by Annis Reid
KADEN
HIGHLAND PASSAGES
ANNIS REID
CONTENTS
Kaden
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Afterword
KADEN
Book One of the Highland Passages Series!
* * *
Anna Cooper is a rock star in the making. She’s at a gig in Edinburgh, Scotland—only the most important, make or break gig—when she falls through a—what? She’s not even sure what she fell through, except she landed right in the midst of what she thought was a roleplaying group. Except they’re not. They’re the real deal. Scottish Highlanders. Ones with swords. Ones who don’t believe in personal hygiene.
And now?
She’s missing the gig.
She’s at the mercy of a hottie called Kaden. A hottie she’d have wished to meet in her century, not in the seventeenth century for Pete’s sake.
And she’s being accused of being a witch?
1
“No pressure.” Anna Cooper stood with her hands on her hips in the center of the concert stage, forcing herself to breathe deeply and slowly as she looked out over the space that in less than half an hour would hold thousands of festival goers. “This is just the biggest gig of your entire career, and your whole life hangs in the balance of this single performance. Right. No pressure at all.”
More deep breaths. More forcing herself to chill, because an audience could always tell when a performer was off their game. The entire set could be made or broken in the first few minutes, no doubt about it.
And when they only had a fixed amount of time to perform, every minute counted.
Another breath. She let it out slowly, counting to four, then waited for four counts before inhaling for another four. Over and over until her midsection unclenched and her chest loosened up.
It was sort of hard to sing when she couldn’t breathe. Impossible, even.
“You’ve got this,” she whispered to herself over the sound of impatient crowds who were chomping at the bit to be let inside the space that had been gated off for the audience. They wanted to get as close to the stage as possible and were annoyed at having to wait until the rope dropped to let them in.
It was a gorgeous day, perfect for a festival. She had prayed to every god and goddess and deity and saint she’d ever heard of for good weather. Everything had to be perfect.
“Watch yourself,” somebody called out without looking as he wheeled three amps behind her and almost knocked her off the stage.
“Why don’t you try watching yourself, instead?” she snapped. It was bad enough her nerves were frayed to bits. He flipped her the bird without looking back. Awesome. Always good to have friends among the crew.
A tiny blonde giggled as she crossed the stage. “Great. I hope he doesn’t screw with our setup.”
“Don’t even say that out loud,” Anna warned Piper in a whisper. “Let’s not invite bad luck, you know?”
The band’s bass player giggled. “Look at you, all superstitious.”
Anna waved a hand around, indicating the standing stones which surrounded the amphitheater in a semicircle. “If I’m going to be superstitious, this is the place to do it. Don’t you feel the energy the air?”
Piper looked around, shrugging. “I don’t know. I’ve never been into that kind of thing. I mean, it’s pretty.”
Pretty. Yes, Anna guessed that was one way to describe it. She would’ve chosen the word wild. Magical. It hummed with energy the way the amps behind her hummed with an energy of their own. There was something special here. She knew it in her bones.
“Somebody must have thought it was important at one time. Or they wouldn’t have left the stones there. Or carved the runes in them.” Twelve tall stones, their faces flat, all of them coming to a rough point at the top. Time had carved them in a sort of ragged, haphazard way, the wind and rain and snow wearing on them over hundreds of years. But nothing could knock them down.
Just talking about the symbols carved into the stones sent a shiver down her spine. And maybe it was her imagination, but it felt like her right arm throbbed a little, too, where the Fehu rune was inked years ago.
She had never seen the rune on her arm anyplace else before, at least, not carved into a random standing stone in the middle of a field in Scotland. It had been Piper who found it, and she had run screaming like she had seen the most shocking thing she could think of.
“It’s just like the one on your arm!” she’d called out, running down the slope and across the field where the audience would sit.
A coincidence, they had decided.
But Anna couldn’t pretend to herself that was just nothing. Because she felt it, too, that throbbing in her arm whenever she looked at or thought about the carved rune. A trick of her mind, she guessed, probably thanks to how tense she was over the outcome of this performance.
Seeing as how this gig would make or break them, the fact that a symbol for money and prosperity was carved on that stone had to mean something. Good luck, the very least. A sign that everything was going to work out well, that quitting her pharmacology program wasn’t the worst mistake she had ever made, after all. Everything was going to be okay.
Because they were going to be discovered at this festival by one of the promoters or agents who combed these sort of events, looking for new talent. They just had to be.
“You look great,” Anna observed, eyeing Piper’s leather pants and thigh-high boots. Between her choice of clothes and her cherry red hair, she tended to stand out on stage. Anna always figured she should be the flashy one, the band’s lead singer.
