The Druid Stone by Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane

Author:Heidi Belleau & Violetta Vane [Belleau, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin Enterprises
Published: 2012-08-05T22:00:00+00:00

Cormac woke in ashes.

The ground was warm and there were timbers smoldering around him, as if a giant had kicked apart a bonfire and dropped him in the center. He staggered to his feet. Brushed himself off as best he could while he circled and tried to get his bearings.

“Sean! I’m here! Where are you?” he shouted into the morning sun.

At least it felt like morning. That was a start; he had a compass now. There were towering high trees to the north, a dirt track heading east, rolling grassy fields to the south and west. Countryside like he’d rarely seen in Ireland, where the old growth forests were few and far between. Nothing close by except for bonfires and—

Not bonfires. The smoking remains of wicker huts. And there was no one left here, no one at all, just an oppressive silence broken only by the low crackle of embers and the soft shuffling collapse of a few fire-weakened timbers. But Sean had to be here, because he’d found the thread, followed the thread, chased it onto the spiral path and then almost grasped it, right at the point it plunged off the path and downward into the abyss. He’d fallen after it, then, and woken in ashes.

He’d almost grasped the thread. Right place, wrong time. If Sreng was playing the same trick he’d pulled on Michael, he’d thrown Sean back in time, into the thick of something torturous, and oh God, maybe Cormac was too late. Sean could already be dead.

That was when he found the first body.

Facedown, arms stiff and bent with the onset of rigor mortis. The sword or spear that must have taken the man through the back of the spine was gone, pulled free, but Cormac saw, recognized, the wound.

Fighting back revulsion, he crouched to touch the body. At least it couldn’t be Sean. The man was wearing a dark blue tunic made of rough linen, and his hair was bright blond under smears of ash. He moved on to the next smoking heap, the next slumped corpse.

This one was an older woman, and she had a little dead child sheltered underneath her.

Cormac almost fell on his knees right there at the sight. Instead he turned away, staggered off a few paces and managed to sit down, staring at the lush green fields to the south and rocking himself and doing his best not to vomit. He thought of his nieces and nephews, how he’d seen them grow up from pudgy babies, watched over them, Jack with his fancies, Jilly…the way she would beam when he praised her good memory at their tutoring sessions…

This was a hard world. A hard time. He had to make himself strong enough to bear it. He wiped away the wetness from his eyes with the ashy heel of his palm, not caring about the mark it would leave. Rose to his feet—

A woman faced him, eyes glaring, white-knuckled hands gripping a spear pointed right at his throat. She must have come quietly out of the trees.

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