Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  “That seals it,” Drustan said calmly. “I’m going to have to kill the man.”

  It was Dageus who put things back into perspective. “You doona mean that, Drustan, nor could you if you did. So long as he’s bound to the mirror he can’t be killed. But doona fash yourself. The poor bastard will be dead in a fortnight anyway and he’ll ne’er toop his mate in our corridor again.”

  Drustan winced and a bleak expression entered his eyes. He stared down at Gwen a moment, then gathered her gently in his arms and held her.

  Dageus pulled his wife close, as well, remembering a time when he’d not believed he had much more time with his mate himself.

  Half an hour later, it was a somber foursome that peeped cautiously out into the corridor before attempting to go to dinner again.

  Jessi awoke late at night, alone, in a bedchamber.

  She and Cian had eventually become cognizant of where they were—and just how public it was—and had stumbled from the corridor into a nearby bedchamber.

  She stirred in the great big, down-filled, canopied bed, nestled in a warm mound of velvety blankets. She pushed a hand through her wrecked curls; she didn’t need to see a mirror to know she had major bed-head. At the edges of her consciousness a terrible reality knocked, seeking entrance to her thoughts, but she refused to grant it an audience. Now was now. Later would come soon enough.

  She smiled. She’d fallen asleep in bed with her Highlander’s strong arms wrapped around her, spooning her backside to his front side, with one of his powerful legs draped over hers.

  A perfect memory, she committed it to a special corner of her mind where each moment she had with him would be immortalized. These memories she would make with him now would have to last her a lifetime.

  She pushed herself up and slipped from the bed, dropping barefoot onto the floor. She dressed swiftly and hurried for the door, wanting to be with him every possible moment.

  But when she ducked her head into the dimly-lit library—the castle had been put to bed along with its occupants hours ago—the mirror wasn’t where she’d last seen it, and a stab of blind panic made her chest feel dangerously tight.

  “We moved it, lass,” a soft voice cut through the darkness.

  She jumped, peering into the dim room. By the soft red glow of the embers of a dying fire, she could make out a man’s shape in an armchair near the hearth. Stacks of books surrounded him on both sides and he was paging through another.

  “Drustan? Dageus?” By voice alone she couldn’t tell them apart.

  “ ’Tis Dageus, lass. Why can’t I deep-read you, Jessica?”

  Jessi shrugged. “I think it’s because I was injured when I was young and I have a metal plate in my head. When Cian uses his Voice-spell on other people, it feels itchy inside my skull.”

  He was silent a moment, then snorted with laughter. “Och, ’tis too perfect. ’Tis also exactly what it feels like—a smooth, cold, hard barrier. It must shield you from magyck somehow. You said ‘other people.’ Has he ever tried to use Voice on you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It doesn’t work.”

  Dageus gave another soft laugh. “Despite how bloody powerful he is, Cian can’t deep-listen to you, either, can he?”

  “I don’t think so. He told me none of his magyck works on me.”

  “Good,” he said slowly. “That’s very good.”

  She thought that an odd thing to say and began to press, but he spoke again swiftly. “Are you all right, Jessica?”

  She shrugged again. What could she possibly say? I’m both happier and more alive than I’ve ever been and I feel like I’m dying, too? And I suspect before this is over, I’ll wish I was. She said instead, “Where is the mirror?”

  “We moved it to the great hall at his request. When I built this castle I buried four wardstones beneath the entry: east, west, north, and south. They are massive stones and I spelled them myself. He sensed their potency and asked that the mirror be hung on the landing of the stairs. ’Twill grant him the greatest protection. He is determined Lucan not be able to reach the Dark Glass.” He paused, and she had the sense Dageus was not pleased with his ancestor. “He will have his vengeance, lass, no matter the cost.”

  She already knew that and was in no mood to discuss it. There was a bitter stew bubbling inside her, but she was not yet ready to ladle deep down into it. She would taste the richness first. She nodded briskly. “Thank you.” She slipped from the library.

