CH 1-10

Summary

In the heart of the Scottish Highlands, Rowan’s coffee shop, the Eagle’s Hearth, is a sanctuary for the weary and the home of a local legend. Perched on the rafters is a golden eagle with a shattered wing and eyes that hold the weight of centuries. The locals call him a lucky charm, but Rowan calls him a friend. But this is no ordinary bird. A soldier in the 1745 Jacobite Rising, sacrificed his humanity in a desperate, bloodstained ritual to save a life as the redcoats closed in. Bound to the stones of his ancestral cottage, which is now a bustling café, he has spent two hundred and eighty years as a “grounded king,” a majestic watcher of a world that moved on without him. When a midnight storm flickers the lights, the eagle vanishes and a man from another time appears by the embers of the stove. Alistair MacCulloch is no arrogant warrior; he is a lost wanderer, humbled by a modern world he doesn’t understand and a woman whose kindness is more powerful than any ancient blade. As the modern world threatens to tear down the stones that bind him, Rowan must decide if she is brave enough to love a man who is half myth and half shadow. In a land of mist and memory, she discovers that a curse may have made him a beast, but only the recognition of his true soul can finally set him free. A story of peat smoke and espresso, ancient vows, and modern hope; a tale of the quiet romance that bridges the gap between a battlefield in 1746 and the heart of a Highland home.

1 The Eagle and the Man

The scent of the Scottish Highlands in 1746 did not include roasted Arabica beans.

Instead, it smelled of wet wool, iron, and the sharp, metallic tang of blood cooling on damp earth. It smelled like Alistair MacCulloch’s soul tearing itself apart as he knelt amid the ruins of his life while the roar of the Redcoat cavalry echoed off the hills.

In 2026, the Highlands smell like hazelnut syrup and the frantic hiss of an espresso machine.

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Outside the window, the Scottish glen was a sprawling tapestry of deep emerald moss and rugged Lewisian gneiss, the oldest rock in the world.

The sky above was the color of a bruised plum—the kind of heavy, Highland gray that promised a storm capable of rattling teeth.

Rowan stood behind the counter of The Eagle’s Hearth. She had bought the dilapidated stone cottage three years ago, fleeing a life in London that had felt like a tightening noose. She didn’t want “fast-paced” anymore; she wanted “permanent.” She poured every penny of her savings into the thick stone walls and kept the original, 18th-century hearth as the centerpiece. To the locals, she was the “Gall” with the good scones. But to Rowan, this place was her anchor.

Today, however, the anchor felt heavy.

The morning mist had never lifted, engulfing the road that led to the village.

For the first time since she opened, no hikers had come through, and no locals had stopped in for their usual “fly cup” of tea. The glen was absolutely silent, except for the low, rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock and the occasional hiss of the espresso machine.

She wiped a stray lock of hair from her forehead, her gaze drifting—as it always did—to the high rafters of the Eagle’s Hearth.

“Just us today, then,” Rowan murmured, glancing upward.

He was there.

High in the rafters, tucked into the shadows where the stone met the timber, sat the Golden Eagle. He wasn’t a pet—no one could own a creature with a wingspan that could block out the sun—but he was as much a part of the house as the foundation stones.

Legend had it that an eagle had nested in this very spot since the days of the Jacobite risings. For Rowan’s guests, the eagle was a welcome asset—a majestic, living myth that drew hikers from across the country. He never moved when the shop was full, perched like a golden-brown gargoyle, lending the café an air of ancient sanctuary with his presence. Tourists would whisper over their lattes, “Is he real?” Rowan would simply smile in response.

But today, in the emptiness, the bird felt different. He wasn’t just a “feature” of the décor; he felt like a guardian on high alert. His whiskey-colored eyes were fixed on the door, unblinking. Rowan followed his gaze to the window. The sky had turned a bruised, sickly purple. The heather on the hills had been flattened by a wind she couldn’t yet hear, but the eagle could.

“You feel it, too, don’t you?” she asked the rafters.

The eagle let out a soft, low trill—a sound that didn’t belong to a predator. It was a human sound—a sigh of weary recognition. Rowan froze. In the silence of the empty café, the air suddenly smelled of ancient peat smoke and damp wool, as if the past were trying to push its way through the espresso-scented present.

A sudden, aggressive knock on the glass door made her jump. A man in a sharp Gore-Tex jacket stood outside holding a clipboard.

Cormac Vane.

“The stones, Miss Rowan!” Vane shouted through the glass, pointing at the original hearth. “They’re a liability! The structural report came back. This entire house is coming down!”

At the word “down,” the eagle let out a sound—not a screech, but a low, guttural growl that vibrated in Rowan’s chest.

An unfamiliar smell of iron and blood grew stronger. She had attributed the changing scents of the house to its age. But maybe Vane was right. She had feared that her home would become a hazard at some point. After all, it was nearly 300 years old. Still, she thought it was in splendid condition.

Rowan looked from Vane back to the eagle. The bird’s eyes were no longer whisky-colored. They were glowing like dying embers in a fire that had been burning since Culloden.

Vane didn’t wait for an invitation. He shoved the heavy oak door open, bringing with him a spray of sleet and the arrogance of a man who bought history only to pave over it.

“It’s condemned, Rowan,” Vane said, slapping a damp folder onto the pristine countertop. “The council won’t risk a collapse. This chimney—” He gestured to the massive, soot-stained stones of the hearth. “—is a relic. It’s dead weight.”

Rowan didn’t flinch. She stepped around the counter, her boots echoing on the flagstones Alistair had laid three centuries ago. “Those stones have stood since before your ancestors had surnames, Cormac. They aren’t dead. They’re the only things in this glen that know how to survive.”

“It’s a safety hazard,” Vane sneered, his eyes darting toward the rafters, where the eagle’s shadow loomed. “The bird, the dust, the damp…it’s over. I’m bringing in the demolition crew on Monday.”

“He is more than just a bird,” Rowan whispered, the realization hitting her with the force of a Highland gale. “And this isn’t just a shop.”

“You’ll have to drive the bulldozer over me first,” she said, her voice low and vibrating with a protective heat she didn’t know she possessed. “This isn’t just a business. It’s a sanctuary. You want to tear down the hearth? You’d be tearing out the heart of the Highlands. Get out before I show you exactly how ‘hazardous’ an old house can be.”

As she spoke, the sky finally split open. A violent clap of thunder shook the porcelain on the shelves. Followed by a flash of lightning that turned the outside world an intense, jagged white.

Vane recoiled, his bravado momentarily eclipsed by the storm’s raw power. He grabbed his clipboard, his face twisting into a mask of corporate spite.

“Fine!” he yelled over the roar of the rain, his hand on the doorknob. “Cling to your rotting rocks, Rowan. But come Monday, I’m coming with a wrecking ball. We’ll see how much ‘sanctuary’ is left when this roof is in the mud!”

He shoved himself out into the gale. The heavy door slammed shut behind him with a boom that echoed like a cannon shot.

Rowan leaned against the door, her heart hammering against her ribs.

“We’ll see,” she whispered, her breath hitching.

She turned back to the darkened room, intending to check on the eagle.

The Golden Eagle loomed as a massive shadow against the old stone. He didn’t move. He hadn’t moved for two hours, his amber eyes fixed on her with an intensity that made him seem less like a bird of prey and more like a silent, judgmental accountant. His left wing was held at a strange, jagged angle—a permanent souvenir of a disaster Rowan couldn’t name.

“Still here, Big Guy?” Rowan asked, her voice softening. She placed a small ceramic saucer of water on a high shelf near his perch. “The weather’s turning. You’re smart to stay inside.”

The eagle tilted its head. For a split second, Rowan felt a jolt of electricity, but it had nothing to do with the shop’s fraying wiring. She saw—or thought she saw—the bird’s reflection in the polished copper of the espresso machine. Except it wasn’t a bird. For a moment, the reflection showed a man with a weathered face wearing a tattered kilt. He had a look of profound, ancient loneliness, and Rowan’s breath hitched. She blinked. The reflection was gone. Just an eagle. Just a bird.

A second bolt of lightning struck the ancient rowan tree in the garden with a deafening crack, and the coffee shop plunged into total darkness. The hum of the espresso machine died mid-hiss, and the comforting glow of the pastry case vanished.

The afternoon sun had been completely swallowed. The Highlands turned as black as a winter midnight, a darkness thick enough to touch.

“Stay calm, Rowan,” she whispered, her hands trembling as she fumbled under the counter for the emergency stash. Her fingers brushed the cold wax of the pillar candles she kept for atmospheric evenings. She had never expected to need them for survival.

With a match, a tiny flame flickered to life. The light was orange and fragile, casting long, dancing shadows against the stone walls. As she lifted the candle, the sky outside began to pulse with an eerie luminescence—not lightning, but a slow brightening of the clouds, as if the storm were exhaling.

She turned toward the back of the shop; the candle flame leaned in the draft.

There, bathed in the dying glow of the hearth’s embers, sat a man.

He was kneeling on the flagstones with one hand pressed hard against the soot-stained rock of the fireplace, as if anchoring himself to the earth. He was massive, his frame draped in the heavy, sodden folds of a great kilt that smelled of centuries-old peat smoke and wild heather. A familiar scent.

His left arm was unnaturally tucked against his ribs at the same angle as an eagle’s broken wing.

Rowan froze, the candle wax dripping onto her thumb, unheeded.

The man slowly lifted his head. His face was a map of exhaustion and ancient grief, his skin pale against the dark scruff of a warrior’s beard. But it was his eyes that stopped her heart. They were the exact whisky-gold of the bird’s, wide with terrifying, disoriented wonder.

He looked at his mud-caked feet, then at the recessed LED lights in the ceiling that had just gone dark.

Finally, his gaze landed on Rowan.

He didn’t move toward her. He didn’t growl. Instead, he let out a jagged breath and spoke in a voice that sounded like stones grinding together at the bottom of a loch.

