The Highlander Series 7-Book Bundle

by Karen Marie Moning

  No more eager than she was to delay it. “Do you want a bite to eat before we go?” she said brightly, reaching for the salmon patties and celery they’d boxed up at the last stop.

  He smiled faintly. “Come, Gwen. Now.”

  With a resigned shrug, she slammed the car door shut and trudged to his side. When he took her hand in his, she didn’t even try to pull away but inched closer, as much for her support as his.

  They hiked the remainder of the incline in silence, unbroken but for the chirping of crickets and the melodic hum of tree frogs. At the top she drew in a sharp breath. Against the backdrop of pink-and-purple-streaked sky, a gentle breeze ruffled the grass within the circle of stones. She counted thirteen of them, ranged about a great slab in the center. The megaliths reared up, black against the brilliant horizon.

  There was nothing beyond the stones.

  Oh, a few pines, and, granted, there were several gentle slopes that might block one’s vision, but nothing that a castle could crouch mischievously behind.

  They moved forward in silence, cutting through the circle of stones, much more slowly now, for ahead of them, past stumps of what had once been lofty and ancient oaks, was the clear foundation of a castle that no longer stood.

  She refused to look at him. She would not look at him.

  When they reached the perimeter of the outer wall, he sank to his knees.

  Gwen eyed the tall grass in the center of the ruin, the chunks of stone and mortar in crumbling piles, the night sky beyond the silent castle grave, anything but him, dreading what she would see. Anguish? Horror? Realization that he truly was mentally unbalanced flickering in those beautiful silver eyes that seemed so misleadingly clear?

  “Och, Christ, they’re all dead,” he whispered. “Who destroyed my people? Why?” He drew a shuddering breath. “Gwen.” The word was strangled.

  “Drustan,” she said softly.

  “I bid you return to your wagon for a time.”

  Gwen hesitated, torn. Half of her wanted nothing more than to tuck tail and run; the other half felt that he needed her desperately here and now. “I’m not leaving now—”

  “Go.”

  He sounded so anguished that Gwen flinched and looked at him. His eyes were dark and unreadable but for a shimmer of moisture.

  “Drustan—”

  “I beg of you, leave me now,” he whispered. “Leave me to mourn my clan alone.”

  The faintness of his voice deceived her. “I promised not to just abandon—”

  “Now!” he thundered. When she still didn’t move, his eyes blazed. “You will obey me.”

  Gwen noticed three things in the time it took him to utter the command. First, although she knew it was impossible, his silvery eyes seemed to blaze from deep within like something she’d once seen in a sci-fi movie. Second, his voice was different, sounded like a dozen voices layered upon one another, obliterating any conscious choice, and third, she suspected if he’d ordered her to walk off a cliff in such a voice, she might.

  Her legs broke into an instinctive sprint even as her brain was processing those startling observations.

  But a few paces inside the stones, the eerie compulsion receded and she stopped and glanced back. He’d entered the ruin and climbed the highest pile of collapsed stone; a black silhouette on his knees, back arched, chest canted skyward, he shook his fist at the indigo sky. When he tossed his head back and roared, the blood curdled in her veins.

  Was this the same man who’d kissed her in the fitting room? The one who’d gotten her hotter than a volcano and as prone to imminent explosion and made her think there might be an equation for passion her parents had never taught her?

  No. This was the man who wore fifty weapons on his body. This was the man who carried a double-bladed ax and a sword.

  This was the man to whom she’d begun losing a little piece of an organ that she’d been raised to believe was merely an efficient pump. The realization startled her. Madman or no, frightening or not, he made her feel things she’d never felt before.

  MacKeltar, she thought, what on earth am I going to do with you?

  Drustan wept.

  The worst was true. He lay on his back in the Greathall, one knee bent, arms spread wide, his fingers laced in the tall grass, and thought of Silvan.

  You have only one purpose, son, as do I. Protect the Keltar line and the knowledge we guard.

  He’d failed. In a moment of carelessness he’d been taken unaware, enchanted, stolen from his time, and buried for centuries. His disappearance had triggered the destruction of his castle and clan. Now Silvan was dead, the Keltar line extinguished, and who knew where the tablets and volumes were? The possibility of such knowledge falling into the wrong hands dragged him down into a deep black place beyond fear. He knew that a greedy man could reshape, control, or destroy the entire world with such knowledge.

  Protect the line. Protect the lore.

  It was imperative that he successfully return to his time.

  Although he had not changed so much as one hair, five hundred years had passed, and nothing remained to speak of his existence or the life of his father and his father’s father before him. Millennia of training and discipline, all gone in the blink of an eye.

  Tomorrow night he would enter the stones and perform the ritual.

  Tomorrow night he would not exit the stones. One way or another, he would no longer be in the here and now.

  And God willing, tomorrow her century would matter no more, for with luck, by Mabon-high he would have undone all the wrong that had been done.

  Still, for the time he had remaining in the twenty-first century, his people were as dead as his castle was destroyed, naught more than ancient dream dust blowing ignobly across Scotland. Roughly dragging the back of his hand across his cheeks, he pushed himself to his feet and spent the next hour wandering the ruin, looking for graves. He uncovered not one new marker in the chapel yard. Where had his clan gone? If they’d died, where had they been buried? Where was Silvan’s marker? Silvan had made it painstakingly clear that he wished to be interred beneath the rowan behind the chapel, yet no stone marker proclaimed his name.

