Falling for Angels - Hazel Hunter Page 0,32
read people’s deepest, darkest secrets by touch, so everyone avoided going near her. Although she seemed fine with that, I didn’t care for it.
“Sure.” I followed her out of the garden.
We walked down to the loch, where Lola stopped and looked out at the water.
“The grove is messing with us.” She glanced at me. “I read you last night at dinner, when you passed me the applesauce. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I frowned. “You said us.”
“I feel the same thing, like it’s pulling at me. “ Lola hunched her shoulders. “I don’t want to go back and die.”
“Me, either.” After my life had fallen apart in the twenty-first century, I’d come to Scotland to kill myself, but being a ghost had cured me of that. “Do you think we should talk to Master Gowan?”
“No.” The cheerleader produced a coil of rope. “Let’s find out what the grove wants.”
Since I had already survived being trapped inside the portal, I insisted on going in. Lola agreed to stay outside the stone circle and keep an eye on the rope we’d tied around my waist.
“How long should I wait before I pull you out?” she asked.
I wondered if I’d still be attached to the rope when she did. “Count to a hundred. Out loud, so I can hear you.”
The ground opened as soon as I stepped inside the stones. Then the darkness swallowed me up, but it didn’t turn around me or take me anywhere. I could hear Lola’s nervous voice counting off the teens as a soft white light glowed around me. Then the rope jerked, and suddenly the cheerleader floated down in front of me, her eyes wide.
I took hold of her hands. It’s okay. I’ve got you.
Who’s got us? She gripped my fingers tightly.
Little movies began to play around us. I saw my aunt giving birth, and then running out of a hospital. Later she cried as she watched my mother pushing me around in a stroller. I watched myself getting married at the courthouse because my fiancé hadn’t wanted the expense of a big wedding, and Lola hitchhiking to college to save money. I saw how lonely I’d been on all the nights my husband hadn’t come home until late, and Lola studying alone in an empty library while the other cheerleaders had been out partying. I saw myself looking up bridges in Scotland I could jump from, and Lola standing on the battlements after losing Hannah, her only friend.
I felt not just what I had suffered, but Lola’s despair as well. Everything we had experienced in those dark places in our lives paralleled.
The movies around us shifted and showed two other women. One was an ancient druidess, the other was Coco’s friend Deb. They looked remarkably alike, just as I realized Lola and I did. We watched as time went backward to a terrible tragedy that had changed both their lives forever. Then the portal began to spin as it forced us up and out.
We landed on either side of the stone circle, and I staggered to my feet and hurried over to Lola, who grabbed me in a tight hug. We were both sobbing, and it took a few minutes to pull ourselves together.
“I would have tried to find you if I’d known,” I told Lola.
“Not your fault.” She wiped the tears from my face and then her own. “We need to tell the others about Ruith and Deb.”
I nodded, and put my arm around her. “Let’s do that right now.”
Coach Jennings and the laird listened as Lola and I described what the portal had shown us.
“Deb is Ruith’s sister,” I said. “As a toddler she wandered into a sacred grove, and it took her to the twenty-first century. The tribe assumed Ruith, who hated the baby, had killed her.”
“By the Gods.” Gill got to his feet. “My father executed a druidess for murdering a bairn. The clan tied her to a stone and drowned her in the loch.”
“Only the calpa rescued Ruith,” Lola said, “and made her queen.”
“Then we came back in time, and Ruith discovered Deb still lived.” Isobel regarded me. “Deb doesn’t know any of it.”
“I think Ruith has been lying to her so she can use her to take revenge,” I told her.
“Then we must capture her, and tell her the truth,” the laird said.
Chapter 27
Remembrance
To rescue my bae Deb from the shape-shifting calpa, and free her from the spirit of Ruith, the evil druidess possessing her, we needed teamwork. Sure, we had a whole