Page 10 of Blood of the Thistle

“Lord love a sinner,” he murmured as he turned around.

She stood where he had left her, staring at him. Her chest heaved, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. Her fear was a raw, visible thing.

Then, faintly through the rain, came the unmistakable crack of a man’s voice carrying among the trees.

Bram lifted the hand still bound in iron and motioned sharply toward himself. “Come—ere they discover ye as well.”

She turned toward the sound, then back to him, her eyes wide with indecision. Bram began backing away, watching her. If she was a fool, he would leave her. But after a heartbeat’s hesitation, she gathered her strange, flowered skirts and ran toward him.

Chapter Four

She was so confused.

And terribly frightened.

And she had no idea why she’d chosen to follow the man who looked like the character from the movie The Count of Monte Cristo—just after his escape but before his revenge tour. But as he seemed to be running from something, she thought she should be, too.

He didn’t wait for her but moved swiftly through the woods.

Anna followed, her heart in her throat, having no idea how she’d gotten here; how one moment she’d been walking on Museum Street and the next she was in the middle of a forest.

She’d had some kind of breakdown, was all she could imagine, some dissociative episode that had made the world briefly feel... unreal, eerie—sinister even—and had wandered away from both Museum Street and reality.

She followed, pushing low-hanging branches from her path, her mind racing with questions. It wasn’t his tattered clothes that had first caught her eye, but the old-fashioned handcuffs. A thick, rusty manacle was linked to one wrist, the other half dangling free as if he’d broken it mid-escape. An escape from where? An asylum? He was tall and broad-shouldered but lean, moving with a desperate speed despite an unsteady gait. His strange, knee-length wool pants and long, stained shirt—stained with what she desperately hoped wasn’t blood—did little to protect him from the woods. His feet were bare, his long black hair swinging as he ran. She’d only seen his face for a moment, but the image was seared into her mind: long and lean, with a wild beard and intense blue eyes.

He was striking... but not in a good way. He was striking because he was unreal, because he was so out of place.

It dawned on her then—she was dreaming.

Strangely, she felt almost an instant relief. Oh, thank God, it’s just a dream. I’m inside a dream.

A dream that felt stunningly real, but only a dream.

It was the only explanation that made any sense. One moment she’d been standing outside a bookstore on Museum Street wondering whether to accept a handsome stranger’s invitation to dinner, and the next she found herself chasing a barefoot man in weird clothing through a rain-soaked forest. Only a dream could make such a leap; reality certainly didn't.

And so she kept running, knowing she would wake soon, and this would all be done. She remembered a dream she’d had as a child, of running from some unseen bogeyman, and telling herself inside the dream that she had to run all the way home and get into bed so that could wake up. Oddly, Anna remembered her fright in that dream, but she didn’t recall feeling winded or getting scratched and slapped by branches.

But then after a while—honestly, she’d run too far in the strange man’s shadow to not have questioned more sooner—Anna stopped, her chest heaving. She swallowed hard, trying to draw long, even breaths while she listened. Above the bare noise of the man in front of her, who moved almost entirely without sound, rather confirming her belief that she was inside a dream, she heard nothing. The muted distant voices she’d heard ten minutes ago, which had prompted her to run—to follow the weirdo in front of her—had vanished. There was no other noise.

Blowing out a hard puff of breath, Anna placed her hands on her hips and watched the Monte Cristo man as he continued on. See ya, she thought with annoyance, unable to make sense of why she’d followed him so blindly. Even inside a dream, that seemed like something she wouldn’t do, or at least as something she would have questioned more.

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, letting the rain fall softly on her face, telling herself to wake now.

But damn, she didn’t wake. Instead, she heard Monte Cristo man’s voice, understanding now as she hadn’t before that his heavy accent sounded more Scottish than British.

“Move, woman!” He commanded in a loud hiss, closer than he should have been.

Her eyes shot open.

He stood between two spindly trees, his hand clutching one slender trunk, staring at her, a dangerous gleam in his blue eyes. He was only ten or so feet away, must have backtracked a bit.

“What—who—are we running from?”

“Stand and stay, and ye’ll find out,” he warned. “But I promise ye, lass, ye dinna want to do that.”

Since this was only a dream, Anna felt a surge of annoyance rather than fear.

“Okay,” she said, holding up both hands. “But can somebody please explain why I’m dreaming about an escaped prisoner who looks like he’s from the Middle Ages?”