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  PRAISE FOR

  TOWARD A

  SECRET SKY

  “Full of intrigue, savvy world-building, and sizzling romantic tension, Maclean’s enthralling storytelling will keep readers flipping pages—and wanting more.”

  —EMILY KING, author of The Hundredth Queen

  “Five stars! This was the type of thrilling story I always dreamed of reading when I was younger (way before paranormal romance became popular)!”

  —SHAILA PATEL, author of Soulmated,

  winner of the 2015 Chanticleer

  Book Reviews’ Paranormal Awards

  “Five stars! Mysterious, romantic, and totally fun! Toward a Secret Sky is the type of adventure I could lose myself in over and over again.”

  —STEPHANIE GARBER, author of Caraval

  “I enjoyed this so much. It has just the right combination of magic, intrigue, and romance, and the beautiful Scottish backdrop and descriptions of various ancient sites just made it all the more appealing.”

  —HEATHER FAWCETT, author of

  Even the Darkest Stars

  “I would definitely recommend to anyone who liked Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, or even fans of the Princess Diaries. The book is fantastic overall!”

  —CLAIRE M. ANDREWS, author of

  Olympus Rising

  DEDICATION

  To my childhood heroes: librarians.

  Docents of the public domain

  who regularly rescued me from my own small world

  and sent me on countless adventures.

  BLINK

  Toward a Secret Sky

  Copyright © 2017 by Heather Maclean

  This title is also available as a Blink ebook.

  Requests for information should be addressed to:

  Blink, 3900 Sparks Drive SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

  Epub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780310754770

  ISBN 978-0-310-75474-9

  Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers in this book are offered as a resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by the publisher, nor does the publisher vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any character resemblances to persons living or dead are coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  BLINK™ is a registered trademark of the Zondervan Corporation.

  Cover design:Brand Navigation

  Interior design: Denise Froehlich

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 /LSC/ 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  “THIS IS LOVE: TO FLY TOWARD A

  SECRET SKY, TO CAUSE A HUNDRED

  VEILS TO FALL EACH MOMENT. FIRST

  TO LET GO OF LIFE. FINALLY, TO TAKE

  A STEP WITHOUT FEET.”

  —RUMI

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Toward a Secret Sky

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER 1

  I was okay until they started lowering my mom’s casket into the ground.

  Up to that point, the whole funeral had felt like an out-of-body experience. I walked around inside my own thick-walled aquarium. My motions were slow. My thoughts bogged down. I knew I was on display—everyone craning their necks to catch the slightest ripple of my movement. The obituary in the paper that morning hadn’t helped:

  Anna Hamilton, systems analyst for T.A., Inc., passed away in a freak accident on Tuesday night. She is preceded in death by her husband, Hugh, and is survived by her only daughter, Maren, age 17.

  Freak. It might as well have been my middle name. And everyone knew it wasn’t an “accident.” I could hear the whispers of the people from her company at the funeral. I knew what they were saying; their too-loud whispers slithered through the air like a toxic smoke.

  Isn’t she the one who found the body? Poor thing.

  What will she do now? She’s a veritable orphan!

  I heard they’re shipping her off to his parents in Scotland. It’s a shame she’s never met them. It’s a shame she never met him . . .

  But I didn’t care, because I was safe behind the glass. Nothing could get in and touch me, not even grief.

  Nothing, that is, until the screaming started.

  We were gathered around the jagged hole that meant to swallow the most important thing in my life. My father died before I was born. Well, on the day I was born, and my mother was all I had. We’d been inseparable, and now we were going to be separated forever. I couldn’t think that way, though, or I’d climb into the ground with her.

  I was staring ahead, eyes unfocused, lost in the mournful symphony of the squeaking pulleys, when a sudden scream shattered everything. An unearthly, guttural wail unlike anything I’d ever heard before. For one horrifying moment, I believed it was actually coming from the grave; that it was my mom screaming.

  Before I could think anything else, I was shoved forward. I fell, and tiny blades of grass bit at my face. Shadows darkened the ground as thunder roared. I’d grown up in Missouri, so I knew that early spring storms frequently rolled in with no warning. They didn’t bother me; you just ducked and covered. It wasn’t until I raised my head and saw the priest running for his car, his robe flapping wildly around his ankles, that I started to get scared.

  By the time I got up, almost everyone was gone. All the handsome men from my mom’s firm clad in their dark suits had disappeared—as if they’d been blown away.

  Someone grabbed my arm to lead me away from the open grave waiting to digest my mom’s shiny white coffin, but I dug my heels into the ground. I didn’t want to go.

  Who’s going to protect her from the rain? I thought crazily. The mud is going to ruin her pretty blue dress. Not that I’d actually seen her in the dress. The manner in which she died demanded a closed casket. But I did pick the dress out of her closet.

