Highland Moon Sifter (a Highland Sorcery novel) (8 page)

It was said a Moon Sifter’s gift sprang from a darkness in their core, an unnatural flaw in their very creation, but this…this was not bred of shadows.

But magic woven upon strands of moonlight, replenishing a tired hurting soul. He blazed like a beacon surrounded by night. Her heart took a tumble as great as the fall to the ocean below.

He was a miracle.

Tilting his head back, Shaw sank to the ground, lying flat on his back, eyes closed, allowing the soft dusty glow to fall upon him and absorb into his skin.

Bekah sank too, overcome by what she was witnessing. He looked so vulnerable at the cliff’s edge, his flat stomach moving up and down with his breathing. He could have fallen asleep, easy prey to her little blade, a soft puncture into his skin.

But she couldn’t make herself get up and go over there. Not like this. Not while…she scrunched her nose, crushing a leaf between her fingers. No, never. She needed to stop pretending. Needed her mind to catch up to what her heart was telling her. There was no way in the known universe that she was going to kill Shaw Limont. Just like that, another decision was made, overriding the first.

So what now?

The Sifts still couldn’t come into existence.

What if she explained things to Shaw? Told him about the Sifts, about everything?

He was a good man. She saw that now, understood why Col would never have killed him. If Shaw knew everything, he would be able to avoid whatever action he’d be taking in his future that created the Sifts. His death didn’t have to be the end all. His choice could end it.

It was worth a try.

Worth everything.

Decision made, Bekah dropped the crushed leaf and looked in Shaw’s direction, ready to put her newly made plans into action.
 
What she saw in that instant made the bottom drop out of her stomach, as well as her new resolve.

Shaw Limont stepped off the cliff’s edge.

~~~

Bekah sprang up out of the tree line and ran to the ledge, slamming to her knees to look over it. Gusts of wind screamed up along the wall.

There. He was there, about twenty feet down, clinging to the cliff face, not fallen to his death in the water far below. The wind snatched at his hair and billowed his kilt as he climbed downward, using protrusions and pockmarks in the craggy stone for hand- and footholds until he stepped onto a thin ledge and then disappeared inside what had to be a dip or cavern in the cliff.

Bekah eased back. She could wait for him here. Unless it wasn’t a hollowed out groove, but a long cavern with another exit point.

Ah, crap. She was going to have to go down there.

~~~

Twenty feet down, her hand slipped and she nearly bought the farm. Drowning in the ancient sea wasn’t on her to-do list. That is if she somehow missed the sharp slabs of rocks slashing the waves. Yeah that’d be worth hurtling back to the thirteenth century for, accomplishing nothing for humanity’s future.

She should have waited up top. Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve.

The wind slicing along the face of the cliff plucked at her with gale force strength. The waves crashing below sprayed her with stinging salt water, soaking her to the bone and making the rock surface slick.

And she was pretty sure the cauterized wounds above her hip had started bleeding. Or maybe it was just the salt water making them feel like they’d been ripped open again. She gritted her teeth against it and kept going. Wasn’t much choice at this rate. Clinging to the side of a cliff, she was past committed now.

She stretched her leg down, feeling for the next foothold with her exposed toe, and found a flat surface instead. Peeking down, she realized she’d made it to the ledge, and handhold by handhold edged sideways until the wall gave way to the opening of a cave.

She immediately hitched over her side, waiting out the pain concentrated there. Holy crap, that hurt. She inhaled sharply, looking around, giving herself a few more moments.

Muted light flickered along the walls from within. Straightening, well, kind of, she moved past barrels and crates, wondering why they were here and how they’d gotten them up. This was a smugglers cave obviously, or had been once upon a time. The curve of wall took her into a second smaller cavern.

She stopped at the entrance, dirty fingers resting on the wall as she took in the scene before her.

This was Edeen’s cave, the place the High Sorcerer brought his sister after the Battle with Aldreth upon Crunfathy Hill. He put the Empath into a slumber so deep it had lasted close to a century.

But she would be awakened in the time of Hitler and do her country a great service.

With his back to the cave entrance, Shaw rested a palm upon his sister’s brow where tendrils of soft luminous silver curled from between his long fingers and enveloped the girl’s length in its muted glow. She really was lovely, auburn hair surrounding pale skin, like a true fairy tale princess.

“I thought the sorcerer’s magic preserved your sister?” Bekah broke the stillness of the cave.

If Shaw was surprised at her sudden presence he didn’t show it, nor turned to address her. “He expends all he can on her, but Toren’s magic isn’t enough.”

“But yours is?”

He looked tired. Shoulders slumped, barely able to stand, yet all the regeneration he’d gained from the moonlight above he now extended to his sister. “It has to be.”

Hidden within those words filtered abject misery and shame and everything clicked. Bekah understood exactly what drove Shaw Limont to remain with the witch. It had nothing to do with being evil or seeking power for power’s sake. “You hope to find a way to save her.”

This time, he did look at her, shifting only enough to peer over his shoulder.

Bekah went on. “What better place to search for a cure from a witch’s accident than right under the witch’s nose? You could have escaped Aldreth, yet you’ve remained.”

His lip twitched. “’Tis not as simple as that.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” His head lowered. She didn’t think he was going to say anything else, but he did. His voice strangely quiet.

