Spell of the Highlander

by Karen Marie Moning

  “Twenty-two days,” he murmured. After more than a millennium of biding time, his vengeance was now dependant upon a laughably finite number of days.

  Jessica St. James didn’t know it yet, but she was going to help him get them.

  If not willingly, then by means of every Dark Art he knew.

  And he knew a lot of them.

  Had practiced most of them. And excelled at all of them.

  Lucan wasn’t the only one who’d wanted the Dark Glass.

  4

  CASTLE KELTAR—SCOTLAND

  “You’ll ne’er believe this, Drustan,” Dageus MacKeltar said, glancing up as his twin brother, elder by three minutes, strolled into the library at Castle Keltar.

  “I doona think much would surprise me after all we’ve seen, brother, but try me,” Drustan said dryly. He crossed to a handsome mahogany serving bar, artfully crafted into a section of bookshelves, and poured himself a tumbler of Macallan, fine, aged, single-malt scotch.

  Dageus flipped through a few more pages of the scuffed leather tome he held, then placed it aside and stretched out his legs, folding his hands behind his head. Beyond tall velvet-draped windows, violet smudged a cobalt sky and he paused a moment, savoring the beauty of yet another Highland gloaming. Then, “You know how we’ve ever thought Cian MacKeltar naught more than a myth?”

  “Aye,” Drustan replied, moving to join him near the fire. “The legendary and terrible Cian: the only Keltar ancestor to ever willingly cross over to the Dark Arts—”

  “Not quite true, brother. So did I,” Dageus corrected softly.

  Drustan stiffened. “Nay, you acted out of love; ’twas a vastly different thing. This Cian—who, like as not, is pure fable crafted to reinforce our adherence to our oaths—did so out of unquenchable lust for power.”

  “Mayhap. Mayhap not.” Cynicism shaped the edges of Dageus’s smile. “I would place no wagers on what our progeny might say of me a thousand years hence.” He gestured to the tome. “‘Tis one of Cian MacKeltar’s journals.”

  Drustan stopped, halfway down into a chair, tumbler nearly to his lips. Silvery eyes, glittering with fascination, met his twin’s golden gaze. He lowered his glass, sank slowly into the chair. “Indeed?”

  “Aye, though a great many pages have been torn out, the notations were made by one Cian MacKeltar, who lived in the mid–ninth century.”

  “Is that the journal you said Da found in the hidden underground chamber library, last you went through the stones with Chloe to the sixteenth century?”

  The hidden underground library was the long, narrow chamber hewn of stone that stretched deep beneath the castle, wherein the vast majority of Keltar lore and relics, including the gold Compact struck between Tuatha Dé Danaan and Man, were housed. It had been sealed up, the entrance concealed behind a hearth, more than a millennium ago.

  Over time, the existence of the chamber had been completely forgotten. Vague tales that once the Keltar had possessed much more in the way of lore existed, but few believed and fewer still had searched for it, and those to no avail. It wasn’t until the castle housekeeper, Nell—who’d later wed their da, Silvan, and become their next-mother—had inadvertently triggered the opening mechanism while dusting one day, that it had been found again. Still, she’d said naught about it, believing Silvan knew, and would be upset if she had knowledge of his clan’s private doings. She would likely never have mentioned it to Silvan had Dageus not been in such desperate straits.

  Their da had briefly opened that chamber in the sixteenth century, but had resealed it in hopes of not altering events that had already transpired between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Drustan had recently agreed to make it again accessible for future generations. Since reopening it, Dageus had been translating the most ancient of the scrolls therein, recopying the fragile documents, and learning much more about their ancient benefactors in the process. And now, about one of their ancient ancestors.

  “Nay. That journal was but a record of recent events: handfastings, births, deaths. This journal deals with his studies into the Druid arts, much of it in cipher. ’Twas hidden beneath a cracked flagstone o’er which Chloe tripped. She suspects there may be more concealed about the chamber.”

