Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  He winced. “Ouch, is that how the world thinks of us now?”

  “Pretty much. Are you telling me Druids were actually magicians of some kind? Like Merlin or something?”

  He glanced guardedly around the parking lot. “Jessica, there’s magic all around you. People doona ken it because those who possess it take every precaution to conceal it. Magic has always been, and will always be.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “So this Lucan guy is also a Druid?”

  “He was once a Druid. He became a dark sorcerer.”

  A week ago, she would have laughed herself silly at anyone who’d claimed such things existed. She would have asked them about lions and tigers and bears and ruby slippers with built-in teleportation devices. Now, resting her elbows on the wet roof of her car, propping her chin on her hands, she only sighed and said, “Okay, so what’s the difference?”

  “A Druid is born with magic in his blood. A dark sorcerer’s magic is acquired via rigorous study and apprenticeship to black magycks, enhanced by rituals and spells. A Druid respects the innate nature of things and permits the universe its pattern. A dark sorcerer perverts the nature of things to his own aims, changing the universe’s pattern without thought to ramifications. A Druid seeks knowledge to heal and nurture. A sorcerer seeks dangerous alchemy to transform and control. A Druid-turned-dark-sorcerer is far more powerful than either a mere sorcerer or a mere Druid.”

  “Well, if he’s a Druid-turned-dark-sorcerer and you’re just a Druid, and a Druid-turned-dark-sorcerer is so much more powerful, then just how do you plan to defeat—oh! Crimeny! Shit!”

  Understanding belatedly dawning, she backpedaled away from him, butting up against the rain-slicked side of the car parked parallel to hers. “I can be so dense sometimes,” she breathed. “Because you’re one of the bad guys, too, aren’t you? You turned dark sorcerer, too, didn’t you? It’s the only way it makes sense.”

  His whisky eyes narrowed. “Get in the car, Jessica,” he said softly.

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way. I’m not done yet. You still haven’t told me about that commanding thing you do. When you tell people to do things, and they just do it—what is that, anyway?”

  A muscle in his jaw worked and he regarded her a long, silent moment. Then, “ ’Tis the Druid art of Voice. Some call it the Voice of Power.” He saw no need to tell her that others called it the Voice of Death, if the Druid was powerful enough. And he was. Though he’d not known he could kill with his tongue until it had been too late and he’d already killed with his tongue. “ ’Tis a spell of compulsion, lass. Now get in the car. The storm worsens.”

  As if to support his words, the rain chose that moment to turn into a steady, soaking drizzle and a boom of thunder crashed overhead.

  But Jessi wasn’t going to let an inconvenient storm interrupt her now. She had a small storm of her own brewing. This compelling thing bothered her. A lot. “Can you make people do things they don’t want to do? Like bad things that would seriously go against their will? Are they even aware of it when you’re doing it to them? Do they remember when it’s over?” she demanded.

  The muscle leapt in his jaw again. “Get in the car, Jessica. I’m trying to keep you alive,” he said coolly.

  “What if I refuse?” she said just as coolly. “Will you force me into the car? Compel me into it? Now that I think about it, I’m surprised you haven’t already tried to use this Voice of yours on me. Why bother being nice to anyone when you could just command anything you want? Geez, you wouldn’t even have to seduce a woman, you could just order her to—” She broke off abruptly, eyes widening.

  “Get. In. The. Car. Jessica.”

  “Oh, God, you did try it on me,” she exclaimed. “You tried it the second I set you free. You tried to make me kiss you and show you my breasts. Didn’t you?”

  His dark, chiseled face was a fortress. If he felt any emotion at all, it was completely concealed. Gaze remote, he inclined his head, a single time.

  Behind him, lightning flashed, brilliant and jagged, against the grim, steely Indiana sky.

  A short, caustic laugh escaped her. “And it didn’t work, did it? For some reason, it doesn’t work on me at all, does it?”

  He gave a single shake of his head. “None of my magyck does.”