“When we were children, Col fell into a hunter’s trap in the forest and trying to get him out, Edeen tumbled in after him. We searched for them for two days. I was but a child myself and ‘twas my first taste of real fear—losing them. And I vowed to myself that I would not lose them again.

“Yet I have.”

His words held her with the fragile strength of a spider’s web.

“Please tell me what you know of Col.” The glow of magic flowing from his palm moved as his hand slipped from Edeen’s forehead to enclose her still hand within his. “I am not the monster you think me. Please trust me to do the right thing.”

“Okay.”

His head tilted, drifting the ends of his dark hair across his bicep. His brows knit together.

“All right.” So she told him everything. She eased down the wall to sit on the stone floor, hand upon her side.

The lines bracketing his mouth deepened with each new piece of information she doled out, though he made no interruptions. She told him of the future, of the Sifts, of how they suspected he was their creator. And she told him of Alexander, just not exactly who he was to him. It was a bit unnerving how intently Shaw listened.

“Seven centuries.” His voice echoed across the cave walls with the heaviness and despair of dirt shoveled onto a pine box six feet down. “Seven centuries my sister is imprisoned in this dark slumber.” He paced away from the stone alter the young woman slept upon and curled his fists to the sides of his head.

“But Roquemore Giordano will be able to awaken her,” Bekah offered hopefully.

Shaw whirled, dropping his hands. “I’ll go to Toren and force my sorcerer brother to open a rift and bring this dragon vampire here to awaken her now. And scoop up Col from this…this
Sea-at-tall
.” He was angry. At her? Or fate in general?

“Can he do that?” Without the magic of their clan supporting him, did the sorcerer still have the juice to open a rift, let alone two, that far in the future? Could he open one at all?

Shaw’s frown deepened. “’Tis uncertain,” he admitted.

“Can…you?” She squinted up at him. It was some sort of rift that had pulled Col away from them, an unstable hole had been ripped in the fabric of time and space, while Shaw had used his magic against the witch’s on Crunfathy Hill. The force and combination of their magic had torn open several rifts and Col had been sucked into one. Fortunately it had been to a time in the twenty-first century and not simply a hole that led to nowhere.

“No.” Shaw’s voice was the quiet shush of a vault door closing.

Bekah tilted her head, looking him over. He had tried. She could see it in the way his hands fisted and the thinning of his lips as he pressed them together. He had tried to open a time rift to find his brother. The ties of their blood would have taken him right to him anywhere in time that Col would have landed. If he’d been able to create a rift. Which he’d tried, but hadn’t succeeded in.

Probably several times.

Why had he failed? Alexander was certain that opening rifts was inherent in Moon Sifters. It was part of why the Sifts also had that ability, though on a shorter leash. The monsters were only able to travel within a span of one hundred years of their lifetime, forwards or back. Period. They couldn’t then jump back another century from that time frame, frog leaping into several more centuries without imploding. Only sorcerers and their time rifts could make the far leaps in time. And Moon Sifters, or so Alexander had thought.

Could he have been wrong?

Or was it something else?

Was something blocking Shaw from that ability? Maybe he simply didn’t know how?

Suddenly his countenance altered. His posture straightened, shoulders thrown back, chin lifted. A determined scowl set firmly across his dark brows as though a decision made settled into his features.

“Come.” He strode out into the smaller cavern chamber and with a subtle lift of his hand, magic pulsed in the air, lifting Bekah’s long bangs and streaking electricity across her skin. She scrambled back from the opening between caverns just as an earthen wall solidified in its place, closing the sleeping Empath out of sight.

Illusion or real? She reached out to touch it, expecting to feel a trickle of magical current, but all she felt was cool damp stone. If it was only illusion, it felt as real as it looked.

No wonder no one had found her for centuries. It took a creature born of dragons and vampires to see through the illusion.

Bekah smoothed her hair back down along her cheek and looked to Shaw. He waited for her at the mouth of the cave, a new undecipherable frown pouring from the gray of his eyes which were pointedly fixed on her bleeding feet. It would take a lifetime to learn all the different emotions that frequented his expressive face.

She lifted both brows in question. “What?”

Those incredible eyes lifted to hers. “Forgive me.” He took a step toward her. “You shouldna have lived a life overrun with monsters.” Another step and the space around her seemed to shrink with his nearness. “I grieve for the loss of your family, loss of your friends.” He stood right in front of her. She had to crane her head back to look up at him.

His hand lifted. He skimmed the length of her wayward bangs between two of his long fingers. His knuckles slid along her cheek. “Ye shouldna have had to grow up like that,
fear-dìon
.”

Her heart cinched up tight in her chest, making it difficult to breathe around it.

“What does that mean,
fear-dìon
?”

He merely
 
smiled. “Why have ye have no boots?”

“What?” She blinked at the abrupt change in subjects. She blinked a few more times to regain her bearings. “There weren’t any shoe stores along the way.”

Confusion lightened the hue of the gray in his eyes to a hazy mist. “Shoe stores?”

She smiled. “I haven’t come across any footwear in the forest.”

He nodded, shifting even closer though there wasn’t any space left between them as it was. Her heart whooshed like drafts of air from a swinging pendulum.