His eyes flared. “You’ll come? Without knowing where I’m taking you?”

“If you think I’ve come this far to be dumped along the wayside, you don’t know me very well, MacKeltar,” she said lightly, seeking strength in levity. The moment was simply too tense. “I’m the woman who snooped beneath your bed, remember? I’m slave to my curiosity. If you’re going somewhere, I am too. You’re not getting away from me yet.” God, had she really said that?

“That sounds as if you’re telling me you plan to keep me, lass.” His eyes narrowed and he went very still.

Chloe caught her breath. It was so similar to her dream!

He smiled then, a slow smile that caused tiny lines about his eyes to crinkle, and for a moment something danced within the coppery depths. Something younger and . . . free and breathtakingly beautiful. “I’m yours for the asking, sweet.”

She forgot how to breathe for a moment.

Then his eyes went cool again and abruptly, he turned back toward the center slab and wrote a series of symbols. “Hold my hand and doona let go.”

“Keep him safe, Chloe,” Gwen shouted, as a sudden, fierce wind kicked up through the stones, scattering dried leaves in swirling eddies of mist.

Safe from what? Chloe wondered.

And then she wondered no more, because suddenly the stones began spinning in a circle around her—but that wasn’t possible! And even while she was arguing with herself over what was and was not possible, she lost the ground and was upside down, or something, and then she lost the sky too. Grass and twilight swirled together, speckled by a mad rush of stars. The wind soared to a deafening howl, and suddenly she was . . . different somehow. She glanced wildly about for Drustan and Gwen, but they were gone, and she could see nothing at all, not even Dageus. A terrible gravity seemed to be pulling at her, sucking her in and stretching her out, bending her in impossible ways. She thought she heard a sonic boom, and then suddenly there was a flash of white so blinding that she lost all sense of sight and sound.

She could no longer feel Dageus’s hand.

She could no longer feel her own hand!

She tried to open her mouth and scream, but she had no mouth to open. The white grew ever more intense and, though there was no longer any sense of motion, she felt a nauseating vertigo. There was no sound, but the silence itself seemed to have crushing substance.

Just when she was certain she couldn’t endure it one more instant, the white was gone so abruptly that the blackness slammed into her with all the force of a Mack truck.