Page 6 of Blood of the Thistle

The pressure spread outward, rising into her throat and behind her eyes until every instinct she possessed screamed that she needed to run, though from what, she couldn’t have said.

Then the sunlight dimmed all at once, casting gray shadows over everything.

Ryan glanced upward, his scowl fierce—since there wasn’t a cloud in the sky—and then returned his attention to Anna.

The air seemed to thicken, wavering before her eyes like heat rising from summer pavement. The buildings opposite the street shimmered. The colors around her blurred, as though someone had smeared wet paint across the world.

Her chest pounded and she gripped Ryan’s arm.

“What’s happening?” she asked desperately. This wasn’t a heart attack. This was danger—more real and immediate than anything she had ever known.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking more perplexed than frightened. “It’s very strange.”

The pavement beneath her feet seemed suddenly uncertain. It didn’t move or shake but simply felt... less solid.

Her stomach lurched violently as the strange distortion spread outward in a widening circle, rustling leaves that moments earlier had hung perfectly still, and sending a newspaper skittering across the pavement. The hanging baskets outside the bookstore swayed, though no wind accompanied them.

“Let’s get inside,” Ryan suggested tersely, steering her toward the door to the bookstore.

Ryan’s hand on her arm propelled her forward, though she wasn’t entirely aware of her feet moving.

Then the world vanished, became strangely colorless—not black but eerily dark—and Anna felt consciousness slipping away.

***

The passage snapped shut with a sound like a sigh, and Eilidh stared down at the street where two mortals—of the American variety—had stood moments before, but where now stood only one.

She blinked, her ethereal form flickering with the expected drain of moving mortals through the years.

She had aimed at the American—the man!—had gathered her energy, had opened the passage, and reached for the one soul she’d watched for days. But drat, the woman—the anxious, pale-haired one who smiled too brightly at strangers—had seized his arm at the precise moment the magic engaged.

And the passage, hungry and indiscriminate, had taken the woman and not the man.

Eilidh looked down at her own hands, still trembling with the expenditure.

She was an apprentice, barely trusted with crossings. Yikes. This might be why.

“Whoops,” she whispered to the empty street, glancing around with as much guilt as she was capable of feeling.

A pigeon startled from a windowsill, wings clattering against the silence, the small sound seeming oddly loud and accusatory.

She should report this, she thought. She should find one of the elders and confess that she had bungled a passage, and that the wrong mortal now wandered in the wrong time—and oy, without a fated mate. But the thought of Moireach's dull, unseeing eyes turning toward her, of the great witch's disappointment—or worse, her indifference—made Eilidh's insubstantial chest tighten with something she barely recognized.

Fear, she supposed it was. Or its witch-equivalent, anyway.

Let her go, she told herself, already fading into the mist, already exhausted. He is safe for now. The pale-haired woman will...

Eilidh vanished before she could finish her own thought, dissipating with weakness, leaving York unchanged except for the faint scent of crackling ozone and the swaying of a hanging basket that no wind had touched.

Chapter Three

Rain had been falling since dawn, thin and cold and steady, the sort that did not strike hard enough to be called a storm, but found every seam in a man’s clothing all the same. By late morning, the road had become little more than a churned track of brown water and sucking mud, bordered on one side by low, wind-gnarled trees and on the other by a long fall of rough ground hidden beneath bracken and mist.

Bram MacCailin kept walking, his eyes scanning the terrain, ever watchful.

Another day of marching. Another step closer to York, and to the royal justice he’d been promised. He glanced at the other eleven Scotsmen, all shackled in pairs just as he was. The officer, de Wycliffe, had been clever enough to chain the strong to the weak. A man couldn’t run far dragging another who could barely walk.

At the moment, the chain between his wrist and the wrist of the man beside him jerked hard.