“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

I read the email again, like something would change if I did. Like that would make it better.

“Son of a bitch.” I pushed back from the table and wasn’t sure whether I would throw up or scream. Maybe both, one at a time. I never thought she would do anything like it, or else I would have tried harder to keep her away.

Stupid me, thinking the more I tried to keep Emelie away, the more she would want to see what was up. The last thing I needed was for her to poke into my new life.

“Tamhas?” I called out when I burst into the corridor.

Most of the clan was in the common room, watching an American football game.

Apparently, the clan from Appalachia had gotten them into it when they crossed paths in St. Lucia. It sort of made me feel more at home to hear the announcers and the names of the teams.

Tamhas was in there, sitting with Dallas and Owen.

I hated to break in on his good time, because it did seem like he was enjoying himself.

When he saw the look on my face, the good times were over—though he was smart enough not to give himself away when he stood and joined me outside the room.

“What is it?” he asked as I dragged him down the hall toward the room we shared.

I held a finger to my lips to quiet him until we were completely alone with the door closed between us and more than a dozen pairs of interested ears.

When we were alone for real, he turned to me. “Okay. Now, what it is?”

“Emelie.” I wrung my hands together and shook my head as I paced the length of the room. “She’s here. Somewhere.”

“Here?” he gaped at me.

“In Scotland. Somewhere in Scotland. God, how could I have been so stupid? It was naïve to think she wouldn’t want to find me!”

“All right, wait a second. Calm down.”

I hated that he tried to calm me down when I had every reason in the world to be upset. “Calm down? How can you even say that? You know what this means.”

“You don’t know she’ll find us. Don’t worry yourself too much about it when you don’t yet know what’s come of her.”

“She emailed me a week ago, Tamhas. A week ago.”

This seemed to knock him crooked for a second. “Oh. I see.”

“Another stupid fault of mine,” I muttered. “I should know better than to let so much time pass without checking, but…”

“But you feel as though you’re further and further removed from the old life,” he murmured with a knowing smile.

“Yes. That’s exactly right. I shouldn’t have forgotten about her like that.” I sat on the bed with a thud and bent to hold my head in my hands. “She was all I had back before I met you, and I was all she had. How could I forget about her? She deserves better.”

“Hold on, now.” He sat beside me and draped an arm around my shoulders. “I wouldn’t let it get that far without first knowing what she found—if anything. Remember, now, the woods surrounding the mountain are all but impossible to navigate for a human. That is part of our protection.”

I raised my head slowly, telling myself not to glare at him. He was only doing his best to make me feel better, after all. “You’re telling me she might have starved to death out in the woods by now.”

“No, of course not.”

“Because now, I’m seeing her dead body in my mind’s eye and I can’t shake the feeling that something bad happened to her.” I bent to pull my hiking boots from under the bed and shoved my feet into them.

“You’re not going to look for her, are you?”

“Do you have any other suggestions?” I finished lacing up, then looked at him. “Tamhas, she was the one who showed me where to find you. She’ll know where to go.”

He sighed as he stood. “All right. Let’s get out there and see what we find.” He sounded like he was on his way to the dentist’s office or something, but I would take all the help I could get if it meant finding Emelie.

My heart was in my throat the entire way down the long tunnel leading outside. What would she have done if she got lost? She was a smart girl, she had always been the smart one out of the two of us. She wouldn’t keep going if she didn’t think she could find the mountain.

Unless somebody who meant a lot to her was missing and she needed to find her.

Tamhas took my sweaty hand in his. “I’m certain she’s all right. More than likely, she got a bit lost and turned around. She returned to her hotel, I’m betting.”

“Then why did she not email me again to tell me she couldn’t reach the mountain?” I countered. “No offense, truly, but you don’t know her as I do.”

“Aye, that’s true. I do not.” He remained silent as we finished our walk, still hand-in-hand until we got outside.

I shaded my eyes against the sun in order to look around.

Think, think, think.

What would she do? I tried to call upon my instincts—another thing about me, something Tamhas had chosen to ignore.

My instincts had always served me well. They were what made me a top-notch bounty hunter and freelance private eye. Not to mention the benefit of being able to “see” what my MMA opponents were going to do before they did it.

It wasn’t cheating if I didn’t know I actually had legitimate powers—and back then, I didn’t. I hadn’t found out about my relation to a bunch of long-gone witches until I came to Scotland to find Tamas.

My instincts were going crazy, pretty much screaming in my head. I stopped in my tracks and closed my eyes in the hopes of making sense of all the noise inside.

“What is it?” Tamhas asked. I only shook my head and kept concentrating.

In a matter of moments, the noise started to quiet down. I drew a few deep breaths and let my inner voice come through.

If Emelie was here, where was she?

When my eyes opened, I followed the place my voice told me to go. Into the woods, past this tree and that bush, turning at random. Or what seemed like random. Tamhas followed me without saying a word. He knew better by now.

We arrived at a place where one of the trees had fallen over until it leaned on another one. I stopped, turning in a slow circle as my eyes scanned the clearing. “There’s something strange here.”

“What do you mean, strange?” He came to me, touching my shoulder.

“I feel something.” I balled up my fists and touched them to my stomach. “Something happened here. I don’t know what. It just feels wrong.”

Under the leaning tree, there was a spot where the fallen leaves had all been brushed or kicked away—everywhere else, the leaves made a carpet on the ground.

“What’s this?” Tamhas leaned down and came up with a bracelet.

Something got stuck in my throat. A lump. I couldn’t speak.

All I could do was reach for the string of beads. Seven colors, one for each of the seven chakras. I had seen it on Emelie’s wrist almost every day since I gave it to her as a Christmas present years earlier, when she was getting into sort of woo-woo spiritual things.

“It’s hers. Jesus, it belongs to Emelie. I bought it for her.” I clutched the bracelet to my chest. “What are we going to do?”

He blew out a hard, sharp breath through flared nostrils. I knew his dragon was going nuts—he had an inner voice, too. “We’re going to find her, of course.”