“I remember something like that. The Y chromosome is shorter, right, so whatever’s on the X chromosome’s longer bit is… what you get.” Nancy looked doubtful, too. “I spent most of high school daydreaming about my next scuba trip, unfortunately.”
“It’s a shame the Sidhe couldn’t throw a doctor through to us,” Anna said with a laugh. “Not that I’m not thrilled to have a detective here, Elena. Maybe you could investigate this illness.”
“I guess so. I don’t want to catch it, though,” she added, wrinkling her nose. “Being sick is the worst.” She hated being sick — it always made her feel weak and crazy. Even a cold was unacceptable. But Nancy and Anna were exchanging meaningful glances. “What? What’s wrong?”
“It’s just… both of us came down with a pretty nasty bug in our first few weeks here,” Anna said cautiously. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got the same thing in store for you.”
“Something about immunity to local bugs, I think,” Nancy added. “I mean, I’m not a doctor, but…”
Elena groaned. “I really hope not. I wish you guys had vitamin C tablets.”
Donal, Brendan, Malcolm and Maeve had been listening to this conversation with expressions of polite but vivid confusion. Elena couldn’t help but giggle — Brendan in particular looked completely at sea, and he laughed a little as well, his face crinkling. “I wish the Burgh went two ways. I wouldn’t mind visiting your world for a little bit, seeing what all these wild things you talk about actually look like.”
“Come through. The Baltimore PD could use a few more men like you,” Elena said, grinning.
The men finished their meals and made their farewells one by one — Maeve disappeared off into the kitchens not long after, and Nancy went with her. Elena and Anna were left together in companionable silence. Elena hesitated — but a question had been weighing on her mind almost since she’d arrived, and this was as good an opportunity as any to ask it.
“Hey — Anna. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course, sweetness.” The dark-haired woman looked up, that intent gaze of hers always a little intimidating. It was the army training — though Anna may have been retired for quite some time, some part of that intensity was never going to leave her.
“About Brendan. He — he mentions you a lot.”
“He does? We’ve been friends for a while.” Anna’s sharp eyes were steady.
“It’s just — I kind of get the idea that he’s flirting with me a little bit. Not — a lot, or anything, but a bit, you know? But at the same time…” She hesitated. “Was there anything between you two?”
Anna smiled. “Not really. When I first got here, he flirted with me a little… but I think it had a lot more to do with wanting to annoy Donal. He and I… well, I guess it was pretty clear what was going on between us. But Donal was stubborn, and so was I, and Brendan… well, he’s got his grudges against his Laird, put it that way. And for a while there, he had more faith in me and my abilities than Donal did. So … yeah, I suppose there was something there. Nothing ever happened, though,” she added firmly.
“Why does he have a grudge against Donal?”
“It’s nothing serious,” Anna shrugged. “He felt he should have been made tanist, not Malcolm. They all grew up together, the three of them — it was between Malcolm and Brendan, and Donal chose Malcolm. It was the right call. Brendan’s a far better Captain of the Guard than Malcolm ever could be. But he’s always been a little sore about it.”
Elena nodded, filing this away with what she knew about the friendly Captain. But there was a new worry gnawing at her stomach, now. “He’s not flirting with me to annoy someone else, is he?”
Anna laughed. “Who would he be trying to annoy?”
“I don’t know! I just… I’m not used to men showing interest in me, I guess.” She shrugged, feeling a bit ridiculous.
“Really? A gorgeous thing like you? That hair, that figure…” Anna clicked her tongue, a smile dancing in her eyes. “I bet plenty of men have expressed their interest. You just weren’t paying attention.”
Elena sighed. “Maybe. Maybe that’s true.”
“Are you interested in Brendan?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Ugh. I don’t know. It’s kind of… not a question I’ve got any spare mental energy to think about, you know?”
