Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  No new beginnings, he’d said.

  He’d known all along he wasn’t going to be free in fifteen days.

  He was going to be dead in fifteen days.

  Precisely two weeks and one day from today, Cian MacKeltar—the man with whom she’d just spent the most amazing, scorchingly passionate, dazzling night of her life—was going to be no more than a one-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty-three-year-old pile of dust.

  She turned numbly toward the mirror. Her own horrified reflection looked back at her. Cian was nowhere to be seen.

  The coward.

  Her face was pale, her eyes enormous.

  “Oh, you son of a bitch,” she breathed.

  Right before she burst into tears.

  Quod not cogit amor?

  (Is there anything love couldn’t make us do?)

  —MARTIAL, C.E. c.40–104

  * * *

  23

  Jessi stood at the open window of the Silver Chamber, staring down through the dreary day at the misty castle grounds.

  Cian was striding across the vast, manicured expanse of front lawn. He’d removed the braids from his hair and it was slicked wetly back from his regal face in a long dark fall. The sky was leaden, the horizon of mountains obscured by dark thunderheads. A light, drizzling rain was falling, and patches of fog clung, here and there, to damp thatches of grass, gusting in drowsy, dreamy swirls as Cian sliced through them.

  He was wearing only a plaid, slung low around his hips, and soft leather boots, despite the chill in the air. He looked like a magnificent half-savage ninth-century Highland laird out surveying his mountain domain.

  God, he was beautiful.

  He was bleeding.

  Blood trickled down his rain-slicked chest, slipped between the ridges of muscles in that sculpted stomach that, only the night before last, she’d tasted with her tongue, covered with kisses.

  Freshly dyed tattoos covered the right side of his chest and part of his right arm, the tiny needle pricks still beading with a wet sheen of blood. More mystic runes climbed up over his right shoulder and, as he turned down a cobbled stone walkway, she could see that either he or one of the twins had branded a fair portion of his back crimson and black, as well.

  Protection runes. They hold the repercussions of meddling with black magycks at bay, Chloe had said.

  She was so absorbed in watching him that she didn’t hear the door to the bedchamber open and someone slip in until Gwen said softly, “He’s transmuting the soil, Jessi. He saw you up here and sent me to find you. He asked me to ask you not to watch.”

  “Why?” Jessi said tonelessly.

  Gwen drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “It’s Dark Magyck, Jessi. It has some ghastly side effects, but even Drustan agreed that it was necessary, and believe me, if Drustan agrees to any kind of Dark Magyck or alchemy being used on Keltar land, there’s a really good reason for it.”

  A faint, bitter smile curved Jessi’s lips. There was so much love and pride in Gwen’s voice for her husband. She knew she would have felt the same about Cian in time—if she’d been given the time. But he’d never had any intention of giving her more than a few weeks from the very first.

  “It will neutralize Lucan’s powers if he comes here,” Gwen told her, “and Cian is convinced he will.”

  “If the bastard comes here, can we kill him?” Jessi said fiercely. “If the wards have neutralized him?”

  “No. The glass keeps him immortal, just like Cian, Jessi. He can’t be killed. The wards will only inhibit his use of sorcery on Keltar land. He won’t be able to work spells and he won’t be able to enter the castle proper. Cian is doing the most intense warding around the perimeter of the castle walls. It’s why he wants you not to watch. Apparently, if anything is dead within the castle grounds, his wards will raise it until he, well . . . er . . . inters it again with a ritual burial somewhere else.”

  “Let me guess. Without his protection runes, those reanimated dead things might turn on him?”

  “He didn’t say. But that’s kind of what I guessed too. And in Scottish soil, God-only-knows-where people and things are buried. This country’s had quite the turbulent past.”

  Jessi shivered and fell silent again. Sorcerers, spells, and now dead-things-walking. She shook her head. How strange and terrible her life had become.

