Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  Heat suffused her skin where his gaze skimmed. “Not. Going. To. Happen.”

  He shrugged, powerful shoulders bunching and rippling. “Have it your way, wench. Die needlessly. Doona say I didn’t offer my aid.”

  He turned in the mirror then. The silver encasing him seemed to ripple, the black stain around the edges flowed and ebbed as if the surface were suddenly liquid, then she was beholding a mere looking glass.

  “Hey, wait!” she cried, panicking. “Get back here!” She needed answers. She needed to know what was going on. What the mirror was; how any of this was even happening; who was trying to kill her; would there really be more assassins sent after her?

  “Why?” His deep butter-rum voice resonated from somewhere within the glass.

  “Because I need to know what’s going on!”

  “Naught in this world is free, woman.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked the smooth silver surface. She was conversing with a mirror. Alice in Wonderland had nothing on her.

  “ ’Tis plain enough, isn’t it? I have something you need. You have something I want.”

  She went absolutely still. Her breath caught in the back of her throat and her heart began to hammer. She moistened suddenly parched lips. “Wh-what?”

  “You need my protection. You need me to keep you alive. I ken what’s going on, who’s coming after you, and how to stop them.”

  “And what do you want in return?” she asked warily.

  “Och, myriad things, lass. But we’ll keep it simple and start with freedom.”

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way. I don’t know the first—”

  “You know all you need to know,” he cut her off flatly. “You know you’ll die without me. Think not to constrain me. I’ve been stuck in this bloody frigging mirror far too long for civility. This glass is the only prison I’ll suffer. I’ll no’ be allowin’ ye to be buildin’ another for me, woman.”

  His brogue thickening, he spat the final words. She swallowed. Audibly. Her mouth had gone so dry that she heard tiny things crunch as her Adam’s apple rose and fell. She cleared her throat.

  Suddenly there he was in the mirror again, looking at her, silver rippling like diamond-spiked water around him.

  That sexy, arrogant mouth curved in a smile. If he’d meant it to be reassuring, she thought, shivering, he’d missed the mark by a mile. It was a smile full of leashed power and chained heat. Barely leashed. Barely chained.

  It occurred to her then that, had she gotten a good look at him the other night, she would probably never have released him, whether she’d believed herself to be dreaming or not. The killer she’d thought so terrifying was no match for this man. They weren’t even remotely in the same league. Breaking the blond man’s neck had probably been as easy for him as absently swatting a fly. Whatever he was, he had something more. Something normal people just didn’t have.

  She fumbled behind her for the doorknob.

  “Let me out,” he said, low and intense. “Say the words. I will be your shield. I will stand between you and all others. ’Tis what you need and you ken it. Doona be a fool, woman.”

  Shaking her head, she turned the knob.

  “Will it be nay, then? Prefer you to die? Over me? Just what is it you fear I might do to you that would be so terrible?”

  The way his heated gaze was lingering on certain parts of her made quite clear some of the things he was thinking about doing to her.

  Which of course made her think about them, too, in great detail. And there she was, wet-pantied again. What on earth was wrong with her? Had her ovaries somehow gotten stuck in a permanent ovulation cycle? Were her eggs firing indiscriminately and constantly—and in some perverse, inversely proportionate fashion—with greater enthusiasm the worse the man seemed for her?

  Yanking open the door, she backed out into the hall. “I need to think,” she muttered.

  “Think fast, Jessica. You’ve not much time.”

  “Great, just great. Every-freaking-body knows my name.” With a fierce little scowl, she slammed the door so hard the frame shuddered.

  “The next one he sends after you may arrive any moment,” came his deep burr through the door, “and will be more sophisticated than the last. Mayhap it will be a woman. Tell me, lass, will you even see death coming?”

  Jessi gave the door an angry little kick.

  “Doona venture far. You’re going to need me.”

