Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  She seemed not to ken that he had an inferno of need for her raging inside him and that if he fed it the least bit of oxygen, the blaze would burn out of control and consume him, along with the entire day, leaving it in a waste of ashes around them.

  Then nightfall would come and she would not be safe enough. And it would be his fault. He refused to bear such blame or take such risks with her life. By eventide she would be as safe as he could possibly make her. Until that time, he dare not begin touching her, or he’d not be able to stop. He’d watched her sleep all night, studying the planes and angles of her face in the changing light, from moonlit night through a rosy dawn and finally in the brilliant blaze of full sunrise, committing them to memory. Were he a sculptor, he could now carve her face in stone, even were he blind.

  It had been agony to stand watching her, caressing with his gaze what his hands could not. It had been a joy. He’d learned centuries ago to suck from life what pleasure his hellish circumstances would permit.

  When she’d awakened, she’d rolled over and stared up at him with sleepy-sexy eyes. She had three cowlicks, unruly thatches of hair that curled wildly. Now he possessed an image of her that only a lover might know—how she looked in the morning with her face sleep-flushed, her lips sleep-swollen, and her curls askew in a short, dark tangle. She woke up looking soft and warm, more than a little bemused, and utterly sensual. Made a man want to scoop her into his arms and devour her.

  He’d briefly envisioned himself stepping from the mirror, yanking her jeans down, taking her hard and fast, then throwing her in the SUV.

  But he’d known better than to delude himself with the notion that he could be “hard and fast” with Jessica. Hard? Aye. Fast. Not a holy chance in hell. If he got started, he’d not be able to stop, and her life, and his vengeance, was of far more import than his lust.

  Today was for the procuring of sheltering goods, foodstuffs, dyes and needles and wardstones.

  Tomorrow was for the claiming of his woman. And the next day and the next and the next. Once she was safe, he would devote every moment of his freedom from the glass to the thorough claiming of Jessica St. James.

  “Shall I package these items up for you as well, sir?” the salesman asked.

  Cian nodded, glancing over to where Jessica was standing. Last he’d looked, her arms had been crossed over her bountiful breasts, shoving them together and even higher, her lower lip had been sulkily and delectably pushed out, and she’d been tapping one foot impatiently.

  She wasn’t there.

  Where the bloody hell was she? He’d told her not to move. In English. And there was naught wrong with her hearing of which he was aware.

  “Sir, did you wish the tent, as well?”

  “Nay,” Cian growled, eyeing a man who now stood, with his back to him, at the same counter where moments ago his woman had been.

  Was that why Jessica had moved away? Had the man behaved toward her in some unseemly fashion? He’d kill the son of a bitch.

  Cian assessed the interloper. The man was tall and powerfully built, wearing black trousers, black boots, and a black leather jacket. His long black hair was braided and folded under, wrapped and bound by a leather thong.

  It was a manner in which Highlanders had once worn their hair, before even Cian’s time. When they hadn’t been liming it for battle to make themselves look more terrifying to the effeminately tidy Romans.

  The man thought much of himself; ’twas obvious in the way he stood, the way he held himself. He reeked of arrogance. Cian didn’t like him. Didn’t like him at all. If the bastard had breathed so much as a single improper word to Jessica, he was dead.

  “Jessica!” he barked. “Where are you, lass? Answer me!”

  There was no reply.

  He scanned the store, seeking the top of her head, her glossy black curls. There was no sign of her. Where had she gone?

  He couldn’t deep-listen to her, he couldn’t compel her, but he suspected a deep-scan of the store would detect her presence. Hers was a unique imprint, a space of serenity and silence in an otherwise clamorous world.

  He stretched his senses, casting a wide net, probing.

  Something probed back so unexpectedly and with such ferocity that he flinched.

  He immediately slammed up mental walls, one after the next, sealing himself off. Sealing out whatever the frigging hell that had been.

  They were walls he’d never needed before.

  No one had ever been able to probe him, not even Lucan with all his dark arts. It had been one of the things that had so infuriated his captor. Lucan still couldn’t probe him, even after a thousand years of continually gaining more power and knowledge, though he’d never stopped trying, convinced that Cian knew spells he was hiding (he did and was), determined to get them one way or another (never going to happen).