  Dageus’s wife, Chloe, an avid historian, had set her heart on systematically cataloging the contents of the underground repository and, as Dageus couldn’t bear to be parted from her for any length of time, he’d resigned himself to spending a great deal of time (meaning, probably until the very moment his lovely, pregnant wife was about to deliver) in the dusty, subterranean compartment, hence the scribing task he’d assigned himself.

  He smiled. Better a dank chamber with his cherished Chloe than the sunniest Highland vista without her. Och, he amended fiercely, better Hell with Chloe than Heaven without her. Such was the depth of his love for the woman whom he’d taken captive in his darkest hour, who’d pledged her heart to him despite his actions, despite the evil within him.

  “So what does it tell us of this ancestor of ours?” Drustan said curiously, jarring him from his thoughts.

  Dageus snorted, disgruntled. He’d hoped for much more, and planned to dig deeper in the chamber to see what else he could uncover about their epic ancestor. He believed an understanding of the past was necessary to ensure a bright future, that those who forgot the past were condemned to repeat it. “From the parts I’ve managed to decipher, little more than that he was, in truth, a man, not a fable, and that the chamber was not forgotten but deliberately hidden from us. Da believed there’d been a battle or illness that had taken many lives abruptly, including all those who knew of the chamber. But ’twas not the case. The final entry in the journal is not his, but a warning about the use of magycks. Whoever made the entry also made the decision to seal the chamber, altering the rooms above to forever conceal it.”

  “Indeed?” Drustan’s brows rose.

  “Aye. So many pages have been torn out, I doona ken what Cian MacKeltar did that was so terrible, or what became his fate, but the last entry makes it plain that the chamber was secreted away because of him.”

  “Hmm,” Drustan mused, sipping his scotch. “It makes one wonder what a man might have done to cause such drastic measures to be taken—the separating of all future generations of Keltar from the bulk of our knowledge and power. ’Twas no small thing to divide us from our heritage.”

  “Aye,” Dageus said thoughtfully, “indeed, it does make one wonder.”

  “Can you frigging believe it, man? Somebody broke the guy’s neck and left him there on the commons, dead as a doornail!”

  “Great. That’s just what we need. More crime. The university’ll use it as another excuse to put the screws to us and raise tuition again.”

  Jessi shook her head, pushed her way through the group of undergrads loitering at the coffee bar. As she placed her order, she wondered if she’d ever been so young, or so faux-jaded. She hoped not.

  Campus was abuzz with gossip. The police had released few details, so everyone was pretending to know something. Funny thing was, she really did know something about the blond, well-dressed “John Doe” found dead on the campus commons yesterday, and she was the only one not talking.

  And she wasn’t about to.

  When she’d flipped on the TV last night, only to discover the local news featuring a story on the murder of one of the two men she’d spent most of the day convincing herself weren’t real, she’d sat, stunned, staring blankly at the screen long after the segment had ended.

  The police were investigating the blond man’s murder. He’d carried no identification and they’d issued a statement asking anyone who might know something about him to come forward.

  All of which begged the questions: If the rest of the world could see the blond man, too, did that mean she wasn’t crazy?

  Or did it mean that the blond man was real, but she’d still hallucinated the man in the mirror and accompanying events?

  Or did it mean she was so-far-g
one crazy that now she was hallucinating news programs in a sick (though—if she had to say so herself—admirably determined and impressively cohesive) effort to lend credibility to her delusions?

  Ugh. Tough questions.

  She’d mulled over such convoluted thoughts for hours, until finally, in the wee hours of dawn, she’d achieved a measure of calm via a firm resolution: She would approach her current predicament the same way she would approach an archaeological inquiry, by applying the meticulous methods of a scientific analyst.

  She would gather all the facts she could and, only when she had everything she could dig up, would she endeavor to piece the facts together into the most accurate representation of reality she could achieve with them. There would be no further talk of crazy, nor thoughts of it, until she’d completed her investigation.

