Page 3 of The Fae Queen's Captive
No youths, no superstitious locals, no neopagans or tripod-toting influencers. Someone came to the middle of nowhere, made a ring of burning torches, and then just…left.
No. No, that can’t be right. I don’t even bother flicking on the bathroom light when I brush my teeth at night—who would go to all the trouble of carrying, planting, and then lighting torches just to leave?
They must still be here.
Squaring my shoulders and practicing my best teaching assistant voice in my head, I raise my phone flashlight and start circling the tomb. The wordtomborcairngives a sense of smallness, maybe, a sense of containment relating to its purpose of holding one or a handful of bodies, but this cairn is nearly a hill all on its own on the valley floor, connected only at the very back to the hill that walls off the south side of the valley. The mound is taller than I am by several orders and wide enough that it takes me the better part of several minutes to check around its perimeter.
I’m still alone after I do.
Baffled, I return to the dig site itself, which is chiefly arrayed on the flat strip of land in front of the cairn and crenelated with plastic totes and heaped bags of sand. Tarps waiting to cover the pits ruffle a little, but the breeze down here is so gentle and still that it’s nothing more than a sporadic flutter. Even the mist continues with its slow, unbothered swirls, following its own laws of physics as it moves between my legs and fills the low stone doorway of the cairn.
My headlamp’s beam moves over the mist-veiled shore of the loch and over the dark water beyond, but there’s nothing. No movement, no sound.
There really is no one here.
On the bright side, this means I can go to the fair now, which has me humming as I turn back to douse the torches before I leave, and then I see a shape standing directly in front of the tomb’s entrance.
I bite off a yelp and drop my phone. My headlamp battery dies at the same moment.
The figure—illuminated now only by torchlight and moonlight—steps forward. Boots, jeans, peacoat, stylish wool beanie. Their gloves have reflective stitching on the forefingers and thumbs. The kind of gloves you wear so you can still use your phone while you’re wearing them. Sensible, forethought-requiring gloves.
My pounding heart slows a little. It’s just a person. Just a non–serial killer person.
Probably.
“It’s dangerous to be out when the lights are lit,” the stranger says, his voice deep and burred, although something about the cadence of his voice doesn’t sound entirely Scottish to me. “Especially on this night, of all nights.”
I squat and start patting for my phone. The lack of headlamp and the picturesque-but-inconvenient mist makes it hard to see exactly where it fell—there is only the sight of my hands, pale in the darkness, sinking into the mist and then disappearing.
“Yes,” I say, palpating the ground like I’m Aragorn looking for hobbit tracks. “Um. About that. See, this is actually an ongoing excavation—” My fingers brush against the sleek shape of my phone, and relieved, I grab it and stand. Which is when I realize the stranger has moved even closer—silently. He’s now only a few paces away, and I can make out his pale, carved features and his eyes shining in the dark. They almost look like they reflect the moonlight, like a cat’s, but then he looks back toward the cairn and the illusion vanishes. It must have been my imagination.
I clear my throat and start again. “You see, we’re not finished securing the site for winter, and so it’s not really ready for visitors—”
“Are you telling me to leave?” the stranger asks, amusement plain in his voice. “Imust leavehere?”
When I’m not on a dig site, I’m teaching moody undergraduates, so I’m used to batting away defiance and unearned condescension.
“That’s right,” I say firmly. “In the interest of conservation, we need to keep the site as clear as—”
“Oh, howadorable,” comes a purring voice from behind the man. A woman with deep umber skin and hair the color of steel is approaching us—from the tomb, maybe?—and like the stranger, she is also wearing very normal clothes. Boots, jeans, coat. A scarf embroidered with silver butterfly-like shapes wound around her long neck. Despite her iron-colored hair, she looks to be my age. Maybe even younger. “She’s perfect, Maynard.”
I like being called perfect by a pretty woman as much as the next person, and I don’t even mind being called adorable, since I’ve made something of a sexual career out of being short and curvy and dimple-cheeked.
But. Being pretty doesn’t mean one floats over the ground when they walk; these people still can’t be traipsing all over as-yet-unstabilized Bronze and Iron Age ruins.
I try a different tack. “I know you’ve probably come a long way to be here tonight, and I really am sorry to ask you to leave.”
“We came from forever and a daydream away,” the woman says, smiling.
The man—Maynard—shakes his head. “We came from only a whisper away. From a thought away.”
“Both things are true,” says the woman, stepping even closer. “All things are true.”
“One thingisn’ttrue,” I say, the first tendrils of real exasperation strangling my good mood, “and it’s that you can walk on an active dig site.”
“Aren’t you going to ask us which ones?” Maynard asks, ignoring me.
I stare. Firelight flickers behind him, and I see a new shadow. So now there are three people I have to shoo off. Fantastic.
