Highlander Hunted: A Scottish Time Travel Romance (Highlander In Time Book 8) by Rebecca Preston

Author:Rebecca Preston [Preston, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-20T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

“Helena — no. Go back to the horses."

She frowned, irritated by his condescending tone. He had moved toward her when he saw her approaching, still breathing hard from his run along the cliff tops. She tried to see what the guards were obscuring from her sight, impatient, but Brendan was right in front of her now, trying to force her back away from the little gathering. Irritated, she shoved him right back, clearly shocking him a little with the force of her conviction.

"Brendan! I'm not a child. What's happening?"

"You don't want to see this, lassie," one of the guards said heavily.

The grief on his face was palpable, and she knew without even seeing what they were hiding that it was bad news. That wasn't the kind of expression one wore when it was good news. She struggled with Brendan a little more, then pinned him with a dagger-eyed look until he finally relented, lifting his hands in surrender and letting her past. She closed the distance between them, stepping around the men to see what they were looking at.

It was exactly what they'd feared. Two men, wearing MacClaran tartan, lying in the grass a few feet from the edge of the cliff … but they weren't sleeping. Their bodies were torn, and mutilated, deep gouges carved all the way across their bodies — their legs, their torsos, even their faces. Both men's eyes were standing open, staring in horror at something unseen… and Helena caught her breath at the horrific injuries that they'd both sustained. She scanned the ground, feeling sick to her stomach, not wanting to look at the bodies any longer — had they defended themselves from whatever had attacked them? Sure enough, there were a couple of torches lying a few feet away, long burned out. This attack had taken place at night, then. And it didn't take long to find the men's swords, lying some distance away, too.

"These poor men," she said softly. The other guards were standing in eerie silence, staring down at their fallen comrades, clearly at a loss for what to do. "What kind of — what kind of wounds are they?"

"They look like they've been cut with blades," Brendan said softly, his voice hoarse with the gravity of the situation. "Multiple blades, close together…"

"It doesn't look like something a bear could do, that's for sure," one of the guards said, and Helena could hear how hard he was fighting to stop his voice from shaking. "It looks like… well, it doesn't look like bites, either. Bears don't do that, do they? Bears don't…"

"Bears would eat their kill," another guard said, and this man's voice was shaking with anger. "From what I've read about bears, they don't kill just for the sake of it. This was no bear."

"Aye," Brendan said heavily. "I think that's the case too. Those wounds are too clear, too regular…"

"Did you see…" Helena swallowed hard, her heart pounding as she revisited a memory she'd been doing her best to distance herself from.

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