Knight of Pentacles (Knights of the Tarot Book 3) Read Free

gone behind a cloud and the glen was darker than before. Even with the aid of the torch, she could only see a step or two in front of her. All at once, the wood seemed haunted. Eyes watched from behind every tree. Nothing looked familiar. The hairs on the back of her neck prickling, she shone the beam right and left, unable to recall which way she’d come.
    Choosing a direction, she hurried down the path a little way, searching the illuminated shrubbery for anything familiar. Gnarled roots reached out to trip her. Branches clawed at her face and hair. Spider webs endeavored to ensnare her.
    An owl hooted, shattering Jenna’s courage along with the silence. As fear flooded her system, she broke into a run. Heaven help her. She was lost in a dark wood inhabited by God alone knew what.
    Over the pounding in her ears, her rational mind whispered, “You are acting like a complete imbecile. There are no creatures more terrifying than badgers in these woods.”
    Returning to her senses, Jenna slowed to a walk and threw a backward glance toward the waterfall. The man was just a man, and his reasons for bathing in the falls were no business of hers. Extreme fatigue coupled with the emotional distress of her cancelled wedding, looming poverty, and unresolved car trouble had robbed her of her logic. She was quite sure that, in the sobering light of morning, she would look back on this momentary episode of madness and have a good laugh. Right now, however, she just wanted to find that bloody cottage and put herself and this crappy day to bed.
    After walking in circles for another half hour, she sat down on a rock she’d passed several times and opened her handbag. As she felt around for the directions, her fingers grazed an item she’d forgotten all about in her anguish. Her mother’s scorched grimoire. On a whim, she’d put it in her purse, thinking she might finally summon the courage to look through its pages.
    When she’d first saved it from the fire, she couldn’t understand the words and drawings inside. It seemed to be written in gibberish and glyphs. A cipher to protect dark secrets, no doubt. Later, after her father, who’d set the fire to burn his late wife’s Pagan books, frightened Jenna with his talk of Satan, she grew too afraid to look again. Not sure what to do with the book, she hid it in the back of a drawer and eventually forgot all about it. A few days ago, she came upon it while packing up her flat.
    I cannot risk my own immortal soul by marrying someone so susceptible to the darkness.
    And she could not give up all hope of happiness by marrying a man who condemned who she really was. Her gifts, God bless them, had saved her from following in her mother’s tragic footsteps.
    Leaving the spell book for later, Jenna studied the map under the beam of her torch. The cottage, to her relief, was hidden in the trees a few yards ahead. Numb and leaden-limbed, she found her way there and, after struggling for a minute with the combination lock-box, released the key.
    As she opened the front door, the disagreeable smell of mildew rushed out to greet her. Too tired to care about the mustiness or anything else, she threw her purse on a chair, kicked off her shoes, and curled up on the sofa under her cloak. Moments after shutting her eyes, she tumbled into a deep and dreamless slumber.
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    In olden times, the maidens of Rosemarkie decorated the pools of Faery Glen with flowers to entice the faery who lived there to keep the village’s water supply clean. Now, they brought Axel other oblations, many of which they left in an abandoned well near a curve in the footpath. Today, he discovered something in the rotting wooden bucket that had been illegal in the Viking enclave in the north of Scotland where he grew up.
    Love poems.
    In his day and age, suitors who wrote such intimate verses were presumed to know their subjects more intimately than the rules of courtship permitted—a presumption that often