Where she should have felt intimidated, she noticed a sense of calming peace rushing over her. It felt like she had known the stranger her whole life—or even lifetimes. How could this be possible?

“Is the battle done?” he rasped, his heavily accented English barely a whisper. “Did the prince… did he fly?”

He looked at his trembling hands, then back at the hearth he had guarded for two hundred and eighty years. A single tear tracked through the soot on his cheek. “I have been away a long time, lass. How many winters? Is there still a Scotland left to bleed for?”

2 The Weight of Two Hundred Winters

Rowan didn’t think. She didn’t consider the impossibility of a man appearing where a bird had just fallen nor the danger of a stranger wearing a tattered kilt. She only saw his knees buckle and the raw agony in his battered eyes.

Setting the candle on a nearby table, she reached out and caught his shoulders just as he began to move.

“I’ve got you,” she whispered, her fingers sinking into the heavy, damp wool of his plaid. He was solid—terrifyingly so—and radiated a heat that felt like a living furnace. “Easy. Just sit down. You’re safe.”

The man flinched at her touch, a low, startled sound vibrating in his chest. But he didn’t pull away. He leaned into her support, his head falling forward until his forehead brushed the soft cotton of her apron. He smelled of the mountains—crushed gorse, old rain, and a metallic tang that made Rowan’s heart ache.

“Ye’re…the lass of the beans,” he breathed. His voice was steadier now, but still thick with the cadence of the old highlands.

“Yes, I guess that’s one way to put it. I’m Rowan,” she said, guiding him to sit back against the warm stones of the hearth. She knelt in front of him, the candlelight carving deep shadows into the lines of his face. “You’re the eagle. Am I right? You’ve been watching over me and the hearth for three years.”

He looked at his hands again, flexing his fingers as if marveling at the sensation of skin. “Aye. I have watched ye for a lifetime of birds. I watched ye bring the light back to these stones when they were cold and forgotten.” He looked up, his gaze searching hers. “The man who was just here, the one with the white papers— he spoke of fire. He spoke of bringing down the walls.”

“He’s a developer. He wants to build something new. He doesn’t understand what this house means to me,” she explained. “What is the name that is on you?”

Rowan already knew, but needed confirmation.

His scorching eyes met hers. A rush of heat shot through her body. She was sure what was happening. But it couldn’t be. Though, her intuition never betrayed her. Her heart raced in anticipation for him to speak.

His hand tightened into a fist against the flagstones. “He’s a Redcoat in disguise,” he rasped, a predatory gleam returning to his eyes. “They always come for the hearth. They always come to take my home.”

Rowan reached out and tentatively laid her hand over his fist. His skin was rough and calloused—the hand of a man who had worked the land and wielded blades. “Your home?” she breathed. Her pulse pounded in her ears. “Speak your name.”

She had to hear it come from his lips.

“I won’t let him. This is my home, too,” she promised. “But tell me what I need to hear. Who are you?”

“Alistair McCulloch, at yer service, mylady.”

Alistair McCulloch. Her breath hitched. It was him. The owner. The builder. The man who had gone missing without a trace during one of Scotland’s most brutal conflicts.

“Alistair, the battle you asked about, Culloden. It was a very long time ago.”

The silence that followed was heavier than the storm. Alistair looked at the modern coffee bags on the counter and the electric clock that had frozen at 5:12. Then back at the woman whose touch was the only thing anchoring him to the present.

“How long?” he whispered, his voice breaking. “How many winters have I been a prisoner of the sky?”

Rowan noticed the way he winced, his left arm held at the same jagged, defensive angle she had seen a thousand times before. “Your arm,” she murmured, her voice steady despite the adrenaline coursing through her. “The wing. It followed you back, didn’t it?”

Alistair looked down at the limb as if it belonged to a stranger. “Aye. A leaden ball from a government musket,” he rasped, his eyes clouding over with memory. “I took the weight of it so the laddie could run. I thought the shift would mend the bone. But the stones caught me mid-flight. The wound became part of the curse.”

“Let me look,” Rowan said. She moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had spent years tending to the minor burns and cuts of café life. This, however, was far beyond her knowledge.

She gently peeled back the sodden, muddy wool of his sleeve. Beneath that was a heavy silver Luckenbooth brooch pinning his plaid and, under that, a jagged scar that looked both ancient and fresh at once. As her warm fingers brushed his skin, Alistair let out a sharp, shuddering breath. He wasn’t used to the touch of a living soul.

The Luckenbrooth sign. The hearth had the same carved into its stone. Endless times had her fingers caressed the spot. Trying to fill her inner void. For now, she decided to tend to his wounds first.

“I can’t fix a three-hundred-year-old musket wound with a first-aid kit,” she whispered. “But I can clean it. I can make it hurt less.”

“Ye have a kind heart, Rowan,” he said, his gaze fixed on her face with an intensity that made her flush. “Like the women of my glen. They used to say the hearth fire lived in their eyes.”

Rowan paused, her hand still resting on his forearm. The moment had come. The storm outside had settled into a low, rhythmic thrum, and the candle was burning down. “Alistair, you asked about Scotland. About the winters.”

He froze. His gaze sharp and awake. Rowan could tell he wasn’t going to like the answer, no matter what.

“The Battle of Culloden was in 1746,” she said in a barely audible voice. “It’s 2026 now. You haven’t been gone for a few winters. You’ve been the guardian of this house for two hundred and eighty years.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Alistair didn’t roar or weep. He simply went still. Rowan couldn’t explain the stillness. Was it the calm before the storm? Was he thinking and contemplating?

His familiar eyes searched the darkened café—the plastic lids on the cups, the ‘WiFi’ sticker on the window, and the digital register. The world he knew—the clans, the prince, and the language of the glens—was a ghost.

“Two hundred…and eighty,” he repeated. The numbers tasted like ash in his mouth. He looked at Rowan, his lip trembling slightly. “Then everyone is gone. My wife. My children. My family. The lad. All of them… dust beneath the heather?”

“The Highlands remember them,” Rowan said softly, moving closer so that her shoulder brushed his. “I remember them because of you. You aren’t a ghost, Alistair. You’re the history of this house, and you’re still here.”

She wondered if he might be a ghost. After all, he had spoken of a curse. Rowan had done her homework. She had read about shapeshifters before. It was not an uncommon phenomenon in this mystic region of Scotland. She had also encountered wandering lost souls while spending time outdoors. They existed. They were neither living nor dead. Stuck between worlds. However, Alistair seemed too real to be a spirit.

He stared at the Luckenbooth brooch pinning his plaid, his thumb tracing the entwined silver hearts. “Two hundred and eighty,” he whispered again, the words sounding like the crumbling of old parchment. “I have watched empires rise and fall from the rafters of a kitchen. I never knew the years were stealing everything I loved.”

Alistair looked at Rowan, his gaze traveling from her modern, practical boots to the soft, concerned line of her mouth. “Why did ye stay? When the outside world is so fast? Why did ye come to these cold stones to make yer fire?”

“Because the world out there is loud, Alistair. I think deep down I was looking for something that knew how to stand still. I was looking for a home with a soul.”

Alistair’s expression shifted, the softness returning as he realized he wasn’t the only one who had been lonely. “Ye’re a bonnie, free lass.”

Rowan knew that she had been single ever since she moved from London. There had been men courting her, but she had enjoyed being just Rowan for once. Also, she had felt promised to someone she had yet to meet.

He leaned his head back against the hearthstones, closing his eyes in a moment of pure, raw vulnerability.

“Ye gave me a home,” he said softly. “Even when I was just feathers and hunger, ye spoke to me. These stones, once barren, have been brought to life by ye. I was trapped in ruins, haunted by fading memories, but ye have given me hope. Ye gave the beast a name. Ye called me Alistair. How did ye know it was me?”

“I didn’t. The name just fit the legend so well. I had hoped it was you, though.”

He struggled to find his footing as his muscles protested the sudden return to human form. He didn’t want to be a patient. He wanted to see what remained of the land he had died to protect.

“Show me, Rowan,” he rasped, nodding toward the dark window where the storm was finally beginning to break. “Show me what has become of the Great Glen. Show me if the mountains still stand, even if the men are gone.”

Rowan guided him to the window, her hand a steadying weight on his good arm. The storm had retreated, leaving the sky a deep, translucent indigo. As the mist lifted from the valley, the moonlight illuminated the distant stretch of the River Nairn and the dark, solemn expanse of Culloden Moor.

“Look there,” she whispered, pointing toward a faint, solitary light glowing near the horizon. “That is the Culloden Memorial Cairn. It’s a stone tower built to honor every man who stood his ground that day.”

Alistair pressed his forehead against the cool glass, his breath fogging the pane. He watched as the clouds parted, revealing the silhouettes of the clans’ memorial stones—small, rugged markers standing in silent ranks across the moor.

“They are not forgotten?” he asked, his voice trembling with a hope he had suppressed for centuries.

“No,” Rowan said firmly. “Thousands of people come from across the ocean every year just to walk those paths and speak your names. The ‘lad’ you saved? His name was Henry Dundas. He became one of the most powerful politicians in Scottish histroy and was often known as ‘The uncrowned king of Scotland’. The family was based in Edinburgh. I never found anything about why and how they had been present during the battle, nor why the child was on the battlefield. But the blood you spilled for this glen is why these hills still feel like home. You didn’t just save a boy, Alistair. You saved the memory of the Highlands.”

Alistair closed his eyes, a single, heavy sob racking his chest. For two hundred and eighty years, he had lived as a beast of burden, convinced he was the last of a dead world. But seeing those stones standing proud under the stars—the same stars he had watched from the rafters—he realized he hadn’t been guarding a ruin. He had been guarding a living legacy.

