Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  She'd smiled faintly, bitterly amused by the irony of it: how not giving a shit about anything came off looking like confidence. It occurred to her that perhaps she should try interviewing with TT&T again.

  But she didn't, because change was more than she was capable of dealing with at the moment.

  Besides, at Little & Staller, she'd developed a routine that kept her nicely numb.

  And if, on occasion, a sneaky little memory of a stunningly gorgeous Fae prince perched on the wall of her cubicle slipped past her tightly erected defenses, she quashed it immediately.

  Filed another case. Asked for more work. Became a veritable arbitration machine.

  She slogged through the days, pretending they weren't made of wet concrete and she wasn't wearing lead boots. Pretending that each step didn't require Herculean effort. Pretending it wasn't taking all her will merely to force herself to eat, to shower, to get dressed each day.

  She lost weight and, in an effort to kill time she might have otherwise been tempted to spend thinking (there would be no thinking, no, none of that at all!), she used some of her suddenly superfluous escape-the-fairy fund to refurbish her wardrobe. She bought new-clothes. Got her hair cut. started wearing it in a sexy new style.

  A part of her knew she was only staving off the inevitable. Knew eventually it was going to catch up with her.

  Knew that at some point she would have to face one of two inescapable facts:

  A) The queen had let Adam die.

  B) Adam had used her.

  Bottom line was, she intended to avoid facing either of those two heartbreaking options for as long as she possibly could.

  24

  Adam was in a vile temper.

  Not only had the queen let him get shot— and he'd suffered every ounce of burning agony involved in it, the bite of each and every bullet— she'd yanked him out of the human realm, tossed him back to Faery smack into the middle of the Tuatha Dé Danaan's High Council chambers, healed him but not restored him, then confined him to those chambers until she'd returned.

  And when she'd returned— what felt like a bloody aeon later— he'd been forced to sit through the entire blasted, infernal, formal hearing, to testify to all he'd seen and all Darroc had done, to answer the most minute and ridiculous questions, all the while seething with impatience to get back to Gabrielle and do what he now understood had to be done.

  "Bloody hell," he hissed, "are we finished here yet?"

  The heads of eight High Council members turned to regard him with imperious, offended stares.

  It was impermissible to speak out of turn in council. An unspeakable insult. An unforgivable breach of ritual court manners.

  Screw the council. Screw court manners. He had things to take care of. Urgent matters. Not piddling courtly crap.

  Adam shot an irritated glare at Aoibheal. "You said I could decide his punishment and that you would restore me. Get on with it already. Restore me."

  "You speak with a mortal's impatience," Aoibheal said coolly.

  "Maybe," he growled, "because I'm stuck in a mortal form. Fix me already."

  She arched a delicate brow, shrugged. Spoke softly in a rush of Tuatha Dé words.

  And Adam sighed with pleasure as he felt himself changing. Becoming himself again.

  Immortality.

  Invincibility.

  A veritable demigod.

  Pure power thrumming through his ... well, he no longer had veins. But who needed veins when there was splendid, glorious, intoxicating power at his very core? Energy, heat, prowess, strength. All the possibilities in the universe at his fingertips.

  And, bloody hell, it felt good. He felt good.

  There were no aches, no pains in Tuatha Dé form. There was no weakness, no hunger, no weariness, no need to eat or drink or piss.

  Absolute power. Absolute control.

  The world again at his disposal, again his favorite toy.

  "Now you may cry sentence, Adam," Aoibheal said.

  Adam pondered Darroc in silence.

  Aoibheal whispered a soft command and suddenly the Sword of Light, the hallowed weapon capable of killing an immortal, the blade with which he'd long ago scarred Darroc, appeared in her hand.

  And he knew that she expected him to demand Darroc's immediate soulless death. It was what he, too, had believed he would claim.

  But suddenly that seemed far too merciful. The bastard had tried to kill his petite ka-lyrra, to extinguish the life of his passionate, sexy, vibrant Gabrielle.