  Critical to her investigation: a talk with Professor Keene. She needed to ask him questions about the relic she’d come to wish she’d never laid eyes on—like where the heck it had come from?

  Maybe it wasn’t a relic at all, she thought, briefly buoyed by the possibility, but a gag-relic of some kind, a special-effects prop from a Stargate episode or some other SciFi channel program. And maybe it had state-of-the-art, highly technical, cleverly hidden audio/visual feeds hooked into it somehow. And it all powered some really tiny, extraordinarily sophisticated projection screen system.

  Which . . . er, didn’t exactly explain the interaction between attacker and man in the mirror, but hey, she was just working up possibilities, devising and discarding.

  Possibility: Maybe it was . . . uh, well, uh . . . cursed.

  That thought made her feel inordinately foolish. Didn’t sit well with her inner analyst.

  Still, better foolish than mad-as-a-mirrormaker.

  She’d phoned the professor last night, using the direct line to his room that he’d left her in one of his gazillion messages, but he’d not answered. She’d tried again first thing this morning, but no luck. Still sleeping, she supposed.

  Bottom line, she was a pragmatist. She’d not gotten this far in her life by being illogical or prone to whimsy. She was a what-I’ve-got-in-my-hand kind of girl. And after intense reflection, she decided that she didn’t feel crazy. She felt perfectly normal about everything except for this idiotic ongoing mirror-incident.

  Maybe she should smash it, she thought peevishly. End of problems. Right?

  Except, not necessarily. If she was crazy, her illusory sex-god would probably just take up residence in some other inanimate object (that certainly brought to mind a few intriguing ideas, especially something in her bedside table drawer). If she wasn’t crazy, she could conceivably be destroying one of the most pivotal, dogma-shattering relics in recent human history.

  “Looks like I’m stuck fact-finding.” She puffed out an irritated little sigh.

  Rummaging in her pack for her cell phone, she withdrew it, flipped it open, and glanced down at the screen. No messages. She’d been hoping the professor would call her back before she got tied up in classes all day.

  Too late now. She turned off the phone, tucked it back in her bag, grabbed her coffee from the counter, paid the cashier, and hurried off.

  She had classes back-to-back until 4:45 P.M., but the second she was done she was heading straight to the hospital.

  5:52 P.M.

  The Dan Ryan Expressway at rush hour was a level in Dante’s Hell.

  Jessi was hopelessly gridlocked in stop-and-go traffic that was way more stop than go—so much stop, in fact, that she’d been working on homework for the past half hour—when her cell phone rang.

  She tossed aside the notes she’d been taking, crept forward a celebration-worthy eighteen inches, whipped out her phone and answered, hoping it was the professor, but it was Mark Troudeau.

  The statement was just forming on her tongue that there was no way she was taking on even one more paper to grade when he ripped all the words right out of her mouth by telling her he was calling to let her know the campus police had just informed him that Professor Keene was dead.

  She started shaking, clenched the steering wheel, and exhaled a sob.

  “And get this, Jess, he was murdered,” Mark relayed in an excited rush, clearly fascinated and clearly oblivious to the fact that she was crying, despite the wet snuffling sounds she was making. Men could be so dense sometimes.

  Dimly, she realized traffic was creeping forward again. Eased her foot off the clutch. Dragged the sleeve of her jacket across her face.

  “The cops are talking like he got mixed up in something bad, Jess. Said he recently pulled a lot of money out of his retirement and mortgaged his house big-time. I guess he owned some land somewhere in Georgia that he just sold too. Cops have no idea what he suddenly needed so much money for.”

  Belatedly realizing the car in front of her had stopped again, she hit the brakes and came to an abrupt halt a bare inch behind the rear bumper of the car in front of her. The guy behind her honked angrily. Not just once, but laid on it, complete with assorted hand gestures. “Right,” she snapped through tears, making a gesture of her own in the rearview mirror, “like it’s my fault traffic stopped moving again. Get over it.”

  Traffic was the least of her concerns. She closed her eyes.

  The cops might not know why the professor had needed the money, but she did.

