Page 1 of Fierce Highland Magic

Chapter One

Lyra

I slammed my foot on the brake out of reflex. A woman vanished before my headlights reached her. There, then not.

The rental car fishtailed on the rain-slick Highland road, tires skidding just enough to turn my stomach cold. I corrected once, twice, held the wheel steady, and stopped with the front end angled toward a low stone wall and a drop I couldn’t see through the dark.

For three seconds, I kept both hands on the steering wheel.

Then I breathed.

"Hazards," I said aloud.

The button clicked beneath my thumb. Amber light pulsed against wet stone, rain, and the black ribbon of road curling away behind me.

The woman was gone.

There had been a woman.

I was certain of it.

Green coat. Silver hair, loose in the storm. Bare head. Bare hands. No breath-mist in the cold. Standing in the middle of a narrow road at 11:47p.m. on a night when sensible people were indoors, preferably near a fire, preferably with a drink that came in a heavy glass.

I checked the rearview mirror.

No headlights behind me.

I checked the road ahead.

No vehicle. No overturned car. No bicycle in a ditch. No shape in the grass. Nothing but heather, rainwater, and the sweep of my own beams vanishing into fog.

"Fine," I muttered. "Seventy percent she's gone downhill. Twenty percent she was never there. Ten percent I need sleep."

The percentages were invented. That didn’t make them less useful.

I reached for the flashlight in the passenger door pocket, then picked up my phone and tapped Cat's name before I could reconsider the wisdom of admitting this qualified as strange.

She answered on the second ring, and the line crackled with something that wasn't static.

"You have arrived safely," she said, without quite asking.

"Not precisely."

There was a brief silence.

"Lyra."

"I'm fine."

"That wasn’t the question."

I watched rain slide in silver ribbons down the windshield. The wipers shoved it aside, only for the dark to fill in again.

"There was a pedestrian in the road."

"In the rain?"

"That was my assessment."