Woken By The Highlander - Rebecca Preston Page 0,3

did a few jumping jacks, trying to keep her body temperature up as she worked through the last hours.

That huge noise, close to her. She'd dived to the ground to avoid being shot… very action hero, she thought, amused despite herself. Then… nothing.

No. Not nothing. She frowned, water dripping from the tip of her nose, as a memory came floating back to her, as nebulous and hard to grasp as a dream the morning after. Something about… something about tall, elongated figures who seemed to shine from within with such a bright light that their features were obscured. Something strange about them… something ethereal, ephemeral, and yet paradoxically eternal. Something about them that made her mind automatically flinch away, knowing she'd never quite understand.

But under it all… something that told her they were friends.

What kind of bizarre hallucination…? Was it possible she was shellshocked as a result of the gunshot that had gone off so close to her? Had she suffered some kind of trauma? Biting her lip, she looked down at her body, half expecting to see an enormous gunshot wound that she'd somehow managed to avoid feeling with the cold of the water… but no, she was completely intact, clothing and all. Her boots were soaked through – they'd take the longest to dry – but thankfully she was dressed in wilderness gear that was designed to get wet but still keep her warm. She wouldn't be dying of exposure any time soon. Still, it was chilly out here.

What was that light in the distance? Was that the closest town to her bed and breakfast, perhaps? She started walking toward it in the absence of any better ideas. Once she got there, she could ask someone just where the hell she was… and she was beginning to suspect that it wasn't anywhere near her bed and breakfast. There were no lakes this size anywhere near where she'd been staying – otherwise, they'd have definitely been set as a stop on her itinerary of photography expeditions. So how the hell had she gotten here?

The dirt road crunched pleasantly beneath her feet, and she settled into the walking rhythm, feeling the heat of her body beginning to dry out her sodden clothes. Her boots still squelched with every step – they were waterproof enough to splash through creeks here and there, but full submersion wasn't a great idea – but the rest of her body was feeling better. She resisted the urge to check her camera, worried that it had been underwater for too long. Thankfully, she'd gotten into the habit of backing her shots up on the cloud since the disastrous day she'd lost her old camera in the rapids, so worst case scenario she'd just be down a camera… but fingers crossed it did what it said on the tin and was waterproof enough to have survived its trip into the lake.

The road wound along the lake shore, keeping close to the lapping waves. She was a little surprised that it was dirt – it seemed quite wide, and the lights up ahead of her seemed to indicate a fairly big… well, something. Not a town, but some kind of landmark, for sure. A lakeside hotel, perhaps? She had her credit card in the wallet that was still stuck in her back pocket, to her great relief – she could book a room for the night and figure everything else out in the morning. She was definitely feeling weary.

But a frown crossed her face a few minutes later when she looked up into the sky and realized that it was undeniably beginning to lighten – just a touch, the way it did an hour or so before dawn. Could it be even later than she'd thought? Four or five in the morning was her closest guess… that meant she'd lost nearly twelve hours altogether.

And a hell of a lot could happen in twelve hours.

Chapter 3

She'd stopped dead in the road when she noticed dawn creeping into the sky, and she felt a shiver run down her spine as a cold breeze blew past her. Not knowing quite why, she turned to follow it with her eyes out across the black waters of the lake she'd crawled out of not so long ago, watching the water ripple… and then she frowned. There, some distance out, just close enough to be visible in the gloom… what was that? Some kind of boat? A long, slender protuberance that emerged from the