  Dageus MacKeltar, beloved brother and son.

  He swept shaking fingers over the stone that marked his brother’s grave. Unable to comprehend the passage of five centuries, Drustan suffered the fever-hot grief of having buried Dageus only a fortnight past. His brother’s death had made him crazed. They’d been close as two people could be. When he’d lost his brother, he’d argued endless hours with his father.

  What good is it to have the knowledge of the stones if I cannot go back and undo Dageus’s death? he’d shouted at Silvan.

  You must never travel to a point within your own life, Silvan had snapped, weary and red-eyed from weeping.

  Why can I not return to a time within my own past?

  If you are too close in proximity to your past self, one of you—either your past or present self—won’t survive. We have no way of foretelling which one lives. There have been times when neither survived. It seems to stress the natural order of things, and nature struggles to correct itself.

  Then I’ll choose a time in the past when I was across the border in England, Drustan snarled, refusing to accept that Dageus was irrevocably gone.

  No one knows how far away is far enough, son. Besides, you are forgetting that we may never use the stones for personal reasons. They are to be used only for the greater good of the world—or in extreme circumstances to ensure the succession of the MacKeltar. One of us must always live. But these are not extreme circumstances, and you know what would happen if you abused the power.

  Aye, he knew. Legend handed down over the centuries claimed a Keltar who used the stones for personal reasons would become a dark Druid the moment he passed through. Lost to honor and compassion, he would relinquish his very soul to the blackest forces of evil. Become a creature of irreverent destruction.

  The hell with the legend! he’d thunde
red defiantly. But even in his grief, he’d known better. Whether or not the legend was true, he would not be the first MacKeltar to trespass on such sacred territory. Nay, he would accept, as all his ancestors had accepted, and honor his oaths. He had not been given unfathomable power to abuse it or use it for personal gain. He couldn’t justify using the stones to mend his own heart.

  If he saved Dageus and became a dark Druid, what then would he do when Silvan grew ever older? Cheat fate again? A man could go crazy with so much power and no limits. Once he crossed such a line, there would be no turning back; he would indeed become a master of the black arts.

  And so he’d bid farewell to Dageus and resworn his oath to his father. I will never use the stones for personal reasons. Only to serve and protect, and to preserve our line, should it be threatened with extinction.

  As it was now.

  Drustan ran a hand through his hair, exhaling. Dageus was dead. Silvan was dead. He was the only remaining Keltar, and his duty was clear. For five hundred years the world had been unprotected by a Keltar–Druid. He had to return and do whatever was necessary to restore a concurrent succession of the Keltar. At any cost.

  And what about the price the woman will pay? his conscience chided.

  “I have no choice,” he muttered darkly. He plunged his hands into his hair and massaged his temples with the heels of his palms.

  He knew by rote the formulas for the thirteen stones, but he did not know the critical three, the ones that would specify the year, the month, the day. It was imperative that he return to the sixteenth century shortly after his abduction. Whoever had lured him beyond the castle walls would not be able to penetrate the fortress of Castle Keltar—even with a full army—for at least several days. The castle was too well-fortified to be taken easily. So long as he returned a day, or even two, after his abduction, he should still have time to save his clan, castle, and all the information within its walls. He would defeat his enemy, marry, and have a dozen children. With Dageus dead, he finally understood the urgency Silvan had tried to impart to his sons to rebuild the Keltar line.

  Drustan, you must learn to conceal your arts from women and take a wife—any wife. I was blessed with your mother; ’twas a miraculous and uncommon thing. Though I wish the same for you, ’tis too dangerous to have so few Keltar.

  Aye, he’d learned that the hard way. He rubbed his eyes and exhaled. He had a minuscule target at which to aim, and he’d never studied the symbols he now needed. He’d been forbidden to travel within his lifetime, so there had been no reason for him to commit to memory the symbols spanning his generation.

  Yet…in a dark moment of weakness and longing, he’d looked up the ones that would have taken him back to the morning of Dageus’s death—and from those forbidden symbols he could attempt to derive the shapes and lines of the three he needed now.

  Still, it would be a guess. An incredibly risky guess, with dire consequences if he didn’t get them right.

  Which brought him back to the tablets. If Silvan had been able to hide them somewhere on the grounds before he’d suffered whatever fate had befallen him, Drustan wouldn’t have to guess—he could calculate the symbols he needed from the information on the tablets, with no fear of error. He felt fairly certain that if he returned himself to the day after his abduction, the leagues between his future self and his enchanted body, coupled with the thick stone walls of the cave, would be enough distance between them.

  He had no choice but to believe that.

  Drustan glanced around the ruins. While he’d brooded, full night had fallen and it was too dark to conduct a thorough search, which left him tomorrow to hunt for the tablets and try to recall the symbols.

  And if the tablets weren’t there?

  Well, then, that was why there was wee, sweet, unsuspecting Gwen.