  During none of Lucan’s attempted probings had Cian ever felt anything touch his mind. Trevayne hadn’t been able to get even that far inside his skull.

  But just now he’d felt a distinct push against his mind. A distinct presence, though he hesitated to say a single presence, for what had pushed at him possessed such complexity of character, such ancientness—older even than he—that he was unable to call it . . . well . . . exactly human. Or if it was, ’twas unlike any human he’d ever encountered.

  Focusing his mind, he pushed back in the general direction from which it had come, trying to isolate it.

  The man at the counter suddenly whipped around, gaze seeking restlessly, scanning the store.

  Unusual golden eyes met Cian’s and locked over racks of clothing and aisles of camping equipment. They were old eyes, aware eyes, eyes full of fierce intelligence.

  They were the eyes of more than a mere Druid.

  Cian shoved past the glassy-eyed salesman and stalked toward him, pushing racks of clothing out of his way. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell are you?” the man flung back coolly. Softly. Arrogantly. The man moved toward him as swiftly and surely as Cian stalked the man; there wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in him.

  They met in an aisle, stopped half a dozen paces apart, and began circling each other, sizing each other up, like two dark, wild beasts, preparing to battle over territory and mating rights.

  Cian felt a rapid battery of hammer blows against the mental walls he’d erected. He permitted them, analyzing them, assessing his foe’s strength.

  Then he lashed back savagely. Just once.

  It should have nigh split the prick’s head.

  If his opponent felt anything, he betrayed naught. Who was this man? “Where is my woman?” Cian snarled.

  “I haven’t seen your woman.”

  “If you’ve so much as touched a hair—”

  “I have my own woman. Yours couldn’t hold a candle to her.”

  “You have a death wish, Highlander.”

  “Nay.” The man laughed. “Laid that to rest some time ago. On an icy ledge outside a Manhattan penthouse.”

  The man spoke nonsense. “Leave now and I won’t kill you.”

  “Can’t. I’m picking up hiking boots for my wife. She wants them today and ’tis her good graces that signify.” His tone was lightly mocking, his smile a hundred-proof testosterone, spiked with dark irreverence.

  Just the kind of smile Cian usually wore.

  Och, aye, the man had a death wish.

  There was no telling what Cian might have done next had a hand not closed over his forearm at that moment. He glanced down, his muscles instantly sliding smoother beneath his skin. Jessica was gazing up at him, lovely as ever, and unharmed.

  “Woman, where have you been? I instructed you not to move from that counter.”

  “I stood there for half an hour,” she replied crossly. “I went to the bathroom. I’m starving. Can we eat soon? I need coffee. And I want a shower. I took a little towel bath in the ladies’ room, but I’m starting to feel like the wild animal that woman at the airport accused me of being. Cian,
why is that man staring at you like that? Do you know him?”

  “ ‘Cian’?” the man demanded. “Your name is ‘Cian’?”

  “Aye. What of it?”

  The man stared at him a long moment. Then he laughed, a darkly amused sound, and shook his head as if he’d been pondering an absurdity. “Nay. ’Tis not possible,” he murmured.

  “What?” Cian snapped.

  “Nothing. ’Tis nothing.”

  “What’s with all these ’tis’s? I didn’t think Scottish people still talked like that,” Jessica said, sounding puzzled, as she stood looking from one to the other. Suddenly, she sucked in a breath and cocked her head, staring back and forth again.

  “You have my name. Give me yours,” Cian said sharply.

  “Dageus.”

  Cian looked down at Jessica. “Did this ‘Dageus’ say aught untoward to you, lass?”

  She shook herself, as if jarred from thought. “How could he? This is the first I’ve seen of him. Do you know—”

  “He was standing at the counter where I left you. You were gone when next I looked for you, and he was there.”

  She shrugged. “He must have gotten there after I’d already left. Cian, do you know that the two of you—”

  Cian turned his attention back to Dageus. “You may go. But doona cross paths with me again, Highlander. ’Twill result in bloodshed. I doona care for you.”