  She gritted something rude at the door that he shouldn’t have been able to hear, but he did. It made him laugh out loud and say, “A physical impossibility, woman, or, believe me, most of us ‘asshole men’ would.”

  She rolled her eyes and didn’t bother locking it this time.

  As an afterthought, she plucked off the rest of the police tape, balled it up, and stuffed it in her pocket.

  Maybe she’d get lucky and somebody’d steal the damned thing and get it out of her hair.

  OPTIONS

  1. Go to police. Tell all and request protection.

  2. Get in touch with original delivery company, ship mirror back, hope that fixes everything.

  3. Flee country.

  4. Check self into mental hospital and trust, with lockups and padded walls, they’re safer than regular hospitals.

  Jessi finished the last of her coffee, pushed aside the mug, stared down at her pathetic little list, and sighed.

  She was still feeling shaky in the pit of her stomach, but compiling her list of options had calmed her a bit and forced her to take a realistic look at a completely surreal situation.

  Number four was out: it reeked of casting one’s fate to the wind and, when all was said and done, if she had to be in a car wreck, she’d prefer to be the one driving when it happened—control of one’s own destiny and all that.

  Number one was out. The police would laugh her right out of the station if she tried telling them she knew who’d murdered their John Doe: a tall, dark, and broody sex-god who was after his freedom, who just happened to be inside a ten-thousand-year-old-plus mirror, who might also be a ruthless criminal that had been . . . er, paranormally interred inside said mirror for the . . . er, safety of the world.

  Uh-huh. Wow. Even she thought she was nuts with that one.

  That left numbers two and three as potential solutions. The way she figured it, fleeing the country and staying out of it forever—or at least until she was reasonably certain she’d been forgotten about—would cost a whole lot more than trying to ship the thing back, even with the exorbitant price of insurance figured in, and Jessi had to believe that if she just returned the relic, whoever was after it would leave her alone.

  After all, what was she going to do? Talk about it, for heaven’s sake? Tell people about the impossible artifact once it was gone? Totally discredit herself and ruin any chance she might one day have of a promising future in the field of archaeology?

  As if.

  Surely she could persuade them of that, whoever they were. Anyone with half a brain would be able to see that she’d never, in an Ice Age, talk.

  She glanced around the university café; the cushioned wood booths were sparsely populated at this time of night, and no one was sitting near enough to eavesdrop. Pulling out her cell phone, she flipped it open, dialed Info, and got the number for Allied Certified Deliveries, the name she’d seen emblazoned on the side of the delivery truck.

  At 8:55 P.M., she didn’t expect an answer, so when she got one, she sputtered for a moment before managing to convey the purpose of her call: that she’d gotten a package she wanted to return, but she’d not been given a copy of the bill of lading, so she didn’t know where to ship it back to.

  Making no effort to mask her irritation, the woman on the other end informed her that the office was closed for the day, and she’d only answered because she’d been talking to her husband when their call had been dropped, and she thought it was him calling her back. “Try again tomorrow,” she said impatiently.

  “Wait! Ple
ase don’t hang up,” Jessi exclaimed, panicking. “Tomorrow might be too late. I need it picked up first thing in the morning. I’ve got to return this thing fast.”

  Silence.

  “It was really expensive to ship,” Jessi shot into the silence, hoping money would keep the woman on the line and motivate her to be helpful. “Probably one of the more expensive deliveries you guys have done. It came from overseas and required special handling.”

  “You going to pay to reship, or you trying to stick it to the shipper?” the woman asked suspiciously.

  “I’ll pay,” Jessi said without hesitation. Though she loathed the thought of spending money on something she would end up with nothing to show for, at least she’d be alive to pay it off. She had a downright scary amount of credit on her Visa; it never ceased to amaze her how much rope banks were willing to give college students to hang themselves with.

  “Got an invoice number?”

  “Of course not. I just told you, I don’t have the bill of lading. Your guys forgot to give me a copy.”

  “We never forget to give copies of the BOL,” the woman bristled. “You must have misplaced it.”