People who didn’t have sick parents to take care of could afford leather pants and fresh, professionally-colored hair. Anna used to be able to. Her boring, blond hair had been just about every shade of the rainbow since her dad agreed she was old enough to make her own decisions.
That sort of thing took money, not to mention time. Having the old color stripped out, the new color applied. After her dad’s stroke, things like that had sort fallen by the wayside, and she had no choice but to stick to boxed black dye from the drugstore.
It was okay, though. Black hair matched her look. Tight, torn jeans, black work boots with tons of silver buckles, a white tank and the one piece of clothing she couldn’t be without, her dad’s leather jacket, beaten to hell and back. But her good luck charm, nonetheless. She wouldn’t wear it during the show. It was too warm outside, and it would be hot as anything once the lights turned on. But it would be just offstage, waiting for her.
Almost like he was there, cheering her on and telling her she’d made the right choice by following her dream instead of following in his footsteps. Almost.
Piper took her by the hand, tugging slightly. “Come on. Jimmy and Ed wanted a couple shots of Jameson before we get started.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Let’s hope a couple shots doesn’t turn into more than that. We need to be on our A-game today.”
“They kn
ow that,” she replied with a little bit of a frown. “We all know what this means to you, especially. Nobody’s gonna mess this up. We worked too hard.”
“I know,” Anna sighed with a tight smile. But they didn’t get it. None of them did. If this didn’t work out for them, they could go on to other things. The band could be their side hobby, something they did at night and on the weekends.
They hadn’t jumped in feet first, the way she did. None of their parents had a stroke just two months after they decided to go full-time in pursuit of their lifelong dream. They didn’t have the sort of responsibilities she did.
Like a father who really needed long-term care in a good facility, but instead had to settle for an in-home nurse who could only do so much for him.
She waved Piper off. “I’ll be right back there. I promise. I just want to check the set-up on the mic before I do.”
Piper gave her a thumbs up. “Never trust a stranger to set it up right,” she said, echoing a statement Anna had made time and again while setting up for various gigs.
“Hey, you don’t trust anybody to tune your bass for you,” Anna reminded her, sticking out her tongue. The last thing she needed was to step out on stage and have her greeting or her lyrics lost, thanks to a dead mic.
The mic stand was positioned downstage center, and she went over to it for a quick test. By now, most everybody had left the stage and were either gathering behind it or in one of the many trailers that had been set up for various acts to hang out in before their set was scheduled to start.
Her band couldn’t afford one of those trailers, but then they were the opening act so there wouldn’t be any waiting to be done.
It still sent a shiver through her whole body. Opening the festival. One of the biggest rock festivals in the world, and they were the opening act.
There was no shaking the feeling that this was it. The make-or-break gig. The one they would look back on and smile. The one music critics would refer to in the years to come when they talked about when and where the band broke onto the scene.
Again, she had that funny, throbbing feeling on her right bicep, where the Fehu tattoo sat. What were the odds that an old Celtic symbol for money and prosperity just happened to be carved into the stone directly across from where she would stand on stage?
She looked across the field that very stone, staring at it, forcing herself to breathe evenly again. Everything’s going to be fine. This is where all the hard work leads. This is where all the sacrifice makes sense, finally. And where I stop telling myself what idiot I was to give up my day job.
She flipped the switch on the mic, turning it on.
“Testing,” she murmured as quietly as possible. She’d probably get screamed at for messing with the equipment before the show, but it wasn’t like she was doing anything wrong. She only wanted to make sure it would work smoothly, that nothing would shake up the band just before they started.
Good thing, too, because nothing came out. There wasn’t even a humming noise to tell her the thing was on.
“Oh, fabulous,” she muttered, shaking her head. Considering they were working the biggest rock festival in Europe, the crew really needed to get their act together.
She looked around, locating the cord leading from the microphone and across the stage.
Following it, she ended up stage left, where it looked like a million and one pieces of equipment were plugged into a single board. It took a minute to locate the microphone cord, which she pulled from the jack before plugging it back in. There was no telltale hum coming from it, though, so she tried again. Maybe the cord wasn’t plugged into the bottom of the mic all the way?
She glanced around, wondering if she should ask for help, but everybody had pretty much cleared out. Great.
“Can’t have a singer without their microphone,” she called out to nobody, walking back to center stage and taking the mic in one hand while fiddling with the cord, jiggling it to see if it was loose.
And that was when it happened.
A rush of something went through her, pulsing energy that she almost instantly understood was electricity. And she knew in the back of her head, even as she fell from the stage, that she had electrocuted herself.
That was the last thing she thought before the world went black. She didn’t even feel it when her body hit the ground, already floating in darkness.