He turned back to Rowan, the vulnerability in his eyes replaced by a quiet, fierce resolve. He wasn’t looking for a war anymore; he was a man who had finally found a reason to stay in the present.

“If the world still remembers them,” he said, finding her hand in the dark, “then I will help ye defend this place against the man with the white papers. He will not move a single stone of this hearth while I have breath in my lungs.”

The lights flickered and hummed before surging back to life and bathing the café in a warm, electric glow. Alistair flinched as if it were sorcery.

“It’s okay,” Rowan said softly as she moved toward the small kitchenette. “It’s just captured light.”

She moved with quiet purpose, preparing a bowl of thick, honey-topped porridge and a mug of strong black tea. She set them on the heavy wooden table and nudged them toward Alistair. As he ate with the careful, measured movements of a man who hadn’t used a spoon in centuries, she finally allowed herself to truly look at him.

He was far younger than the ‘ancient’ spirit she had imagined. Beneath his wild, untamed beard and gritty moorland appearance, he seemed to be in his mid twenties. His bone structure was regal, with high, sharp cheekbones and a jawline that not even a week’s growth of dark stubble could hide. His hair was a chaotic mane of deep mahogany that caught the light with reddish-gold hues like the eagle’s feathers. But his eyes—a startling shade of gold like well-ripened whisky—bound his entire identity together, matching the earth tones of his tattered, mud-stained great kilt. He looked like the Highlands themselves: beautiful, dangerous, and entirely untamed.

“I knew your name before tonight,” Rowan said, her voice trembling slightly. “I found it on a list of the ‘missing’ from the MacCulloch line. I… I searched for you. I knew this was your home, and I felt a pull to this place that I could never explain. Like I was supposed to be here. For you.” She stopped herself, not yet daring to tell him about the dreams she’d had long before she bought the old house.

Alistair looked up, a spoonful of porridge halfway to his mouth. He set it down and moved to the hearth. With a single strike of flint from his pouch, he coaxed the smoldering embers into a roaring blaze. The firelight danced in his eyes as Rowan asked the question that had haunted the stones for centuries. “Do you remember what happened?”

3 The Ghost of the Drumossie Mist

“I do. But, lass, before I recall my past, may I ask a favor of ye?”

Rowan nodded. He could ask her for anything, and she would probably be willing to give it to him.

“Ye said ye found my name,” he whispered, his eyes locking onto hers with desperate, piercing hunger.

Her stomach twisted. She felt a pull toward him that she could not describe. It was as if he had set her insides on fire without even entering her. His hunger likely referred to his life rather than her.

“Did ye find my wife, Isobel? She was pregnant when the pipes called us away. Our son, Uilleam, was only five.” He leaned across the table, the ancient Luckenbooth brooch on his chest catching the electric light. “Tell me they did not starve. Tell me the redcoats did not find them in the glen.”

His deep Scottish accent sent shivers down her spine. Rowan knew she could never get enough of hearing him speak. She felt a lump form in her throat. She had spent months scrolling through the National Records of Scotland and the Highland Council’s digital archives, fascinated by the tragedy of the MacCulloch land.

“They survived, Alistair,” she said softly. “Isobel stayed in this cottage until her death. She never remarried. The records show that she claimed the ‘widow’s portion’ of the land. Your son grew up to be a stonemason. He had great influence here, he built some of the most significant walls and buildings in the village. You had a daughter too, and descendants living in Inverness right now. Your blood never left the Highlands.”

Alistair let out a long, shuddering breath and dropped his head into his hands. To him, they were just in the next room, but to history, they were merely ink on a page. “Thank the Great Spirit,” he choked out.

After a long silence, he sat back, his gaze narrowing as he studied Rowan. His weakness vanished for a moment, replaced by the keen, observant stillness of the eagle.

“But ye, Rowan,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “Ye’re not of my blood. Are ye? Ye’re from the south, aye? Yet ye came to this ruin. Ye searched for a man who died three centuries ago. Why? Why did ye spend yer life looking for a ghost in the rafters?”

Rowan felt the heat rise to her cheeks. She thought of her dreams—the ones where she saw a great bird falling in a storm and a man with eyes like honey reaching for her hand in the dark. She thought of how, the moment she stepped into this dilapidated cottage, she felt like she had finally stopped running.

“I was never sure of it,” she admitted, her voice barely a whisper. “But I felt…pulled. A calling. Every time I looked at the eagle, at you, I felt a grief that wasn’t mine, yet it somehow was. I searched for you because I wanted to know who loved this house so much that they never left it. I think… I don’t know what I was thinking.”

She didn’t tell him yet that she had found his signature in an old parish Bible and that her thumb had fit perfectly into the indentation his hand had made in the paper.

“Pulled,” Alistair repeated. This couldn’t be a coincidence. He contemplated whether she was born to set him free. He would have to ponder the idea later, for now, he owed her a story.

“The mist was a shroud that morning,” he began, his voice dropping into the rhythmic, hypnotic cadence of a Gaelic storyteller. “We stood on Drumossie Moor, our bellies empty and our claymores heavy. The wind didn’t just blow; it screamed with the voices of our ancestors, warning us to run.”

He leaned forward, his hands gesturing as if painting the scene in the smoke.

“When the grape shot began to tear through our lines, the world turned red. It wasn’t a battle; it was a slaughter. I saw my brothers fall like wheat before the scythe. Amidst the thunder of the cannons, I heard a high, thin wail. A wee lad had tripped over a furrow. A pair of Hanoverian dragoons were bearing down on him with their sabers drawn, ready to deliver a cowardly kill.”

Alistair’s breathing hitched and his chest heaved under the tartan.

“I ran. Not away from the fire, but into it. I scooped the lad up, but my lungs burned, and lead whistled through the air. I reached the edge of our glen, my legs failing and the child sobbing into my neck. I felt the hot sting of a musket ball in my shoulder—the broken wing’ ye saw. I knew then that I wouldn’t make it to the ridge on foot.”

He looked at Rowan, his voice dropping to a haunted whisper.

“I called upon the old blood— the skin-turning song my grandfather whispered in the dark. I didn’t ask for a warrior’s strength. I asked for the sky. I felt my bones snap and lengthen as my skin erupted with the sting of a thousand needles. I felt the lad’s weight leave my arms and shift to my talons. One moment, I was a dying soldier in the mud, and the next, the ground dropped away. I looked down at the red coats of the soldiers and saw them not as men but as ants.”

He gripped the edge of the stone hearth, his knuckles white.

“I flew, Rowan. I flew until the lad was safe on the high crag. But as I turned to head back to the house—to my hearth—the binding ritual, fueled by blood and desperation, twisted. I didn’t shift back. I slammed into these very stones—a king of the air, trapped in a cage of rock. And then… I woke up to the smell of yer beans.”

Rowan stood up, walked to the small safe behind the counter, and returned with a leather-bound book wrapped in acid-free silk. “I spent six months tracking this down from a private collection in Edinburgh. It’s a family ledger—a record of the MacCulloch line after the ’46.”

She placed it on the wooden table between them. The paper was the color of dried hay: brittle and smelling of ancient dust. Alistair reached out, his fingers hovering inches above the cover, trembling.

“It is her hand,” he whispered, his eyes following the elegant, looping script on the first page. “Isobel. She always wrote with such a firm stroke, as if she could command the ink to obey.”

Rowan turned the page to the will and testament of Isobel MacCulloch from 1782. “She lived a long life, Alistair. She never left this hearth. She left the house to your son. She mentions you in the very first line.”

Sixty wasn’t considered old at all these days, but 300 years ago, it was a proud age to reach.

Alistair leaned in, his eyes devouring the words. Rowan translated the archaic phrasing for him. “To my son, Uilleam, I leave the stone, the soil, and the memory of his father, Alistair, who flew into the mist to save the future.”

“She knew,” Alistair choked out, a single tear falling onto the table, though he carefully avoided the paper. “She knew I didn’t desert her. She knew I was watching.”

“There’s more,” Rowan said gently. She turned to the back of the book, where later generations had tucked early daguerreotypes and sketches. She pointed to a charcoal drawing of a man in his fifties whose face was a mirror image of Alistair’s—the same regal brow and sharp jawline. “This is Uilleam as an older man. He became a master mason. He’s the reason this chimney didn’t collapse during the Great Gale of 1848.”

Alistair traced the sketch of his son’s face. “He has my mother’s chin. And Isobel’s eyes.” He looked at Rowan, his expression one of profound, quiet awe. “Seeing his face and knowing he grew gray and strong is a mercy I did not earn.”

“You earned it when you chose the Ridge over your own life,” Rowan countered. She flipped to a small, faded photograph from the 1920s of a group of Highlanders standing in front of the cottage. “Look at the girl on the left. That’s your great-great-granddaughter. She’s wearing a Luckenbooth brooch exactly like the one on your plaid.”

Alistair touched the silver hearts on his chest. “We are a stubborn breed, it seems.” He chuckled, the soft roar of it vibrating throughout his entire body. “Why did ye care to find this? Most people would see a bird and think of feathers. Ye saw a story and thought of home.”

Rowan met his gaze, the candlelight reflecting in her eyes. “Because I know what it’s like to have your history erased, Alistair. I wanted to make sure yours was written down. I just didn’t realize the ink was still wet.”

Rowan turned to the last page of the ledger. Tucked into a tiny slit in the leather binding was a yellowed, stiff scrap of vellum. Unlike the formal script of the will, it was written in a hurried, private hand.

“It’s in Gaelic,” Rowan whispered. “I had a scholar in Inverness translate it for me. She wrote it for the stones, Alistair. She wrote it for the house.”

Alistair leaned in; the scent of the old paper triggered a physical reaction—a sharp thrumming in his chest that felt like the beat of an eagle’s heart. Rowan began to read the translation, and as she did, the modern walls of the café seemed to dissolve into the mist of the eighteenth century.