  Twenty minutes later, Jessi had what she needed.

  While she spread the comforters and throws and pillows at the base of the mirror on the wide expanse of landing in the great hall, Cian stood framed in the mirror, watching her every move. When she was cozily scrunched into the blankets, curled on her side, facing the mirror, she smiled drowsily up at him.

  “Good night, Cian.”

  “Good night, Jessica. Dream sweet, lass.”

  “You too.”

  He was kind enough to not remind her that he neither slept nor dreamed while in the minor.

  And Jessica made a sleepy entry in a mental diary.

  Memory/Day Fourteen: We said good night tonight like a married couple who’d been together for years and years.

  So what if he was in a mirror and she was sleeping on the floor.

  It was still a fine memory.

  * * *

  25

  Days sped by on winged feet.

  Jessi’d always thought that was such a cliché: time speeding by on winged feet; time flies when you’re having fun; or as Cian had once put it so simply—time is of the veriest essence.

  Yes, it was.

  Suddenly all the clichés in the world were true. Each and every one made perfect sense to her. Those love songs on the radio that had once made her roll her eyes and tune the dial to Godsmack instead now reduced her to sappy sentimentality in moments. She’d even caught herself humming the maudlin melody of a country-music song the other day and she’d never liked country music.

  Last year she’d read The Stranger by Albert Camus in French for extra foreign-language credits. Not her cup of tea, though it had given her food for thought, including the existential contention that death made brothers of all men.

  Jessi now knew the truth was that love made brothers—and sisters—of all people. As different as they were, love was that common, defining ground, making everyone the same giddy, delirious fools for it in a thousand and one ways.

  Like countless women before her, from tender teens to wise seniors welcoming a second wind, Jessi began keeping a diary to forever capture her memories.

  Memory/Day Thirteen: Today we kissed in all one hundred and fifty-seven rooms in the castle (including closets, utility rooms and bathrooms!).

  Memory/Day Twelve: We had a midnight picnic of smoked salmon and cheeses and three bottles of wine (my aching head!) on the castle grounds beneath a star-drenched sky and, while everyone else slept, we swam nude in the garden fountain and made love on all three tiers.

  Memory/Day Eleven: We chased the cooks from the kitchen and made chocolate-chip pancakes with raspberry jam and whipped cream.

  What they’d done with that raspberry jam and whipped cream had had very little to do with eating. The pancakes, that was.

  But not all of the memories were good. She couldn’t hide in some of the memories. Some of them slapped her in the face with truth.

  Memory/Day Ten: Lucan Trevayne came today.

  Lucan stood at the line of demarcation between Keltar-warded land and Trevayne-warded land, staring up at the castle. He toed arrogantly up to it, though he didn’t care for the feeling at all. The Keltar’s power hummed in the earth beneath his feet, trying to push past the invisible boundary, butting up against his own wards.

  It had taken him all night and the efforts of a dozen well-trained men to secure this portion of land, enough for him to accomplish his aims. By the light of a pale moon, while the castle slept, they’d spelled the soil, from the sleek black limousine readied b
ehind him for a swift departure, up to the circle of estate Cian had claimed for himself.

  Now he stood approximately two hundred yards from the castle proper, waiting. The Highlander hadn’t wasted time and resources warding more than the immediate grounds, nor had there been any reason to. Lucan was effectively barred from the castle by this meager yet insurmountable perimeter, as Cian had known he would be.

  So long as he did not cross that boundary, Cian couldn’t use sorcery on him. So long as Cian did not cross it, Lucan couldn’t use sorcery on him, either. As they were both immortal and self-healing, they couldn’t harm each other with anything else. They’d mastered long ago the exact wards that neutralized the other’s power. This was the only way reclusive sorcerers were ever willing to meet, toe-to-toe on neutralized ground. Cian would not cross the line, nor would Lucan, unless a temper could be provoked, and they were both too smart for that.

