Highland Moon Sifter (a Highland Sorcery novel)

  Highland Moon Sifter

  By Clover Autrey

  Copyright 2013 Clover Autrey

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Red Rover Books

  Table of Contents

  Highland Moon Sifter

  Scotland, Thirteenth Century

  Bekah McRafferty plunged out of the sky, naked as the day she was born, and tumbled into meadowgrass, scraping her chin along the ground.

  Guess an easy ride eight centuries into the past shouldn’t have been expected. Riding a swirling vacuum raging bronco of a time rift didn’t exactly ease her out on a downy bed of roses, but rather spit her out after sucking everything material away. Good luck to anyone with fillings in their teeth.

  Shaking her head to clear the haziness creeping along the edges of her sight, Bekah squinted at her surroundings. Thick forest on one side, dark fitted stone wall stretching as far as she could see on the other.

  The reality of where she was hit her like, well, a stone wall.

  She’d really done it.

  “Oi, you there,” a guttural voice called out.

  Bekah jerked to the side, finding a guardsman, in authentic tunic and cross-leggings, rushing toward her, another two right behind him.

  Um, no. Nada. Getting detained by the witch’s guard, especially naked, was not penciled onto her agenda for today. Whatever day it was.

  Lunging up like a sprinter, she tore off into the trees, giving the men a stark view of her unhindered tush.

  Spongy leaves and pine needles kicked up beneath her bare feet, stabbing tender insoles, but she ignored the pain, hurdling over fallen branches.

  Shouts and trampling through brushy ground echoed behind her. Twigs and branches snapped. The men were clumsy and loud. She was quick. She’d once outrun a pack of Sifts through a maze of the old subway system on a twisted ankle.

  She could outrun clumsy mercenaries any day of the week. Doing it with clothes on, especially shoes, would be nice. She wondered if doubling back and taking on one of the guards for his tunic would be worth the trouble, but decided her best option was to outdistance them, get as far from the witch’s castle as possible.

  From what the scientists and historians back home knew, the Moon Sifter wouldn’t be at the castle, except when the Highland brothers had scouted it out for a rescue mission to get Toren from its dungeon. They had found Charity Greves outside the castle walls instead and mistook her for a lesser witch.

  Bekah knew every bit of the story because she had one job and she’d already messed it up. She knew exactly what had happened on Crunfathy Hill, Scotland. She and her two brothers-in-arms, and best friends, Matthew and Luke, had traveled from the year 2083 to early twenty-first century Seattle. They’d also known that Col Limont had been flung forward from that ancient battle on the hill to Seattle and it was their job to help him get back to his own time in the thirteenth century. They’d failed.

  No one could have predicted it would be her instead of the Shapeshifter who jumped into that rift.

  Well, she was here now with nothing but her pride and knowledge of future events. Oh, and some nice little gashes in her shoulder compliments of the monsters she came here to eradicate. Peachy.