  Jessi stared at him, struggling to take in this new information that put such a different slant on the way she’d so naively believed things to be. She’d been walking around thinking that the good guy was keeping her safe from the bad guy.

  Only to find out that there were no good guys in Jessi St. James’s world.

  Just bad and badder.

  She wanted to know exactly how bad. “So how far would you have taken it, Mister Poor-me-I’m-trapped-in-a-mirror-dark-sorcerer? If it had worked, if I’d ‘removed my woolen and shown you my breasts,’ how far would you have pushed?”

  “How the bloody hell far do you think?”

  “I’m asking you. How far?” she demanded.

  “I haven’t fucked in eleven hundred and thirty-three years, Jessica,” he said flatly. “I am a man.”

  “How far?” she repeated frostily.

  “All the way, woman. All the frigging way. Now get in the damned car.” A flash of lightning, followed by a booming thunderclap, punctuated his final words, as if Nature herself conspired with him.

  Jessi stared at him in silence, rain dripping down her face, splattering on her chest, pondering her options. Being brutally honest with herself.

  She could walk away now. Try it on her own. See if she could manage to disappear for the next nineteen days.

  She was being hunted by a bona fide, ninth-century sorcerer who wanted her dead.

  She was being kept alive by another bona fide ninth-century sorcerer who wanted to have sex with her and was willing to use magic to score.

  Her life or her “virtue.”

  It bore considering that it was a virtue she’d very nearly given him of her own accord.

  Granted, she’d hardly been in her right mind at the time, but still.

  She got in the damned car.

  * * *

  13<

  They were flying at a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean when the Dark Glass reclaimed him.

  At least they hadn’t been about to have sex this time, so Jessi wasn’t left with a bad case of hostile hormones, and aghast at herself for yet another appalling lapse in moral fiber.

  She glanced hastily around when he vanished, and caught several other passengers doing double takes. It didn’t surprise her to discover other people were looking straight at him when he disappeared. He was just that kind of man, the kind people watched. Some because they wondered what it would be like to have sex with such a gorgeous, dangerous-looking hunk of testosterone (the category she was in), others because they were concerned about their purses, wallets, or lives (the category she was in).

  None of the onlookers said a word. Assuming any of them believed it had genuinely happened, not one of them appeared in any hurry to talk about it.

  She smothered a dry laugh. Been there, done that, thought I was going nuts, too, the first few times I saw him.

  Tugging the worn blue airline blanket up to her chin, she pretended nothing was amiss, that she’d boarded alone, and been alone all this time. She’d been braced for him to disappear. He’d told her before they’d embarked that the Dark Glass would no doubt reclaim him long before they got to Scotland.

  Scotland. Crimeny. She was on her way out of the country! Life as she’d known it—work, school, and all her tidily scheduled plans—were slipping away from her at the astonishing rate of 565 miles per hour.

  She’d not believed they were going to be able to pull it off until they’d arrived at the Indianapolis airport and he’d proceeded to give her a mind-boggling display of his formidable “talents.”

  He’d used his “Voice” to coerce airport employees to crate and ship the mirror to Edinburgh. Unwilling to generate a
ny records of their passage, he’d bypassed procuring tickets, and instead “persuaded” their way through security, past armed officers. There’d not been a direct flight available to Scotland, and he’d refused to go through London, as it would take them too close to Lucan for his comfort, so he’d “Voiced” them onto a Boeing 747 bound first for Paris, showing only his palm as necessary documentation, accompanied by terse commands.

  She’d watched in abject amazement. Quite simply anything the man said, people believed and obeyed. Mutely, docilely, blankly. He’d used a few “forgetting” commands as well, though he’d told her they were tricky things and he was employing mild ones only to buy them all the time possible. He’d told her that a true forgetting spell took much time and was risky, as the mind endeavored to retain the imprints it bore, and stripping away one memory frequently damaged many others. It was a damage he was clearly reluctant to be the cause of, which she found interesting for a Druid-turned-dark-sorcerer.

