The White Spell (Nine Kingdoms #10)(128)

She turned back and walked through the forest. It was only as she paused to catch her breath that she heard the ringing. It wasn’t her phone; it was more a metal on metal sort of sound. Blacksmith? Fellow jewelry designer looking for the same sort of inspiration she was? She pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked at it just to be sure, but that wasn’t what she was hearing.

She looked around herself and considered. She couldn’t see anyone nearby, but what did she know? She supposed she could at least do a bit of careful investigation. For all she knew, she might make a friend. If she found something odd, she would just turn and run like hell. That useful plan made, she continued on silently, then stopped at the edge of a clearing with far less grace than she might have hoped for on another day.

No, it hadn’t been her phone making that ringing noise.

It had been the guys with swords in front of her.

She had to reach out and put her hand on a tree, not necessarily because she wanted to lean on something but because she was having a difficult time trying to decide what she was seeing and she needed something real to hold on to. Was that a movie set? A re-enactment group taking things way too far?

A waking nightmare?

There was a mist surrounding the men fighting there, as if they were truly part of some sort of group that existed only in her dreams.

Scotland in my dreams. She’d actually thought that, hadn’t she? Maybe she needed to be more careful with what went on inside her head.

The battle, if battle it was, was nothing like she’d ever seen in a movie, only because what she was seeing looked thoroughly unscripted and she could see men dying. Actually, the filthy clansmen shouting, the men dying, and the metal screeching against metal were everything she’d ever seen in a movie only this was a hundred times more intense.

That might have been because it looked real.

She couldn’t move. She could only stand there, her fingers digging into the damp bark of the tree, and wish she could move so she could flee.

And then a dark-haired man stumbled out of the fog. He caught sight of her, then skidded to a halt. He was covered in what looked like blood, but she assumed it wasn’t his own. Surely it was just some sort of stage stuff, or something he’d bought down at the local costume shop. It looked real, though, and so did he.

But it couldn’t be real. She was obviously having a hallucination, but she found she didn’t want to disturb it. She stood, frozen in place, and tried not to breathe. She might have been imagining things, but she was nothing if not pragmatic. Maybe if she kept very still, she might get a decent look at that guy before he disappeared.

He was beautiful; there was no other way to describe him. His face was planes and angles but in such perfect symmetry that she almost took her phone out and grabbed a picture so she could have reproduced his face perfectly when she’d had a pencil to hand. He was much taller than she was, likely a trio of inches over six feet. He looked as though he spent a fair amount of time working out—though she supposed that was less time spent at the gym and more time spent with, well, a sword.

Good heavens, she was losing her mind.

And his eyes were green. She could see that from where she stood.

He looked as if he’d just run into a wall, but perhaps that expression of surprise was what most hallucinations wore when they escaped from a dream and found themselves facing a human. It was the only explanation she could come up with on short notice and it seemed reasonable enough to her.

“Damn it to hell,” he blurted out, adding several other things she didn’t quite catch, though she had to admit he had a very lovely accent.

He stepped backward, then ducked. She knew why because she’d heard the whistle of sword coming his way as well.

She put her hands over her eyes, rubbed them, then looked again.

There was nothing else in the glade there, nothing but a bit of mist and the sound of rain falling lightly against the last of fall’s leaves. She hovered there for a moment or two, her fingers digging into the bark of that tree, hearing that man’s accent ringing in her ears.

Then she turned and ran.

It was certainly the most sensible thing she’d done all year. She ran until she stumbled out of the forest, then she kept running until she had flung herself inside her car. She turned that car around, then drove like a bat out of hell back to the village.

It had been nothing. Just a waking dream brought on by truly the worst cup of tea she’d ever had in her life. And those things that she’d found to accompany that tea? Awful. She wasn’t sure what to call them, but she suspected that not even smothering them in chocolate would have redeemed them from their resemblance to sawdust. She suspected they had been sitting on that tray for months.

She reached the village without getting lost, no mean feat considering her state of mind but perhaps less impressive than it might have been if there had been more than one road leading in and out of the village. She parked, locked her car, then walked straight up to the turret room in her hotel. She locked the door, stumbled over to stand in the middle of that room, and shook.

She shook until she thought maybe her trembles came less from terror and more from a serious dip in her blood sugar. She reached for her phone to see what time it was only to realize she didn’t have her phone. She looked around her frantically, then looked out her window to see if she’d dropped it in the front garden.

She thought back. She’d had it on her way into the forest, but she’d had it in her hand, not in her coat pocket. She remembered reaching for that tree, but couldn’t remember the last time she’d had her phone in her hand.