Anna nodded, but there was a twinkle in her eye regardless. “Well. You two seem to be getting on very well as friends, anyway. I’ve never seen him listen so closely to someone when they talk. Donal was complaining about it. Said he should get you to do his briefings for him.”
Elena laughed, blushing a little. “Really?”
“Mm. He’s quite taken with you.” She shrugged. “Do with that what you will. I’m certainly not going to try to bully you into falling in love, not when you’ve got so many other things to worry about. But if I were you, I wouldn’t mention it to Nancy. Not if you want a moment’s peace. She adores Brendan, she’ll be planning your wedding within seconds if you mention that there’s anything going on there.”
Elena laughed, making a mental note to keep her relationship with Brendan to herself when it came to Nancy — and then immediately feeling ridiculous. There was no relationship. They were just friends — friends who occasionally paid each other rather friendly compliments. Friends who occasionally experienced long, strangely tense silences in the middle of their conversations when their bodies got a little too close.
Just friends. That was all.
So why couldn’t she stop grinning?
Chapter 16
The day passed in its usual way. She’d been having fun poking around in the library, so she spent much of the morning and afternoon doing that. But when her eyes got too tired to focus on the old books anymore, she headed downstairs, finding herself at something of a loose end. She’d had vague intentions of asking someone to teach her to ride a horse — she’d mentioned it a few times, but her friends were busy people and she didn’t want to impose too much. But it seemed the castle was rather busy — there was something going on in the village, and none of her friends were back from their various errands yet. Could it have something to do with the strange disease that was going around? She was still a little worried about that. Whether or not it was restricted to men, she’d rather not risk such an unpleasant-sounding condition. Wasting away… she was more than slender enough already, as far as she was concerned, and all the walking around and the endless stair-climbing she was doing wasn’t going to help.
So she decided to go for a walk around the castle, maybe catch the sun setting over the lake if she was lucky. She hadn’t been back down to the docks since she’d arrived, and she’d hardly been in the kind of mood necessary to appreciate her surroundings. There was a way down to the docks from the walls, and she intended to go down and have a proper look at the surface of the Loch. Maybe she’d even see Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster everyone had been telling her about. It sounded absurd, that a creature she’d heard of so many times in myths and legends was just out there, swimming about happily in the lake, but her life was so downright weird at the moment that she’d simply accepted it as fact. The Loch Ness Monster. Of course.
Should she bring her some food? she wondered. It might be good to try to make friends with the creature. None of her friends seemed to agree on how intelligent the monster was — Nancy insisted she was at least at a human level of intelligence, if not more, but Anna seemed to think she was more along the lines of a dog — clever enough to be trained and to have a vague idea of what was going on, but not cognitive in the same way that human beings were. Whatever the truth was, Elena figured the creature would appreciate a fish. So she sidled into the kitchens, hoping to find something to give to the creature.
There were leftovers from the night before that hadn’t been finished off at lunch, either. She eased the lid off one of the plates, pleased to discover some fried fish. Does Nessie like cooked fish? she wondered. She hoped so. She wrapped the
fish in a napkin she’d brought through from the dining hall and turned to go — but before she did, she felt the prickle of a pair of sharp blue eyes on the back of her neck, rooting her to the spot.
“Hello, Elena. How are you settling in?”
“Good morning, Blair.” She turned around reluctantly, the fish in her hands. “I took this, is that okay?”
The woman blinked those ice-blue eyes, supremely unruffled. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Elena breathed a sigh of relief. “I don’t know. You always make me feel like I’ve done something wrong.”
Blair chuckled, and the sound was disarming. “Oh, yes. I have that effect. It keeps the servants in line, more or less. But I’m perfectly harmless, truly.”
Elena smiled. “You remind me a little of my captain, back home. She had that effect on people.”
“A Captain,” Blair said thoughtfully. “Hmm. I suppose I’m a kind of captain. A distant ancestor of your captain, perhaps. Anyway, enjoy your day. I hope the Monster likes your present to her.”