“To the one who listens to the stones: Tell him the rowan tree we planted has grown tall. Tell him that the hearth still holds the heat of the fire he built with his own two hands.”

4 The Architecture of Hope

“I remember the day we claimed this ridge,” Alistair said, his voice dropping into a rhythmic storytelling lilt. “I was only twenty, and Isobel was a fierce lass with tresses of a rich and vibrant auburn, glowing with the deep, polished warmth of beaten copper and the dark fire of a winter’s hearth.”

He closed his eyes, and Rowan could almost see the landscape changing through his words. The modern road vanished, replaced by a winding cattle trail. ‘Eagle’s Hearth’ was no longer a café, but rather a dream that Alistair was pulling from the earth.

“The land was raw then,” he whispered. “No fences, no borders, just heather and high peaks. I hauled the stones from the riverbed one by one. I didn’t want a master mason; I wanted my sweat in the mortar. I wanted Isobel to know that every inch of these walls was a promise.”

He gestured toward the massive fireplace. “I spent a whole month on the hearthstone alone. We had two Highland cows—shaggy, stubborn beasts—and a handful of sheep that treated the roof like a buffet. It was a life of stoic peace, Rowan. We woke with the sun and slept with the smell of peat smoke in our hair.”

Rowan hung on Alistair’s every word.

“We had a small kailyard and a field of oats that rippled like gold in the wind. There were the sounds of pipes echoing from the next glen, communal waulking of the wool, and the safety of a clan that felt unbreakable. Isobel and I would sit on the doorstep at twilight and watch the golden eagles circle the peaks. We never thought that I would one day join them. We didn’t need much. We were happy with the little we had. And we had each other,” Alistair said, his face hardening as the memory shifted toward the darkness.

“Neither did we know the ‘red wind’ was coming from the south. We didn’t know that the house I built to hold a family would become my cage.”

He looked at Rowan, the candlelight reflecting the deep sorrow of a man who had built a paradise, only to see it become a battlefield. “I built these walls to last forever, Rowan. But I never asked the stones if they wanted to remember the blood.”

Alistair recalled the night, after Isobel had told him they were having a wee lad. He had carved a small, secret mark into the foundation stone—a Luckenbooth heart—never imagining that one day, a woman named Rowan would find it while trying to save his soul.

---

The Highlands, 1738

Alistair wiped the sweat from his brow with an arm dusted with stone grit. Twenty years old, his muscles were lean and corded from a summer spent hauling the bones of the earth. Before him sat the ‘Eagle’s Hearth’, though at the moment it was just four low walls of unhewn dry stone rising out of the heather.

“It will be too small, Alistair MacCulloch!” a voice teased from the slope.

Isobel picked her way through the gorse, her skirt tucked up to reveal sturdy boots and hair the color of ripening barley. She carried a jug of ale and a loaf of oat bread, but it was her smile that fueled him more than any meal could.

“It will be exactly the size of our world,” Alistair countered, dropping a heavy lintel stone into place with a satisfying thud.

The landscape was a wild, unfenced cathedral. To the north, the peaks of the Great Glen were like jagged teeth against a sky so blue it looked painted. There were no roads here, only green ways worn by cattle and eagle shadows. Life was perfect. He had the three essentials he needed: his beloved Scotland, a beautiful lass to call his wifey, and a house that he built himself.

Alistair’s clan and origins were in the Lowlands, but Isobel was a lass from the Highlands. He decided he would live wherever she felt at home. He couldn’t complain. The landscape was stunning, with majestic mountains and deep, narrow glens. Heather stretched as far as the eye could see, and the nearby River Nairn provided fresh water. Yes, they had chosen their home wisely.

Alistair spent his days fitting stones together. He built the hearth wide, large enough for a family to huddle around when the ‘black wind’ blew in from the peaks.

As they sat on the half-finished threshold, Isobel pointed to the sky. “See them? The pair of golds? They’ve nested on the crag since the beginning of time. They say that as long as the eagles stay, the MacCullochs will never lose their home.”

Alistair laughed and pulled her close, his hands stained with the dust of the land he was claiming. He was a son of the soil, a man who understood the language of the wind and the weight of a hammer. He didn’t know about ‘risings’ or ‘pretenders’. All he knew was the warmth of Isobel’s hand in his and the sturdy promise of the house he was building stone by stone.

“We shall have a son with your eyes,” Isobel whispered as the sun dipped behind the ridge. “He shall be the first to sleep by this fire.”

Alistair looked at the hearth, which he now had to finish sooner than planned. But his heart was light. He would be a father soon.

As the final stone had been placed on top of the chimney stack, Alistair stood in the center of the room, his chest swelling with pride. He admired how the light from the small, deep-set windows illuminated the golden dust motes dancing in the air. The house was finished, smelling of fresh thatch and the clean, sharp scent of the pine beams he had cured himself.

He reached for a broom to sweep the stone chips from the hearth, but a sharp, ragged intake of breath stopped him. It didn’t belong to the wind.

He turned to find Isobel leaning heavily against the door frame. Her face, usually flushed from the mountain air, was pale, and she was pressing her hand firmly against her swollen stomach.

“Alistair,” she whispered, her voice tight with a strange, forced calm. “The bairn is tired of waiting. He seeks the light.”

The broom fell from Alistair’s hand, clattering against the flagstones. For a man who had moved boulders and faced down storms, he had never felt such a hollow terror.

“Now?” he stammered, his mind racing. “But the sun is still high. The midwife is three miles across the bog.”

“The midwife will be too late,” Isobel gasped, her knees buckling as a fresh wave took her. “The water, Alistair. And the linens I bleached in the sun. Go!”

The next few hours were a blur of fire and water. Alistair moved like a man possessed. He hung the heavy iron cauldron over the new hearth to boil and tore clean sheets into strips, his hands shaking. He felt utterly and miserably helpless. He could build a fortress, but he could not ease the pain of the woman he loved.

As the shadows lengthened across the glen, ‘Eagle’s Hearth’ became a battlefield of a different kind. Isobel lay on the bed of fresh heather and linen he had prepared. Her knuckles were white as she gripped Alistair’s hands.

“Listen to me, Isobel,” he commanded in a low, grounding rumble. He sat behind her and pulled her back against his chest, holding her weight and acting as the stone pillars he had built. “Breathe with me. Steady. Like the tide at the loch.”

She endured with a fierce, quiet strength that humbled him. She didn’t scream. She gritted her teeth and breathed in short, sharp bursts. Her brow was drenched in sweat. Each time a contraction seized her, Alistair squeezed her hands and whispered ancient Gaelic blessings he hadn’t realized he remembered—prayers for the strength of the mountains to pass into her.

When the final moment came, Alistair had to find a courage he had never used before. He moved to the foot of the bed, his large, calloused hands—hands that had spent the morning hewing rock—becoming impossibly gentle.

“I see him, Isobel,” he breathed, his beaming gold eyes wide with wonder. “He has a thatch of dark hair like the peat.”

With a final, shattering effort from Isobel and Alistair’s steady, guiding hands, a new life entered the world. The silence of the cottage was broken by a high, thin wail that sounded more majestic to Alistair than any eagle’s cry.

He expertly cleared the bairn’s airway as his mother had taught him and wrapped the squirming, warm weight in a soft woolen blanket. He knelt beside Isobel, who was gasping for air with her eyes closed from exhaustion.

“Look, mo chridhe,” Alistair whispered, his voice thick with tears. “Look at what we have made.”

He placed the bundle in her arms, but his own hands lingered for a moment. He looked down at his firstborn son, Uilleam. The laddie’s tiny fingers reached out and instinctively curled around Alistair’s thumb. The bairn was perfect—a tiny miracle of skin and bone, born on the very hearthstone Alistair had carved.

At that moment, as the firelight flickered against the walls of their new home, Alistair felt invincible. He believed that no force in heaven or on earth could ever break the circle of the family he had just begun.

5 Salt, Stone, and the Sandalwood Sea

The golden flicker of the firelight in the cottage faded as the café’s modern LED lights hummed back to full strength, pulling Alistair and Rowan away from the ghosts of 1740.

Alistair sat at the table, his chest heaving as if he had just run three centuries in one breath. The memory of holding Uilleam was fresh in his mind, a stark contrast to the mud of the battlefield that was still caked on his skin. Rowan watched him, her heart thundering. She had just seen the man she had dreamed of—the architect, the father, the lover—not as a myth, but as a living, breathing soul. And somehow it felt familiar, as if she had felt it before, though she couldn’t place where or when.

“You need to wash the moor from your skin, Alistair,” she said, her voice breathy and uneven. “I’ll draw a bath upstairs.”

She led him to the guest suite she had painstakingly renovated: a room of white linens and deep wooden beams. She turned the brass taps of the clawfoot tub; steam rose like a veil. When she turned back, she found Alistair standing in the center of the room. Without any modern modesty, he reached for the silver Luckenbooth brooch at his shoulder.

Rowan’s breath caught in her throat as the heavy great kilt fell away. She had expected to see scars from a soldier’s life, but she wasn’t prepared for his raw power. He was a masterpiece of survival. His broad shoulders spanned the width of the room, and his back was a map of corded muscle, built from hauling the very stones of the house she now owned. His skin was the color of toasted cream and marred only by the jagged, silvered scar of a musket wound on his left shoulder. His lean torso rippled with hard muscle, tapering into powerful thighs built for traversing the vertical world of the Highlands. Blessed Isobel, she thought. The woman who had the privilege of lying with him.

Alistair stepped into the water with a low, primal groan of relief. He leaned back in the clawfoot tub, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. For the first time in centuries, his heart beat against a chest not covered in feathers. Moved by an instinct older than her own shyness, Rowan knelt by the tub. She picked up a sponge and a bar of sandalwood soap; her hands trembled as she touched his warm, wet back.

