Page 7 of Highlander’s Heart

No. She had no idea who called or who Kate was, but she knew she couldn’t let him get closer. She wanted to get away from both the name and the caller.

She crawled away from the voice, away from the vomit, away from the pain. But her head was about to burst like a ripe watermelon.

“Kate!”

There might have been some light behind her, she wasn’t sure because spots flashed before her eyes. She crawled ahead, having no idea where she went. She felt like a blind person in a malfunctioning helicopter, spinning out of control. She sank deeper into a reeling darkness and flashing spots and pain.

After a while, she saw something glowing blue and brown in the distance. A rock. She slowly advanced there—somewhere in the back of her psyche she knew that rock was hope. A direction. An answer.

She came to the rock and pushed herself up, wincing from the glow of a circle of blue waves with a straight brown line through it. Was there just one, or were there two or three of them? Her vision floated, doubling and tripling everything around her.

There was a handprint in the stone. As if someone reached out to her. As if someone wanted to help her. She needed help to get out of this dark, mindless world.

She put her hand in the handprint. It was icy cold and wet against her palm. Surprisingly, it calmed her, soothed her.

Help, she thought. Hope. I need hope. And she knew that it was on the other side of that handprint.

A vibration went through the rock, and a buzz went through her.

It was as though the rock lost all hardness and became something else. Like water, then thin air. She fell. Right through the stone. Tumbling down…

The impact of hitting something hard again slammed through her, and everything went black.

Chapter 2

Inverlochy Castle, July 1308

“Who goes there?” cried the guard from the wall.

Ian patted the neck of his horse. A bridge across the moat separated him from his clan. They were all there, behind those walls, or at least, that’s what his cousin Marjorie had told him when he’d gone to Glenkeld, their current clan seat.

Even his father was supposed to be in Inverlochy.

And no one knew that Ian was still alive.

“Ian Cambel,” he cried.

He hadn’t called himself that in years. The words sounded strange. They sent a tremor through his core, but his voice didn’t give it out. It was as though he were an imposter about to take the place of a dead man.

Where was the feeling of coming home to freedom and peace? Where was the man he’d thought he would become once he returned to the Highlands?

Instead, he was ashamed of who he was. And dreaded his family’s reaction to seeing what had become of him.

He was a monster who’d killed people for the pleasure of his masters. What would his father say if he learned that?

The guard turned to another man on the wall, and they talked briefly.

“Prove ye’re a Cambel,” one of them said.

Ian closed his eyes briefly and lowered his head. “I havna anything with me that can prove that. I’ve been on the road for months. If ye call my father or my uncles Dougal or Neil… Or any of my cousins—Craig, Owen, or Domhnall—they’ll recognize me.”

“Aye,” the guard said and left the wall.

Ian patted his black horse, Thor, again—more to calm himself than the horse. Ian had named him after a warrior in Baghdad. The man had been from Norway, a giant with shoulders as broad as a ship. When the slave masters had tried to force Thor to kill a wounded Ian, the man had refused and was put to death for it. That was a lesson Ian had never forgotten.

So much had changed in the clan, he’d learned in Glenkeld. Craig had marrit. Lena, Craig’s sister and Ian’s cousin, was marrit, as well, and Domhnall. Owen had grown up a strong warrior. Ian’s father was weak and stayed in bed in Inverlochy, which was the reason Ian had come here rather than returning to his family home. Life had gone on without him. Everyone had evolved and grown.

He was the only one who’d taken a step back in development, lowered himself to a primitive state of survival. Life against death.