“I’m fine,” Hazel replied with a bit too much pep, scooping steaming apple crisp into a dish and setting it in front of me. “Just trying to find my footing, I suppose.” She grabbed her tea, sat across from me, and sighed. “It’s strange not being at work keeping busy. Instead, I’m sitting around waiting for…you know.”
I did know, and to a degree, I couldn’t agree more. For me, who not only excelled at embracing change but had also come to enjoy it, I was eager for my grand adventure. Anxious to see where fate took me and to meet my Scot of Yesteryear. Yet Hazel, whopreferred consistency and routine, tried to hide her trepidation at such profound change and uncertainty.
“Whatever happens, it will be okay,” I assured her, without knowing if that was true. “Because, if nothing else seems certain, we’ll all be there together.”
“So you assume because they’re all MacLeods,” Hazel countered. “That doesn’t mean they’re all in the same place or even necessarily, the same era.”
“Now you sound like Willow,” I pointed out. “The sister determined to avoid all this, even as she’s drawn to this place.”
Like me, a few years ago, Willow had bought a place in Salem, Massachusetts, but rarely resided there. As a pilot, she preferred to be in the air, flying. Neither of us was a huge fan of locking ourselves down to any one location, but Ellie had insisted, claiming we should live close because it would matter someday.
Little did we realize just how close that would eventually be.
“I know I can’t avoid all this,” Hazel said softly, her gaze dropping to her tea as if drawn there because, without a doubt, it was. “It’s…they’recoming for all of us.”
Troubled by the way she said that, I cocked my head. “What did your last letter from Storm say, anyway?” I shook my head. “Because I didn’t get the sense anyone was necessarily coming for us. If anything, I got the feeling we were going to them.”
“I know, and maybe,” she began but trailed off when something in her tea caught her attention.
I leaned over and peered into her cup but saw nothing unusual. “What is it?”
Hazel was notorious for catching signs or symbols in her tea that, one way or another, foresaw the future.
“I’m not sure,” she murmured. “It looks like a spiral. Circles within circles, but all one line, leading to a central point.”
“Interesting.” I whipped out my phone to Google it, but the insistent tap of a tree branch on the window caught my attention. Most might only see a branch swaying in the wind, but I saw more.Feltmore.
“It’s trying to tell me something.” The same sense of anticipation I’d had when the seedling landed in my palm washed over me again. “Show me something.”
I yanked my jacket back on and headed for the door, eager to see what secrets the tree held because I was certain it had to do with my Scot. Certain my destiny was right around the corner. Sure, I was a little nervous that it might be happening so soon, but mostly just ready for what came next.
“Wait,” Hazel exclaimed, flying after me. “I get that you’re eager, but we talked about approaching all this cautiously and not rushing into anything.”
“Yet you were the first to move in,” I reminded, stepping out into weather much like I’d left it. Calm and chilly, with barely a breeze. There certainly wasn’t enough wind to sway the branches that much. Proven by the fact the leaves overhead were barely moving.
I was about to comment on it when something snagged my attention.
“When didyouappear there?” I murmured, crouching to touch the small spiral carved into the trunk.
“That’s it!” Hazel crouched beside me. “That’s what I just saw in my tea.”
“I know,” I said softly, recalling a forgotten dream. One of several I’d remembered over the years that were lost to me until something triggered a recollection. “I carved it…someplace else.”
“Where?” Hazel wondered, understanding I referred to a dream rather than an actual place.
Yet itwasan actual place.
I just wasn’t really there…or was I?
“I dreamt about this spiral shortly before I received my first letter from Storm,” I murmured.
“That young, then?”
“Yes.”
We started getting Storm's letters when we were relatively young, arriving in ways that kept them hidden from our mothers. While occasionally tempted to share them with our moms, we never did and couldn’t say why, other than we felt they were meant for only us. Secret fairytales designed to appeal to each of us individually.
We had never met Storm, but we trusted her like a sibling. Not surprising because, in some strange way, we had grown up with her before she ultimately brought the four of us together. I had asked Adlin about her, but he had been vague in his response, offering nothing more than a twinkle in his light blue eyes and cryptic words said with a distinctive Scottish brogue.
