Free The Queen of Swords: A Paranormal Tale of Undying Love by Nina Mason Page A

to cross it but feared it might break, plunging her into the abyss below.
    At last, he went on, his voice low, his words tinted with the sepia of another time. “I was born on Christmas Eve in the year seventeen hundred and eighty four. ’Twas a Friday, at the stroke of midnight, and by all reports, my head crowned just as the clock began to strike the hour. I had a caul, which was sold to one Angus MacGregor, a victim of the clearings who was bound for Nova Scotia on the tide.”
    How odd. She too had been born with a caul, a rare and harmless membrane around the head and face of a newborn. Was it significant they’d both been born with one?
    He pulled on his cigarette and, while exhaling, glanced at her from over his shoulder. “Do you ken about the clearings?”
    She nodded. Her fascination with Scotland extended to its history. The clearings or clearances were a terrible time when the chiefs of the Highland clans evicted their tenant farmers, most their own kinsmen, so they could rent the land for sheep grazing.
    “I still remember the smoke when they burned the cottages so those driven out couldn’t return ,” he said, returning his gaze to the window. “And seeing those poor, turned-out families in the glens with everything they owned strapped to their stooped backs.” His voice took on a faraway quality as he added, “It’s strange what I remember. And what I’ve forgotten.”
    She could not imagine living so long a life. Nor could she imagine living her s, brief in comparison, without him in it. Even though they’d only just met, it was as if he’d always been part of her, but dormant or hibernating.
    “My mother ought to have kept it .” His voice was still pensive and distant. “Or, at the very least, let me keep it.”
    She knew he meant the caul, but didn’t understand why anyone should want to keep such a thing. “Why?”
    He turned and met her eyes, his expression drawn and grim. “Because, in another of God’s cruel ironies, she drowned. Along with my father. Orphaning me at the age of sixteen.”
    He turned back to the window, folded his arms, and smoked in pregnant silence for what seemed an eternity. She didn’t press him to continue. Clearly, the memory of his parents gave him pain. Would she grieve for hers two hundred years hence? Would she miss them at all? Somehow, she doubted it.
    “Why should your mother have let you keep it? The caul, I mean.”
    “Because a caul is also said to be a talisman against the dark arts.”
    His words, soft and strained with emotion, made her think. If his “curse,” as he called it, was a product of dark magick, it might be possible to break it.
    “They say those born with a caul possess preternatural abilities, though I was unaware of any special powers. I could not even see the spirit said to reside in my own castle.”
    She could see spirits. Was her caul the reason? Was it also the source of her other abilities? “Who haunts your castle?”
    “ My Granda, supposedly. The caretaker claims to have seen him, though I never have.”
    She smiled at his use of Granda, the Scots term for grandfather. “Did you know him in life?”
    “Aye. We were very close for a time.”
    “Will you tell me about him?”
    “If I start, I shall never stop.”
    He went quiet again and she could feel the emotion radiating off of him in waves. Did he know her true purpose in summoning him? Could he read her mind? He started toward her, quickening her pulse, but only put out his cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand. He then stood there a long moment gazing down at her, looking very much as he had in her vision. She bit her lip as the same longing she’d felt then pulsed through her again.
    She swallowed again. “Will you sit by me?”
    “Believe me, lass,” he said with chilling gravity. “When you’ve heard the rest, you’ll wish me as far away as possible.”             
    She pulled her gaze away from his and lowered it to her hands,