Page 102 of Edge of Yesterday

Chapter Seventeen

Cailean watched as Julianna brought a candle close to the bone. She pulled the sides of the bag down, careful not to touch the bone, then slid her hand beneath the wood and cupped it.

“Ye see the blood?” She turned the bone and pointed to a streak of blood down the side. “It is human blood. There is power in the blood. Even our ancestors know this truth. The life…spirit carries knowledge. Until we know what that knowledge is we dinnae mix it with our life.”

“You’re talking magic,” he said.

“Magic is only truth not yet understood. These are the laws of nature.”

He grunted a laugh. “I have to admit, I’ve seen stranger things.”

She looked at him. “Nae.”

Her eyes were wide like a child’s and he had to laugh. One moment she was talking magic and voodoo, the next she was amazed that strange things existed in the world. He didn’t know about magic—though four days ago he also didn’t know about time travel or parallel universes—but he did know curiosity killed the cat.

He gripped her arm, squeezed. “Will you do me a favor and not mention this to anyone?”

She regarded him. “Ye dinnae want Crowe to know that you suspect him.”

Cailean’s groin tugged. He liked smart women, and Julianna was as smart as they came. “It will likely end up being nothing, but I would rather wait and see.”

She nodded and set the bone on the shelf. “And I dinnae want him knowing it was me who saw him in the woods.”

“If you’re right and he was practicing black magic, he could be put to death.”

Seeing Crowe hang wouldn’t upset him.

There were some damn strange goings-on in Heatheredge that seemed to have started with Crowe. Three people had disappeared from this Heatheredge. Had people been vanishing from Heatheredge for six hundred years? Bloody hell, how had that escaped the authorities?

It hadn’t.

Constable Drummond had noticed.

This had to end. Cailean had worn his sword at the time he was catapulted back in time and hadn’t been able to prevent what happened to him. His belly twisted with dread. How could he stop a foe he couldn’t see and couldn’t kill with a sword? Who back home would believe that the people who disappeared had stepped into some sort of time travel or parallel universe portal?

He imagined Constable Drummond’s face when Cailean claimed he’d been sent to an alternate universe. Drummond would lock him up, and not in a jail. Cailean’s jaw tensed. He would make the constable understand. He had to. The people who’d disappeared from this Heatheredge went somewhere. The door swung both ways. He would make it home. Before then, however, he would ensure Julianna’s safety.

Cailean’s brain froze. Julianna. He stared at her. She was intent on the cursing bone. He wanted to reach out, touch her, reassure himself she was really there, but his hand trembled and he could almost see the fear chewing its way up his arm to his heart. If the monster reached the epicenter, it would gnaw through to the blood and drink until he was drained.

Historians had hypothesized about Lady Julianna’s death. The servant who confessed to Lennox that Hugh kidnapped her had said she escaped. Chroniclers believed Julianna had been killed by Hugh or had run into brigands, but Cailean knew the truth. She’d fallen into the vortex that had claimed her aunt and the others who had disappeared.

What had Lennox said? Some people don’t leave their homes in the month of April for fear of being taken. But Strone Hall was nowhere near where Cailean had landed. His stomach made a sick turn and for one horrible moment he thought he would vomit.

Crowe.

Crowe had to be the mysterious party who’d been in league with Hugh Murray. In Cailean’s history, Crowe had seized her and thrown her into the vortex just as Val had him. But why? And how was it possible that two men separated by a multitude of generations could be…what? Manipulating time? Crossing into another dimension or parallel universe? What the fuck had Crowe started here in the fourteenth century that Val continued in the twenty-first?

Cailean’s head pounded, but one thought bounced off the insides of his skull: he couldn’t let what happened to him happen to Julianna.

A big piece of the puzzle unexpectedly clicked into place. Crowe had figured out it was Julianna who saw him in the woods and he intended to dispose of her in a way that ensured she wouldn’t talk and no one would be able to accuse him of murder.

“I cannae understand what the cursing bone is doing here,” Julianna said. “Holy ground is the last place I would think to store an instrument of witchcraft.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” Cailean said.

Understanding dawned in her eyes. “No one would look for it here. Still, it is strange. Why not bury it somewhere, hide it in a cave or beneath a rock? There are many easier places to conceal such an item where it simply wouldn’t be found, and it would be more accessible.”

“Unless one of the other men you saw that night is here at Reay Abbey.” That had to be the answer. Someone at Reay was in league with Crowe. Rathais, he thought with a start. It had to be Rathais. Val was Crowe’s doppelganger and Father Andrew was Lord Rathais’ double. Bloody hell, they even shared the same surname. Another coincidence that was too damned strange to be for real. Whatever was going on was a family tradition shared by these two men. Did that mean Rathais was party to the disposal of Julianna?