  Though he was immortal and could not be physically slain, he could be bespelled. If he were fool enough to stray onto Cian’s warded ground, the Highlander could trap him and cocoon him in a mystic stasis, as helpless as a fly in a thick, sticky spider’s web.

  Eventually, Lucan might figure out how to break free, but he had very little time left to take chances with. And he’d never been willing to wager on the outcome of a battle of spells between him and the Highlander.

  The situation at this second Castle Keltar was far worse than he’d imagined. He could feel the potency of two Keltar Druids in this new castle, about whom he knew nothing but for this—their power was as old as their names. They were strong. Not like Cian. But also not like any other Druid he’d ever encountered.

  He’d arrived yesterday afternoon and swiftly gotten the lay of the land: There was no way he was going to be able to get inside that castle without help.

  Which was why they’d spent the night warding, why he was standing here now.

  His wits would have to serve him again, as they had so well eleven hundred and thirty-three years ago.

  “Trevayne.” Cian’s nostrils flared as he spat the word.

  “Keltar,” Lucan spat it back, as though the vilest of viles had passed across his tongue—a tongue so heavily tattooed it was blackened with dye.

  That tongue had spoken such sordid spells and lies that it should have rotted from the dark sorcerer’s mouth, as his soul had rotted from his body so long ago.

  “You don’t look ready to die to me,” Lucan taunted.

  Cian laughed softly. “I’ve been ready to die for over a thousand years, Trevayne.”

  “Really? I have pictures of your woman. She looks like quite the fuck. I’m going to find out once the tithe is paid.”

  “The tithe will never be paid, Trevayne.”

  “You’re going to watch us together, Highlander. I’ll push her up against your mirror and—”

  Cian turned around and began walking back toward the castle. “You waste my time, Trevayne.”

  “Why did you come out, then, Keltar?”

  Cian turned around, walked back to the line and toed it. He stood so close that their noses nearly touched. The width of a hair kept them separate and safe from each other, no more.

  Lucan saw movement behind the Highlander. The woman had just stepped out onto the top stair of the elaborate stone entryway. Precisely as he’d hoped.

  “To look into your eyes, Lucan,” Cian said softly, “and see death there. And I saw it.”

  He turned sharply again, heading for the castle. He looked up at the entrance. “Go back inside the castle, Jessica. Now,” he called sharply, seeing her on the stairs.

  “What does she think of all this, Keltar?” Lucan called after him, making his voice loud enough to carry clearly to her ears, as well. “Is she as eager for vengeance as you?”

  Cian made no reply.

  “Tell me, is she as ready for you to die as you are, Highlander?” Lucan called.

  Cian broke into a sprint toward the stairs.

  “I don’t believe you want to die, Keltar,” Lucan yelled after him. “I know I don’t. In fact, I’d do virtually anything to stay alive. I think I’d agree to anything at all to pass that tithe through the Dark Glass at midnight on Samhain.” His voice rang out, carrying clearly across the lawn, echoing off the stone walls of the castle.

  Cian reached the stairs and loped up them. Turning Jessica by her shoulders, he steered her back in the castle and closed the door behind them.

  Lucan didn’t care. He’d accomplished what he’d come for. His final words had not been meant for the Keltar at all. They’d been meant for the woman who’d stood on the steps so foolishly betraying her emotions, her hands anxiously fisted, her eyes deep with grief.

  It would take time. He had no doubt it would take more days than he would bear well, and others would die, victims of his displeasure, in the interim. Though he could not read her, in fact, had smashed up against that strange smooth barrier once again, he’d read her body. There was no greater fool than a woman in love.

  “Think on that, Jessica St. James,” he whispered. “And let it begin to eat away inside you.”

  Many hours later, long after Lucan Trevayne had gotten back in his sleek black-windowed, black limousine and gone, Jessi sat staring at the computer screen in the darkened library.

  She pressed her palms to the cool surface of the small library table beneath the softly illuminated portrait of an eighteenth-century MacKeltar patriarch and his wife, keeping her hands well away from the keyboard and the mouse.

