Juliet Dark - The Angel Stone

“That’s what Nan Stewart—your descendant—told me. She said that I had to find the angel stone that would destroy them, but I don’t know where to look. The girl you call Katy must have had it. Did you ever see her with a milky-white tear-shaped stone?”

“Aye, she wore it in a brooch just like the one you’re wearing.” She pointed at the pin on my shawl and then flicked her eyes toward William and saw the one that he was wearing. “When the witch hunters came and Katy ran away, she left the brooch for her daughter, little Mairi, but it no longer had the stone in it. Malcolm thought she must have taken it to sell. The witch hunters stayed six months, turning neighbor against neighbor, sister against sister. By the time they were done, twenty-four men and women were hanged for witchcraft. And now they’re back again. They’ve taken my cousin Mordag—”

“Mordag?” William asked. “Why, she’s a harmless old woman. We stayed in her cottage last night.”

I thought of the unfinished bowl of oatmeal and the spinning wheel knocked over on the floor and the beautiful woven blankets I’d slept under. Although I’d never met Mordag, I felt a pang for the woman being yanked out of her quiet life by those monsters. “Where have they taken her?” I asked.

“To the dungeons of Castle Coldclough,” Nan replied with a shiver.

I felt a chill, remembering how the dark ruin seemed to loom over the village, casting a malignant shadow.

“We’ll rescue her,” I said. “Once I have the angel stone, we can use it with your magic plaid.”

Nan snorted and plucked at my ordinary and decidedly un-magical plaid shawl. “A magic plaid, what nonsense! I’ve never heard tell of one of those.”

It was hard to disguise my disappointment. “But your descendant told me that her family used the plaid against the nephilim. She said a fairy woman taught them. Are you sure Caill—I mean Katy—didn’t teach you?”

“Nay, she couldn’t even spin or knit or weave. Whenever she tried, the wool tied itself into knots. As for the stone … well, you’ll just have to stay here until you find it, I suppose. In the meantime, I suggest the two of you stay out of sight. That pirate story you spun in the town square fooled no one, and this lass looks enough like Katy Brodie that folks will say she’s a changeling. If the witch hunters get ahold of you, it won’t take them long to discover you’re not who you say you are.”

The idea of being interrogated by a seventeenth-century counterpart of Duncan Laird made my knees go weak. I was remembering the details of that class I’d taken on European witch hunts and the horrific torture devices they used to extract confessions. I suddenly had had enough of the seventeenth century. It had been foolish to think I’d be able to find the angel stone with no clue to its whereabouts. And as for William … I looked at him regretfully. He might look like the incubus, but he wasn’t the man I’d fallen in love with in the twenty-first century.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that I’ll ever find the stone here. After all, it’s just a fairy tale …” My voice cracked on the last words. What was any of this but a fairy tale? My life, my love for Bill—it was all a fairy tale that had evaporated into the mists. “I have to get back and help my friends.” I turned away from the look of hurt in William’s eyes and, like my ancestor before me, fled Ballydoon.

I ran through the narrow alley, my bootheels echoing on the cobblestones. When I reached the square I turned to look back, but William hadn’t followed. I squelched the pang of disappointment, raised my shawl over my head, and hurried through the square, ignoring the curious looks of the few remaining stragglers. Most townspeople had scurried back behind their shutters, but a few old women lingered by the market cross in the center of the square, gossiping—probably about the scene I’d played a part in earlier. They’d go back to Jeannie MacDougal, no doubt, and tell her they’d seen William Duffy’s queer wife fleeing the town alone. Jeannie would decide I’d fled in shame at finding myself married to a man who’d been betrothed to another—or that William had repudiated me in favor of his beautiful first love. It irked me that she would interpret my leaving as proof of my shame and her own superiority, but I couldn’t worry about that—or whether or not William and she would end up married. I could look it up in the history books when I got home.

I hurried fast out of the town, fueled at first by my urgency to get home and then by the need to keep warm. The sunny day that William had extolled on our way into town—it already felt centuries ago—had become gray and overcast. When I got to the top of the hill, it was raining. By the time I reached the stone cross, I was soaked. I glanced up toward Mordag’s cottage, where William and I had spent the night. The memory of the warmth of the fire—and the heat of his hands on my body and his mouth on mine—flashed through me. He wasn’t Bill. He wasn’t the man I had fallen in love with, but leaving him behind seemed a final admission that I would never see Bill again. Even as I’d seen Bill’s throat cut, watched his blood seep into the ground, I’d clung to a remnant of hope that something of him remained in Faerie that I could reclaim.

But now I knew in my heart that Bill was really gone. Since I’d saved William from becoming an incubus, Bill would never exist. When I got back to my own time, I might not even remember him.

Perhaps that was for the best. I pulled my shawl more tightly around my shoulders, bowed my head against the now driving rain, and turned away—into the path of a heavily laden cart. The rain had covered the sound of its approach and it was nearly on top of me, so close I could feel the hot breath of the horses steaming the air. I veered sideways, my ankle twisting in the mud, and stumbled into the ditch on the side of the road.

The wagon wheels narrowly missed my foot but ran over a corner of my shawl and splashed muddy water over my face. I squawked in protest, my cry taking in all the agonies of the day, a sound so pitiful that I was sure the cart driver would stop immediately and get down to help me, but he only cast a baleful glance in my direction and snapped the reins over the horses’ backs to drive them harder. Anger quickly replaced self-pity. I struggled to my feet, prepared to give this road hog a piece of my mind, but my gaze met not the driver’s eyes but the dazed and hopeless eyes of three women standing in the back of the cart. They were bareheaded in the pouring rain, hands chained, feet hobbled, unable to even huddle close together for warmth. Wet hair plastered their heads and turned their faces skeletal and their staring eyes into empty sockets—as if they had already been tried, convicted, garroted, and burned. Clearly these were more women accused of witchcraft, being transported to the dungeons of Castle Coldclough.

Their jailer told me that. I knew immediately that he was a nephilim. He loomed over the prisoners, ramrod straight and stock-still despite the rocking of the cart, in a long black cloak and a ghastly mask. It had a long black beak and red glass eyes that stayed on me as the cart continued on its way down the road. But it wasn’t the horrible mask, which I recognized as the kind plague doctors wore, that held me riveted; it was the brooch pinned to the nephilim’s cloak. It held a cloudy white stone big as a goose egg and shaped like a tear. As I stared at it, it began to glow, piercing the gray steaming air like the moon appearing from behind clouds. The angel stone . Every atom in my body called out to it. The light from it seemed to be filling my body, cold water pouring into my bones as if the rain were coming in through my pores. With it came an overwhelming sorrow—the grief of the creatures who had fathered these monsters and the shame of the children whose fathers had turned from them. This sorrow made the grief I’d been feeling for Bill a moment ago seem like a drop in the ocean, but it also made that grief swell into a flood that threatened to drown me. Every sorrow I’d ever felt—the death of my parents, the shame of my grandmother’s coldness and disapproval, the moment I believed Liam had betrayed me, Bill’s death—rose up inside me. It was unbearable. I wanted to throw myself under the wheels of the cart or lie facedown in the ditch until I drowned. I wanted to …