  It would seem the mirror was a bona fide relic, after all, albeit one that had come—she was now willing to bet serious money—hot off the black market.

  The professor had indeed gotten mixed up in something bad.

  “Garroted,” Mark was saying. “He was actually garroted. Nobody does that anymore, do they? Who does that kind of thing?”

  She palmed the microphone on her cell, stared unseeingly out at the sea of stopped cars. “What on earth is going on?” she half-whispered.

  Mark continued talking, a distant, chafing din.

  The professor and I have already had our time together this evening, the blond man had said. And she’d pushed the comment brusquely aside, too wrapped up in her own petty concerns and interests.

  And now the professor was dead.

  Correction, she thought, a little chill seeping into her bones, according to what Mark had just told her—time of death 6:15 P.M. Monday—he’d been dead before she’d even gone to pick up his books that night.

  The whole time she’d been standing in his office he’d been dead.

  “And get this,” said Mark, still blathering away, “Ellis, the department head, tells me I’m gonna have to take the professor’s classes for the rest of the term. Can you believe this shit? Like they can’t afford to hire—”

  “Oh, grow up, Mark,” Jessi hissed, thumbing the OFF button.

  When finally she managed to escape the tenth level of Hell, Jessi made a beeline for side streets and headed straight back to campus.

  Thoughts tumbled in disjointed confusion through her mind. Amid them all was a single clear one, drawing her like a beacon.

  She had to see the mirror again.

  Why—she had no idea.

  It was simply the only thing she could think of to do. She couldn’t bring herself to go home. In her current state of mind she would climb the walls. She couldn’t go to the hospital; there was no longer anyone to visit. She had a few close friends, but they tended to work as much as she, so dropping by unexpectedly wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and besides, even if she did, what would she say—Hi, Ginger, how have you been? By the way, either I’ve gone insane, or my life has taken on distinct shades of Indiana Jones, complete with mysterious relics, foreign villains, and spectacular audiovisual special effects.

  When she got back to the office there was police tape across the door.

  That stopped her for a moment. Then she noticed it was campus police tape and tugged it aside. Violating university procedures didn’t seem quite as felonious a felony as breaking a law in The Real World.

  As she jiggled the key in the lock, making sure it re
ally was locked this time, she asked herself just what she thought she was going to do once she was inside.

  Strike up a conversation with a relic? Lay her hands on the glass? Try to summon a spirit? Make like it was a Ouija board or something?

  As fate would have it, she didn’t have to do a thing.

  Because the moment she opened the door, a shaft of light splintered in from the hallway, straight onto the silvery glass.

  Her feet froze. Her hands clenched on the door. Even her breath stopped mid-inhalation. She wasn’t certain, but she fancied her heart paused a long, ponderous moment, as well.

  The towering, half-naked, absolute sex-god of a man standing inside the mirror, glaring out at her, snarled, “‘Tis high damned time you came back, wench.”

  5

  When Jessi was seventeen years old she’d almost died.

  She’d gone to one of those indoor rock-climbing gyms (because her best friend had called to tell her that the football player she had a crush on was home from college that weekend and he and his friends were supposed to be there) and taken a horrible fall, breaking multiple bones and splitting her skull.

  She’d missed the best parts of her senior year in high school, recuperating at home with her head shaved from where they’d inserted a metal plate to piece her skull back together, listening to other people’s stories of proms and parties and graduations.

  And the guy she’d been so crazy about hadn’t even been at the climbing gym that day.

  She’d learned a few things from the experience. One: the whole “best laid plans of mice and men” adage was absolutely true—she’d not gotten to rally her football team to the State finals the only year they’d made it in the past seven; she’d not gotten to wear the scrumptious pink prom dress that still hung in her closet; she’d not tossed her cap; she’d not attended a single senior party. And two: Sometimes when things got bad, a sense of humor was a person’s only saving grace. You could either laugh or you could cry, and crying not only made you feel worse, it made you look worse too.