Page 16 of A Scot in the Storm
I should not be writing these things. And yet I find I must. She showed me the foundation calculations today and suggested an improvement I have been circling around for months without seeing. When I asked how she’d thought of it, she said she’d seen it done before.
The last letter was dated December 1788. The ink was fresh enough that Abigail could see every variation in tone, every slight hesitation. This one had cost him.
I will say only this. Whatever choice is made, I will count myself blessed for the knowing of her. She is the finest mind and the kindest heart I have met in any century.
Any century.
In the margins, Rory had written one more line, almost invisible.
Gods help me, I’m in love with her.
Abigail sat alone with the letters. She read the last one again.The finest mind and the kindest heart I have met in any century.The words reached across the years and tugged at something inside her chest that she didn’t have a name for.
They had been written to her. She could no longer pretend otherwise.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Sam, probably, checking in. She ignored it.
Outside, the sky turned black. Samhain eve settled over Fraserburgh like a held breath.
It happened fast.Faster than any weather system she’d ever seen. One moment the haar was its usual grey, the next, the clouds had thickened into something dark and foreboding. The museum windows rattled. Arthur stuck his head back in.
“That’s odd,” he said. “Forecast was clear through tomorrow.”
“Looks like they got it wrong.” Abigail peered out the window, her shoulders tight.
Lightning split the sky. The thunder was immediate, a crack, not a rumble, sharp and close. The lights flickered and died.
“Power’s out,” Arthur said, which was unnecessary.
Another flash. Abigail looked through the window and saw the lightning strike the Wine Tower, a direct hit, blue-white and violent, the bolt hanging there a heartbeat too long before it released. The hair on her arms stood straight up. The air tasted like copper and something else. Something electric. Something green and alive.
She was moving before she’d decided to move, Arthur sputtering behind her to be careful. Through the archive room, down the corridor, out the back door into the storm. The wind hit her like a wall. Rain drove horizontal, stinging her face, soaking through her jacket in seconds. She couldn’t see three feet ahead, and didn’t care.
She ran toward the castle. Toward the Wine Tower. The path was slick. Her boots skidded on the wet stone. Once she stumbled and caught herself against the castle wall, cold stone under her palms, and pushed off again without stopping. The storm was getting worse. She could hear things breaking. Woodsplintering. The scaffolding on the tower swaying in the violence of it.
She reached the seaward side of the Wine Tower. Lightning struck again, not the tower this time, but the ground near her feet, the bolt striking the rocks with a sound like reality breaking apart. The world went white. Her teeth hurt. She could taste metal.
The air around the tower changed. Temperature, density, the very texture of the storm, it all shifted. The rain stopped falling and hung suspended for an impossible second, each drop lit from within by the lightning that was still branching through the sky. The stones beneath her feet began to hum, a feeling like the loud bass of rock music filled her body.
Somehow she understood, in that moment, what was happening. The Cailleach had said the storm was the door.
She took a step forward. The hum rose to meet her foot.
And every nerve she had locked up at once.
Don’t.
She stood there. One hand out, one foot committed, the suspended rain hanging in the air around her like a held breath. The instinct wasn’t fear. Fear was loud. This was something quieter, the way a rabbit looks at a wolf.
She could still turn around. The door was open. She hadn’t yet gone through.
Abigail thought of Rory writingany century.Of her own handwriting on eighteenth-century paper. Of Sam on a board at Morro Rock, riding every wave like it was the last. Of Elaine Hargreaves and the Bronze Age brooch and every careful path she had ever chosen, watching her career narrow to a dead end.
The ink is drying as we speak.
Abigail stepped forward into the light.
And the light hit back.