  By the time they’d boarded, and dropped into emergency-exit seats (two cooing female flight attendants had much-too-sweetly for her taste volunteered to rearrange things so the six-and-a-half-foot sexy Scotsman could “stretch out his legs a bit,” Grrr . . .), Jessi’d had a pretty darn good idea why his “talents” didn’t work on her.

  She’d actually felt it trying to work on her.

  Each time he’d laid the compulsion on thick, her head had itched inside, just above the metal plate splicing her skull together, the same way it had when she’d first freed him and he’d been attempting to compel her.

  It felt as if his commands were buzzing up against her metal plate, making it vibrate beneath her skin. She couldn’t begin to comprehend the mechanics of it, she just knew it somehow shielded her from his magic.

  Thank heavens! For the first time in her life, she was grateful she’d taken that horrendous, skull-splitting fall.

  All the way, woman, he’d said back in the rainy parking lot of Chick-fil-A. Meaning he would have used Voice on her to have sex with her.

  It had perturbed her. Deeply.

  Until she’d realized he was lying.

  Maybe he believed he would have pushed her all the way, but she didn’t.

  She judged people by their actions, not their words. And his actions just didn’t support his words. Big bark—little bite. Even his commands to get them on board the plane had been tempered. He’d wielded the least coercion necessary to accomplish their goals.

  Bottom line was: Any man who would have used magic to have sex with her against her will would simply have changed tactics when magic had failed, and raped her with his brutally superior strength.

  Especially after eleven centuries of enforced celibacy.

  Cian was nearly six feet six inches of pure muscle. He’d had multiple opportunities to do anything he wanted to her.

  And he’d not harmed her in any way.

  Tucking her legs up, she snuggled deeper into the blanket. The lights were low, it had been yet another long day, and the steady hum of the engines was lulling her to sleep.

  She closed her eyes, pondering the power he had—the Druid art of Voice, he’d called it—trying to imagine what it would be like to have the ability to make anyone do anything you wanted them to do, merely by telling them to do it.

  She was blown away by the possibilities.

  And by the awesome responsibility.

  Druid-turned-dark-sorcerer? She wasn’t so sure she believed that. Oh, maybe a little bad, but the man wasn’t evil. In fact, he seemed a near paragon of restraint, in light of all he was probably capable of doing.

  She yawned, wondering how young he’d been when he’d realized such a thing was within his means. “Voice” meant consummate power, consummate freedom. It meant being able to live with absolute impunity.

  No excuses, no apologies necessary.

  If it were her gift, she thought drowsily, she could hop on a plane anytime she wanted, fly to England, and make them let her pet Stonehenge. Or she could go to Ireland and visit the museums and touch things. Take things home with her, for heaven’s sake!

  Or, she mused dreamily, she could go to a bank, make them give her millions of dollars, buy herself houses in ten different countries, and spend her life playing on pristine white beaches in the sun. Or, the heck with money, she could just go to those countries and make people give their houses to her. She wondered how many people Voice could control at any one time, and for how long. Surely there were limits.

  Still, “What a ridiculous amount of power,” she murmured on a sleepy sigh. The world would, quite literally, be one’s playground.

  Still, even with it, he’d somehow gotten trapped in a mirror for centuries on end.

  Strong warrior’s body, yet gentle hands. Formidably endowed with magic, yet trapped.

  What an enigma he was!

  It occurred to her, as she drifted off to sleep, that it should probably worry her a lot that—even in the middle of the utter chaos her life had become—he was an enigma she was greatly looking forward to deciphering.

  An áit a bhfuil do chroi is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú.

  (Your feet will bring you to where your heart is.)

  —OLD SCOTS SAYING

  * * *

  PART 2

  SCOTLAND

  14

  THE GOD-AWFUL HOUR OF 3:00 A.M.