  In the past forty-eight hours, she’d soared to the greatest heights she’d ever known, only to plummet into the deepest abyss. She’d been blissfully, idiotically thinking she’d found her soul mate, only to discover that said soul mate was not only going to die in two weeks’ time, but she was going to be forced to occupy a front-row seat to the spectacle.

  Dageus and Drustan had confined her to the castle. She was not allowed to leave unless and until they said otherwise. They believed that if she left, Lucan would either try to use her to get to Cian (frankly, she wasn’t sure he’d care—why care about her body when he’d not cared about her heart?) or kill her outright if he got his hands on her. She bought into the killing-her-outright part, which meant she had to stay put if she wanted to survive.

  Which meant she had to watch her Highlander die.

  “Dageus and Drustan are trying to find another way, Jessi,” Gwen said softly. “Some alternative to get Cian out of the glass and defeat Lucan.”

  “If Cian knows of no way, then do you really think they’ll be able to find one? Nothing against your husband and his brother, but Cian is the only one here that seems to know anything about sorcery.”

  “You can’t give up hope, Jessi.”

  “Why not? Cian did,” she said bitterly. “He’s ready to die.”

  Gwen sucked in a breath. “It’s the only way he knows to stop Lucan, Jessi. At least right now it is. Let my husband and Dageus work on it. You’d be amazed at what the two of them can accomplish. But don’t hate Cian for this. Oh, he was wrong not to tell you—you’ll get no argument from me there. I’d be devastated too. And furious. And hurt. And devastated and furious and hurt all over again. But I think you need to ponder why he didn’t tell you. And think about this, too: you’re twenty-something years old, right?”

  Jessi nodded. Below her, Cian was entering a small copse of rowan trees, moving with sleekly muscled, animal grace through gossamer milky-white tendrils of fog. “Twenty-four.”

  “Well, he’s lived, let’s see—forty-seven-point-one-six times that long—almost fifty times as long as you have, trapped inside a looking glass. Living not even a mere reflection of a life. For more than a thousand years he’s been by himself, imprisoned, powerless. He told us a bit last night, after supper, while you were sleeping. He has no physical needs in there. He has had nothing with which to pass the time. Lucan never gave him any word of his clan once he’d incarcerated him. He’d believed, for the past millennium, that Lucan had wiped out his entire family, that the Keltar line had been destroyed. It’s why he never thought of looking for any descendants; why it didn’t occur to him that Dageus might be a Keltar when they met. The only companion he had in that mirror with him was his bitter regret and his determination to kill Lucan one day. The opportunity finally presented itself. Is it really a wonder to you that he might be willing to die to take down his enemy, rather than continue living in such a hellish fashion? It’s a wonder to me that the man didn’t go insane centuries ago.”

  Tears burned the backs of Jessi’s eyes. And she’d thought she’d cried herself out yesterday. She’d wondered the same thing—how he’d stayed sane. But then she’d realized he was a mountain.

  Yesterday had been the most awful day of her life. If she could have collected together all the tears she’d ever cried, beginning with that first wailed protest at the shock of being born, through childhood pains, adolescent indignities, and womanly hurts, they’d not have made a drop in the bucket of tears she’d wept yesterday.

  When Dageus had explained to her what Cian meant to do, she’d raced from the library as fast as her feet had been able to take her. She’d
tried to flee the castle, as well, but Dageus had caught up with her and stopped her, gently rerouting her upstairs to the chamber they’d readied for her.

  She’d locked herself in and collapsed across the bed, weeping. Eventually she’d sobbed herself into a deep, exhausted sleep. The worst of it was, the whole time she’d been crying, hating him for making her care about him, knowing he was going to die, and not telling her, every ounce of her had nonetheless ached to go back downstairs and sit as close to his damned mirror as she could possibly get. To regain that intense, tender intimacy they’d just shared. To touch the glass, if she couldn’t touch him. To settle for anything at all.

  To beg for crumbs.

