Mystical Warrior by Janet Chapman Page A

up whatever nails she could find, praying to Godthat Trace Huntsman wouldn’t take out his anger at her on a poor, innocent puppy.
    “I’m picking them up!” she screamed as she frantically searched the ground. “I’ll find every last one, I promise! Please, just give me time to find them!”
    “Here, this will help,” he said quietly, setting a rectangular piece of metal the size of a shoe on the ground and then walking away.
    Misneach bounded up and started licking her face, and Fiona blindly pulled the puppy under her as she leaned over him. She swiped at her eyes with the back of one hand as she held her pet protectively beneath her, and picked up the heavy piece of metal—only to discover several nails stuck to the underside of it.
    “It’s a magnet,” her landlord said from several feet away as he started unrolling the plastic. “Just run it over the ground, and it will attract the nails. Then brush them off into the pail and run it over the ground again.”
    With a whispered plea for Misneach to behave himself, Fiona began working as quickly as her shaking allowed, her silent tears of relief dripping onto her hands. She could actually hear the nails clinking against the mysterious metal as she pushed the tall grass aside to slide it over the ground.
    The magnet held such power that she had a difficult time prying off the nails. But every time she lifted it up, several dozen more nails were clinging to it, and in less than five minutes, she had the pail nearly full.
    But even more magical than the magnet was that Trace Huntsman hadn’t flown into a rage. In fact, she saw him giving Misneach playful little shoves as he unrolled the plastic along the back side of the house. But as fewer andfewer nails clung to the magnet each time she lifted it, and her shaking subsided and her tears dried up, Fiona’s terror slowly turned to shame.
    She had utterly humiliated herself in front of this man, and probably lost any chance she might have had of getting him to respect her as a modern woman.
    Maybe she should go live in the woods.
    “You’ve found most of them,” he said, pulling a knife out of a large pocket on his work belt and cutting the plastic. Then he cut the cord binding the bundle of wood. “Here, take these laths down to the other end of the house,” he said, holding out several of the flat sticks when she stood up. Only he didn’t immediately hand them over. “But first, you might want to put on the gloves I gave you.”
    Fiona patted the pockets of her coat, then spun around so he wouldn’t see her further humiliation as she tried to remember what she’d done with the gloves.
    Her cheeks burned like hot coals when she heard him sigh. “You’re not getting those gloves back,” he said, giving a chuckle, “unless you have a spare set of hawk wings under your coat.”
    Fiona turned to see him looking toward the ocean, and she spotted Misneach racing along the bottom of the bluff the house sat on, her leather gloves in his mouth. The pup splashed into one of the shallow tidal pools without even slowing down, tossed the gloves into the air, and then pounced on each one as it started to sink.
    “Misneach!” she shouted, looking for a place to descend the steep bank.
    But she came to an abrupt halt when Huntsman thrust the sticks toward her again. “Forget the gloves,” he said,walking away as soon as she took them. “We have only about an hour of daylight left to get this side of the house banked.”
    “Banked?” she repeated, although she was once again talking to his back and had to chase after him.
    “What did you do in the eleventh century to keep the snow from blowing through the cracks in your house?” he asked, lifting one edge of the plastic. He held it against the clapboards, about a foot above the granite foundation. “Here, hold one of those laths over the plastic while I nail it in place.”
    Fiona dropped the flat sticks onto the ground, picked one up, and then held it in