As she lathered the soap, the water turned a murky gray with the dust of the past. She washed him with a reverence usually reserved for sacred things, tracing the line of his spine and the heavy swell of his biceps with her fingers. Her body reacted with a sudden, localized heat—a magnetic pull toward him that made her dizzy.

“Ye’re quiet, lass,” Alistair murmured.

Of course Rowan was quiet. She couldn’t share her thoughts. It would have been highly inappropriate. Instead, she worked the sponge over the heavy, corded muscles of his thighs, her touch both cautious and mesmerized. She was a woman of the modern world and knew the human form, but Alistair was different. He carried a raw, unusual density. He was a man forged by hand-hewn stone and mountain air, untouched by the softness of the twenty-first century.

“Your body is a map,” she whispered, tracing his skin with her fingers.

“It’s a map of a world that no longer exists,” Alistair rasped, his voice vibrating through the water. He opened his eyes, his gaze burning with sudden, sharp intensity. He reached out and caught Rowan’s wrist with his wet hand. He didn’t pull her toward him but held her there, his thumb pressing against her fast, frantic pulse.

“Ye look at me as if I am a miracle, Rowan. But I am just a man who has lived too long in the dark.”

“To me, you are a miracle,” she countered breathlessly. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she leaned closer. The scent of sandalwood soap and the heat of his skin made her head spin. She could feel his warm breath against her skin. The breath of the past, the present, and the future. Her eyes lingered on his lips. They were full and rosy. She could hardly resist the urge to kiss him. She wanted to feel him. Not just through a sponge. The space between her legs screamed for his manhood.

“I wish to see it,” he said, his voice dropping into a somber register.

“I beg your pardon?” His unexpected request pulled her out of her trance.

“The moor. The place where the world broke. Isobel and Uilleam. If they stayed by this hearth, then they must be buried nearby. Do ye know where the stones are kept?”

Rowan paused, the sponge dripping in her hand. “The old parish cemetery is just over the ridge. I go there often. I’ve seen the MacCulloch stones, Alistair. At first, I didn’t know they were yours, but I’ve been cleaning the moss off them since day one.”

Alistair opened his eyes and looked at her with such profound gratitude that it felt more intimate than the nakedness between them. “Ye were tending to their sleep before ye even knew my name. Why, Rowan?”

“It was as if the stones called me,” she whispered, her hand lingering on the back of his neck. “And deep down, I think I was waiting for you to come home.”

Alistair’s eyes stayed locked on Rowan. A flicker of something intense—something that hadn’t been felt in three hundred years—ignited in the gold of his pupils. He reached out a wet, calloused hand and gently cupped her cheek. His thumb traced her jawline with a tenderness that contradicted his rugged frame.

Rowans’s breath hitched. His touch set her on fire.

“Ye have the heart of a Highland shield maiden,” he whispered. “To care for the dead stranger…it’s a grace I do not have the words for.”

She leaned into his palm, her eyes fluttering shut. “You aren’t a stranger anymore, Alistair. You never have been.”

The steam in the small guest bathroom had begun to settle, clinging to the mirror in heavy droplets. His skin started to adapt to the water. “I look like a frogman,” he laughed. “Help me out, lass. Will ye?”

Rowan got to her feet, her legs a little wobbly from kneeling for so long, and helped him out of the tub. She wrapped him in a heavy, oversized towel that looked small against his broad shoulders.

Standing in her modern guest room, he looked a little lost, like the man out of time that he was. He eyed the soft mattress and cotton sheets with a mixture of suspicion and longing.

“I have slept on stone and heather and on the cold wood of rafters,” he said, looking at the bed. “But I do not think I will find peace until I stand before Isobel’s stone. I need to know where she rests before the sun finds us.”

Rowan looked at the clock. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. Time had flown by and the storm passed, leaving the Highland night crisp and silent.

“The old cemetery is a twenty-minute walk through the heather. If we go now, we’ll reach it just as the light starts to gray. It’s…it’s a beautiful place.” Despite the early hours, she wasn’t tired at all. In fact, she had never felt more awake.

Rowan went to find him some clothes—something more modest and inconspicuous, in case a neighbor saw them. A pair of her oversized gray joggers and a thick woolen fisherman’s sweater would have to do it for now.

“This is not much to my liking,” he complained. “Why can I not wear my kilt?”

He was right, though; the clothes didn’t fit him. But for now, they would have to do.

“I’ll wash your kilt tomorrow. I promise. We just got you clean; let’s not ruin it with a muddy plaid.”

“Aye,” he agreed. “But lassie, will ye get them ready for me quickly? Otherwise, I’ll be walking around like the day I was born. Naked.”

Rowan had no doubt he would.

---

Rowan watched him pull the thick fisherman’s sweater over his head. The dark charcoal wool made his mahogany hair and gold eyes pop with an almost supernatural vibrancy. Even in modern clothes, he didn’t look like a man of the twenty-first century.

They stepped out of the café’s back door and into the cool, pre-dawn air. The Highlands were hushed, and the scent of damp earth and blooming gorse wafted toward them.

Alistair took a deep breath, his chest expanding. “The air,” he whispered. “It is the same. No matter how many years the men count, the breath of the glen does not change.”

As they began the trek toward the old parish cemetery, Alistair walked with a strange, predatory grace, his eyes scanning the horizon. He stayed close to Rowan—close enough that their hands brushed occasionally in the dark. Each time they touched, a spark of heat traveled up Rowan’s arm, reminding her that the man beside her was real. Not only that, but she also wondered if he felt the same way.

“She waited for me on the threshold the day the pipes called,” Alistair said, his voice a low rumble blending with the sound of the nearby stream. “Uilleam was clutching her skirts, a bairn growing under her heart, and she didn’t weep. She just pressed her hand to my heart and told me to find my way home. I think… I think she knew even then that I wouldn’t return as the man who left.”

They reached the rusted iron gates of the Old Inverness Parish Cemetery. The headstones were jagged, moss-covered teeth rising from the mist. Rowan led him to the far corner under the protective boughs of an ancient yew tree.

There, side by side, were three weathered slabs of granite.

Alistair dropped to his knees before them. He didn’t look at the dates or the caring upkeep that Rowan had performed. He simply laid his calloused palm against the cold stone of the larger slab, closing his eyes as he felt its grain.

“Isobel,” he choked out, her name a broken prayer.

6 The Edge of the Blade

Alistair sat on the thick, woven rug by the fire, leaning against the stone he had carved centuries ago. He noticed Rowan shivering—a fine, rhythmic tremor that wasn’t caused by the morning draft, but rather by the raw, magnetic pull of the man beside her.

“Come here, lass,” he murmured, his voice a low, grounding rumble. “I’ll warm ye.”

Reaching for a heavy tartan plaid draped over the nearby wing chair, he pulled her into the circle of his warmth. He wrapped the wool around her shoulders and began to slowly and hypnotically rub her arm with his thumb.

Rowan leaned into him, her nose brushing the soft knit of his sweater. She inhaled deeply, taking in the scents of sandalwood, rain-washed skin, and wood smoke. He is just mourning Isobel, she told herself, trying to steady her racing heart. This is just the comfort of two lonely souls.

But Alistair’s thoughts were far from platonic. As he looked down at the crown of her head, he felt a fierce, confusing ache. Why does she feel like home? he wondered. Was it the way she laughed? Or the way her eyes held the same defiant spark as the women of his clan? Like his Isobel. Or maybe had her soul simply become the only North Star he knew after three years of watching her from the rafters? He didn’t know, but beneath his gray joggers, his body reacted with a primal, insistent thrumming—a stirring of manhood he hadn’t felt in centuries.

To quiet his rising heat, he began to sing. He sang old Gaelic waulking songs and ballads of Highland freedom. His voice was a rich baritone, carrying the weight of love and the salt of loss. Tucked against the iron-hard muscle of his shoulder, Rowan felt her eyelids grow heavy. The ancient melodies acted as a bridge into a deep, dreamless sleep.

---

When her eyes fluttered open, the shop was flooded with mid-morning sun and the frantic, cheerful clatter of a busy Saturday. Disoriented, she blinked and found herself tufted under the plaid on the sofa.

She felt confused. Where was Alistair? Had it just been a dream? No. There he stood behind the counter, looking absurdly handsome in his woolen sweater and her oversized, worn joggers, his long hair tied in a man bun. He embodied a whirlwind of clumsy, earnest energy. Right now, he was wrestling with the ‘Beast of Beans’, as he called it, his large hands looking misplaced as they handled the delicate portafilters.

“Aye, another black brew for the lady in the green hat!” Alistair boomed, flashing a grin so broad that it seemed to light up the entire room. His arm seemed a lot better and he was charming the locals with effortless Highland hospitality. A skill that Rowan had spent years trying to perfect. A joke was on his lips for every hiker. Though he occasionally pressed the wrong button on the grinder, the patrons were too enthralled by his rugged, mysterious vibe to care.

He caught Rowan’s eye across the room and beamed, his affectionate eyes sparkling with joy.

“The lady of the house has returned!” he called out, dodging a jet of steam from the machine. “Tell me, Rowan—is the soldier doing a grand enough job, or shall I be demoted back to the rafters by noon?”

Rowan laughed and shook her head as she stood up, the plaid sliding to the floor. “I think the ‘Beast’ is winning. Step aside before you steam-clean the ceiling, or this house will burn down before Monday.”

“Aye,” he growled, remembering there was still something that needed to be taken care of.

She gently put her hand on his stubbly face. Her fingers caressed his skin, absorbing the feel of it. Alistair thought she was referring to his unshaven face in a suggestive way. “But first, woman, ye will have to shift that stubble for me. Now.” His demanding tone echoed through the old house, bouncing off the stone walls.

Rowan had to keep in mind that he was still a man of his own time. He was harsher than men these days, yet more manly than anyone she had ever met.

“I’ll do it after closing hours,” she replied, laughing.

