Fickle Fates and Dark Secrets

You can't spell life with out a little LIE

"-so helplessly lost! Please, if you could just point me in the direction of a highway or interstate... Wait, do you guys call them interstates here?" I waved my hands as if to erase that train of thought. "Big road. I need a big road." And a big glass of vodka. Or wine. Hell, I'd even take a beer at the moment.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to take a pit stop for the night and partake in a little happy hour at the quaint Scottish pub that I had managed to find on this very narrow, very bendy, very remote road. If you could even call it a road at this point. I needed to get back to civilization, and my only hopes of achieving that was getting directions from the large Scottish men that surrounded me. I don't think they were used to small redheads in sports cars wondering into their bars. Although to be fair, the once sleek Porsche sitting outside was probably a bad call if the mud caked on the red body was any indication. But it had been too tempting to pass up when The Agency was the one picking up the tab.

"Well, what are you doing out here anyway?" The man was alright looking. Probably the best looking I'd seen since getting there, and he was definitely the pick of the litter in terms of the three men and bartender that were leaning on the scarred wood of the bar around me. They eyed me with interest. They didn't stand a chance.

If I'm being blunt, I'm attractive. Not a grand beauty by any stretch of the imagination, but I've never had a hard time getting male attention while back in America. Scotland proved no different in that category.

"My boyfriend and I are on vacation here, and I got all mad over some silly little argument and took the car and just drove and drove and drove, and I was in such a tizzy, I completely forgot to look where I was going." The lie slipped easily off my tongue. The men around me nodded their heads in sweet, gullible sympathy. I was a master at weaving tales, and the slight taste of magic that influenced my words helped.

However, something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. Two older men and a woman stiffened at a table. I held in my sigh. That was something very different from America. The Scots that weren't interested in taking me to bed were a lot more suspicious than their American counterparts. My small frame, rounded face with high cheek-bones, and wide green eyes gave me a girlishly innocent look that lulled people into trusting me. Scots were also a lot more openminded in the supernatural department, so I tried to keep the magic to a minimum. Or at least not a maximum.

"Aye, Philip, you got a map around here?" The man with the a somewhat crooked nose and large round eyes turned to the bartender.

The bartender-Philip, presumedly- snapped his scrawny frame up from where it had been leaning on the bar and headed toward the warped black door at the back, all while nodding his head.

Thirty minutes later, I was back on the road this time armed with a map. Fucking maps. I knew how to read them, but they were never easy. And does Scotland not believe in road signs? Or cell service? The hardest part of this task has easily been the lack of those two things.

I looked back at the god forsaken map on the passenger seat. This unmarked road was supposed fork into another unmarked road pretty soon. I looked back through the windshield right as the first fat raindrop hit. Then another. And another.

"Fother mucker." My eyes strained to see the road through the sheets of rain now pelting my beautiful car. "Where's the turn? Where's the turn?" It had to be close. "There!" I whipped the steering wheel of the magnificent Italian machinery.

You know how they say hindsight is always 20/20? Well, in hindsight, I should have rented a truck. Or something with four wheel drive.

My wheels spun as the front of the car jerked left, and the back of my car lost traction and swung out behind me. I slammed on the breaks as I lost control and my car slid off the narrow road into the grassy plain. I breathed a sigh of relief as I leaned my head back against the headrest. That could have been so much worse. I picked up my head as I turned my wheel back toward the road and gently pressed the gas. Nothing. I pressed a bit harder. The sound of my engine was accompanied by rubber churning mud.