  "Do it," Darroc snarled, staring fixedly at him. "Get it over with."

  "A soulless death by blade is too good for you, Darroc."

  Darroc snorted. "You live like a beast in a cage, and you no longer even see the bars. I was only trying to free you, free us all."

  "And enslave the human race."

  "They were born to be enslaved. By their very nature. Weak, puny things."

  And there it was, Adam realized with a faint smile, precisely the sentence the arrogant Elder should bear. "Make him human, my Queen. Condemn him to die in the human realm."

  The queen laughed softly. "Well spoken, Adam; we are pleased. Both fitting and fair."

  "You can't do this to me," raged Darroc. "I will not live as one of them! Bloody kill me now!"

  Adams smile deepened.

  Aoibheal moved forward, speaking in the ancient tongue, circling around the Elder, faster and faster, until but a radiant swirl of light spun on the floor of the chamber.

  As Adam watched, the light grew blindingly intense, then suddenly Darroc and the queen reappeared.

  Adam eyed his ancient nemesis curiously. There was something... different about him. His human appearance was somehow unlike Adam's human appearance had been. But what? Rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, he scrutinized the ex-Elder.

  Tall, powerful, beautiful as all the Fae. Long gold-shot copper hair spilling to his waist. Chiseled, aristocratic face etched with disdain. Copper eyes glittering with rage— ah, his eyes! They were human eyes, with no unnatural iridescence or fiery golden sparks flickering within them.

  And, although Darroc still presented an exotic, stunningly masculine beauty only rarely glimpsed in the human realm (and then usually immortalized on stage or screen), he no longer had that brush of otherworldliness that Adam had never lost. Despite an ineffable sense of ancientness, Darroc would pass as human in nearly any quarter.

  "I don't get it," Adam murmured. "He looks different than I did."

  "Of course he does," said Aoibheal. "He's now human."

  "Yes, but so was I."

  The queen laughed, a silvery sound. "No you weren't"

  Adam blinked. "Yes, I was; you made me human yourself."

  "You were never human, Adam. You were always Tuatha Dé. I merely played with your form a bit, made you as close to human as I could get you without actually transforming you into one of them. I heightened your senses, made you believe you were mortal. You yourself had diminished your essence by healing the Highlander. But you were never human. It's the one form I cannot shapeshift our people between. Once I give a Tuatha Dé a human form, it is irreversible. What I just did to Darroc can never be undone. No one and nothing in all the realms can prevent him now from dying, human and soulless. A year, fifty years, who knows? He will die."

  "But I felt human feelings," Adam protested.

  "Impossible," Aoibheal said flatly.

  Adam frowned, confounded. But he'd felt them. He'd felt pain in his chest where he'd thought he'd had a heart. He'd gotten a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever Gabrielle had been in danger. He'd suffered human feelings. How was that possible if he'd never been in human form?

  He shook his head abruptly, scattering the questions from his head, to puzzle over later. There were far more important matters to which he needed to attend. And quickly, before Aoibheal decided to constrain him in some new fashion for some ridiculous reason.

  While the queen was occupied with summoning her guard to escor
t Darroc to the human realm and bring in her consort Mael, whom Darroc had betrayed as his accomplice, Adam quietly tensed to sift out.

  Suddenly the queen's head swiveled in his direction and she snapped furiously, "You will stop that this instant, Amadan D— "

  But she'd spoken too late to compel him— he was already gone.

  * * *

  Adam went first to the Queen's Royal Bower.

  Once before he'd stolen the elixir of life from her private chambers.

  Now he did so again.

  A tiny glass vial containing a tiny amount of shimmering silvery liquid.

  And as he sifted about, displacing his residue before heading for Cincinnati, he reflected on those last moments he'd spent with Gabrielle.

  You're not falling for me, are you, Irish? he'd asked. And she'd blown up at him.

