The Silver Bough Read Free Page B

rocks, nibbled by big-horned, bedraggled-looking sheep or goats. Some of them looked up as the bus lumbered past, staring across the distance from slotted yellow devil’s eyes. Veils of mist shivered and parted, floating away like ghostly spirits. At any moment, she thought, a couple of animatronic skeletons should lurch out at them, clanking and moaning to give the passengers a pleasurable fright.
    Finally, the bus stopped laboring so hard as the road leveled out, but then, almost immediately, it began winding downward in a long, slow descent. She looked down at a mountainside covered in dark green pines like a pelt of thick fur, and up at a glittering, roaring cascade of water that tumbled steeply down over rocks. There were no buildings anywhere. It was all wilderness, with nothing man-made in sight but the long and winding road.
    Except for the traffic, there was nothing to fix you to a particular era. The scene was magically timeless. Wander off across that rocky meadow, or into the shelter of that dark forest, far enough to lose the sight and sound of the highway, and you might find yourself in another century, meeting some hunky, shaggy, kilted Highlander…
    The fantasy was barely taking shape when she noticed the solitary figure of a man walking by the roadside ahead of the bus. He had a purposeful stride, like a man who had been walking a long time with a clear aim in view, yet he wasn’t dressed like a recreational hiker. He wasn’t wearing a rucksack or a brightly colored windbreaker or hiking boots. His clothes were nondescript, but wrong for the setting; like his leather slip-ons, they belonged to an indoor life.
He might have dashed out like that to pick up a pizza, but what is he doing out here in the mountains? Where is his car?
    She leaned forward, pressing her face close to the window, wondering if he’d signal to the bus driver to pick him up. Sure enough, she saw him stop and half turn, looking up at the noisy approach. But his look was not for the driver. Instead, it skated across the passenger windows until it found hers.
    The feeling—
    Later, trying to describe it to herself, she compared it to the description in one of the
Harry Potter
books of the effect of the magical portkey. She remembered Harry’s feeling that a hook just behind his navel had been yanked to pull him forward—yes, it was like that, something at once magical and visceral, although for herself the location of the hook was somewhat lower down.
    It happened in an instant, when his eyes met hers, and it was over almost as quickly—and unlike the fictional portkey, it did not carry her out of the bus and to another place. It couldn’t have lasted, that connection, more than a second or two, because by then the bus had roared past, and although she twisted around in her seat to keep him in view, in a matter of moments, tilting vertiginously, the bus swept around another bend, and the walking man was out of sight.
    She fell back in her seat and tried to breathe normally. She felt herself throbbing all over.
What the hell was that?
    But she knew, all right.
    Lust. Pure lust.
    She put her hand on the empty seat beside her, imagining Freya’s raucous laughter.
Get over it! He was a hunk, so what? Do you think he spoke English? There’ll be another one along in about fifteen minutes, if you can wait that long.
    Maybe this was another product of jet lag and sleep deprivation, an emotion out of the same stable as the remote detachment with which she’d viewed Glasgow. It was movie time again, where a single, sexually charged look between strangers turned into the tragedy of
Romeo and Juliet.
    Or maybe…maybe it hadn’t happened at all. Maybe she’d been asleep and dreaming.
    Frowning, she sat up straighter. Now that was ridiculous. She would know if she’d been asleep. He had been real. She remembered a pair of dark, rather narrow eyes, and how they’d found hers. Like an aftershock, she felt the power of his look again: The