  All she had to do was find Shaw Limont and kill him before he can break the world.

  ~~~

  “Got you!” A beefy body lurched out between two trees, reaching for her. How did he get the drop on her? This particular guard was better than she’d thought, running quietly ahead while he let his noisy companions herd her straight to him.

  She should have anticipated that. Then again, his cloak looked nice and warm.

  Grinning, Bekah spun her back to him, let him grab her around the shoulders while she bent over, letting his own bulk and momentum carry him over the top of her to hit the ground. He wasn’t done twisting, but she wasn’t finished either. She jumped heels first onto his belly, regretting the lack of shoes, and leaped off, coming for him again.

  He whirled forward to protect his nethers—men, always worried about certain parts—and she grabbed the neck of his cloak instead, ripping it off his back and tearing it away, while he grabbed for her.

  Not pressing her luck, Bekah was already dodging away, the mercenary’s cloak balled in her arms when a hideous screech rent the quiet air.

  Her heart hit her ribs like a gun blast. She’d recognize that sound anywhere.

  A Sift here? How could a Sift be here?

  The human scream that came next jolted her to the core. Long, drawn-out, cresting of shock and agony, the noise of sharp teeth feasting on one of the unfortunate guards she’d outrun. She’d seen it a hundred times and it still had the power to take her to her knees.

  Her throat closed with the tightness of a hangman’s noose.

  Bekah ran.

  Sifts couldn’t be here. It wasn’t possible. They didn’t yet exist in this time.

  The only way—crud. They’d entered the time rift back in Seattle just before her. It was the only explanation. How many? It couldn’t be a lot. Maybe two, possibly three at worst. Which just made her job a lot trickier.

  She’d come to ensure the Sifts were never created—erased from existence. She couldn’t leave any trace of them in this time.

  And they knew that. Which meant the Sifts would do everything they could to stop her.

  Bekah fled deeper into the forest, pulling the cloak around her as she ran. East, she headed east. Hopefully. She’s grown up in the desolate streets scavenging. It was not the same as scavenging in the woods, but the hold-out human survivors had hidden in the wilds on enough occasions that she knew in the northern hemisphere that moss grew on the northern side of trees. There was plenty of the fungus in this wet coastal forest to determine her direction.

  Crunfathy Village was north of Aldreth’s castle, and the warriors’ camp the brothers had taken Charity Greves to—were taking Charity to—lay somewhere in between.

  That’s where she’d find Shaw Limont.

  She hadn’t jumped into the tail end of the High Sorcerer’s time rift for nothing.

  Shaw Limont had to die.

  A hard body bore her to the ground. A shrilly screech and noxious smell of things that should have been, by rights, long dead assaulted her. Vicious hot pain erupted across her hip as they broke apart.

  The Sift came up on all fours, sniffing the air, face moving side to side. On her butt, hands planted on the ground, Bekah drew her legs up to run. Sifts could see beneath the putrefied translucent scar tissue over the pits of their eyes, but not well, relying more on smell and sound.

  Her hand felt a large stone beneath the soggy leaf-litter and closed around it.

  The Sift’s dark face jerked toward her right before it sprang.

  Rolling to the side, Bekah carried the rock with her, connecting with the side of the creature’s head. She felt bone give beneath the rubbery bloated folds of skin. She was up and running, not taking the time to see how fast the beast would be up and coming after her. Because it would. It’d take more than a rock to the head to stop a Sift in its prime.

  Nearly staggering from the pain in her side, she pressed a palm over the wet slash where the beast’s claw ripped a line above her hip. She didn’t have time to deal with the damage, not unless she wanted to live. So she ran, bearing down on the pain and let it motivate her to push harder.

  It was either that or be eaten.

  Ch
apter Two

  The Sift stalked her through the falling night. Bekah knew she’d never shake it. It was as motivated to remain in existence as she was to make sure the man eaters were never created. Those malignant beasts in her time had nearly eaten humanity to extinction.

  But to kill it, she needed better weapons than a rock. And help. She could get both from Clan Limont.

  Hi there. I need you to help me kill the monsters. Oh, and then, I need to kill your Guardian Shaw Limont to make sure these monsters never come into being. Yeah, that’d make her popular around the hearth fires.

  Hours later, she crested the lip of a hill that looked down into a sleepy little village and she felt like weeping. The weather of Scotland was not exactly warm. She was cold and hurt and miserable and hunted by one of the most lethal cunning creatures born entirely of dark magic. She had purposely dragged her body through every patch of mud and decaying mass of forest fodder to mask her scent from the creatures. Her side was a bleeding welt of pain. Oh, and not to be outdone by a new wound, the gashes she’d taken in the shoulder before leaping into the time rift had decided to make themselves known with a vengeance. Every footstep brought stabbing pain and her feet were cut and bruised.

  She needed help and help was down there in the form of Healers. Many of them.

  They would help her. Their hearts would have to be made of stone for any Healer to turn down an injured naked woman who stumbled out of the forest. At least the self- imposed layers of filth helped with her modesty, if not her smell. But it appeared to have worked so far. She hadn’t seen signs of the Sifts for nearly an hour. How could she live with herself if she had led one of those demons to an unprepared village?

  Yet Clan Limont was full of the most powerful magic wielders ever known in history. As much as she didn’t want to lead the Sifts there, they were the ones who could best handle them. She couldn’t do it on her own, not in the shape she was in.

  She’d play the pity card, get the aid she needed—and then do her job.

  She started down the slope, slipping along the loose earth.

  Exhausted and in pain, she didn’t have to pretend to stumble. Moonlight sprinkled the quiet village in a soft glow.

  “Help,” Bekah called out at the base of the hill. “Help me.” She didn’t need to add any dramatics to her tired breathy voice.

  Nothing stirred. No light from within proved there were any simmering hearth fires lit to welcome her. No dogs barked or livestock brayed from their pens. She limped through the open gates, seeing what she hadn’t noticed from above. The cottages were in ruin, more than half were little more than burnt husks. Crunfathy had been long abandoned.

  No…no. This couldn’t be right. Clan Limont had to be here.

  She stared numbly into an empty window.

  There were Sifts after her. She was walking wounded. Unarmed. Unclothed. And completely utterly alone.

  It hadn’t exactly been her day.

