Beyond the Highland Myst(233)

She gazed out upon a misty night from ancient history.

Fifty feet above the ground, she was in a stone castle that stood on an island promontory surrounded by a thundering sea. Waves hurled themselves at the rocky crags, breaking into foam and becoming one with the mist that swirled up from the black surface of the ocean. On a cobbled walkway, men carrying torches moved silently between the castle and small outbuildings. The distant cry of a wolf competed with faint strains of bagpipes. The night sky was blue-black, tinted purple where it met the water, dancing with thousands of stars and a thin scythe of a moon. She'd never seen so many constellations in Cincinnati; smog and the halo effect of the brilliantly lit city dimmed such beauty. The view from the window was breathtakingly stark, majestic. A bitter wind howled up from the sea and across the promontory, buffeting the tapestry in her hand.

She dropped it as if she'd been burned and it fell across the window, blessedly sealing out the inexplicable vista. Unfortunately, as her eyes focused on the tapestry, she discovered a new horror. It was brilliantly woven and far too detailed: a warrior riding a horse into battle while an army of men clad in bloodstained plaid cheered. At the bottom of the hanging, embroidered in crimson, were four numbers that chipped away at her sanity: 1314.

Lisa moved to the bed and sank limply onto it, her energy sapped by the successive shocks. She stared blankly at the bed for a moment, then her hand flashed out and poked frantically at the mattress as she tested another part of her environment. Not your run-of-the-mill Serta Sleeper

here, Lisa. Filled with a growing sense of panic, she pulled back the tightly tucked blankets and was momentarily sidetracked by the fragrance that clung to the linens. His scent: spice, danger, and man.

Firmly ignoring a desire to bury her nose in the sheets, she tugged at the mattress, which was little more than thin pallets laid atop one another encased in bristly fabric. One crunched like dried brush, the next seemed stuffed with lumpy wooly stuff, and the top had the feel of limp feathers. For the next twenty minutes Lisa scrutinized her surroundings, driven by increasing desperation. The stones felt cool, the fire felt hot. The liquid in the cup near the bed tasted vile. She heard the bagpipes. Every sense she possessed was activated by her tests. Absently, she swiped at her neck with the back of her hand, and when she drew it away a single drop of blood lay crimson upon her skin.

She understood with sudden certainty that she should never have touched the flask. Although it defied rational explanation, she was neither in Cincinnati nor in the twenty-first century. She felt the last of her hope that she was dreaming slip from her tenuous grasp. Dreams she knew well. But this was too real to be a dream, detailed far beyond her mind's ability to fabricate.

Give me the flask, he'd demanded.

You see this? This is part of the dream? She'd been astonished.

But now, reflecting upon it, she realized that he'd seen it because it was not part of a dream. It was part of reality, his reality, a reality she now shared. That it was the flask she had touched just before she'd started to feel like she was falling, and the flask that he'd demanded, seemed too logical a connection to exist within a dream. Had the flask somehow carried her back to a man who had direct or indirect proprietary rights to it? And if so, was she truly in the fourteenth century?

With growing horror, she saw the frightening pattern: His odd manner of dress, his intent perusal of her clothing as if he'd never seen the like before, the primitive wooden tub situated before the fire, the strange language he'd spoken, the tapestry on the wall. All of it hinted at the impossible.

Stricken, she glanced around the room, reassessing it from a different perspective. She viewed it as her employment in the museum had led her to believe a medieval chamber would appear.

And all the oddities made perfect sense.

Logic insisted she was in a medieval stone castle, and according to the wall hanging, at some point in the fourteenth century, despite the improbability of it.

Lisa blew her breath out in a frantic attempt to calm down. She couldn't be somewhere else in time, because if this was medieval Scotland, Catherine was some seven hundred years in the future—alone. Her mother desperately needed her and had no one else to rely on. That was unacceptable. Being stuck in a strange dream was now relegated to the minor problem it would have been, had it been true. A dream would have been easy to manage; eventually she would have awakened, no matter how awful things had been in the dream. If she was actually in the past, which was what all her senses insisted, she had to get back home.

But how?

Would touching the flask do it again? As she pondered that possibility she heard footsteps in the corridor outside the chamber. She moved quickly to the door, debated cowering behind it, then pressed her ear to it instead. It would be wise to discover everything she could about her environment.