To one woman.
Agnes.
I sucked in a sharp breath. The thread was unlike anything I’d seen before—even with Greta, even with Matthew. It was braided and shimmering with multiple colors—deep loch blue, molten gold, and moss green. It twanged with purpose, stretching taut between the island and Agnes’s small, fierce frame at the rim of the gully.
“Agnes,” I shouted.
She startled, one hand flying to her chest. “What? What is it?”
I could barely drag my gaze away from the thread humming above us. Images hit me in flashes of Agnes as a wee girl, toes in the loch, Agnes as a teenager sketching the island from the shore, Agnes in her shop, facing toward the loch.
She wasn’t just part of Loren Brae’s story.
She was pivotal to it.
“Liora?” Zara’s voice came from very far away and very close all at once, layered over the chant still pouring from her mouth. “What do you see?”
“I,” I whispered, eyes locked on the thread, “think we’ve got a bigger problem here.”
“There’s more,” Zara gasped, and I whipped my head back to the loch to see the surface disrupted. “They’ve brought friends. I can only dissuade them so long.”
The water beyond the Kelpies heaved, a swell rising that had nothing to do with wind. The surface bulged, then collapsed inward, then bulged again, as if something colossal was coiling deep below.
The Kelpies tossed their heads and screamed, not in rage this time but in something like exultation.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Kaia shouted. “We need to get them out.”
“What do we do?” Graham shouted, frustration deep in his voice.
The loch answered for him.
A massive ripple rolled outward from the island, waves slapping against the rocky shore. The air dropped a few degrees, a chill sinking straight to the marrow of my bones.
Then the water exploded.
A creature erupted from the depths with a roar that shook the trees.
It was not Nessie. It was worse.
Longer than The Tipsy Thistle and the bookshop combined, its serpentine body was armored in overlapping plates that shimmered like wet slate. A mane of water and kelp streamed from a crown of horned ridges along its skull, and its eyes glowed a furious, otherworldly teal. Great fins flared along its spine, each beat sending torrents cascading back into the loch. Its mouth opened, revealing rows upon rows of needle teeth, and the sound that tore out of it was half dragon roar…half tidal wave.
The beast of all beasts.
The Kelpies reared around it, shrieking in wild joy, as if they’d just called their gigantic, horrifying cousin in for backup.
Beside me, Zara’s chant faltered, her fingers crushing mine so hard my knuckles ground together.
“Well,” I whispered, heart hammering so hard I felt a bit sick. “Bugger.”
Torin’s shout cracked through the chaos—raw, panicked, furious in a way I had never heard from him before.
“Liora!”
I jerked upward, heart seizing.
Torin wasn’t at the top of the gully anymore.
He was moving through the trees.