The air in the shop grew colder, and a chill crept up from the floorboards like mist off the loch.
“It goes deep,” Liora murmured. “Back through your chart, through the generational patterns, through—” She stopped, her breath catching.
“What? What do you see?”
Liora’s voice had gone strange. “It’s connected to Loren Brae itself. To the land. To the... oh.”
The web of light shuddered, and for one heart-stopping moment, I saw it too.
A thread—no, a chain—stretching from my chest across the shop, through the walls, down the hill, across the water to the island where the Stone slept. And along that chain, wrapped around it like barbed wire, was the dark strand. Pulsing.
Bracken chittered loudly, launching himself onto Liora’s shoulder, breaking her contact with the thread.
The web collapsed.
One moment it was there, shimmering in the air between us, and the next it was gone—snuffed out like a candle flame. Liora gasped and slumped back in her chair, her face sheened with sweat.
“Are you okay?” I lurched forward, grabbing her arm. “Liora?”
“I’m fine.” She didn’t sound fine. She soundedanythingbut fine. “I’m fine, I just... that was a lot.”
Bracken scurried down from the chairarm and pressed himself against Liora’s chest, chittering softly. She cupped him in her hands, drawing slow breaths.
“What did you see?” I asked. “At the end. What was that?”
Liora looked up at me, and there was something in her eyes—fear, yes, but also a fierce determination that reminded me, oddly, of Sophie.
“I saw the connection,” she said. “Between you and the Stone. Between your bloodline and whatever’s been happening in that loch for... God, Agnes, I don’t even know how long. Centuries, maybe.”
“Centuries.”Of course.So it was real. I mean, I’d known it was real, but this was different. Seeing it in real life? Why wouldn’t I have a centuries-old curse tied to my bloodline? That pretty much tracked for my doomed love life.
“Whatever this is, it’s heavy.” She reached out and gripped my hand. “We have some work to do. Like, fast. I think we need to dig into your family history. Your ancestors. Anyone who might have had a connection to Loren Brae going back generations.”
“Archie and Hilda have archives of information on Loren Brae at the library in the castle. I have some boxes of old family papers too.” Because, of course I did. Books were in my blood, as was being a historian. And while many of the books containing my family history were neatly organized with footnotes, naturally, I still had more to get through. That “whole running a business to make a living” thing often got in the way of my reading. It was annoying, but reality often was.
“Then that’s where we start. But Agnes...” Liora said. “I’m worried. I wouldn’t be a friend if I didn’t tell you that I was.”
The chill from the floorboards had faded, but a different iciness had settled into my bones.
The loch takes what we love.
“Bloody hell.” I leaned back in my chair and let out a breath. The light Celtic music playing over the speakers in the background seemed much too cheerful for what Liora was telling me. “So I was right to break things off with Graham.”
“How did you end it? Like … Graham doesn’t strike me as the type of man to let you walk away easily. At least not from the way he looks at you,” Liora said, and I stood, crossing to a small kitchenette space where I made tea for customers who wanted to linger in the bookshop. I didn’t want to think about the way Graham looked at me. It was enough to make flutters move through my stomach. Filling the kettle with water, I flipped it on to boil, and turned back to Liora, crossing my arms over my chest as I waited for the water to heat.
A cup of tea usually sorted most things out.
But I wasn’t sure it would this time.
“We were…” I laughed, shaking my head. “Graham was,is, magnetic. We grew up together: Lachlan, Graham, and me. There were others, of course, but three of us managed to stay best mates through all the weird bits of growing up, when Lach’s mum drowned in the loch, all the things, you know? We were tight. Wearetight. But something shifted when I came back from uni.”
The kettle clicked off and I turned, busyingmyself with the routine of setting out tea, while I talked, the waves of memories crashing over me.
“I think being away allowed me to see Graham with fresh eyes, I guess. Or see me, even? I don’t know. But, I’d loved uni. I couldn’t get enough of learning, spending hours in the library, arguing with other students about literature, just that rawness of discovering the world on your own for the first time. I fell in and out of love.” I laughed and held a hand to the back of my forehead. “Dramatically, so. There’s something about the angst of that time in your life, I guess.”
“Oh, I get it. You fall fast and hard,” Liora agreed as I brought the tray of tea over and settled it on the table between us.
“Aye, that I did. But it was fun, and never really love. Just surface attraction, I suppose. But at the time it felt all-consuming. Even more so than diving into a series of your favorite books and not coming up for air.” I looked around my bookshop with a deep-rooted affection. If anything, books would always be my first love.