  She’d thought of what Gwen had said, herself, yesterday. She’d had the occasional lucid moments in her self-pitying and furious delirium.

  Yes, of course she could see how he would not just be willing to die, but might actually be ready to embrace death after an eternity in a cold stone hell all by himself.

  Understanding didn’t make it any better.

  She’d read once, in one of those magazines like Woman’s Day or Reader’s Digest, about a nurse who’d fallen in love with one of her terminal patients, a man who had no more than ten or twelve months left to live from some disease or another. The article hadn’t been her cup of tea, but she’d gotten sucked into it, victim of the same morbid fascination that made rubberneckers of people passing the scene of a gruesome car wreck splashed with blood and strewn with body bags. She’d thought how incredibly stupid the nurse had been to let it happen. She should have transferred his case to someone else the moment she’d started liking him, and fallen in love with a different man.

  At least the nurse had gotten nearly a year.

  Her terminal patient had a mere fourteen days.

  “Go away, please,” Jessi said.

  “Jessi, I know we don’t know each other very well—”

  “You’re right, Gwen, we don’t. So, please, just leave me alone for a while. You can tell him I won’t watch. I promise.” And she meant it. She would respect his wishes. Moving woodenly, she closed the window, flipped the latch, and let the heavy damask drape fall over the mullioned panes.

  There was silence behind her.

  “Please go, Gwen.”

  A few moments later there was a gusty sigh, then the chamber door clicked softly shut.

  Lucan threaded his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back from his temples. His palms were hot, the flesh singed, his nails blackened.

  No matter. In a moment, the lingering traces of Hans’s misfortune would be gone.

  He stepped over the charred body dispassionately.

  It smelled and needed to be removed from the pub.

  Wending his way through the posh, paneled bar with its high-backed wooden booths cushioned in tufted leather upholstery, Lucan murmured a series of spells beneath his breath, concealing from the pub’s animated patrons both the man he’d just scorched to a cinder, and his true appearance.

  Centuries ago, tattoos had taken what remained of his face, including his ears, eyelids, lips, and tongue, making him far too memorable to observers. Even his nails had been removed and tattooed beneath. His eyes had changed shortly after he’d finished scoring the final black-and-crimson brands inside his nose. He’d ceded his dick and testicles long before his tongue, his eyelids in advance of those sensitive inner nasal mucous membranes, though by then he’d suffered no pain. People often had a strongly unfavorable reaction to the face of a sorcerer.

  He shouldn’t have agreed to meet Hans in a pub. Lately, several of his employees had displayed a preference for public meeting places.

  As if that made any difference.

  Cian MacKeltar had indeed returned to the Highlands. As Lucan had known he would. The bastard wanted to die in Scotland. As Lucan had known he would.

  According to his late employee, the castle the ninth-century Highlander had once lived in was now occupied by Christopher and Maggie MacKeltar and their children.

  But it was not that castle and its occupants that concerned him.

  It was the other one. The one he’d not known existed.

  A second castle had been constructed on a distant part of the MacKeltar estate at some time during the sixteenth century, years after he’d quit paying attention to that rocky, barbaric little corner of the Highlands. It was currently occupied by twin Keltar males.

  With old names.

  Dageus and Drustan.

  Who the fuck were they and from beneath what fucking rock had they crawled?

  It was in that castle, or so Hans had suspected, that the mirror was being kept. A man and a woman fitting Cian and Jessi St. James’s description had been seen in a store in Inverness. There Hans had encountered the confusion typical of the aftereffects of Voice, but he’d managed to obtain the information that a heretofore unknown Keltar, one of the twins, Dageus, had driven off in a vehicle with a large, ornate mirror in the back of it. The employee had recalled the mirror because “that tattooed guy” had been obsessive about it not getting broken, rearranging it three times and padding it with blankets before permitting other items to be loaded in with it.

  Lucan had not anticipated this.