  The screaming and the thunder continued. Someone lifted me, tried to drag me away from my mother. I fought them and clawed at their back with my nails. I wanted to run back to the coffin, open it up, and lie down next to my mom. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I didn’t want her to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone . . .

  I leaned against the cool glass and studied the scenery as the outdated, purple shuttle bus wound through the Scottish Highlands. The hills
were broken up and sharp-looking. Prickly plants and crumbling rocks littered the ground. Huge pine trees rose to the sky like alien life-forms. And the mountains in the distance were topped with snow.

  The van headed toward Aviemore, the tiny town where my dad had been born. The last time he’d been there, he hadn’t yet married my mom. In fact, his parents didn’t approve of the match and had refused to come to the wedding. They never spoke again, and when my mom had me, she must not have felt the need to reach out to people who hated her. People I was now going to live with.

  That was twenty years ago, I reminded myself. Surely, they wouldn’t hold a grudge against me, especially since, from the photographs I’d seen, I resembled my father . . .

  My mother was totally beautiful—a former Miss Springfield—and I looked nothing like her. While she had olive skin and shiny black hair, I got my Scottish father’s pale white coloring, light green eyes, and crazy, thick, curly blonde hair. The kind of hair that once made a hairdresser cry because the haircut came with a free blow-dry, and she hadn’t counted on the whole process taking three hours. Of course, it wasn’t California blonde or even all-the-same-color blonde. It was, someone once told me, “dishwater blonde.” Just what my self-esteem needed: hair that reminded people of dirty water.

  “Try ’n stay awake,” the van driver offered, as we pulled up to a large stone house. “The trick to besting jet lag is to get into the new time as quickly as possible. Don’t be taking a nap today, no matter what anyone says.”

  Before I knew it, I was standing alone on the gravel driveway between my two, large, soiled red suitcases.

  It was hard to tell from the outside how many stories my grandparents’ house was. The roof was impossibly steep, covered in zigzags where the shingles rose and fell at different heights. A single dormer window protruded out of the roof at the very top. I hoped it was an actual room and not just architectural decoration or a useless attic; someplace I could hide out.

  Large, flat rocks covered the walls of my grandparents’ house, so slick with the constant Scottish moisture that moss grew in the cracks. The house appeared old, but solid, like it could stand through any storm. I hoped I wasn’t going to be the bad luck that brought it down.

  Before I could survey the house any further, my grandparents burst out the front door. I had been dreading this moment for days, because old people make me really uncomfortable, especially old people I’ve never met, and especially old people that might possibly hate me. Would they be hunched over one of those walkers with tennis balls on the bottom? Still have all their teeth? Would they be cold to me? I braced myself just in case.

  They answered my concerns about their sprightliness as they bounded across the slippery grass to greet me. And they seemed to like me well enough. They hugged and squeezed me, held me back at arm’s length, admired me, squeezed me again, kissed me on each cheek, and clucked over me. But my grandfather took no time in proudly showing me his missing tooth.

  “Murdo, stop it! You’re scaring the girl,” my grandmother scolded him.

  “Och,” he answered, with the thickest accent I’d ever heard. “I only wanted to show the wee thing that she oughtn’t be alarmed at the space in my mouth, because I was getting my bridge back tomorrow!”

  I smiled politely, but couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Thankfully, my grandmother spoke. “How was your flight, dear?”

  “Fine,” I mumbled. I glanced around, desperate for some common ground, for something, anything to say. “Do you play a lot of golf?” I asked, nodding at a set of clubs on the porch.

  “Do I play a lot of golf?” my grandfather boomed. “Does a bear crap in the woods?”

  “Murdo!” my grandmother chided again. I couldn’t help but chuckle just a little. These were definitely not the mean old people I’d expected to meet. They were actually kind of funny.

  “Yes, I play as much golf as Mother Nature and my bum knee will allow,” my grandfather continued. “As Liz here well knows, my fondest wish is that I die on the golf course. Club in my hand, right by the tee, what a way to—”

  “MURDO!” my grandmother shouted. “Do shut up!”

  “Oh, sorry, sorry,” my grandfather apologized. “Me and my big mouth. I shouldn’t be joking about death . . . with your mum and all.”

  I kept smiling, without teeth, but my eyes filled with tears. Is this really my new life?

  I felt my grandmother’s thin arm around my shoulders. “Come now, dear. I’ve got your room all prepared for you. You must be exhausted after such a long journey. What you need is a wee nap, and you’ll be right as rain.”

  I lay on the bed in my new room, determined not to fall asleep.

