Page 17 of A Scot in the Storm
It wasn’t falling. Falling had a direction. This was a force that took her from six sides at once and pulled her through her own skin. Pressure built in her ears past anything she’d ever felt on a plane, and then her eardrums gave way with two thin, bright pops. She tasted blood. Her back molar on the left gave a sharp snap, and she felt a shard come loose against her tongue. Her vision greyed at the edges, went white in the middle, then greyed again. Something in her right sleeve heated suddenly, the way fabric heats when it’s too close to a stove, and she smelled wool and plastic and a thin chemical burn.
She wasn’t falling. She was being drawn, dragged like thread being pulled through cloth.
The pressure cracked. The pulling let her go. Abigail felt stone under her hands before she felt the air. She was on her side. Wet. Cold. The sound of the sea was very close. Her ears were filled with a high thin whistle she understood distantly was the sound of a ruptured eardrum.
She lay still, didn’t dare open her eyes yet. She took one breath. It hurt. She took another. Then it hurt less.
Her tongue found a new sharp edge where her molar had broken. Her right sleeve was black and curled at the cuff, the outer fabric scorched through, as if something had caught it at the threshold and held on, and she had come through anyway.
The sky above her was clearing. The rain was already thinning to a fine spitting mist. She rolled over slowly, every muscle screaming, and saw the base of the Wine Tower twenty feet above her on the rocks. There was new scaffolding made of timber and rope.
Something moved on the edge of the path.
A man in a dark coat was coming down the rocks toward her with a lantern in his hand and the sort of stride a person uses on a path they have walked at night a thousand times. He hadn’t yetseen her. She had maybe four seconds, so Abigail did the only thing that felt safe.
She closed her eyes and waited for him to find her.
Chapter 6
Rory
Fraserburgh, Scotland
October, 1787
Rory bracedone gloved hand against the cold stone wall of Kinnaird Head Castle while the wind tried its level best to throw him into the North Sea.
Above him, the scaffolding groaned like an old ship under strain. Timber creaked. Rope ends snapped sharply against the stone. Rain lashed sideways across the headland hard enough to sting exposed skin.
Most sensible men had already retreated to the workers’ lodgings below. Rory Sinclair had never been especially sensible.
“Captain!”
Ewan MacLeod appeared through the rain with his plaid whipped half loose around his shoulders. “Leave the damned rigging!”
“Two more lines.” Rory hauled another rope tight around the anchor post.
“For the love o’ God, man, ye’ll break yer neck.”
“Aye, likely.”
The storm had rolled in fast from the north, black clouds swallowing the horizon just before dusk. By full dark the sea had become a living thing below the cliffs, waves smashing themselves against the rocks with the same relentless violence Rory remembered from another storm fourteen years earlier.
Another ship. Another reef. The night full of screaming men carried beneath black water while he stood helpless against the storm.
He shoved the memory aside before it could root too deeply.
He had work to do.
The lighthouse conversion was already behind schedule thanks to weather and shortages from Edinburgh. If this gale destroyed the upper rigging, they would lose another fortnight rebuilding it.
And winter was coming hard this year. Samhain night always seemed to drag strange weather in behind it. Old wives’ tales, perhaps, but half the men working Kinnaird Head still crossed themselves when storms rose on October’s last night.
Lightning split the sky as the strike hit the Wine Tower.
For one strange suspended heartbeat the entire headland glowed white. Every raindrop seemed frozen in midair.
The thunder cracked at the exact same instant, a brutal concussion that shook the scaffolding beneath Rory’s boots. He felt it through his teeth, then darkness slammed back into place.
