Today's teaser is rom my WIP,
Gallowglass. Our heroine, Karina Stewart, is about to unleash something from the Otherworld. Read on...
“I can’t believe you’re dragging me to
another old rock.”
I shot my older brother a glare; I was
really starting to regret offering to bring him along on this trip. “It’s not
an old rock. It’s a church. A kirk.” I would have said more, but I needed to
concentrate. This driving on the wrong side of the road business was for the
birds.
“Kirk,” he repeated, rolling the word
around in his mouth. “And, what are ‘kirks’ made of?”
I scowled at him, almost went into a
ditch, and jerked the car back onto the road. “Chris, do you have to be such a
jerk all the time?”
“Rina, do you have to be such a bad
driver?”
“Stop drinking all that complimentary
Scotch, and you can do the driving.”
“When in Rome.”
He had a point there. Nearly every place
we’d visited in Scotland either had few samples of the local whisky laid out
for us, or a proprietor with a handy flask. Add this to all the pubs we’d
visited in Britain,
and my liver was starting to ache.
“Besides,” Chris continued, “if I was
driving, you wouldn’t get to drag me to every known fairy sighting.”
“You liked Stirling.” My brother is a
literature professor, with a doctorate in Shakespeare. He’d wandered the halls
of the old castle, randomly quoting the Scottish play. Beyond Lady Macbeth’s
demons, his feet were firmly grounded in
reality. By contrast, I’d always been fascinated by stories about magic and
fairies. I’d jumped at the chance to do some of my geology grad work in the UK, so I could
tour the locations I’d read and imagined about since childhood.
“At least real people lived there,” he
smirked as we pulled into the car park. “What kind of ghosts are in this kirk again?”
“No ghosts.” I pulled up the emergency
brake, and jammed my water bottle into my daypack. “There was a reverend here
in the seventeenth century who communed with fairies and elves.” Chris gave me
a look over the roof of the car, raising a single eyebrow. That had always
irritated me, since I’d never been able to do that. “He wrote a book telling
everyone their secrets, and the fairies imprisoned him in a tree.”
“Anyone can write a book,” Chris grumbled.
“I’ve written several.”
I bit my lip; Chris had just enough
midgrade liquor in him to be itching for a fight, and anything I said about his
crumbling career would just add fuel to the fire. After a few moments of
silence, Chris wandered over to the Plexiglas encased signage, carefully positioned to catch a tourist's eye.
“Did you get a pamphlet about this
place?” he called over his shoulder.
“Yeah.” I rooted around in my daypack,
and pulled out the wad of information supplied by Spiritual Sites of the UK, the tour
group I’d contacted. I was so glad I’d opted for the cheaper, self-guided
package. I’d hate for any hapless tour guide to be saddled with by brother’s
foul attitude for six days, seven nights.
I pulled out a slightly rumpled pamphlet
and handed it over. Chris opened it, scanning the paragraph’s with an English
professor’s ease. “This guy wasn’t taken by fairies!” Chris said. “He had a
stroke while he was walking around the hill.”
“You know where the term stroke comes
from?” Without waiting for his smart-ass reply, I continued, “It was thought
that a fairy had stroked your cheek. That’s why only one side was paralyzed.”
“Thank god for modern medicine,” Chris
muttered. We reached the remains of the kirk, and headed toward the graveyard.
Chris might think I was a loon, but he admitted that gravestones were cool.
“Look, he’s buried right here. Case closed.”
I walked over to where Chris was
standing, and read the inscription. After a suitable
moment of silence, I mentioned that we should climb the fairy hill.
“We’re here, so we might as well,” I
said when he whined. “Besides, the walk will burn off some of that booze.” He grumbled, but followed anyway.
The tree at the top of the fairy hill
was, in a word, magnificent. It was old and stately, like a Scottish version of
Yggsdrasil, and prayers, printed on colored bits of cloth, were tied to the
branches. More offerings surrounded the roots, and shiny coins were pounded
into the bark.
“Some walk,” I grumbled, digging in my
pack for my water bottle. The water was warm, but it was better than nothing.
“So, he’s in here, huh?” Chris leaned
close to the trunk, and picked at a coin. “Why hasn’t anyone tried to chop it
down, set the poor guy loose?”
I shrugged. “To keep from angering the
fairies?”
Chris barked a derisive laugh. “Yeah.
Or, they don’t want to kill this golden goose of a tourist trap.” I glanced
around; Disneyland, this was not. “This stuff
is all so lame, Rina. I don’t know what you see in all these bedtime stories.”
I fingered one of the cloth prayers.
“They remind us of where we came from, where we’re going. They’re comforting.”
Another bark. I think Chris had had more
whisky than he’d let on. “Comforting? That’s your explanation for this
crap—that it’s comforting?”
“Of course,” I said, trying to keep my
voice even. The booze would wear off soon enough. I hoped. “Why would people
keep doing all of this-” I gestured at the tree, all of the flapping bits of
cloth prayers and offerings “-if no one ever got anything out of it?”
Chris looked from me to the tree. “If
all this goddamn magic shit is real, why is my life over?” he ground out. “You
think I didn’t pray for an answer? A solution? You know what I got? Nothing.
Because there’s nothing to get.”
He turned and stalked down the hill,
over toward where we’d left the car. I watched him until he disappeared around
a curve, then I turned back to the tree.
“Don’t worry,” I said, patting the rough
bark. “I believe in you, Reverend Kirk. I know what really happened. And, I’d
rescue you if I could.”
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