Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

“If I had known you would leave me for a human girl, William Duffy, I would have plucked out your eyes and heart and replaced them with eyes and heart of wood. If you ever step foot in Faerie again, I’ll do just that. And you.” She turned her eyes on me. “I condemn you with the same curse. You may never step foot in Faerie again.”

Then she turned and rode off, leaving me with a shivering half-naked man atop a bare and windswept hill.

“Are you all right?” I asked the shivering half-naked man beside me.

In answer, he sank to his knees. “I am now, my lady. You have saved me. I have been a prisoner of the Fairy Queen for seven long years, and tonight she was supposed to sacrifice me to the devil. At the last minute, she decided to keep me as her slave, but then I would have become a demon myself. You have saved me from that fate.” He took my hand. “And for that, you have my undying gratitude and love, dear lady.”

His hair, still wet from his dunk in the well, hung in dark waves around his face. Drops of water clung to his pale flesh, glistening in the moonlight. The hand that grasped mine was cold and trembling, just as Liam’s flesh had been before I’d breathed life into him. His expression, though, was like Bill’s when he returned to make up for how he had hurt me as Liam—a look of pure gratitude. But this man’s face was younger—and his skin was goose-fleshed with cold.

“You’re human, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “What else would I be, lass? Did ye think you’d snared a kelpie or a phouka?”

“You haven’t … been changed yet. You’re William before he became the incubus.”

The amusement in his eyes faded, and his face became still as marble. “An incubus? A creature that ravishes young maidens? Aye, the Fairy Queen told me that’s what I’d become if I remained with her in Faerie. Once she sucked all that was human out of me, I would have to feed off human girls to survive.” He took his hand from mine and turned it back and forth in the moonlight. I recognized the hand, remembered the feel of it caressing me. I reached out my hand and took his. His skin was still cold. For a moment I thought I was too late, but then, beneath the chill flesh, I felt the warm pulse of human blood. I squeezed.

“See,” he said, “I am human. You saved me before I could become a monster. Just as you said you would.”

“Just as I said …” Of course. He thought I was my ancestor, the first Cailleach, the fairy girl he laid with in the Greenwood, who promised to come back for him in seven years. I looked around us, at the wild heath covered with long grasses and flowers. I sniffed and smelled—yes, the same scent that had been haunting my dreams, the flowers I’d been finding in my bed— heather . The humpbacked mountains that surrounded us were taller than the Catskills that surrounded Fairwick, and perched atop one were the ruins of a castle. I had done it! I’d gone back in time to Scotland in the time of William Duffy. But where was the angel stone?

I looked down at William and noticed something glimmering on the ground. We both reached for it at the same time, our fingers touching. I withdrew my hand, and he held up a silver heart identical to the one still pinned to the tartan wrapped around him. He held the two halves of the heart together.

“Aye,” he said, “you told me that someday these hearts would be rebound.”

“I’m not that girl …” I began to explain to him, but then I noticed how badly he was shaking. It was colder here than in Fairwick, and we were on a bare hillside with no visible shelter—and no angel stone. I’d hoped somehow that the stone would be waiting for me when I walked through the door, but clearly I would have to go looking for it. “I’ll explain all that later,” I told William, “but for now I suppose we’d better find someplace warm, before we both freeze to death.”

We walked down the hill, into a narrow valley where a stream flowed through a copse of beech trees. We followed the stream for more than a mile in silence, until we came to an unpaved road marked by a massive stone cross carved with intricate Celtic designs. Normally I’d be fascinated by an ancient monument such as this one, but I was cold, wet, and confused.

“Do you recognize where we are?” I asked William, whose teeth were chattering even more than mine were. Despite his cold, he’d offered twice to give me my plaid shawl back, which he’d craftily wrapped like a kilt around his waist with one end draped over his chest. I’d refused on the grounds that being seen walking with a naked man wouldn’t help my reputation any in the seventeenth century.

“Aye,” he said, “that stream is Boglie Burn. It runs into the Tweed, just beyond Ballydoon. And the forest we came out of is the Greenwood, an ancient enchanted wood. That castle on yonder hill is Castle Coldclough, but nobody lives there and it’s haunted. But that wee croft up there belongs to a cousin of my auntie’s, Mordag MacCready.”

He pointed up a hill that rose to our right. All I could see was a stone outcropping, but when the clouds cleared from the moon, I made out the shape of a stone cottage built up against the hillside. Its windows were dark, but that could be because its inhabitants were asleep.

“Do you think she’d put us up for the night?” I asked.

“No Christian soul would turn us away,” he said, already climbing the hill. There was a narrow dirt path between the bushes, clear enough to indicate that it had been in use recently. I caught up to him, wondering what Mordag MacCready would make of a naked man knocking on her door in the middle of the night, cousin or no. Would she think he was one of the boggles or haunts that everything around here seemed to be named for? As we approached the house, though, I began to doubt there was anyone home. The place had a forlorn, derelict look to it. A gate had been left open, swinging on its hinges, an empty bucket lay in the yard, and there was no smoke coming from the chimney.

“It looks deserted,” I commented to William.

“Aye, maybe Mordag is pasturing her sheep in the hills overnight, although it’s getting late in the year for that.”

Now that he mentioned sheep, I could detect the not-unpleasant aroma of manure mingled with hay and wet wool coming from an empty stone-walled enclosure beside the house.

“How do you know so much about sheep?”

William snorted. “As a wee lad, I watched the flocks—before I ran away to the city.”

“If you were living in the city, how did you get kidnapped by the Fairy Queen?” I asked.

“Och, I’d come back,” William answered. “Do ye want to know my whole life’s story standing here freezing on the doorstep, or would ye mind if I continued the tale inside by the fire?”

“Do you think we should break in? Won’t Mordag think we’re burglars?”

But William had already opened the door. I stood nervously on the threshold until William found a lantern and lit it by striking something that looked like a primitive lighter. With the lamp lit, I saw that the cottage was plainly and sparely furnished but clean. And cold. It was hardly warmer than it was outside.

“Are ye going to stand there all night letting in the cold air?” he asked, holding the lantern up. “Or are ye afraid of me? I’ll no’ turn into a lion again.”

With the coarse wool shawl draped over one shoulder and his long hair bushing out around his face, he resembled one of the wild men that peasants believed roamed the woods of medieval Europe. As I looked at him, it came home to me that I really didn’t know him. I knew the man—or creature—that he would become: the incubus Liam, who came to me as moonlight and shadow and became flesh through my breath; then Bill, who came back to me to make amends and died when my love made him human. But this man—William Duffy—I had dreamed of him, but I didn’t know him. Could he be trusted?