  “I doona care for you, either,” the man replied coolly. “But I’m not going anywhere until you release that salesman from your spell.” He nodded past Cian, where the salesman waited. Where he would wait dazedly until Cian was through with him.

  “What ken you of spells?” Cian asked softly.

  “More than you, I’d wager.”

  “Not a chance. Stay out of my affairs.”

  Jessica tried to interject, “Do either of you see the slightest re—”

  “This village and all in it is my affair. This is my world, stranger,” Dageus retorted flatly.

  ” ’Twas my world long before it was yours, Highlander.” Cian’s smile showed teeth, but no amusement.

  Dageus went motionless but for that intense golden gaze, scrutinizing Cian thoroughly. Again Cian felt a push at his mind, more subtle than the last, yet much more forceful.

  He shoved back, much more forcefully, as well, and this time the man’s unusual eyes flickered the tiniest bit.

  “You doona mean what I think you mean by that,” said Dageus.

  “Thinking implies sentience. I see little of that in you.”

  “Look in a mirror, you’ll see even less. I’ll have your clan name, Highlander. What is it?”

  Jessica piped up, “Speaking of looking in a mirror—”

  “You’ll have my clan name and a battle. ’Tis Keltar,” Cian spat. “And yours?”

  “Keltar,” Dageus spat back.

  Cian stared at him, stunned.

  Beside him, Jessica exclaimed, “I knew it, I knew it! That’s what I was trying to tell you, Cian. That the two of you look alike!”

  * * *

  18

  “Get back here. You can’t be finding out that you’re my kinsman and then just go stomping off,” Dageus snapped at Cian’s broad retreating back.

  “Watch me,” the towering barbarian flung over his shoulder. To the dazed salesman, he ordered, “Pack it all up and load in the black SUV outside the door. Here are the keys. Lock it when you’ve finished. I’ll return for it anon. You will not speak of me or my woman to anyone.” Banding an arm around the curvaceous, raven-haired woman’s shoulder, he steered her toward the door. “We have much yet to do. Come, lass.”

  Dageus watched in disbelief as his ancestor, Cian MacKeltar—he was assuming it had to be the ninth-century Cian MacKeltar standing before him, for he’d ne’er heard of any other Keltar with that name—prepared to stalk off into the Highland morn without so much as a “fare-thee-well.” Without even having offered a “good-morrow, kinsman,” for that matter.

  Without so much as a blethering word of clanly tidings.

  Without a single explanation for this incomprehensible happenstance!

  Furthermore, the man was indiscriminately using Voice, left and right, as if no rules applied to him whatsoever.

  “I assume you’ll be paying for those goods,” Dageus said pointedly.

  “You assume wrong.”

  With that, the massive, wild-looking, tattooed Highlander guided the woman out the door, the salesman close on their heels.

  Dageus glowered at the closing door. Christ, his ancestor was a savage! No wonder he’d gotten such a bad name. He looked uncontrollable, and he behaved like a barbarian. And by Danu, the power he sensed in him! Raw, rich, potent magic flowed through the man’s veins, not blood. If the Draghar had gotten their claws into Cian rather than him . . .

  He blew out a long, deep breath. ’Twas a damn good thing they hadn’t. Though he couldn’t fathom for a moment what might have prevented such a primitive, egotistical beast from breaking any rule he damn well pleased, including using the standing stones of Ban Drochaid for his own purposes.

  What was he doing here? How had he gotten here? Where had he been for the past eleven centuries? Who was the woman with him?

  He’d tried probing her while she’d stood at Cian’s side, but had encountered some kind of sleek, smooth barrier. Was she a practitioner of magycks, too? His deep-listening talents had been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few months and he should have been able to pick up something. But he’d not gotten a flicker of a thought or emotion from her.

  “Drustan’s not going to like this,” he muttered darkly. “Nay, he’s not going to like it at all.”

  If a willingness to sacrifice everything for those he loved characterized Dageus, an abiding, unrelenting honor and a desire for a simple life uncomplicated by matters of Druidry and the Fae characterized his elder twin Drustan.

