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But she hadn’t been hallucinating. She knew it. It had been real. There really was a Power; she had felt it from the first moment she had seen those old documents. That was why she had been driven to keep translating them, lugging both them and the laptop around when doing so had been a lot of trouble. She had protected them when common sense should have led her to abandon both.
Everything that had happened in the past eight months had led her inexorably to this moment, standing naked and cold in a dingy little shower in a truck-stop motel somewhere in Iowa, facing an unbelievable but suddenly crystal-clear conclusion.
If it were possible, she had to travel through time. Parrish had the sheet; perhaps that was preordained, and there was nothing she could have done about it. But now that he knew, she had to prevent him from getting the Treasure, and the only way to do that was to force Niall to hide it somewhere else. Or perhaps—silly thought, because she wasn’t made of heroic material, but still—just perhaps, she was meant to find the Treasure, and use the Power to destroy the Foundation.
She had to go to Creag Dhu—six hundred and seventy-five years ago.
Chapter 18
SPRING CAME SOFTLY TO THE HIGHLANDS. IT WAS MAY, AND THE mountains were carpeted with green. The cool, misty days could suddenly give way to bright sunshine and air so clear it hurt her eyes to see it. From somewhere would come a fragment of sound, the faint echo of a bagpipe, and the haunting sound made her soul weep.
It had taken her four months to get here. At first she had simply kept on driving, going south, angling toward the east. The seasons changed as she drove, winter loosening its grip more and more the farther south she went, and it was in Tennessee, in mid-February, that she saw the first flower blooming. It seemed like such a miracle, in the form of a cheerful yellow jonquil, that she stopped driving then, and rested, and planned.
An early spring, the locals said, after a mild winter. The jonquils were blooming a couple of weeks earlier than usual. The winter hadn’t been mild in Minnesota, but eight hundred miles farther south put her in a different climate, a different world.
She had quickly realized she couldn’t do this alone, and there was only one person she could think of to call.
Harmony had listened silently to Grace’s request to travel with her to Scotland for an unspecified length of time.
“Scotland,” she finally said. “They don’t still paint their faces blue, do they?”
“Only in movies.”
“I don’t have no passport.”
“That’s easy to get, if you have your birth certificate.”
“You said you need my help doin’ something. Reckon you can bring yourself to tell me exactly what it is I’d be doin’?”
“If you go,” Grace said.
“I’ll think about it. Call me in a couple of days.”
Grace gave her three days, then called again. “Okay,” Harmony said. “If I go, would I be doin’ anything illegal?”
“No. I don’t think.” Given that she had to expect the unexpected, Grace couldn’t swear that she would stay on the side of the law.
“Dangerous?”
“Yes.”
Harmony sighed. “Well, hell,” she drawled. “You do make it hard to resist, don’t you? How long would I be gone? I got my house to look after, you know.”
“I don’t know. A couple of days, a couple of weeks. I’ll pay all your expenses—”
“I’ll pay my own way, if I go. That way, if I get pissed, I won
’t feel beholden to stay.” She was silent for a moment, and Grace could hear her tapping her nails on the phone. “I got one more question.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your real name?”
Grace hesitated. It felt strange to say her own name. The only time she had heard it spoken in months was when Kris had said it. She had gone by so many names that sometimes she felt as if she had no identity. “Grace,” she said softly. “Grace St. John. But I’ll be traveling under the name Louisa Croley; that’s the name on my passport and driver’s license.”
“Grace.” Harmony sighed. “Shit. If you’d lied to me, I coulda said no.”
* * *