  Wee, sweet, unsuspecting Gwen perched on the hood of the car, munching celery sticks and salmon patties and absorbing the remaining warmth of the engine. She glanced at her watch. Nearly two hours had passed since she’d left Drustan at the ruin.

  She could leave now. Just hop in the car, slam it into reverse, and squeal off to the village below. Leave the madman alone to sort out his own problems.

  Then why didn’t she?

  Pondering Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, she considered the possibility that since Drustan’s mass was so much greater than hers, she was doomed to be attracted to him—so long as he was in her near vicinity—as much a victim of gravity as the earth orbiting the sun.

  Lost in thought, she hummed absently as she huddled on the hood, shivering as the indigo sky deepened to black cashmere, arguing with herself and reaching no firm conclusions.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was overlooking one or more critical facts that might help her figure out what had happened to him. She’d never given any credence to “gut instinct” she’d believed the gut controlled hunger and waste, nothing gnostic. But in the past thirty-six hours, something in her gut had found a voice, it was arguing with her mind, and she was baffled by the discord.

  She had remained in the stones and watched him for some time before she’d sought the warmth of the hood of the car. She’d studied him with the remote candor of a scientist observing a test subject in an experiment, but her study of him had only revealed more contradictions rather than resolving any.

  His body was powerfully developed, and a man didn’t get a body like that without extraordinary discipline, effort, and a mind capable of sustained focus. Wherever he had been before she’d found him in the cave, he’d lived an active, balanced life. He’d either worked hard or played hard, and she decided it was more work than play, because his hands were callused, and no stuffy, jock-type aristocrat had calluses on fingers and palms. His silky black hair was too long to be considered apropos on a twenty-first-century lord and gentleman, but it was glossy and well cut. His teeth were even and white, more evidence of care for his body. People who devoted attention to their physical health were usually healthy in mind as well.

  He walked with a gait that bespoke confidence, strength, and the ability to make hard decisions. He was reasonably intelligent and well-spoken—his strange inflection and vocabulary aside.

  He hadn’t known the way out of the cave, and when they had emerged, Gwen hadn’t missed the significance of the collapsed tunnel and the overgrowth of foliage.

  Och, Christ, they’re all dead, he’d whispered.

  She shivered. The engine had cooled, the remnants of heat gone.

  Occam’s Razor promulgated that the simplest explanation that fit the majority of the facts was most likely true. The simplest explanation here was…he was telling the truth. He’d somehow been put into a deep sleep five hundred years ago against his will, perhaps via some lost science, and she’d awakened him by falling on him.

  Impossible, her mind exclaimed.

  Tired of trying to coax the jury to deliver a consensus, she reluctantly accepted the hung verdict and admitted that she couldn’t leave him. What if the impossible was possible? What if tomorrow he offered her some concrete proof that he had been frozen in time for nearly five hundred years? Perhaps he planned to show her how it had been done, some advanced cryogenics that had been lost over time. She wasn’t vacating the premises if there was even a remote possibility of finding out such a thing. Oh, admit it, Gwen, despite having “dropped out” on the profession that has been eternally crammed down your throat, despite refusing to continue your research, you’re still fascinated by science, and you’d love to know how a man could somehow sleep for five centuries and wake up healthy and whole. You’d never publish it, but you’d still love to know.

  But it was more than just scientific curiosity, and she suspected it had something to do with his sock and her eggs and a desire she couldn’t attribute solely to the mandate programmed into her genes that clamored for survival of her race. No other man had ever incited such a response in her.

  Science couldn’t explain the tenderness
she’d felt at the sight of tears in his eyes. Nor the desire she’d had to cradle his head against her chest—not to have her cherry once and truly plucked, but for his comfort.

  Oh, her heart was engaged, and it both alarmed and elated her.

  Tucking her bangs behind an ear, she slid off the hood and started up the hill. He’d had enough time alone. It was time to talk.

  “Drustan.” Gwen’s voice cut like a light through the darkness around him.

  He met her gaze levelly. The poor wee lass looked terrified, yet bristled with resolve.

  She looked directly into his eyes then and, if she felt fear, she rose above it. He admired that about her, that despite her misgivings she forged on with the valor of a knight entering battle. When he’d chased her off, he worried that she might simply jump in her metal beast and drive away. The relief he’d felt when he glimpsed her heading toward him through the stones had been intense. Whatever she’d decided to think of him, she’d resolved to stick by his side—he could see it in her eyes.

  “Drustan?” Hesitant, yet firm.

  “Aye, lass?”

  “Are you feeling better now?” she asked warily.

  “I have made a tentative peace with my feelings,” he said dryly. “Fear not, I doona plan to leap up and avenge the loss of my people.” Yet.

  She gave him a brisk nod. “Good.”

  He could tell that she didn’t wish to discuss it, and rather than accuse him of being deluded when he was clearly distraught, she was going to scuttle around it in some circuitous manner. He narrowed his eyes, wondering what she was up to.

  “Drustan, I memorized your poem, now it’s your turn to grant me a favor.”

  “As you wish, Gwen. Only tell me what you want of me.”

  “A few simple questions.”

  “I will answer them to the best of my ability,” he replied.