  The small room was stuffed with ancient, mismatched furniture: a rolltop desk marred by varnish bubbles, a shabby, fabric-covered armchair, and a massive armoire for clothes. Faded pink floral wallpaper that oozed apart at the seams clung to the walls and even the vaulted ceiling.

  I didn’t care about the room’s décor. Its location more than made up for anything. The rooftop window did belong to a real room—a single room at the very top of the house. And it was mine.

  I was kissing the hottest guy ever. He was so hot, even his hair was red. We were lounging in the long grass, kissing deeply, like it was our new way of breathing.

  It was hot outside, and the kissing was making me even hotter. Everywhere he touched me, my skin burned. I’d never kissed anyone before, and certainly not like this.

  The sun was blinding me, searing my eyes. Even when I squeezed them shut, I still saw and felt a deep, hot red.

  When he started kissing my neck, I wanted to melt into him. I opened my eyes and discovered that he actually was melting. His body liquefied into a pool of blood that burned into my stomach. I started cramping, curled my body into a tight ball, and screamed.

  My eyes shot open. Tiny pink flowers. Sloped ceiling. So moving to Scotland wasn’t a dream.

  Hopefully, I hadn’t screamed out loud. I shook my head and tried to calm my racing heart.

  I hadn’t had a bad dream since the night before my mom died. I slid off the soft bed, not wanting to believe that my nightmares had followed me to Scotland. Maybe they weren’t back for good. Maybe this was an isolated one—a hallucinatory effect of extreme emotional and physical exhaustion. At least no one had died in this one. Except maybe me . . .

  I shook my head and reminded myself that my worst nightmare had already come true: I’d lost my mom. At this point, if I died kissing a hot guy, so be it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Fear of future nightmares didn’t stop me from spending my entire first week in Scotland in bed. And, thankfully, neither did my grandparents. They were super sweet, but treated me like a guest, not a long-lost grandchild, which was fine with me. I wasn’t up for a family reunion. I wasn’t up for anything. I wasn’t even up.

  I missed my house, my old room, and more than anything, I missed my mom. When I crawled under the covers and closed my eyes, I was back in Missouri, back with her.

  I only emerged to eat, and I was not excited by the food I found waiting for me. Breakfast, which I’d always assumed was a fairly safe meal for picky eaters, in Scotland consisted of insane things like clotted cream and black pudding. The first is exactly what it sounds like: chunky, spoiled, warm cream. The second is not to be believed, let alone eaten under any circumstance: congealed pig’s blood deep-fried, sliced, and eaten with a knife and fork.

  Even the “normal” food in Scotland wasn’t normal. French fries, which were called “chips,” looked like the fries back home, but instead of being crispy and yummy, they were soggy and not. Chips were called “crisps,” which was a true description, but they didn’t have any fun flavors like ranch or hickory barbeque. In fact, they didn’t barbeque anything at all. They’d never heard of brownies or cornbread (“Why would you put corn in a bread?” my grandmother asked). They’d heard of peanut butter, but they didn’t believe in eating it. They didn’t put ice in their d
rinks (“Waste of money,” my grandfather explained). And even though the can was identical, their Diet Coke tasted gross.

  By the sixth day, after I’d eaten every crushed mint and fuzzy piece of gum in the bottom of my backpack, I couldn’t ignore my rumbling stomach. I was miserable enough without the headache from my unintentional hunger strike. I needed to get out and find edible food.

  When I came down the stairs and announced my desire to go to the grocery store, my grandparents greeted me with the same exaggerated politeness I’d gotten since I’d first arrived. My grandfather said he would be delighted to drive me, and my grandmother smiled widely from around her romance novel.

  They were nothing but nice, but I had the feeling they would treat a beggar off the street the same way. The thought stirred something inside me. I wanted them to treat me differently than a stranger—bad, good, anything but this fake pleasant nothingness.

  I’d been frozen in a state of numbness since my mom died, but I’d always been the opposite: very passionate about everything, bordering on histrionic, according to my mother (although, compared to a systems analyst, like my mom, anyone with a pulse could be considered overly dramatic). I realized I needed to feel something again.

  I wasn’t ready to dig into my own damaged life, but decided it would be interesting to pick at my grandparents’. I didn’t know how, but I was going to break through their façade and find out what they were hiding behind their charming, gap-toothed grins.

  My grandfather took the opportunity of my first trip out of the house to give me a quick driving tour of Aviemore. Scotland felt a little like being in Wonderland; everything looked pretty much the same, but was ever so slightly different. The people spoke English, but I had trouble understanding them because they had such thick accents and used weird words for regular things, like brollie for “umbrella” and bairn for “baby.” The cars not only drove on the wrong side of the road, the driver and the passenger seats were switched. And I discovered via an almost-accident that you had to pay money to unlock public restroom stalls, like a vending machine for pee.