Page 116 of Blood of the Thistle

And had failed.

Even now, Eilidh didn’t understand why. The passage had opened—she’d felt it. Anastasia had stood within its reach, wanting to return, yet something had resisted the pull until Eilidh's strength gave out and the breach collapsed. She’d wondered afterward if the fault had been her own. Mayhap moving the wrong mortal days before had weakened her more than she’d realized, and perhaps too little of her power had returned at the time to undo what she'd done.

Whatever the reason, Eilidh had let the matter rest. Anastasia remained in the past, and in the days that followed, what had begun between her and the hard-hearted MacCailin only deepened. Eilidh watched her fall in love with the chieftain despite the accidental nature of her arrival.

And now, finally, the woman was settled. She was bonded, protected by love in a way that made her untouchable, beyond the reach of any witch's power.

Which meant this American was free to be moved at last, as originally intended.

Eilidh gathered herself, feeling the familiar drain as she prepared the passage. It would cost her—moving a mortal always cost—but the reward, if he found love in the past and she earned her humanity through his union, would still be worth any price.

His obsession was a useful anchor, keeping him tethered to the spot where it all began. He questioned his sanity, of course—any mortal would. But what he thought was madness was merely a side effect of Anastasia Ellis being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not this time, Eilidh promised herself.

The air began to change, that particular thinning that mortals felt as dread, as pressure behind the eyes. The American frowned, glancing at the sky, and Eilidh felt recognition sweep across him—he remembered. Good.

She is not yours, Eilidh thought, with something that might have been kindness. She was never meant for you. But you will find your own mate where I send you, if the Doctrine holds true.

The passage opened. The American cried out, reaching instinctively for something to steady himself, but there was nothing to grasp in the space between times. Eilidh felt the wrench of energy, the familiar drain, and then—

He was gone. Deposited nearly in the same place she’d mistakenly sent the woman some time ago.

Aveline de Graham, desperately in need, waited a lifetime away. If he found her, if they loved, this long-held ache inside Eilidh might finally become something else. Ryan would serve his purpose, and she, perhaps, would finally serve her own.

She faded into the mist, exhausted but satisfied.

***

Ryan had been back to the bookshop possibly a dozen times. He’d stopped counting somewhere during the second week, when keeping an accurate tally had begun to seem like one more piece of evidence that he was losing his mind.

He stood upon the York street now, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket, staring at the stretch of pavement where Anna Ellis had disappeared weeks ago. People passed between him and the shop without giving him any notice, tourists wandering in pairs and groups, a woman pushing a stroller, two teenagers sharing something on a phone as they walked. The hanging baskets outside the bookshop had been changed since that day, or perhaps only watered and trimmed. Ryan wasn’t sure why he had noticed that, but then he noticed everything about this particular stretch of pavement now.

He knew which cameras faced the street. He knew what time the bookshop opened and when the woman who worked three mornings a week generally arrived. He knew that if he stood beside the lamppost across the way, he could see almost precisely where Anna had been standing without putting himself directly in front of the CCTV camera mounted several doors down.

He also knew that none of this was normal behavior, though that knowledge had yet to stop him from coming back.

Ryan shifted his gaze from the shop window to the pavement immediately before it and tried, for what must have been the thousandth time, to reconcile what he remembered with what he knew to be possible. Anna Ellis had disappeared, and while he had spent three weeks trying to find some other word for what had happened, none of them adequately described what he’d witnessed.

She hadn’t run from him, had not been dragged away or snatched into a passing car, and there had been no doorway behind her into which she might have slipped or a crowd large enough to conceal anything. More damning to every reasonable explanation Ryan had attempted to construct was the fact that his hand had been upon her arm when it happened, and he could still remember the feel of her beneath his fingers.

That was the part that troubled him most, the detail that had awakened him more than once in the middle of the night and kept him staring into the darkness until dawn. He remembered Anna’s frightened face as the sunlight dimmed around them despite the cloudless sky, remembered the buildings wavering before his eyes and the colors seeming to blur together, and remembered the strange pressure that had made his ears ache and his stomach turn. Most vividly, he remembered Anna gripping his arm and asking what was happening, and telling her that he didn’t know.

And then the arm beneath his hand had simply ceased to be there.

There had been no wrenching movement or force pulling her from him, nothing at all to explain how one moment he had been touching a living, breathing woman who looked absolutely terrified and the next his fingers had closed upon empty air.

Ryan had spent three weeks wondering if he’d gone mad, but unfortunately, madness didn’t explain the missing woman, nor did it explain the security footage that had turned his own face into part of the mystery.

He had seen himself on the news for the first time two days after Anna disappeared. The footage had come from outside the bistro, showing Anna leaving with a tall, dark-haired man the police had evidently been unable to identify, while another camera farther along had caught them walking together. There was no footage of them at the moment she disappeared, and the images they did show weren’t especially clear, but they were clear enough that Ryan had recognized himself instantly and suspected anyone who knew him well would do the same.

So far, thankfully, no one had.

The news reports called him a person of interest, though one particularly dramatic online headline had labeled him the mystery man in the disappearance of American tourist Anna Ellis, which Ryan had thought made him sound rather more sinister than a man who had spent all of five minutes with a stranger and then watched her vanish into thin air.

He should have gone to the police, and he knew it. He’d even driven past the station once with every intention of walking inside and telling them everything he knew, but he’d continued driving after imagining the first five minutes of that conversation. He could identify himself as the man in the footage readily enough and swear that he hadn’t harmed Anna, but sooner or later they would ask him what had happened to her, and Ryan possessed only one answer.

She disappeared while I was touching her.