  EDINBURGH AIRPORT

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15

  “No, I don’t have a claim ticket,” Jessi told the woman behind the desk, for the fifth time, beyond exasperated. “I keep telling you that. But I can describe it. Exactly. Every tiny little detail. Both crate and contents. Now how could I possibly know that such a crate even existed, not to mention what was inside it, unless it was mine?”

  “And I keep telling you,” the woman huffed, “that nothing gets claimed without a claim ticket, young lady.”

  “You don’t understand, I need that crate,” Jessi said urgently.

  “I understand perfectly,” the fifty-something, ash-blonde replied, without a flicker of emotion on her Botox-smoothed face, but with an unmistakable sneer in her voice. “You want to collect something for which you have no claim ticket. How would you feel if I permitted someone else to claim your package with no claim ticket? How could we hope to control our packages at all if we permitted such unauthorized claimings to occur? That’s why, young lady, we give claim tickets in the first place. One ticket retrieves one corresponding package. You may file a missing claim ticket claim, if you wish.”

  “How long will it take me to get my package if I file a missing claim ticket claim?”

  “Processing a missing claim ticket claim can take several weeks to several months.”

  Jessi was not pessimistic by nature, but she could have sworn a note of smug satisfaction had just entered the woman’s voice, and she suddenly had no doubt any claim she filed would lean toward the several months mark. For whatever reason, the woman didn’t like her and didn’t want to help her.

  And without the mirror, Jessi was doomed. She had a whopping forty-two dollars and seventeen cents in her purse. Oh, sure, she had a credit card, but the moment she used it Lucan would know exactly where she was. She needed the bottomless bank account of Cian MacKeltar’s deep, sexy, magical voice.

  One way or another, she had to get the mirror back. And it was pretty clear that this woman had no intention of facilitating things. Some people were problem-solvers and some people were problem-compounders. This woman was a Compounder with a capital C.

  Jessi muttered a nearly inaudible thank you and turned hurriedly away before she said something she’d regret.

  Sighing, she shifted her backpack to her other sore shoulder, trudged back down the long hallway, out into the main part of the airport, and slumped wearily into a hard plastic chair.

  She glanced at her watch, slipped it from her wrist, and moved the hour hand forward six hours. It was a little after nine in the morning, Edinburgh time.

  Well, she consoled
herself, the bright side of things is that he’ll definitely be able to come out now, if I can just get to him. It had been over twenty-four hours in both time zones since she’d he’d last been free and, drat it all, she actually missed the domineering barbarian. Missed his annoying testosterone overload, missed knowing that any minute now he might give her one of those kisses that vacuumed her brain out through her ear and turned her into a vapid little sex-kitten.

  Leaning back in the torture-chamber of a chair, she rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Flight 412 leaving Edinburgh for London will depart . . .” a woman’s lilting voice spoke brightly from the speaker above her.

  Leaving Edinburgh. She was in Scotland! The fabulous, five-thousand-year-old stone furniture of Skara Brae was near. The incredible Rosslyn Chapel was a mere eight miles from Edinburgh. The ruins of Dunnottar and countless other ancient treasures loomed just beyond the airport doors.

  And she was beginning to think she might never make it that far. Her connecting flight from Paris had landed five hours ago.

  And she’d been trying to get her hands on the mirror ever since.

  It had taken her nearly an hour just to find the idiotic Special Items Claim Pickup Office.

  It hadn’t been anywhere near baggage, as she’d expected, but down a long hallway, tucked back in the rear of the airport, accessible only through a window that opened onto a long counter built into the wall. It had been so deserted that she’d not believed she was in the right place until she’d glimpsed the tiny handwritten sign perched on the corner of the desk. It seemed almost as if they wanted to keep the unclaimed items. Maybe, she thought cynically, they auctioned them off to employees or something when their time was up.

  There wasn’t even an exterior door into the office; apparently staff gained access some other way.

  If there’s no name on the crate, where will it go when it arrives in Edinburgh? Cian had asked, prior to compelling the airline employees to crate and ship it.