Fierce Highland Guardian (Reckless Hearts of the Highlands #1)

CHAPTER ONE

Dead Stone - Fiona

Here’s a thing they don’t teach you in archaeology: most of the job is being cold and wet in a place that wants you dead, writing down measurements nobody will ever read.

They also don’t teach you that a career can hang on one of them.

But mine does. Six months of my life, the last of a grant that took me two years and one divorce to claw back, all of it riding on the survey buried in this laptop bag—a full magnetometry map of Dunnottar’s lower works, clean and defensible, the kind of data that gets a woman her name back on the papers she used to write before everyone decided she was unreliable.

Prove the anomaly’s real, prove I can still read a site cold, and the review board stops using the word temperamental in their notes.

That’s the whole job. That’s why I’m on a cliff in a gale instead of asleep like a sane person.

Three hours on Dunnottar’s curtain wall, my headlamp punching a white hole into seven hundred years of weather-chewed stone, with the camera sitting under its rain hood on the ledge where I’d left it.

The camera cost more than my car. The camera was the whole point.

Fast, objective, no opinions. And I’d set it down twenty minutes ago to sketch chisel marks by hand, like some gentleman naturalist with nothing but time.

I don’t have time to waste. I wanted to.

The whole place smelled like the inside of a shell—brine and wet rock and the green iodine reek of kelp rotting somewhere down on the tideline, all of it scoured clean by a wind that tasted of salt before it tasted of anything else.

Somewhere below the cliff, under the wind, something hummed.

One low note, steady, sitting in my back teeth like a struck tuning fork.

I stopped drawing. Listened. Sea in a blowhole, probably — the North Sea does weird things to rock, and this whole coast was Swiss cheese underneath, caves and faults all the way down.

I told myself that, anyway, and the note kept going like it hadn't heard me.

A mason cut those marks the afternoon my country didn’t exist yet. You couldn’t get that off a photograph. You could only get it if you slowed down enough to find a dead man’s grip on your own wrist, and slowing down was not a thing I was supposed to enjoy.

You have instruments for that, Fiona.

Two years gone and my ex-husband still lived rent-free in the part of my skull that policed fun.

He’d said it in that exact voice—reasonable, patient, faintly disappointed, the voice that turned every instinct I had into a symptom.

You feel too much. You’re not seeing what’s there, you’re seeing what you want.

Say it to a woman long enough and she’ll hand you her own eyes to hold.

He was right, technically. I did have instruments.

One of them was drying out on the ledge.

I filled half a page anyway, guilty and fast, like I was getting away with something. Then the good professional in me took the pencil out of my own hand and capped it. Ninety seconds of rebellion. New personal best.

The storm had been a “maybe” all day. Now it committed.

The cloud went the color of a bruise and the wind came off the water with teeth, and every few seconds a gust flung a fistful of spray up the cliff, cold and stinging, finding the gap at my collar.

Rain you can hold. Salt gets into the lens housing and eats the electronics from the inside, and you don’t find out until you’re home and the thing won’t wake up.

The locals in Stonehaven had told me twice, with real heat in it, not to work the cliffs when it blew like this.

Nice people. They thought I was mad. They were probably onto something.

I packed up in the lee of the gatehouse where the wall killed the worst of the wind, and ran my end-of-day ritual on nerve memory.

Body wiped, lens capped, kit zipped into the dry bag.

Card into the laptop. Files renamed by grid square.

The blue bar crawling as everything climbed to the university server, because I don’t trust a single drive on a cliff in a gale, and because a woman who’s been called unreliable learns to make herself unarguable—every finding backed up, time-stamped, in triplicate, somewhere she can’t be accused of inventing it.

Something under my ribs said, Keep this one. Don’t send it.

Which made no sense, so I clicked upload, because gut feelings don’t survive grant review and backups do. That’s the lesson I’d learned so well it had worn a groove: never trust the thing you feel. Trust the thing you can prove.