Elena was halfway outside before she realized that she hadn’t actually told Blair what she was taking the fish for. Curious… but she was hardly going to turn around and ask her how she’d known. Something told her that the answer would be unsettling. So she headed down toward the docks, whistling to herself. Sunset was drawing near — that gorgeous orange light was coloring the sky, and she grinned to herself as she emerged from the winding staircase inside the castle walls that led down to the docks.
There were several little boats moored at a few of the docks, but she chose one that didn’t have any boats on it at all, wanting to get as unobscured a view as possible. She moved out along the uneven wood of the jetty, smiling a little as the cool air whipped at her hair — she’d gotten a lot better with the cold even in the week that she’d been here. Wearing thick socks inside her boots helped, of course, as did layering her clothing a little. She sat down cross-legged at the end of the dock, staring out over the gently ruffled waters of the Loch and feeling a lot more at peace than she had for a long time.
She hadn’t even though of her job for the longest time, she realized with a little pang of guilt. Of the murder investigation she’d left behind… but it wasn’t as though she’d left on purpose. And she still held out hope of being returned to her own time, only a few minutes after her departure. She’d get back to it then. Still, she could be using this extra time to think about the case, try to see if she could work anything out, make some breakthroughs… but out here, with the gorgeous sunset and the cool air, somehow her treacherous mind kept sliding away from the case and into the peace of the present moment.
“Did you bring that for the Creature?”
A soft voice sounded very close behind her — it lilted with the now-familiar Scottish accent that Elena was growing more and more fond of, but the voice itself was unfamiliar. She turned, surprised that someone had managed to get so close to her. Had she let her situational awareness down? It wasn’t like her to be crept up on like that without noticing… and the jetty was difficult to walk on without making any sound. But sure enough, there was a figure behind her… a tall woman in a long, green dress, her bright eyes fixed curiously on the fish in Elena’s lap.
A shock of recognition ran through her as she looked at the woman’s face. “You’re — you’re the one who saved me, that first night! You pulled me out of the Lake, didn’t you?”
The woman smiled, revealing a mouth full of pearly white teeth. “You remember.”
“Of course I remember. I think I would have drowned without you.” Elena smiled up at her, shifting across at the edge of the jetty. “Would you like to sit with me? It’s a beautiful night.”
“That it is,” the woman said softly. There was a rustling of skirts as she carefully folded her body into a sitting position, her feet tucked carefully away beneath her and out of sight. There was something so strange about how she moved — Elena couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She was graceful, that was true, but it wasn’t the kind of grace that a ballet dancer had. It was the unconscious, easy grace of some kind of wild animal… a deer, perhaps. Or a panther. Something predatory… something aware of being seen, but not concerned by it.
“My name’s Elena,” she offered, feeling oddly shy as she extended her hand to shake. Women so beautiful rarely took much of an interest in her — in high school she’d been far too much of a geek to be noticed by girls like this one, and as a cop, you tended to be pretty invisible.
“Una,” the woman breathed, taking Elena’s hand in both of hers as though it was a precious gift. Her long, graceful fingers were icy cold. “Una Corbin.”
“Nice to meet you, Una.” She smiled. “Yeah, I brought the fish for the Monster. I kind of wanted to see her, thought she might appreciate a snack.”
“I’m sure she will,” Una said gravely, her dark eyes still fixed resolutely on Elena’s face as though she’d never seen anything so fascinating in her life. They were strange eyes — try as Elena might, she couldn’t tell where the pupil ended, and the iris began. They must have been an incredibly dark shade of brown to almost look black in the light like this.
“I never thanked you for saving me,” Elena said. “You disappeared so quickly.”
“Yes, I heard the men coming.” That was odd — her lips rippled around the word, almost like a snarl. “I made myself scarce. You understand.”
“Not really,” Elena admitted. “You — hid from the men in the Castle? Why?”