  Launched into a furious, rambling diatribe that hadn't made much sense to him, possibly because he'd tuned most of it out upon realizing after the first few sentences that there'd been no "yes" in there anywhere and she hadn't sounded remotely as if she'd been leading up to one.

  And then she'd demanded to know why Morganna had refused the elixir of life, and something inside him had snapped.

  Christ, it was always souls. Souls, souls, souls. And his great, big fucking lack thereof.

  He could have offered her a pretty lie— he'd fabricated several smooth ones for just such an occasion— but anger, defiance, and an age-old hurt had filled him with a wildness, a need he'd been unable to deny.

  To cram his reality down her throat. To say, This is what I am, for Christ's sake, is it so bloody awful?

  See me. See me!

  And she'd seen him.

  Ah, yes, he'd forced her to see him.

  And she'd gazed at him with horror in those lovely green-gold eyes. Those eyes that only the night before had been dreamy with passion, soft and warm and inviting. Those eyes that had made him feel every inch a man, more alive and at peace and at home than he'd ever felt in his entire existence.

  And that was when he'd finally understood.

  He'd been a fool with Morganna. He'd made a huge mistake.

  He had no intention of making the same one with Gabrielle.

  Now that he was all-powerful again, he would erase Gabrielle's memory of his admission. He would eliminate all those facts that she'd found so distasteful, wipe them cleanly from her mind.

  Then he would slip her the elixir of life. And he would whisk her off and keep her blissfully occupied, keep her enchanted by whatever means necessary, for as many years as it took for her immortal soul to burn out.

  And when her soul was finally gone, she would no longer even feel those parts of herself that made her try to cling to it. She wouldn't even know to miss it.

  And she would be his forever.

  * * *

  As long as she possibly could turned out to be exactly one month, seven days, and fourteen hours.

  Gabby would have made it longer, but once again, she was undone by yet another diabolical iced cup of coffee to go.

  To her credit, she did briefly contemplate that giving up her addiction might greatly simplify her life. Still, by the time she'd arrived at that conclusion, it was too late.

  Friday night. Date night. She stayed at the office late, knowing couples would be walking the streets of her neighborhood this evening, holding hands, talking and laughing, enjoying the light kiss of fall in the early September air.

  Classes had begun again, and though her load was heavy, she'd kept her job at Little & Staller, rearranging her hours around her class schedule, in a desperate bid to stay busy enough that she couldn't think.

  Upon leaving for the evening, she ducked into Starbucks and grabbed said dastardly iced coffee before going to retrieve her shiny BMW from the upscale paid lot she'd treated herself to with a bit more of her escape-the-fairy fund.

  She slid behind the wheel, pretending the faintest scent of jasmine and sandalwood did not still linger in the plush leather interior.

  Part of her had wanted to sell the car, to erase that reminder of Adam from her life, the same way she'd packed up the crystal and china he'd left on her dining room table, his T-shirt, and all the gifts he'd given her. and tucked them away in a trunk in the attic.

  Unfortunately, she'd needed something to drive and the thought of selling the car and trying to buy a new one was more than she could dredge up the energy to even contemplate doing.

  Just like returning the seventeen phone messages Gwen and Chloe had left in the past week would have taken too much energy.

  It seemed the note she'd sent them a few days after she'd gotten home hadn't been enough. Granted, it had been brief: Gwen, Chloe, things didn't work out like I hoped. But I'm okay, just real busy at work. I'll call you sometime. G.

  She knew what they wanted. They wanted answers. Wanted to know what had happened with Darroc, with Adam. She didn't have any answers to give them.

  She hadn't gotten the Happily-Ever-After they'd gotten, and she simply couldn't face delving into her misery with such shiny, happy people. People who had all those things she'd hoped for: devoted husbands, beautiful babies, lives rich with love and laughter.

  They would want answers about her. They would want to know how she was really feeling, and once they had her on the phone they wouldn't permit any evasion. Their empathy and kindness would unravel her. She knew that the day she called them back would be the day she fell apart.