  Jessi sighed. “Okay, fine, I misplaced it. Regardless, I don’t have it.”

  “Ma’am, we do hundreds of deliveries a week. Without an invoice number, I have no way of knowing what delivery you’re talking about.”

  “Well, you can look it up by last name, can’t you?”

  “The computers are down for the night. They go off-line at eight. You’ll have to call back tomorrow.”

  “It was an unusual delivery,” Jessi pushed. “You might remember it. It was a late-night drop. A recent one. I can describe the guys who brought it.” Swiftly, she detailed the pair.

  There was another long silence.

  Then, “Ma’am, those men were murdered over the weekend. Garroted, just like that professor man that’s been all over the news. Police won’t leave us alone.” A bitter note entered her voice. “They been acting like my husband’s company had something to do with it, like we got shady dealings going on or something.” A pause, then, “What did you say your name was again?”

  Feeling like she’d just been kicked in the stomach, Jessi hung up.

  She didn’t go straight to him.

  She refused to do that.

  The thought of such a swift show of defeat was too chafing.

  The past few days had been a study in humility for her. Not a single thing had gone according to anything remotely resembling The Jessi St. James Plan For A Good Life, and she had the bad feeling nothing was going to for quite a while.

  So she stubbornly toughed it out in the university café until half past midnight, sipping still more coffee that her frazzled nerves didn’t need, savoring what she suspected might be her last moments of near-normalcy for a long time, before caving in to the inevitable.

  She had no desire to die. Crimeny, she’d hardly even gotten to live yet.

  Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Her friend Ginger had given her a coffee mug with that quote on it a few months ago. If you spun it around, the other side said: When did having a life become an event you had to schedule? She’d stuffed it way in the back of her cupboard and not looked at it again, the sad truth of it shaving too close to the bone.

  No, she certainly wasn’t ready to die. She wanted at least another sixty or seventy years. She hadn’t even gotten to the good parts of her life yet. Problem was, she didn’t suffer any illusions about her ability to, as he’d so succinctly put it, “see death coming.” She was a college student, an archaeology major, at that. People were not her forte. Not living ones, anyway. She was no slouch with the dead ones, like the Iceman or the Bog People, but that wouldn’t get her very far with an assassin. Sad fact was, Death could probably stalk up to her wearing a hooded black robe and toting a scythe, and she’d get all distracted wondering about the age, origin, and composition of the scythe.

  Ergo, like it or not—and dear God, she didn’t—she needed him. Whatever he was. The professor was dead. The deliverymen were dead. She’d been next. Three out of four down. She felt like one of those ditzy heroines in a murder mystery, or one of those fluffy romance novels, the loose end that needed tidying up, the one the psychopath kept coming after. The helpless, girly girl. And she’d never considered herself helpless in her entire life. Girly, maybe, but not helpless.

  Now, standing outside the door to Professor Keene’s office yet again, she stiffened her spine, mentally preparing to fling herself upon an impossible being’s mercy.

  Either he would protect her as he claimed, or he really was some cosmically evil villain, justly imprisoned and lying through his teeth, who planned to kill her—the way things had been going for her lately—gruesomely and with much blood, right there on the spot.

  If that was the case, she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, her demise a mere bit of squabbling over place and time, so she should probably just buck up and get it over with.

  She glanced at her watch—12:42 A.M.

  Good-bye life as she knew it, hello chaos. Hopefully not just good-bye life.

  She pushed open the door and stepped into the office. “Okay,” she told the silvery surface with a sigh, “I think we can make a deal.”

  He was there before she’d even fully formed the word “think.” She finished the rest of the sentence a bit breathlessly.

  A slow, exultant smile curved his lips.

  “Deal, my ballocks. Get me the bloody hell out of here, woman.”

  * * *

  6

  “Don’t give me excuses,” Lucan snarled into the phone. “Roman is dead. I need Eve in Chicago now.”