He seemed to be in good spirits. Maybe visiting his family’s grave had given him some closure. Rowan wondered, though, if he could remember watching over her for the last three years, why couldn’t he recall his family’s lives? Maybe the time span had been too long. Or would it come back to him in time? She decided to save the question for another day.

---

However, the energy in the café was infectious. With each passing hour, Alistair became more and more of a revelation behind the counter. He treated the espresso machine like a temperamental stallion that he was slowly breaking in. He quickly became an asset to every hiker and local as he spun Gaelic fairy tales about kelpies in the loch and síthes in the hills. His whisky-colored eyes danced with mischief, making the tourists linger for ‘just one more cup’.

During a rare lull, Alistair stood by the window, staring at the rowan tree split by the midnight lightning. Its bark was charred, yet the berries remained defiantly blood red.

“I planted that tree for Isobel,” he whispered as Rowan joined him. “When I built this house. I chose it to protect the threshold. Rowan, don’t ye find that strange? I planted a tree bearing yer name 280 years before I knew of yer existence. Now, a bolt of fire from the heavens has broken the wood and brought me back to my skin. It’s as if the tree gave its life to restore mine.”

“A soul for a soul,” Rowan mused, her heart skipping a beat.

They spent the afternoon spinning conspiracies. Was she a descendant of someone he had saved? Was the land itself calling for its guardian because of Vane’s threats? The room was filled with a shared, ancient secret.

---

As the ‘Closed’ sign was flipped and the glen fell into silence, the playfulness evaporated into a heavy, localized heat. Alistair sat on a stool in the dim light of the guest bathroom, his face lathered in white cream. Rowan stood between his knees with a straight razor in her hand.

“Steady,” she thought, calming herself as she tilted his chin upward.

The room was silent except for the rasp of the blade against his thick, dark stubble. Rowan’s breath hitched as she worked. She had to stay focused, but the sight of his vulnerable, pulsing throat beneath her hand made her dizzy. Alistair didn’t pull away. His hands rested folded in his lap, and his gaze was fixed on her face, tracing the curve of her lips with a hunger that made the air feel thin.

Slowly, his large, warm hand moved and settled on the small of her back. The touch was grounding as much as it was uplifting. As she cleared the last of the hair and his sharp, regal, devastatingly handsome jaw emerged, his hand began to roam. It slid lower, his palm pressing against the curve of her hip and pulling her a fraction closer until her apron brushed the rough wool of his sweater.

Heat radiated between them like a furnace. Rowan leaned in, his unique scent and weathered, masculine skin overwhelming her senses. His thumb hooked into her belt loop, and his eyes darkened to a molten gold.

“Rowan,” he groaned, his voice vibrating low enough that she could feel it in her bones.

Just as his lips leaned toward hers, his head started spinning and his senses left him. The modern world flickered. The familiar scent of sandalwood vanished, instantly replaced by the acrid, choking stench of black powder and wet heather.

The warmth of the bathroom was replaced by a bone-chilling mist that clung to Alistair’s kilt. Instead of holding Rowan, he gripped the cold hilt of his Highland broadsword.

7 The Song of the Fireun

The Glen, April 14, 1746

The sky above Drumossie Moor was an oppressive shade of dusky mauve. This was not unusual weather for this time of year or for Scotland.

The men of the MacCulloch clan huddled around him for warmth; their faces were gaunt with hunger. The red wind was no longer a metaphor. The government’s cannons were sighted in the distance.

Alistair looked down at his hand, expecting to see soapy lather. Instead, he saw only the white-knuckled grip of a man standing on his own grave.

“Alistair!” a voice called out in the sharp, frightened tone of a clansman. “The Prince is coming to the line. It’s time.”

Though some battles were already raging, the decisive battle would not take place until two days later.

The house—the Eagle’s Hearth—was silent, though it felt as if the stones themselves were weeping. Alistair stood by the rowan tree he had planted five years ago. His great kilt was fastened tight, and his broadsword hung heavy at his hip.

Isobel emerged from the doorway, her face a mask of fragile marble. She didn’t scream or beg. She held tightly to Uilleam’s hand. Now a sturdy lad with Alistair’s mahogany curls, who was more interested in the silver buttons on his father’s coat than in the war waiting over the ridge.

“The pipes are at the bottom of the glen, Isobel,” Alistair said, his voice breaking.

She walked to him and pressed her forehead against his chest, right over his heart. “I have heard them in my dreams for a week, Alistair. I have seen the eagles leaving the crags.” She looked up at him, her blue eyes piercingly clear. “Promise me, not that you will return—for no man can promise the wind—but that you will not let them take your soul.”

Alistair leaned down and kissed her with desperate, crushing intensity that tasted of salt and finality. He knelt before Uilleam, pressing his cheek against the boy’s soft skin. “Grow strong, my son. Build with stone, not steel.”

He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. If he looked back at the house he had built stone by stone, he knew his legs would turn to water.

Drumossie Moor, April 16, 1746

The heartbreak of the farewell was quickly overshadowed by the brutal reality of the moor.

Alistair stood in the second rank of the MacCulloch line. The ground beneath his bare feet was a sodden, freezing sponge of peat and moss. They had been marching and counter-marching for days with almost no food. His stomach was a hollow pit, and his vision blurred with exhaustion.

The atmosphere was suffocating.

Across the flat, featureless moor, the government ‘Redcoats’ appeared as a wall of scarlet and steel, their bayonets catching the dim gray light.

The wind whistled through the heather, carrying the rhythmic thump-thump of the enemy’s drums. Occasionally, a horse neighed or a man coughed; these sounds were jarringly loud in the tense silence.

Alistair felt the ‘Skin-Walker’ blood within him churning. His senses were heightened. He could smell the black powder in the enemy’s pouches half a mile away. He could see the individual feathers of a raven circling above. He knew with a predator’s instinct that this was a killing field.

“Steady, lads,” his cousin whispered beside him. His hands shook so hard that his claymore rattled in its scabbard. “The Prince says the Lord is with us.”

Alistair looked at the sky. There was no God here. Only the mist.

Suddenly, the silence was shattered. A flash of fire erupted from the scarlet line. Then came the roar—a sound so massive that it felt as if the earth were being torn apart. The first government cannonball skipped across the heather, kicking up a spray of black mud and human remains just twenty yards to Alistair’s left.

The slaughter had begun.

Alistair gripped his hilt, his whisky-gold eyes narrowing. He didn’t think of the Prince. He thought of a rowan tree and a woman named Isobel who was waiting for him to survive.

It wasn’t just raining over Culloden Moor; it was weeping a cold, sleeting mist that turned the peat into a treacherous bog. For an hour, Alistair and the MacCulloch men stood like stationary targets. They were a line of flesh and tartan against a wall of government iron.

The government artillery was relentless. Every few seconds, the ground shuddered as grapeshot tore through the Highland ranks, turning men Alistair had known since childhood into spray and shadow. Acrid, sulfurous stench of black powder and the coppery taste of blood lay heavy in the spring air.

“God’s teeth,” his cousin gasped, a splinter of wood from a shattered musket embedded in his cheek. “Why don’t we move?”

Alistair didn’t answer. He was watching the center of the line. The Highland Charge was their only hope—a terrifying, all-or-nothing sprint across a thousand yards of open, boggy terrain.

Finally, the order came. It wasn’t a shout, but rather a collective, animalistic roar that started with the Mackintoshes and swept through the line like wildfire.

“CLANNA NAN GAIDHEAL AN GUAILLIBH A CHEILE!”

Alistair didn’t think. He ran.

The charge was chaos. He slipped on the slick moss as he dodged deep bog holes that threatened to swallow a man whole. To his left and right, his brothers-in-arms screamed war cries and raised their broadswords high.

Then came the musket volleys.

The English waited until the Highlanders were within fifty paces—close enough to see the whites of their eyes—before unleashing a wall of lead. The sound was like a thousand whips cracking at once. Alistair felt a bullet graze his ear and saw the man in front of him lifted off his feet and thrown backward as if struck by a giant’s fist.

He reached the first line of bayonets. The air was a whirlwind of steel and screaming. Alistair swung his claymore; the weight of the blade was an extension of his desperate rage. He wasn’t fighting for a prince; he was fighting for the right to return home and for his country.

However, the government had a new tactic: the bayonet thrust to the right, bypassing a man’s shield to pierce his unprotected side. Alistair saw his clan’s line begin to buckle under the sheer discipline of the scarlet ranks. They were being funneled into a killing zone between two stone dikes where the crossfire was absolute.

Through the smoke and screams, Alistair’s amber eyes caught a flash of movement.

It was a wee lad, not older than his own, huddled behind a pile of fallen bodies. He was clutching his body, his face was white with terror, a feeling no child should ever experience. A line of government dragoons was swinging their horses around, sabers drawn for the no quarter slaughter of the retreat.

In that moment, the ‘skinwalker’ blood in Alistair didn’t just thrum—it exploded.

He threw his head back and summoned a voice that didn’t belong to a man, his throat working as he did so. It was the incantation of the ‘Watcher of the Peaks’, a string of Gaelic words so ancient that they sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates.

“A-nis, na sgiathan! Fuil na beinne, anam an adhair. Gabh mo chridhe, gabh mo chraiceann, is bi mo neart!”

‘Now, the wings! Blood of the mountain, soul of the air. Take my heart, take my skin, and be my strength!’

The agony was immediate and absolute. It wasn’t a transition; it was a shattering.

First came the sound—a sickening crack and pop as his humerus and radius snapped and elongated, stretching his arms into the vast, hollow-boned structure of wings. His skin didn’t just itch; it felt as if a thousand needles were being driven outward from his muscles. Each hair on his body became a quill and burst into the air with a spray of iridescent gold and brown.

