Woken By The Highlander - Rebecca Preston Page 0,2

ground to get below the gunshot's range… and just like that, terrifyingly quick, there was nothing but blackness.

Chapter 2

Cold. Cold, wet, damn… Julia wrinkled her nose as her consciousness came back to her in a rush, and absolute befuddlement haunted her for a moment or two as her eyes flickered open. Had she fallen asleep on the trail somewhere? She didn't remember lying down to rest… and she'd have known better, with upstate New York's reputation for ticks and Lyme disease… but as her eyes slid open those concerns were replaced almost instantly with far more immediate ones. Like the enormous body of water she'd just found herself immersed in.

Confusion mounted as she suddenly started paddling her arms and legs, feeling a jolt as she realized her head had been just about to slip beneath the surface. But where the hell was she? This wasn't where she remembered being… there was a stream that ran through the park she'd been walking through, sure, but it was nowhere near this big. From the moonlight that shone down on the waters around her, she could just about make out that the body of water was much bigger than even the little lake that the stream ended up in… which she'd been miles away from, at any rate. And it hadn't been the middle of the night, that was for sure.

The cold, more than anything, prompted her to start swimming, a shiver that was wracking her body and making her feel concerned by the numbness beginning to set in around her extremities. The knowledge that her phone was in her hip pocket and probably ruined set in a few strokes in, and she opened her mouth to swear… just in time for a little wave to slap her in the face and fill her mouth with water. She closed it, wisely. Her camera around her neck was less of a worry – it was water-resistant to several feet underwater, a decision she'd made when her last camera had been lost during an afternoon trying to capture images of salmon swimming upstream over rapids. Her camera had dropped into the water and that had been that. Honestly, sometimes she thought she mourned the shots she'd lost more than she mourned the expensive camera she'd had to replace.

Julia didn't let herself panic. She wasn't in the habit of allowing herself to panic about anything – she just focused on the next step, on whatever she needed to do to get into a situation where panic was no longer necessary, and action, as a general rule, would short-circuit the desire to freak out. Swimming was doing that, for now. She could see the shore of the lake, or whatever body of water it was she was in, in the middle distance, knew that she'd make it comfortably – she'd always been athletic, a strong swimmer and a good runner, too. Once she was there, with her feet on solid ground, she'd give some thought to just where the hell she was – and how she'd managed to lose several hours of her memory.

Within twenty minutes, she felt her feet hit rough, stony lake bottom, and she breathed a sigh of relief as she began to trudge uphill toward the shoreline, water cascading from her sodden clothing as she neared the sandy shore of the lake. Beyond the crescent of sand, she could make out a flat area that might have been a road… but not one made of asphalt that was for certain. A dirt road, running alongside the lake. And in the distance – light. She peered in that direction as she shook one leg then the other, waiting for the water to rush out of her sodden clothes, shivering in the chilly night air. It was definitely autumn, she could tell by the chill in the air… at least the season hadn't gone and changed on her.

What the hell had happened over the last few hours? Where was she? The backpack she'd been wearing was gone, she realized with a grimace. No real loss there – it had just been snacks and a few extra layers of clothing in case a chill set in or it came over rainy, as it so often did without warning in the Adirondacks. There was something different about the climate right now, something she couldn't quite put her finger on… but she chalked it up to her sodden state, to the slight shock her body was experiencing. She