  When he heard tell of this latest news, Drustan would undoubtedly say, “Why the blethering hell can’t people stay where they belong, in their own century and out of mine?”

  At which point his wife, Gwen, would remind him that it wasn’t his century. That, in fact, it was he who’d begun it all by refusing to stay in the sixteenth century where he belonged. That if Drustan hadn’t opted to slumber for five hundred years in a Rom enchantment so he could be reunited with Gwen in the twenty-first century, he never would have died in the fire that night so long ago. And if he’d not died in the fire, Dageus wouldn’t have had to breach Keltar oaths and use the standing stones of the Ban Drochaid in violation of the sacred Compact between Man and the Tuatha Dé Danaan for personal gain, to go back in time and save Drustan’s life. And if Dageus hadn’t breached those oaths, he never would have been possessed by the souls of the thirteen evil Draghar, and forced to come forward himself to the twenty-first century, seeking a way to escape them.

  And by the time his brainy physicist sister-in-law was done, Dageus had no doubt she’d have found some way to postulate an obscure yet peculiarly synchronistic link between Dageus and Cian himself, and Drustan would heap the blame for this new visitor soundly at Dageus’s feet.

  Which was beyond far-fetched. There was no way he was taking the blame for the sudden appearance of their controversial ninth-century ancestor. He’d only been reading up on him, not trying to summon him.

  He rubbed his jaw, frowning, wishing he could be entirely certain of that last fact.

  The problem was, months ago in London, when Aoibheal, Queen of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, had personally appeared and wielded her immense power to strip away the souls of the thirteen evil Druids possessing him, freeing him from their dark control, she’d left their memories inside him, and he wasn’t always certain of precisely what he was capable or not.

  Initially, when the Queen had removed the thirteen souls of the Draghar from him, he’d believed himself entirely free. After suffering the din of thirteen rapacious, twisted, demanding entities inside him, the silence inside
his skull had made him think them completely eradicated.

  It had been some time before he’d realized that, although their consciousnesses were gone, every last memory of thirteen entire lives had been left in him, buried deep in his subconscious. He’d not wanted to believe that he still contained the terrible and forbidden lore the Draghar had so long ago amassed and, at first, when inexplicable knowledge had begun popping into his head, he’d denied it.

  But he no longer could. Each day he discovered something new about himself. And on occasion, of late, he’d caught himself muttering bits of a spell beneath his breath that he’d never read or practiced, and he knew he’d somehow plucked it from the endless vaults of the Draghar within him, as if his subconscious was sorting through the banks of memories, filing them away according to some mysterious design.

  Had he inadvertently used a spell?

  He sighed.

  If he had, this was his fault and he had to fix it.

  If he hadn’t, he still had to do something. He couldn’t just let the oversized heathen stalk and stomp about their Highlands, using Voice on all and sundry, stealing goods from simple merchants honestly endeavoring to support their clansmen.

  As if you’ve ne’er stolen anything, his conscience jabbed.

  “Aye, but I always gave it back, eventually.” And he had. He didn’t think Cian MacKeltar had any intention of making eventual amends. He didn’t look like an eventual-amends kind of man.

  Sighing, he tucked the box containing Chloe’s hiking boots beneath his arm and walked out the door after his ninth-century ancestor.

  As he stepped into the sunny Highland morn, he looked left, then right. He spied neither hide nor hair of Cian MacKeltar.

  Back at the castle, his four-and-a-half-months-pregnant wife awaited him. Pregnancy suited his lovely Chloe like a Highlander’s wet dream; she was even more amorous of late, and she was quite the sensual vixen under the usual circumstances. He was of no mind to be separated from her for long. They’d planned a hike in the hills today and a leisurely picnic. It was warm enough to toop outside on a plaid beneath an endless blue sky, and he’d been greatly anticipating hours and hours of hedonistic love play. Her breasts were getting fuller, her hips widening, and her skin glowed with the inner radiance of impending motherhood. He was impatient to taste and touch and explore every last changing inch of her. He was of no mind to alter his plans to accommodate this recent unexpected development. Highly unexpected development, at that.