“Has any good ever come to a woman, from men?” Una asked idly, tracing an intricate pattern on the wooden boards of the jetty with her long fingernails.
Elena laughed. “That’s very fair,” she said, smiling at the joke — but there was something altogether too serious, too still about Una’s face.
“I don’t trust the men of this castle,” Una said simply. “Neither should you, my dear.”
Elena hesitated. It wasn’t an unreasonable position to take. Men were capable of some pretty awful things… and she’d seen a lot of them firsthand. And as the thought occurred to her, Una leaned forward, those black eyes intense.
“You know what I mean. You’ve seen what I’ve seen.”
“I’ve seen what some men are capable of, yes,” Elena admitted softly. “A lot of horrible things have happened. But—” She shrugged, feeling a little uncomfortable, and tried to lighten the mood with a joke. “They have their uses, right?”
Una uttered a sudden bark of laughter — it was a strange sound, seeming to echo shrilly across the lake, and Elena heard a flock of birds take flight from a nearby tree as though startled by it. It was an oddly feral sound… like a wolf’s howl, or a hyena’s cry. “They have their uses! Oh, too true, well put, sweet Elena. Elena,” she repeated, playing with Elena’s name in her mouth like it was a toy. “I do love that name. Elena, can we be friends?”
It was disarming, the intensity of the woman’s regard, her sudden, breathless interest in her. There was something unnerving about it, too, of course, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on… but then again, she was in medieval Scotland, wasn’t she? She was bound to meet people who weren’t quite like the people she’d known back home. Maybe Una was one of them. The first of many quirky new friends. She smiled. “Of course we can. You saved my life, I’d say that makes us friends already.”
Una beamed. It was an exquisitely beautiful smile — it seemed to light her face up from within. Elena wondered if Una lived in the village nearby — if so, it was no wonder she had so many problems with men. A face like that would bring men like moths to a flame. Passion made people do terrible things. Elena wondered if Una had been seriously hurt by a man, felt a surge of protectiveness deep in her chest.
“I’m so glad.” Una smiled. “Come and see me? After dark. Anywhere outside the keep. I’ll find you, Elena. El-e-na,” she sang, a smile dancing across her face.
They sat for a while longer, gazing out across the water. Just what they
talked about for that long hour, Elena couldn’t say. Strange. And stranger still, that something stopped her from mentioning her new friend to anyone at dinner.
Well, she could keep a few things to herself, couldn’t she?
Chapter 17
The next day, the sun crept across Elena’s pillow the way it usually did, but for some reason, she had trouble waking up as readily as she usually did. She felt more tired than usual, sluggish as she pulled herself out of bed, and she dragged her feet a little getting dressed, the chilly autumn air finding its way into her bones. Feeling out of sorts, but hoping that breakfast would sort her out, she headed down the stairs toward the breakfast hall, still shivering a little. A hot bowl of porridge would set her right, wouldn’t it?
As she reached the dining hall, she saw Brendan coming in and smiled — but then frowned, a little confused. He’d had the late night shift the day before — that had been why he’d joined them all for breakfast. What was he doing here now? Had he doubled up, or something? And he looked unusual, too — on second glance, she realized he was wearing a long, dark cloak over his usual armor, and there was a worried look on his face that didn’t quite vanish when he looked up to meet her eyes. He gave her his usual bright smile, though, and she trotted across the hall to him, her own under-the-weather mood forgotten in the wake of her curiosity about what he was doing.
“What’s the cloak for?”
“This? Oh. I’ve been down in the village overnight,” he explained, fighting back a yawn as he spoke.
“Don’t you have to man the walls this afternoon?”
“Mm. I’m going to need to keep my wits about me to stop from falling asleep and toppling off the edge,” he joked, grinning, but she frowned at the look of exhaustion that his bright smile didn’t quite keep off his face. “What?”
Swept By The Highlander: A Scottish Time Travel Romance-Highlander Forever Book 3 Page 10
