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is,” snorted Gavin. He looked me up and down, a little disapproving smirk on his face. First he’d wanted to bite me, now he was my judge and jury?
    “Oh fuck you,” I shouted. “I never asked to be anyone’s maiden.” To Alec, I added, “You should have never brought me here or at least let me leave when I wanted to, then none of this would’ve happened.”
    “That’s not how it is with a dragon and his maiden,” Alec said. “We’re destined for each other. To turn away from fate’s desire is to invite death.”
    “Okay, well, maybe that’s how dating worked back in your day, but in the twenty-first century, we don’t believe in destiny or fate. They don’t exist.”
    All three men rolled their eyes at me, which made me want to smack them in turn. I made my own fate and destiny was a word used only by fake psychics.
    Not true, sniffed the voice in my gut.
    Shut up, I growled at it. I’d been a modern woman in a modern world before it showed up. I’d never asked for this fucking magic, never wanted to lift the veil. Now I’d added a missing dragon shifter to the mix. Like I knew anything about that.
    “You see the future, right, lass?” Niall’s voice intruded on my thoughts. “Can you not look to see where Malcolm is or where he will be?”
    “He has to be here. The curse wouldna let him go any further.” Gavin headed for the stairs, his stride full of purpose. “I will go search for him. If there’s magic here in Inverness beyond our own, it canna hide from us.”
    A vision sucker punched me just then, coming out of nowhere. I gasped and fell to my knees as white hot pain twisted through my head. I saw women, a group of them and they were full of magic. The witches. It had to be. The energy’s flavor was the same as the storm, which now that I was focused on it, I realized it matched what I’d felt in Rome.
    They gathered around their prize, but shrieked with fury when they saw it wasn’t me. Malcolm lay in a motionless heap, unaware of the stir he’d caused. The witches pawed at him, moving almost as one, like they shared some kind of hive mind or some other weirdness I could really live without learning about.
    They weren’t in Inverness. Not even close, although I couldn’t pinpoint a city. I had a sense of yawning distance, a jump through time and space followed by a hard landing. Somehow their magic had circumvented the curse anchoring the dragon shifters in place. I wondered if that meant Malcolm could now shift.
    Taking a cue from my thoughts, the scene changed, spinning like a whirling top before settling on another moment in the future, one where Malcolm lived in a dark stone room with a tiny slit for a window.  His clothing was tattered and his ribs ran in a raised row up and down his chest. He’d been starved.
    Shift, I thought at him. Escape.
    He stirred, raising his head and looked at me as if he could see me. “I canna, lass. You must save me another way.”
    And then the vision was gone. My consciousness returned to the turret, the floor feeling unsteady and uncertain beneath my feet. My eyes closed, I folded in on myself until I huddled on the floor, hands pressed against my temples.
    Someone kneeled next to me and touched my shoulder. “What did you see, lass?” Alec asked, his voice gentle.
    I whimpered. My temples throbbed, pain sizzling through me like hot fireworks. For all that the vision had cost me, I’d accomplished nothing.
    “Please, lass. Tell us. He’s our brother. Our flesh and our blood.” This was Niall and the pleading sincerity in his voice twisted my heart. I remembered what it was like to have a family and I knew too well the agony of having them all ripped from you, destroyed to serve someone else’s mad whim.
    “Not to mention our mage. We will lose our way out without Malcolm,” added Gavin.
    I shuddered as the headache grew to include my back. Electric tingles zapped along my nervous system as if I had my own personal source of