  He’d expected Cian to head for the hills. To be in the wide open. He’d expected to be facing one MacKeltar, not three; two of them complete unknowns. In a castle that was probably warded to the fucking rafters.

  He frowned over his shoulder at the crisply blackened remains of Hans. It would remain concealed by his spell for a few moments more. Then one pubgoer or another would take note of the grisly corpse on the floor, women would scream, and men would mill about, gaping, readying their stories for watercooler chats in the morning. Law enforcement would be rung. Lucan quickened his pace, pushing his way through the boisterous after-work crowd.

  It was damned inconvenient for Hans to be dead right now.

  There were other matters to which Lucan would have liked him to attend. He’d not killed him—oh no, not he—he’d brooked no quarrel with Hans. The power within him was occasionally wont to act with a will of its own. It was part of being such a great sorcerer. The vessel of his tattooed body was no longer sufficient to completely contain his greatness. Magic sometimes overflowed, leaked out, and someone got burned. Literally. Lucan chuckled dryly.

  Surely he was the greater sorcerer by now.

  Fourteen days.

  His crimson eyes lit with mirth and he was taken by a sharp bark of laughter, struck by the sheer absurdity of the thought that he—Lucan Myrddin Trevayne—could die.

  Impossible.

  As he quit the pub and stepped into the chilly London evening, he considered his next step. A cry of shock and horror chased him through the closing tavern door into the drizzly night beyond.

  He would return to his residence and take another stab at securing a connection with the St. James woman. He’d been attempting regularly to reach her again, but either she was not logging into her account, or he was missing those windows of opportunity when she was.

  Women were weak links. There was always something in them begging to be exploited. He just had to find it. Exploit it.

  He would punish the Keltar for this. Wasting his time. Taking him away from his true purpose. His destiny.

  Only this morning an unusual man with long coppery hair and shimmering copper eyes had sought him out, claiming to have knowledge of the ciphers in which the Dark Book was written. The man had dripped a deep-seated arrogance that could only have been born of some kind of power—either his own, or close association with someone who made him feel fearless. Lucan’s first instinct had been to eliminate the man. From time to time an apprentice petitioned mentoring, or a rival sorcerer dispatched a spy. Lucan never suffered such fools to live. He didn’t trust anyone who’d managed to learn of him, penetrate the layers of his many identities, and locate him.

  But then the man had told him he’d actually lived among the Fae for a time, he’d been fami
liar with the runes on the Hallows, and he’d spoken a tongue he’d alleged was that of the Tuatha Dé themselves. He’d also displayed an intimate knowledge of the Seelie and Unseelie courts. It had been enough to stay Lucan’s hand.

  Whoever, whatever, the man was, he needed him alive until he’d stripped from him what knowledge he possessed. It took time to perform a ruthless deep-probing. And until the Dark Glass was secured, such critical matters had to be suspended. He’d been forced to allow the man to leave, telling him he’d get in touch.

  Oh yes, Cian would be punished. For delaying his plans, wasting his time, and tying up his resources at such a crucial hour. The men Hans had been searching with in the Highlands, those who’d been watching the airports and others he’d been preparing to ward around the Highlander when he found him, if necessary, all were men who could have been following the latest lead on the Dark Book.

  He wondered how the arrogant Keltar would like spending the next thousand years hung in a deep, dark cavern, flush to a stone wall. He’d only kept the mirror in his study for the amusement it had given, and because, on occasion, he’d needed his captive to perform some deed he’d not yet possessed the power to do himself. But once he had the Dark Book, he would never need the Druid again.

  And then Cian MacKeltar was going to rot in the deepest, coldest, blackest hell Lucan could find for him.

  * * *

  24

  Under ideal circumstances, Jessi might have spent days brooding. Weeks, even. When she was hurt, she preferred to hole up and lick her wounds alone.

  But circumstances were far from ideal, and days were precisely what she didn’t have. As for weeks—she had two. Period. By the time she finished licking wounds, she would have a much bigger one to tend.