It was a breeze that woke her up, skimming over her face, sending wisps of hair dancing over her cheeks and eyes and nose. She wrinkled her nose, waving her hand in front of her to clear the hair away. It tickled.
And she remembered.
Her eyes flew open, staring up at the clear, blue sky. Except for the air rushing past her and fluttering the leaves on the trees beyond the amphitheater, she couldn’t hear anything else. Not even the beating of her heart.
Maybe it wasn’t beating. Maybe she was dead.
But no. She could smell the heather in the fields beyond the amphitheater, could hear birds twittering in the woods behind the standing stones. She felt the grass under the palms of her hands—soft, deep like a carpet.
Dead people didn’t feel things, or hear or smell them, did they?
Aside from a slight ache in her back which she assumed was from when she hit the ground, she didn’t feel bad. There was no pain otherwise.
“Holy crap,” she whispered. She had electrocuted herself and lived to tell the tale. Maybe there was a reason stagehands and roadies were the ones who are supposed to mess with the equipment, but it wasn’t her fault they hadn’t set it up right, was it?
She could ask these questions later. She had to get herself together. There would be people rushing the field at any minute, just as soon as they were allowed through the gates.
She worked her way to a sitting position, taking her time. Somebody must’ve seen her fall, right? She only hoped she hadn’t shorted anything out and affected the equipment somehow. What a great way to make an impression on the other bands, all of them bigger and more important than hers.
She looked around.
Rubbed her eyes.
Looked around again.
Where was everybody? And everything?
“Hello?” she called out, listening as the wind took her voice away and carried it across the field. The empty field. The field where there had been rows of chairs and benches set up not thirty seconds earlier.
The field where a stage full of equipment had just sat. Drums, guitars and stands, amps and microphones and keyboards and a lighting rig. She had just stood on it! And fallen from it!
The space was empty. Everything was gone. Even the buses and trailers and generators. Gone.
Along with everybody but her.
No. No way.
She stood, brushing grass from her jeans and the back of her shirt, turning in a slow circle while she did. What the hell happened? Where did everybody go?
“Hello?” she called out, louder this time. There was nobody to hear her. Only birds in the trees beyond the stones, taking wing when they heard her cries.
She must be dreaming. That had to be it. She’d shocked herself, knocked herself out and just hadn’t come around yet. That was all.
The brain was a funny thing; hadn’t she found that already? She had watched a stroke turn her father from a razor-sharp chess champion and crossword puzzle fiend into somebody who couldn’t remember a conversation he had five minutes earlier.
Her brain was just trying to compensate for what it couldn’t make sense of. It needed time, was all.
That didn’t mean the rest of her had to be okay with it, evidently, since her stomach churned hard enough to make her bend at the waist, hands clasped over her middle. Her chest hurt. She was maybe three seconds from going into a full-blown panic attack.
“I’m dreaming. This is just a dream.” Maybe if she said it enough times, she would calm down a little bit. Because there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a dream, but death. Or the place between life and death.
&
nbsp; What if she was dying? What if this was where she would wait until whatever higher power made these decisions figured out whether she would live or die?
She suddenly felt cold and rubbed her arms to bring down the goosebumps that had sprung up over her skin. If this was limbo or whatever, it was pretty vivid. More vivid than any dream she ever had, for sure.
The standing stones were there. At least they had changed. She crossed the empty space, like a bowl carved into the ground, the sides sloping upward. At the top of the slope stood the semi-circular arrangement of stones.
She went to the one in the center, the one with the rune that looked like the ink on her arm. This was real, this was true. This was the same as it had been before. She needed to touch something, anything that had been the same as before.
Why, she didn’t know. Instinct, maybe, or the need for comfort. She had to get her bearings, no matter what this place was.
The rune was there, just like it had been before. She ran her fingers over it, then looked down at the matching symbol on her right arm. Funny how she had considered it a symbol of good luck, a sign all her troubles were over. She should’ve known better.
What was she supposed to do? There was nowhere to go, no shelter anywhere in sight. Into the forest, maybe, but why would she want to go in there? Who knew what sorts of things were in there, even if this really was the place between life and death.
From this angle, positioned above the land before her, she could see much further than she could down where the stage used to be.
And what had she expected? There was nothing out there, either. None of the buildings that had been there before she’d stupidly electrocuted herself. No roads, either, no cars. No people. Nothing. Just land. Trees. Lakes in the distance, with silvery streams rambling all over the place.
And no way of knowing when she would get out of there. Or if she ever would, for that matter.
Which was why she froze in place when the ground started to shake. An earthquake? No, it wasn’t strong enough for that. And she didn’t think they had them in Scotland, but she wasn’t in Scotland anymore. She was someplace else.