  She headed for the closest still-intact cottage, because she didn’t really know if she had the strength to hobble to the next one. The thick wooden door appeared sturdy enough, with iron brackets that would hold a crossbar across it. Unfortunately she didn’t see any crossbars lying around.

  She’d have to jimmy something in place, though anything would be merely a hindrance to a Sift. But she’d survived long enough in a world overrun with the beasts to discredit even a few seconds of warning.

  The floor rippled and swayed as her vision blurred. She stilled, focusing on taking deep breaths. She couldn’t afford to pass out. Not here. Not now.

  She waited for the walls to tip back into their upright position and quit moving altogether.

  The little one-room cottage was wrecked. Not just quickly abandoned as the clan fled, but ransacked. The scant chairs thrown and broken, table overturned and heirloom chests lying on their sides, unwanted contents strewn across the floor. It looked like she wasn’t the first to have stayed here for shelter.

  Fortunately one of the table legs had snapped off and she used that to fit across the brackets in the door. It wouldn’t hold a Sift out for long. It could burrow through the flimsy thatched roof for all that was worth. She was so screwed.

  The two windows were in better condition, one’s latch on the covering shutters was still intact while the other was braced with hewn boards. Whoever had sheltered here before her obviously hadn’t wanted unexpected company either.

  The fabric spilled on the floor from the upturned chest was little more than torn scraps, which was why they’d been left. A woman’s patching scraps perhaps.

  She grabbed them up, shaking out mouse droppings and went over to the large hearth and eased down. The pain in her side flared and she felt more blood flow down the side of her leg. That coupled with the scratches in her shoulder and she was in a bad way. How was she ever going to fight off the Sifts and then stop them from ever being born like this?

  Body tensing, Bekah waited the sharp agony out until she could draw a breath again when something caught her eye.

  Jack pot.

  It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  An iron poker lay in the cold ashes at the bottom of the fire place. Whoever had last tended a fire here, had discarded the poker. When her fingers closed around it, the cool ashy iron felt like salvation.

  Clutching it to her chest, she let her eyes close for a second, only a second. She wouldn’t drift to sleep. That would be unforgiveable, no, deadly, in these circumstances, but sleep found her nonetheless.

  She ran in her dreams, always running, always hiding, in dark desolate echoey alleyways, through unused sewers and worker tunnels and empty shopping malls. To be caught meant death at best. At worst, it meant being kept alive long enough for sport.

  While the Sifts had a penchant for human flesh, they delighted in the hunt, herding and manipulating their prey to exhaustion, playing—a noxious, half-blind-sagging-bag-of-skin cat to their human mice.

  In her dream, Bekah slipped across slick cement and fell forward to her stomach. Cold bloated fingers clamped around her ankle instantly.

  Her eyes snapped open, separating dream form reality, uncertain for a moment which was which.

  The fingers were still at her ankle, warm and clammy, moving up her calve.

  “Unmaker,” it hissed. “We exist. We always exist.” Rancid breath washed across the air, ashes blown from a funeral pyre. It spoke of her intent. It knew what she’d jumped into the time rift to do. Unmaker. She was going to see to it that Sifts never got the chance to be made in the first place. And they knew it.

  Heart pounding, she stayed utterly still, letting the Sift taunt her, tease her. It’s what they loved. Didn’t its mother ever tell it not to play with its food?

  Sniffing her, its bloated half-blind puckered face pressed near her bloodied hip. Its fat tongue flicked out, rough wet sandpaper lapping along her flesh, licking up her blood. Bekah swallowed thickly, fear and nausea blending into a harsh mix. The folds of sagging skin draping the Sift’s neck wobbled across her skin. Bekah sprang, jabbing the iron poker point first into its blubbery temple, the thin bone beneath so fragile for a monster. She rolled away out from beneath its razor claws.

  On her knees, in too much pain to get to her feet, she pressed all her weight onto the poker, gouging into the malformed head. Gray blood pooled around the shaft.

  The beast squealed, head pinned to the ground, arms flailing to catch her.

  Bone crunched, the skull breaking beneath the soft folds of skin.

  Bekah screamed, more of an anguished groan, pushing, pushing, with everything she had left in her, which wasn’t much, but if she let go now, she was dead.

  It was her or the beast and she was not going to let the human race down. Not while her heart still pumped. Everything around the edges of the room grayed, became kind of floaty, the same gray of the brain matter bubbling out of the beast’s mouth. All her senses narrowed down to a crystalline focus of her pulse pounding in her temples, her
weight bearing down, pushing, pushing, even though the Sift had to outweigh her by at least fifty pounds. Her sweat-slickened palms slipped on the iron bar, the cracking of bone—all graying—so very very gray.

  All she knew is that she was not giving up. She wasn’t cut that way. She was a survivor. She’d survived worse than one smelly Sift that thought it could stop her.

  There was too much riding on her shoulders. Too much. Way too frigging much. She was the only one left who could stop it. But it was too much.

  She pressed and pressed and pressed until the gray turned to black.

  Chapter Three

  Bekah awakened to the worst smell ever known to the world and gagged, vomiting onto the packed earthen floor. Dead Sift. They smelled bad enough alive, but brain matter seeping into the dirt? There just wasn’t a cesspool equal to the raw stink of that.

  She hurt everywhere, side mostly, but the claw scratches had stiffened up her shoulder overnight considerably. She was a mess. A mess with no help in sight. She’d really counted on the Healers of the Limont Clan to get her back to fighting form.

  She pulled herself up, wincing, and scooted away from the fallen beast and vomit. If only she could get away from its stench as easily.

  Okay, so what now? She took stock of the situation. The village had been abandoned. Partially burned. On purpose or by a random strike of lightning without anyone present to put out the fire? Nature could do as much damage—if not more than man. Just look what nature had created with a Moon Sifter’s dark magic? Sifts sprang into her century like maggots on a rotting corpse.

  So the village had already been abandoned. By the looks of things, three or four years ago, which meant her placement of landing in this century had been way off.

  Of course it had. Why should she begin having good luck now?

  The time rift from the early twenty-first century in Charity Greve’s Seattle apartment had been different. Large and volatile. Not that anyone from 2083 had seen a Sorcerer’s time rift, but it hadn’t been anything like Alexander had described it should be.