Page 3 of The Story of his Highland Bride
“Ow—” she hissed as, slowly, she sat up and touched the throbbing lump at the back of her head. “Way to go, Eloise. Let’s go out into the Highlands, hey, wander around some rocks and smack your head on one, and then drive home with a concussion. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
Grabbing part of the drystone wall, she hoisted herself to her feet and took a moment to catch her breath and wait for the dizziness to fade. Still, she was alive. Her heart still beat in her chest, her lungs were sucking in crisp, cold air, and the pain in her head was real enough. Only the memory of what had happened was foggy, too strange and inexplicable to be the truth.
It must’ve been an old Halloween decoration,she told herself, remembering the loud boom and the odd whispering and the way her hand had gotten stuck.I’ll have to put in a complaint to someone, get them to remove it before someone else gets hurt.
Wondering if there was a visitor center or staff hut somewhere nearby, where she could lodge said complaint, she finally turned her attention toward the rest of the cairn site.
Squinting in case her splitting headache was messing with her eyes, she scanned her surroundings, struggling to get her bearings. By her reckoning, the parking lot should have been behind her, through the small stretch of trees, and there should’ve been a road passing the ancient burial ground on her left. But neither of those things were where they were supposed to be. In fact, neither of those things seemed to be there at all. And the gravel path that led into Clava Cairns was gone, replaced with an overgrown dirt track, barely visible.
“It just looked different in the storm,” she told herself, sliding out of the keyhole shape of the cairn.
Convinced she was concussed or worse, she walked back to where sheknewthe parking lot had to be. But the longer she walked, the quicker she realized that the small coppice of trees that she’d come through wasn’t a small coppice at all. It was a certified woodland, densely packed with sycamores and horse chestnuts and a bunch of other trees she couldn’t recognize without the handy guide she often used when she was writing her novels.
As for the parking lot—if it was there somewhere, Mother Nature had swamped it. The road, too.
“Did I come out the wrong way?” she muttered, turning back.
Traipsing into Clava Cairns once more, she headed to the opposite end, past two other circular cairns. As she went, she took out her phone, but the flimsy bar of signal had gone entirely. Not even the network showed up on the screen, or the usual “emergency calls only” when she was out of range, just a flashing battery that was nearly dead.
“Perfect,” she grumbled, though she doubted calling the emergency services out there would have worked anyway. “What would I say? Oh, I hit my head and can’t find my car. They’d think I was just another drunk and leave me to sober up.”
When the other end of Clava Cairns bore no fruit—and no road or car either, just endless forest—Eloise had to stop and reconsider her situation. She was already lost, unable to find any path or track that led back to the cairns, and trying to return to where she’d started seemed like a recipe for disaster. It was cold, and getting colder, with evening drawing in. She’d lose the light soon enough, and she didn’t fancy spending the night out in the wilderness with a coat that was woefully inappropriate for a Scottish winter.
“Someone is screwing with me,” she decided, since every other possibility made her want to curl up in a scared ball. “The same person who put that trick panel on the stone is messing with me.”
She thought about it until it made perfect sense. There were probably bored teenagers or anti-English locals who made a hobby out of terrorizing tourists. When she’d banged her head on the stone, they’d likely panicked and carried her off to some other place, some other nearby cairns, so she’d be far away when she woke up, and wouldn’t be able to press charges. Maybe, they wanted her to get lost, so she’d never make it back to anywhere with a police station.
If getting dumped two months before my wedding didn’t kill me, no idiot teenagers are going to,she decided, feeding her determination with fury once more. It was a powerful tool; it was just a shame she couldn’t use her anger to get any pages to her editor, Harriet.
“Now, she definitelyisgoing to kill me,” Eloise considered nervously, searching the shadowed trees and picking the direction that felt like south. By her reasoning, being in the Highlands, she’d find civilization in the south.
Burying her chin in the high collar of her bright blue, wool peacoat, and readjusting the matching blue bobble hat that likely had a bloodstain on the back, she marched onward. There was nothing else she could do, not unless she wanted the tricksters to win.
The sun had gone into hiding to make room for the moon, a billion stars sprayed across the clear winter night, weaving a celestial tapestry so breathtaking that Eloise almost forgot howmuch danger she was in. It was the kind of night’s sky that, living in London, she’d only seen in pictures and movies. Light pollution didn’t exist out here, and if she’d just had her car to keep her warm, it would’ve been perfect.
A candy bar or the other half of the cheese sandwich she’d brought to Clava Cairns wouldn’t have gone amiss, either. After hours of walking and getting nowhere, trudging through dense undergrowth that wasn’t always as solid as it appeared, cutting her legs to ribbons on thorns and tangled roots, she was ravenous, exhausted, desperate for a sip of water… and, most of all, completely lost.
The lady at the B&B will realize something is wrong,she pleaded silently.She’ll know I’m in trouble when I don’t come back tonight. Maybe, she already guessed where I went and has called the cops.
Then again, if the ladyhadcalled the cops and they’d gone to Clava Cairns to look for her, they wouldn’t find her. They’d have to launch a search party. She could see the headlines now:Heartbroken, best-selling novelist Eloise Longman missing in the Highlands.People would put two and two together and get five, the journalists embellishing to their hearts content about a devastated author venturing out into the wild and never returning, a month after discovering her fiancé of six years had been cheating on her, breaking off the engagement just two months before the wedding.
“As if I’d give you the satisfaction, Peter,” she spat, imagining him and the woman he’d left her for pretending to commiserate the loss.
Kicking a stone, picturing it as Peter’s head, she halted at the sound that followed: not the rustle of it landing in thick underbrush, but the skitter of a rock on solid ground.
Using what was left of her precious phone battery to bring up the flashlight, she chased after the bobbing glow as it bounced off shrubs and gnarled trunks and caught the flare of a creature’s eyes… and burst out of the tree-line, onto what definitely appeared to be a road. It wasn’t tarmac and white painted lines, but it was man-made—just wide enough to fit one car and some extra room for a bicycle.
“Oh, thank God!” She wanted to sink to her knees and weep with relief, as all roads led somewhere. With any luck, this one would lead to someone with a phone.
Rallying what strength she had left, at the very moment that her own phone decided to sputter out, Eloise glanced up and down the road. There were no signposts, but therewasa white painted rock on the far side: an old-fashioned way-marker.
She hurried to the other side of the road and crouched down, using the light of the moon and the stars to make out the words carved into the rock. Moss had grown over it somewhat, but a few vigorous scrubs with her gloved hands revealed a destination:Wishaw Village, 2 miles.
“Two miles,” she panted. “Easy.”
The name of the village was unfamiliar, but everything in the Highlands was new to her. Dusting herself off, she was about to take her first step toward the hope of civilization, when another sound made her pause. It began as a low drumbeat, juddering through the earth. Flashbacks of Clava Cairns ricocheted through her skull, the night’s sky flaring with pulses of menacing red light, rendering her motionless.
As she stood there, rigid with a terror she didn’t fully understand, the drumbeats grew louder. Something was coming closer, heading in her direction.
