Page 6 of Fierce Highland Magic

That was impossible.

I had seen 11:48.

The minute changed again.

11:48.

Then 11:49.

Then 11:48.

The digits blinked between them, as if time had caught on something sharp.

Outside, somewhere beyond the fog, music began. A fiddle. Then another.

The melody was bright and wild and wrong for a storm-dark road. It rose over the rain with the unmistakable rhythm of dancing feet.

My pulse climbed.

I put the car into reverse. The engine revved. The wheels spun once against the wet road.

And behind me, from the place where the fog had swallowed the road, came the low, unmistakable sound of stone breaking.

I looked in the rearview mirror.

A tree had fallen across the road.

No—not a tree. A massive branch, black with rain and thick as a bridge beam, lay across the tarmac where I had driven only minutes before. It stretched from wall to wall, tangled in a ruin of roots and wet leaves.

I couldn’t back up. There was no way around it. No way through it.

The only open road led left. Toward Achnashee. Toward the music.

"Seventy percent it's a trap," I whispered.

The silver thistle burned through my pocket. I gripped the wheel harder.

"Thirty percent it's the only way out."

Then, because I had spent my entire adult life refusing to be the woman who made a decision without first calculating what it might cost her, I drew one slow breath and drove toward the sign.

The fog swallowed the car. For a moment, there was nothing.

No road beneath my tires. No rain against the windscreen. No sound except the thin, high ring of silver. Then the mist opened.

A village lay in the valley below.

It should have been small.

Old stone cottages. A narrow bridge over a black burn. The ruins of a kirk standing crooked against the hills. The square at its center, no larger than a village green. But every window blazed gold.

Lanterns floated above the rooftops in colors that had no business existing in flame: violet, sea-green, rose, blue as midnight beneath water.

I drove slowly on, and the square transformed into a market.

Silken tents crowded the green where there should have been grass. Stalls spilled light across the cobbles. Music poured from somewhere unseen. Figures moved between the lanterns in velvet and silver, in antlered masks and feathered cloaks, in gowns that glimmered like frost.

At the village entrance stood a gate made of black iron and white thorns.