The White Spell (Nine Kingdoms #10)(129)
She walked downstairs and looked carefully at the ground on the way to her car. She searched inside her car, even the backseat. She finally straightened, stood next to her car and let out a deep, shuddering breath. There was absolutely no way in hell she was going to go back and look for it now. Not when it was starting to get dark. Not in that haunted forest.
Highland magic.
Well, if that was what they wanted to call it, more power to them. She leaned back against her car and considered her next move. She was starving, cold, and more than a little freaked out. Well, the first thing she could solve was food, so she locked her car, then headed for the pub she’d walked past the day before. At least there she might find the company of real, live people.
Fifteen minutes later she was sitting in a corner near a fireplace with a comforting cup of tea. She sipped, then leaned her head back against the wall and tried to forget what she’d seen.
“I won’t speak ill of them, but you do what you like.”
“‘Tisn’t ill-speaking to speculate,” said another voice. “And you must admit, odd things go on up in those woods.”
“Aye, and goodly amounts of money come flowing down into the village to benefit the likes of you, so don’t blather on about what you think you know.”
Fortunately for her, Emma supposed, that old-timer didn’t seem to take his companion’s injunctions very seriously. He seemed perfectly happy to dish with the rest of his buddies. That worked for her, because she was perfectly happy to eavesdrop.
Though after a few minutes, she wondered why.
Highland magic was, apparently, just the beginning of the odd things that went on in the area. Ghosts, bogles, an influx of gold-diggers from down south: those were all examined at length with judgments passed on them accordingly.
But then their voices lowered and the juicy stuff was brought out and presented for speculation.
Emma listened through a lovely dinner of chicken, a jacket potato, and peas, though she had to admit after a few bites, she was only chewing out of sheer habit. The things she was hearing really couldn’t be taken seriously, but she couldn’t stop listening.
Time-traveling lairds? Money dug up from gardens? Murder and mayhem that stretched through the centuries and found itself solved in times and places not her own and with pointy medieval implements of death?
She had to have another gulp of tea. All that was starting to sound uncomfortably more possible than she would have wanted to believe, especially that last part about swords.
Good grief, what had she gotten herself into?
She was actually rather glad she’d already finished her dinner because she had certainly lost her appetite. She grabbed her coat and made her way as inconspicuously as possible to the door. She paused outside on the sidewalk and wondered if she might be losing her mind. It sounded reasonable. Actually, it sounded like the most reasonable thing she’d thought all day.
She pulled her slicker more closely around herself, gave herself a good mental shake, then walked off back toward her hotel. Jetlag. It had to be jetlag. She thought she had that crazy time change handled, but it was obvious she had been more affected by it than she’d feared.
It couldn’t be that she’d signed herself up for a couple of months in a place where magic really meant what it sounded like it meant.
She would go back to her temporary home and get some sleep. Before she did, she would consign her day’s events to the receptacle entitled Jetlag Hallucinations, then she would get back to her very sensible way of doing business, which included finding her phone in the bright light of day.
Unfortunately, she thought it might be quite a while before she managed to forget the sight of that green-eyed man in the ratty kilt.
Highland magic, indeed.