He fell to his knees as his jaw unhinged and his face pushed forward into a sharp, terrifying raptor’s beak. His vision, once human and limited by smoke, suddenly exploded. The moor expanded. He could see the individual stitches on the dragoon’s coat and the frantic pulse in the lad’s neck.

Alistair let out a scream that started as a man’s roar and ended as the piercing shriek of a Fireun—a golden eagle.

The dragoon’s horse reared up in pure, instinctual terror and threw its rider into the mud. The soldiers froze, their muskets lowered, as they watched a massive, six-foot shadow rise from the mud where a Highlander had just stood.

With a powerful thrust of his new feathered wings, Alistair took flight. The broken wing, where the government musket ball had grazed his shoulder, burned like white fire, but he ignored it. He dove through the sulfurous clouds, his talons locking around the boy’s woolen coat.

“Hold fast, laddie!” Alistair tried to cry out, but it came as a majestic, echoing screech.

He beat his wings against the red wind of the cannons; the force of his updraft knocked over a line of startled soldiers. No longer a soldier of the Prince, he was the Spirit of the Glen, carrying the future of his people away from the slaughter.

The sounds of the battle faded into a low, rhythmic heartbeat—the beat of wings.

8 The Shadow of the Golden Soul

The air above Drumossie Moor was a chaotic mixture of sulfur, sleet, and the sharp metallic scent of a dying army. Beneath Alistair’s massive six-foot wingspan, the Highland Charge had transformed into a desperate, blood-soaked retreat. He watched the clansmen he had shared ale with just hours earlier fall into the peat, their tartans blending into the dark mud.

He didn’t look away. Through the Golden Eagle’s telescopic sight, he saw every bayonet thrust and every falling banner. His thick, scaled talons were firmly locked into the wool of the lad’s coat. The boy was a dead weight, his eyes squeezed shut against the deafening roar of the wind and the screech of the beast that had plucked him from the grave.

Alistair beat his wings, each downstroke was agonizing; a musket ball had torn through his left shoulder mid-shift, and now his primary feathers were slick with dark, iridescent spirit blood.

As he cleared the battlefield smoke and soared toward the ridge of his glen, the world began to flicker.

The mist of 1746 grew thin, and for a heartbeat, the rugged, heather-clad hills were overlaid with something else—something impossible. He saw the silver thread of a paved road cutting through the valley. He saw the distant, rhythmic flash of blue and red electric lights.

Then, he saw her.

In the center of the swirling white fog, where his cottage threshold should have been, the air rippled like water. He saw a lass. But not his. She wasn’t wearing a bodice or a kirtle. She wore a modern apron, and her face was streaked with tears. Her hand reached out into the void as if she could feel the beat of his wings across three centuries.

“Alistair!” her voice echoed, not through his ears but directly into his fracturing soul. “Come home! Follow the light of the hearth!”

The sight of her gave him a final, desperate surge of strength. He tucked his wings and dove, the wind whistling through his quills. He reached the high, jagged crag above ‘Eagle’s Hearth’ and released his grip. The lad tumbled onto the soft moss, safe and hidden in the shadows of the rocks.

But, as he tried to pull up and circle back to the house to find his human skin—the hearthstone snapped tight.

He felt a cold, iron weight wrap around his heart. The ritual he had used—the ancient Gaelic incantation—had been fueled by a life debt. By saving the lad, Alistair had traded his own place in the world of men.

He slammed into the thatched roof of his home, his talons scrabbling against the straw. He tried to scream Isobel’s name, but only a jagged, heartbroken shriek came out. The stone beneath him hummed with predatory magic, pulling his spirit down into the foundation itself.

He was no longer a soldier. He was no longer a man. He was the Grounded King, bound to the stones until a love as fierce as his sacrifice could call him back.

9 The Thaw of Three Centuries

The scent of black powder and frozen peat disappeared, replaced by the humid, sandalwood-scented air of the modern bathroom. Alistair’s body went limp and became a heavy, dead weight against Rowan’s chest. He collapsed into her arms, breathing shallowly and erratically.

“Alistair!” Rowan cried out, her voice cracking as she struggled to hold him.

She looked down at his left shoulder, and her heart nearly stopped. The silvered pucker of the ancient musket wound wasn’t just red—it was pulsing with a low, ethereal golden light. The heat from it radiated through her palms like a fever.

With a strength born of pure adrenaline, she guided him toward the guest suite and half-dragged his powerful frame to the bed. He was burning up, his skin slick with sweat that smelled of salt and wild heather. Rowan frantically grabbed a basin of cool water and a cloth. She bathed his forehead, his chest, and the glowing, haunted scar.

“Alistair, please,” she whispered, her hand trembling as she brushed back his mahogany hair. “Come back to me. Stay here.”

His head thrashed against the pillow, and his lips moved in a frantic string of melodic Gaelic. He wasn’t in 2026 any longer.

“Alistair!” she called again, this time more sharply.

His eyes snapped open. For a heartbeat, they were entirely gold, like the predatory, telescopic eyes of an eagle, before his pupils dilated and his familiar whisky-colored irises flooded back in. He gasped and grabbed Rowan’s wrist with an iron grip.

“I saw ye,” he rasped, his voice a ghost of itself. He sat up slowly, the glow in his shoulder fading into a dull, throbbing red. “Before the stone took me . . . before the feathers grew into my skin . . . I saw a woman in the mist. I saw ye, Rowan.”

He reached out and traced the line of her jaw with his thumb as if to confirm that she was made of flesh and not dreams. “I have known you for three hundred years. I didn’t just watch you from the rafters. I was waiting for ye. I heard yer voice calling to me through the stones long before ye bought this house. Ye were the only reason I didn’t let the wind carry my soul away.”

Rowan’s breath hitched at the sheer, ancient weight of his devotion crashing over her. “I felt you, too,” she whispered. “I think I’ve been walking toward this hearth my whole life.”

Alistair didn’t hesitate. He reached out and pulled her toward him, his large hands cradling her face. Their kiss was anything but tentative. It shattered the ice that had encased his heart since 1746. It tasted of longing, ancient promises, and a hunger that had survived the death of kings.

He pulled her down onto the soft linens, his touch a mixture of a warrior’s reverence and a man’s desperate need for grounding. In the dim, warm light of the guest room, the modern world finally fell away.

Their first time together was not a conquest, but a merging of eras. It was the way his calloused palms moved over her soft skin, discovering the curves of a woman who had restored his humanity. It was the way Rowan arched into him, her fingers tangling in his wild hair, welcoming the heat of a man as solid as Highland granite.

They moved together with a slow, rhythmic intensity—a language of touch that needed no translation between the centuries. In the quiet of the room, amidst the familiar scent that defined them and the low rumble of thunder, Alistair finally found the peace he had sought since the ‘red wind’ began. He wasn’t a soldier, an eagle, or a ghost. He was simply a man, finally home.

---

Alistair didn’t sleep the way modern men did. He woke with the sun, his senses sharp and attuned to the subtle shifts in the air. But for the first time in three hundred years, he didn’t feel the urge to stretch his wings. Instead, he lay perfectly still, his body entwined with Rowan’s beneath the soft cotton sheets.

He watched her in a state of quiet awe. Sunlight filtered through the curtains, casting a soft glow over her skin. He listened to the steady rhythm of her breathing, a sound more beautiful to him than the dawn chorus of the glens. He was a man who had forgotten the weight of a woman’s head on his shoulder and the softness of her hair against his skin. To him, Rowan was a miracle born of time and kindness.

When Rowan’s eyes finally fluttered open, she found him staring at her with such profound, unfiltered love that it stole the air from her lungs.

“Mo chridhe,” he whispered, his voice a low morning rasp. “I thought perhaps the dawn would turn ye back into a dream.”

Rowan smiled, a sleepy, radiant expression that made his heart hammer against his ribs. She reached up and brushed a stray strand of mahogany hair from his forehead, tucking it behind his ear. “Good morning. I’m still here, Alistair. And so are you,” she whispered, leaning in to press a soft, lingering kiss on his jaw.

The rest of the world could wait. The threat of Vane and the mystery of the stones felt miles away as Alistair pulled her back into the heat of his embrace. Their second time together was slower, a gentle exploration fueled by the quiet light of Sunday morning. It was a tender, wordless vow between two souls who had finally found their anchor.

Later, as they sat in the quiet guest room, wrapped in towels and drinking coffee, the reality of the calendar began to set in.

“It is Sunday,” Rowan said, her gaze turning toward the window. “Vane comes tomorrow with the machines. We have twenty-four hours to figure out how a man from 1745 can defeat a billionaire with a demolition permit.”

Alistair looked at his hands, which were now solid and no longer shaking. “I will not leave ye, Rowan. I have spent three centuries as a shadow in these rafters. I won’t walk away now that I’ve found the light.”

“But how do we explain you?” Rowan asked. “A man with no ID, no history after 1746, and a kilt that belongs in a museum?”

Alistair leaned forward, his eyes narrowing with the focus of an eagle. “We do not play by his rules. Vane wants the land because he thinks it’s empty. He thinks the history is dead.” He looked at the Luckenbooth brooch sitting on the nightstand. “But I am living proof that this house is occupied. If he wants to tear down the hearth, he must prove that it is abandoned. I am the laird of this glen, by blood and by stone. We’ll find the records ye spoke of—the ones that show the MacCulloch line never truly ended.”

“Wait,” Rowan said, her eyes widening. “If I can prove that you are the direct descendant—or even better, if we can find a legal loophole regarding the Sacred Burial Grounds or the Protection of the Golden Eagle, we could tie him up in court for years.”

Alistair smiled, a predatory, dangerous glint in his eye. “And if the law fails, he will find that the ‘Eagle of the Hearth’ has talons that reach farther than he imagines.”

“We’re going to Inverness,” Rowan declared as she grabbed her keys. “I know the head archivist at the Highland Council Archives. If I can convince her to open the doors on Sunday, we might have a chance.”