  He rose and stood before the tall windows of his study, staring out at the London dawn as the first faint streaks of sun burned off the fog. The sky beyond was still dim enough that he could also see his own reflection superimposed on the tinted glass. Alone, he did not bother with a spell to conceal his appearance.

  His entire skull was a miasma of crimson-and-black runes, his tongue flickered black inside his tattooed mouth when he spoke, and his eyes were feral crimson.

  It was Thursday morning. He had twenty days.

  He turned his gaze to the darker spot on the silk wallpaper where the Dark Glass had hung for so long. Cian’s captivity had been a constant source of amusement to him—the legendary Keltar, the most powerful of all Druids ever known, ensorcelled by one Lucan Myrrdin Trevayne.

  His hands fisted, his jaw clenched. That empty spot would be filled again, and soon. Returning his attention to the conversation, he snapped, “The St. James woman knows she’s in danger now. There’s no telling what she’ll do. I need her taken care of immediately. But first, I need that damned mirror back. Roman said it was in the professor’s office. Have her ship it to my private residence the moment she arrives. Then get rid of the girl and anyone else who’s seen it.”

  Damn Roman. The police were asking too many questions, and he suspected at least one or two officers had seen the Dark Glass, which meant retiring a few members of law enforcement, and those cases never closed. In the past he’d not denied Roman his preference for strangulation, so long as he went in, disposed of all problems before the police found any bodies, and got out fast, before an investigation was even opened.

  But he hadn’t. He’d failed with the woman and ended up dead himself.

  Which gave Lucan no small amount of pause.

  How had Roman ended up on the commons with his neck broken? He could think of one man that possessed the deadly strength and skill to snap the Russian’s neck as if popping chicken bones: Cian MacKeltar.

  And if that were the case, someone had let him out of the mirror. Not good, not good at all.

  The only person he could fathom might have done so was the St. James woman. According to Roman, when he’d last checked in, there were four people in Chicago who’d seen the Dark Glass or, like Dr. Liam Keene, had possessed critical
knowledge of it, and Jessica St. James was the final one to be dispatched. Lucan knew well the Keltar had a way with women.

  His upper lip curled. So much wasted on a primitive mountain-man, a Highlander, no less. Not just looks, strength, and charisma, but wild, pure magic. The kind of power Lucan had worked dozens of lifetimes to achieve a mere fraction of, the Keltar had been born with a hundredfold.

  If the St. James woman had indeed been seduced to the Keltar’s bidding, then Lucan was sending Eve to her death. He’d have his answer soon enough. If Eve went missing, he’d know he had a far more serious problem on his hands than he’d thought.

  “Tell her to put her other contract on hold. I need her now.” A pause. A growl. “I don’t believe you have no way of reaching her. Find one. Get her in Chicago today or else.”

  He listened a moment, holding the phone away from his ear. After a long pause he said tightly, “I don’t think you understand. I want her there now. I’d advise you to pass on my orders to her and let her decide.” He punched off the phone, terminating the call. He knew what she would do. She trafficked in death for a living, and feared little, but she feared Lucan. They’d had a liaison a few years past. She knew his true nature. She would obey.

  He rubbed his jaw, eyes narrowed. Samhain was too swift approaching. For the first time in centuries, he felt a whisper of unease. He’d been untouchable, virtually invincible for so long that, he didn’t quite recognize the feeling.

  At least he knew exactly where the mirror was. That alleviated much of his unease. Still, if it weren’t in his possession within a very short time, he would have no choice but to go after it himself.

  He greatly preferred not to.

  On those rare occasions he’d freed the Keltar from the Dark Glass, he’d stayed on heavily warded ground that had neutralized the Highlander’s immense power until the mirror had safely reclaimed its captive. The complex, intense warding necessary to keep Cian MacKeltar’s power suppressed required painstaking ritual and time.

  Could he and his men manage to ward the university’s grounds around the mirror?