  It was four o’clock in the morning and the castle was silent as a tomb. It had begun to feel like one to her too.

  She hadn’t been the only one affected by the dark sorcerer’s visit earlier in the day. It had cast a somber pall over all the MacKeltars.

  Cian alone had been grimly satisfied by it. He comes begging. He knows I’ve won, he’d told her.

  Won, her ass. Dying was not winning. Not in her book.

  Lucan Trevayne was evil. He was the one who should die. Not Cian.

  She raked a hand through her curls, staring at the display. Lucan Trevayne was, in fact, utterly terrifying. She’d had no idea what to expect of Cian’s ancient enemy, but even if he’d warned her, nothing could have prepared her for what she’d seen.

  He hadn’t even looked human. The plate in her head that shielded her from compulsion and deep-listening indeed shielded her from all magic, for, while Gwen and Chloe had seen nothing more than a handsome man in his forties, Jessi’d seen the dark sorcerer’s true appearance.

  He’d been so heavily tattooed that his skin had appeared rotted in places. He’d moved with sickening reptilian stealth. His eyes, if they could be called that, had been fiery crimson slits. His tongue had flickered blackly as he’d spoken.

  But far worse than his grotesque appearance had been the chill and suffocating sense of pure evil that had emanated from him, even from so far across the lawn.

  Not so far that she hadn’t been able to clearly hear every word he’d said.

  She’d tried to stay in the castle as Cian had ordered.

  But when they’d gone toe to toe, when she’d seen her man facing off with that twisted . . . thing . . . out there on the lawn, she’d burst from the castle, unable to stop herself.

  Her every instinct had demanded she do something—anything—to help Cian, though she’d known there was nothing she could hope to do. Not against something like Trevayne. At that moment, she’d understood much of Cian’s conviction. It wasn’t just horrific evil that rolled off the ancient sorcerer, it was horrific power too. Not nearly as great as Cian’s, but now that she’d seen him with her own eyes, she had to concede the possibility that once Trevayne had the aid of the Dark Book, he might genuinely be unstoppable.

  I think I’d agree to anything at all to pass that tithe through the Dark Glass at midnight on Samhain, the sorcerer had said.

  Jessi wasn’t stupid.

  She knew he’d been baiting her.

  Problem was,
he had the right stuff on his hook.

  Cian’s life.

  She buried her face in her hands, massaging her temples. The instant he’d said it, some terrible, weak-willed part of her had wondered how she could possibly contact him, if she wanted to.

  The answer had come swiftly: E-mail. Of course. Myrddin@Drui.com. She’d had the means to contact him all along.

  After a moment, she raised her head and returned her gaze to the display.

  Her laptop battery was dead and she had no adaptor, so she’d waited until she was certain the castle was asleep before leaving her makeshift bed on the landing, winding down the echoing stone corridors, and booting up one of the three computers in the Keltar library.

  She had over a hundred new E-mails.

  Forty-two of them were from Lucan Trevayne. He’d been trying at periodic intervals to reach her again since that night in the hotel. His earlier efforts had no subject line. The more recent E-mails were captioned with blatant taunts: Do you love him, Jessica? Are you ready to watch your Highlander die? You can save him. Would he let you die? Would he give up on your life? Buy time, Jessica, live to fight another day.

  Such a juvenile ploy. And so damned effective.

  All she had to do was open an E-mail to open communications. She had no doubt that back at his residence in London—or perhaps no more than a few miles down the road, somewhere between the castle and Inverness—Lucan was monitoring a computer, waiting for the moment she did so.

  Waiting for a mere “yes” to keep Cian alive.

  At what cost?

  Her stomach felt sick.

  You can see him as he is, can’t you, lass? Cian had asked, as he’d steered her back into the castle.

  She’d nodded, tears threatening, for she’d known exactly where he was going.

  I am the only one who can stop him, Jessica.