Alistair headed for the old stone shed at the back of the property, once a grand stallion stable and now converted into guest rooms for hikers. “I’ll fetch the horses,” he called out, his hand already on the latch. “We’ll make it to the city by nightfall if we ride hard.”

Rowan caught his arm, laughing. “Alistair, the horses are for the trails. We’re taking the car.”

She led him to her parked vehicle. Alistair circled the it, poking the tire with the toe of his boot. “Ye mean to tell me that we sit inside this iron box, and it moves without the pull of a beast? How does it breathe?”

“It’s an internal combustion engine,” Rowan explained as she opened the passenger door. She laid out that it was more convenient than a carriage because there was no need to feed it or stop for rest, and it could complete the journey in forty minutes.

Alistair climbed in, looking the part in his heavy tartan kilt and wool sweater. Her heart started beating faster as she thought back to last night’s lovemaking. She remembered how his strong but tender hands roamed her body. His soft hair between her legs while he worked his magic with his mouth. She remembered the heat that shot through her when he released himself into her. The noises he made when relief washed over him. She had never been touched or loved like that before. She had never felt such peace and pleasure. Before she knew it, her body took control, reacting to him in the most intimate way. She must have given herself away when he turned to face her. A wide smile spread across his face.

“Woman, are ye thinking of me naked?”

Rowan blushed, unwilling to answer. She knew where that would lead.

“I knew it,” he laughed, his whole body shaking. “I can read yer mind. Ye would like to come sit on my lap right now.”

“Alistair,” she croaked, now feeling a tingle in her soft spot, yearning for him.

“Aye, I’d take ye anytime. Look,” he said, lifting his tartan. “Ye do the same to me.”

Rowan gasped for breath. “Oh, my goodness.” Focusing on the narrow Scottish roads became nearly impossible. His manhood stood in all its glory.

“Shall we stop quickly? Then ye can ride my horse.”

The thought was inviting. She craved nothing more than to feel the man she had been searching for her entire life, hot and hard, inside her.

Rowan took the next exit and drove to a deserted road. A quick pit stop wouldn’t hurt, and surely the papers would still be there in an hour.

---

They reached a quiet residential street in Inverness and began banging on a sturdy oak door until a light flickered on. A woman with silver hair and sharp, intelligent eyes opened the door, pulling a cardigan over her nightgown.

“Rowan? It’s Sunday morning, lass!”

“Mairi, please,” Rowan said breathlessly. She was still exhausted from making love in the car until fog covered the windows and puddles of water started to form. “It’s an emergency. It’s about the Hearth.”

Mairi looked at Rowan, then her gaze drifted to the towering man at her side. She took in Alistair’s archaic kilt and the way he carried himself like a king from the old world. She noticed the whiskey-gold fire in his eyes, too.

“The Eagle,” she whispered. As a true Scot who grew up with Highland myths, she didn’t ask for identification. She simply nodded.

“Into the kitchen. I’ll put the kettle on.”

Over tea, Rowan explained the situation. Mairi listened, her eyes never leaving Alistair. When they finished, she stood up. “The Archive Center is officially closed, but I have the keys. If Cormac Vane is trying to steal land based on a falsified history, we’ll find the truth.”

They spent hours in the cold, silent vaults of the archives. They went through hundreds of crumbling Sasine records and hand-drawn maps. Just as the gray light of afternoon began to fade and hope felt like it was slipping away, Mairi pulled a thin vellum folder from a box marked “Uncatalogued MacCulloch Papers.”

“There,” she whispered. “I found it.”

It was there in black and white. The document confirmed that the land was a royal grant that could never be sold to a commercial entity as long as a MacCulloch inhabited the land. It was the ‘Paper Shield’ they needed.

The victory was sweet, but the cost was high. As Rowan drove them back toward the glen, the adrenaline drained from Alistair’s body.

He stared out the window at the passing hills as his vision began to fracture. The smooth asphalt of the A9 road looked like a muddy track. The hum of the engine sounded like the distant roar of cannons.

“Alistair?” Rowan asked, noticing that his knuckles were white as he gripped his knees.

He didn’t answer. A seizure of time gripped him. The world blurred into a kaleidoscopic mix of 1746 and the present. He struggled to remain in the passenger seat with Rowan, but the past pulled him back toward the moor. His breath came in ragged gasps, and his eyes rolled back, revealing only gold.

Before Rowan could pull the car over, Alistair slumped against the window, his consciousness slipping into the dark.

10 The Ghost of Drumossie

The silence was the first thing to claw at him. It wasn’t the peaceful quiet of the Highlands. It was the heavy, suffocating silence that followed a massacre.

Alistair’s eyes snapped open. The cushioned seat of the beast on wheels was gone. Instead, his cheek was pressed into freezing, iron-tasting mud. He scrambled to his knees, his throat raw from screaming and his breath hitching. He looked down at his hands. They were battered, the knuckles split and stained with black gunpowder soot.

“Rowan?” he croaked, his voice cracking. “Rowan?”

She was gone.

Desperate for the sight of the asphalt road or the glow of streetlights, he looked around. But there was nothing but the bruised, gray twilight of April 1746. The moor around him was a carpet of tartan and broken steel. The kin he had stood with only hours ago—the men he had laughed with in the café’s shadow just yesterday—lay in heaps. Their eyes stared sightlessly at the weeping sky.

What was going on? Was he a time traveler now? A man with a splintering soul? The deed… Where was the sheet of paper? He searched the ground and his kilt. Nowhere. It must have stayed in the year he last visited. The modern world felt like a fever dream he had imagined while standing in the muck.

Alistair began to walk. With each step, he struggled physically against the weight of his grief.

The air was a nauseating soup. It smelled of spent saltpeter, voided bowels, and the cloying, metallic scent of cooling blood. Beneath it all was the scent of wet heather and the peat fire of a thousand burning dreams. It was the smell of a nation’s funeral.

As he navigated the piles of fallen bodies, his heart burned with pain. He was a smart man and a leader of his sept. He knew what was coming. The Duke of Cumberland would not stop at the moor. The butcher would send his redcoats to every glen and shieling. They would strip the Scots of their clans, their language, and their identity.

“They will starve us,” he whispered, his jaw tightening until his teeth felt ready to shatter. “They will hunt us like wolves. But they will not take the hearth.”

His mind was a battlefield of its own. Who waits for me? he wondered frantically. Was it Isobel, the wife he had loved with steady, quiet devotion? Or was it Rowan, the woman who had seen the man inside the bird? The woman whose skin he had just felt against his own in an iron box on wheels, three centuries away? He had just laid with another lass—not just his body, but his soul as well. Was he a traitor to his wife or a ghost haunting his lover?

The Eagle’s Hearth finally crested the ridge. It stood alone against the darkening sky, a pillar of defiance.

Alistair didn’t slow down. He ran. He ignored the fire in his lungs and the protest of his bruised limbs. He reached the heavy oak door, which he had carved himself, and, with a desperation born of both hope and terror, he roared and slammed it open.

“Isobel!” he screamed, his voice echoing in the stone room.

He stood in the middle of the kitchen, his chest heaving and his mouth open to shout her name again.

“Isobel!”

She walked right past him. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t turn. The hem of her woolen skirt brushed through the space where his legs should have been, leaving no more than a faint, icy ripple in the air. Alistair reached out to catch her shoulder and pull her into the embrace he’d been dreaming of since the moor, but his fingers passed through her like smoke through a screen.

He stared at his hands. They looked solid. He could see the grime under his fingernails and the purple bruising on his knuckles. He pinched his arm—it stung. He felt entirely, brutally real. Yet to the world he had built, he was less than a shadow. He was a frequency they could no longer hear.

He tried to go to his son, crouching down to his level. “Uilleam, look at me. It’s Da.”

The boy didn’t look. Instead, he turned toward the hearth, and Alistair’s heart stopped.

Sitting on the floor by the fire, leaning its head tenderly against the boy’s knee, was the Fireun. The Fire Eagle.

Alistair watched in horror and awe as his son stroked its golden feathers. The boy babbled about his day, the sheep he’d seen and the pebbles he’d found, talking to the bird as if it were his father, who had promised to return.

“I helped Ma with the water, Da,” Uilleam whispered to the raptor.

From the wooden bassinet in the corner came the soft, rhythmic gurgle of a bairn. Alistair approached the cradle, his breath—if he was even breathing—shuddering in his chest. He remembered Rowan mentioning that he had a daughter. He looked down and saw a crown of flaming red hair—a stark, beautiful contrast to the deep, Highland blue of her eyes.

Isobel stepped into the light and lifted the baby. The infant let out a coo of pure joy, her tiny hands reaching for her mother’s face. Alistair felt a sob rip through him, but it made no sound in the room. He watched as Isobel sat by the fire, and the Eagle, the version of him that had stayed, hopped onto her arm. It snuggled its sharp beak into the soft skin of the baby’s neck with impossible tenderness.

Alistair backed away until his back hit the stone wall. He was a ghost in his own life.

Is this my punishment? he thought, his mind racing with wild, desperate fury. He was stuck in a state of existence that belonged to neither world. He was no longer Isobel’s husband—the bird on her arm had claimed that role. He was also not Rowan’s lover; his body for that life was currently unconscious in a car three hundred years in the future.

He realized with terrifying clarity that he was a conscious observer caught in the midst of a supernatural transition. If he stayed, he would watch his family grow old and die while remaining a silent, invisible spectator.

He looked at the little girl with the red hair. She looked like Isobel. She looked like Rowan. Rowan, he thought. Why does she look like Rowan?

His heart sank. She had brought him back once before. She was the only one who could see the man inside the monster.

In 1746, he had no life left; he was a dead man walking a dead moor. His only hope for a shared life, for a touch he could actually feel, lay with the woman who held the deed to his heart in the new time. He had to find her again. He had to find his way back to the passenger seat of that car.