack made a lumpy pillow, but Leanne couldn’t bring herself to care. Almost as quickly as she’d closed her eyes, she felt a deep sleep take over.
If a dream disturbed her rest, she didn’t remember it. The next thing she knew, she was blinking blearily in the early morning sun, the fresh scent of the forest around her and the distant sound of birdsong confirming her suspicion. She was still here. She’d fallen asleep and woken up in the same place… on the edge of the forest that surrounded Loch Ness, if what Caelan had told her was true. He was still here, too, stirring in his sleep as the bright light of day banished the shadows of the night.
This was real, then, she thought faintly, blinking up at the canopy of tree branches above her. This was really happening, whatever it was. Which meant that the encounter she’d had last night with the Loch Ness Monster… that had been real, too. Despite the shock of it all, she still felt a strange, pure joy bubbling in her chest. She’d seen it, she realized. She’d seen the Loch Ness Monster… not only seen it, but touched it, talked to it. It had even given her a ride to the shore.
She wondered, as she watched Caelan rise from his sleep and set about breaking camp, what the expression on his face had meant when he’d ignored her question about whether the Monster was good or bad. Did he not know? It must be a good creature, she decided, thinking back to the way it had brought her to the surface and then carried her to the shore as well. She was fairly certain that it had saved her life. How else would she have gotten to shore, so overcome by shock and confusion that she’d barely been able to tread water? The creature had come to her rescue. That meant it was an ally to humans, and a friend. That made her smile even more widely… and Caelan must have noticed, because he bid her a gruff good morning as he kicked dirt over the remnants of the fire.
“I’ll take you a quarter mile from the Keep,” he informed her as he began saddling up the horse, working quickly to cinch the leather girth around the placid creature’s midsection. “You’ll have to make the rest of the journey yourself, I’m afraid — I can’t leave my post. Can you ride?” He gestured to the horse, who flicked an ear in response.
She nodded.
Caelan gave her a satisfied little smile, brief but genuine. “Good. A lot of them can’t when they first arrive.”
Them? she wondered. But Caelan had already turned away to finish tacking up the horse, and she decided against questioning him further. There was something about his disposition that made her a trifle uneasy… as though there was something he wasn’t telling her. Once the camp was packed up, he helped her mount the horse, and she took a deep breath as she settled into the saddle. Years of pony club as a girl meant she still knew what she was doing up here, though it felt odd to slip her bare feet into the stirrups. She could feel Caelan’s gray eyes on her, taking her in… unconsciously, she straightened her posture, feeling oddly as though she needed to impress him.
“So is it just you guarding the world from these monsters?” she asked as Caelan led the horse away from the campsite and toward the shore of the Loch. In the full light of day, she could see him properly — the kilt he was wearing, and the pin attached to his plaid covered chest. He tapped it now when he looked back up at her, shaking his head with a smile.
“Oh, no. The Sept of Clan Grant maintains a sizable force to guard the locals against the Unseelie Fae. I’m one of many in the Watch.”
“Do you always keep guard alone like that?”
“Sometimes,” he said shortly. “When it’s necessary.”
Yet again, she was getting the impression that he didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Strange, that. Given the absolutely ridiculous things he was happy to tell her about, it seemed odd that he got cagey about something like why he was guarding alone instead of with a companion. But she wasn’t about to alienate her one human ally in this bizarre place… especially not when she couldn’t see a trace of the Monster out there in the water. The Loch, so foreboding the night before, looked a lot more pleasant with the early morning sun dancing across its waters, and she found herself taking in the beautiful view for a long time, letting the silence between them linger. Finally, she cleared her throat and looked back down at Caelan, not wanting to be rude.
“So you guard the locals against — bad Faeries,” she said, a new thought occurring to her. “Is that why you wear the old-fashioned outfit?”
He looked back at her, a little nonplussed. “I wear Clan tartan as a mark of my kinship to the Clan, if that’s what you mean,” he said, frowning a little as he glanced down at the kilt he was wearing. “And the brooch is the symbol of the Sept.”
“I mean, I was more talking about… you know, the crossbow and the dirk. Medieval era, right? Is it a uniform thing, or…?”
“Ah,” Caelan said softly, his expression clearing as though he’d figured something out. “Of course. I didn’t mention…”
“Mention what?”
He exhaled, studying her for a moment as he brought the horse to a halt. She blinked down at him, taking hold of the pommel of the saddle unconsciously, worried about what he might be about to tell her. “You’re far from home in more ways than one,” he said, a gentle expression on his face. “The Sidhe moved you from one place to another… but they also moved you from one time to another, if your situation is the same as the others.”
“One time to another?” Her heart was pounding hard in her chest. “What do you mean? What year is it?”
Caelan sighed. “I’m sorry, Leanne. It’s the sixteenth century.”