  Hence, she wasn't calling them back. Period. Not falling apart. Not on the meticulously controlled agenda right now.

  And if they arrived unannounced at her house, as they'd threatened in their message last night, well... she'd deal with that then.

  Ten minutes later. Gabby pulled into the alley behind her house. Exhaling gustily, she slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed her briefcase, her gym bag, a teetering stack of files that hadn't fit in the briefcase because she needed a lot of work to get her through the weekend sane, then balanced her coffee on top of it all, wedging the plastic lid firmly beneath the underside of her chin to hold it all steady.

  She made it all the way into the living room before losing control of the unwieldy load.

  Files slipped one way, the briefcase the other, then the coffee went, tumbling from beneath her chin, bounced off an end table, knocked over a pile of books and magazines, and drenched it all with dark, iced liquid.

  Cursing under her breath, she began snatching coffee-stained files from the floor.

  And that was when she saw it.

  Since the day she'd gotten home from Scotland, she'd been avoiding the turret library, refusing to go in, in no frame of mind to be able to even so much as glimpse the O'Callaghan Books of the Fae.

  Not even noticing that all this time the Book of the Sin Siriche Du had been lying on the end table near the sofa.

  It was now facedown in a puddle of coffee.

  It was going to be ruined!

  She pounced on it, snatched it from the thick, muddy spill of icy liquid, and frantically dabbed it off on the sofa, heedless of the mess she was making of the flowered upholstery.

  Thumbed it open to assess the damage.

  And as Fate— which Gabby was seriously beginning to believe was wont to masquerade as seemingly innocuous cups of coffee— would have it, the slender black tome parted to a page that hadn't been there before.

  His elegant, arrogant, slanted cursive. She read it once, twice, a third time, flinching as the words slammed into her.

  I will never stay with another human woman and watch her die. Never.

  And there it was.

  Her answer had been there all along.

  No, he didn't die. He'd chosen not to come back.

  An anguished cry built in her throat and she tried desperately to swallow it, but she'd been swallowing her feelings too long. Day after day she'd been denying the pain in her heart, managing to stay in a state of limbo by arguing the case to herself that so long as she accepted no o
utcome, there was nothing to grieve.

  She could no longer pretend. He was gone. And he wasn't coming back.

  Tears stung her eyes, blinding her. Clutching the book to her chest, Gabby sank to the floor, sobbing.

  * * *

  Because she was a Sidhe-seer, because he knew the féth fiada didn't work on her, and because he had an irresistible urge to spy on her unseen for a few moments before completing that for which he'd come. Adam popped into Gabrielle's kitchen a dimensional sliver beyond her perception, the tiny bottle of elixir cupped loosely in his hand.

  He inhaled. Ah, he'd missed this, the scent of her! A faint, utterly feminine scent of vanilla and heather and sunshine.

  The house was dimly lit, and he moved through it, seeking her. She was here, he could feel her.

  Ahead of him in the living room, a light was on.

  He stepped into the doorway and there she was. Sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back to him. Beautiful as ever. Dressed in a trim-fitting, short-skirted black suit (by Danu, he'd missed those sweet legs!— especially wrapped around his waist), with sexy little heels on her feet. Jacket nipped in at the waist, accenting her hips and full breasts.

  But she looked different. Frowning, he stepped into the room, circling to her side. Thinner— he didn't like that at all. He liked his woman built like a woman. Liked the way she'd been before, soft and nicely rounded. Christ, how much time had passed? he wondered. He always lost track of it when he was immortal; time passed at a slower pace in the Fae realm than it did in the human one. Her hair was styled differently, too, but that, he decided, eyeing her, looked sexy as hell, though he couldn't quite get a good look at it with her head down like that and all of it spilling around her face.

  A soft, wet sniffling sound came from behind the silky curtain of hair.

  He cocked his head, moving to stand before her, looking down.

  Was she crying?