The software coughed a flag while it chewed.

A density anomaly, deep, down under the crypts and into the rock.

A gap where solid stone had no business being.

I leaned in to read the coordinates and my eyes slid right off them, greased, refusing to hold—a name you’ve forgotten mid-sentence.

A small ache started behind my temple. The number wouldn’t stay put in my head long enough to matter.

The file kept it, even after my head let it go.

Bad rock, old kit. I flagged it for a review I already understood I’d never do.

Upload finished. Everything I had, sent safe out into the world.

Famous last words.

I stowed the laptop deep in the dry corner and climbed back up for the last of my markers—and the note came up the stairs to meet me.

Louder now. Not in my ears. Under them. One steady note sitting in my back teeth like a struck tuning fork, aching in the bone. I stopped on the top step with the rain coming sideways and did the thing I do when I’m scared before I’ve agreed to be scared, which is make a list.

Wind in the arches. The note didn’t care.

Tide working a blowhole. The note got bigger.

Three nights of bad sleep and a brain building company out of nothing. I liked that one. I wanted that one. And it still didn’t hold, because below the cliff the sea drew back.

I watched it go. The water gathered and pulled down and away, the way it does when something underneath has shoved it aside.

Then the sea stood up.

It came out of the water like the water had been hiding it—black, streaming, huge, past the point where my brain would give me a number, and I always have a number. Scales the color of wet ink.

The smell hit a half second behind the sight: ozone and scorched air and hot metal, and under that something sweet and dark, woodsmoke and cinnamon, so wrong against the brine that my stomach turned.

Heat rolled off it in a wave I felt on my face across thirty feet of storm, actual warmth, furnace-warmth, steam boiling where the spray struck its flank and hissed away to nothing.

A wing unfolded—unfolded and kept unfolding, farther than a thing that size had any right to reach—and the downdraft of it flattened the grass on the ledge.

Lightning went off out over the water, and for one whole second the shape of it hung there, silver-edged against the sky, and every system I owned quit at once.

Dragon, said the four-year-old in the back of my head. The one who used to draw them on the backs of church bulletins. The one who’d been told, kindly and often, to grow up.

Dragon, she said, not afraid at all. I told you. I told you, and nobody believed me, and here it is.

My hand was already moving for the bag. For the camera. For proof, because proof is safe and proof means you don’t have to believe anything, you can measure it instead.

My hand stopped halfway.

And stayed there. Me—the woman who photographs her own breakfast for the field log—and I’d walk away from this without one pixel of it.

Just my word. And I’d spent twenty years learning exactly what my word was worth the second I said a thing nobody wanted to hear.

If I photographed it, it went in a file, and the file went to people who’d already decided what I was, and they would take this—the only genuinely impossible thing that would ever happen to me—and they would use it to finish the job my marriage started.

So I didn’t reach. For once in my careful, backed-up, triple-stamped life, I chose the thing I couldn’t prove.

It came down on the rocks below with an impact I took in my boots, my knees, my fillings.

Then it came apart. Changed. Bone moving in directions bone doesn’t move, a shimmer rolling over the whole of it, heat-haze, oil on water. The wings folding down into nothing. The mass crushing inward, smaller, smaller—

—and then there was a man on his knees on the black rock. Bare, soaked, steaming faintly where the spray broke over him and hissed off into nothing. Breathing like he'd fought his way up from somewhere very deep.

The scientist in me kept gamely narrating. Refraction. Cold-water hallucination. Ball lightning, that’s real, that’s documented, sensible people don’t believe in—

The narration ran out of road.

He lifted his head. He found me up on the wall like he’d had the coordinates the whole time, and his eyes caught the last of the light and threw it back wrong—a pale, melted silver that didn’t belong in any human face I'd ever cataloged. He went still. All of him, at once, a wolf working out that the clearing isn’t empty.

Whatever he’d braced for, hauling himself out of that water, it hadn’t been me.

Run.