Yup, right where she’d thought he was going.
I am all that stands between that monster and that monster gaining unlimited power.
I don’t need a crash course in ethics, Cian, she’d snapped. She’d instantly regretted her tone and words.
They had so little time left. She’d sworn to herself that she would not make a moment of it ugly, that she would not vent her rage and frustration and grief on him. That she would save her ugliness for later, when she’d already lost all she had to lose.
That now, she would give her strong, determined, noble Highlander the only gift she had to give him: perfect days and perfect nights.
A small perfect lifetime in no time at all.
I’m sorry, she’d said softly.
Nay, lass, ’tis I who am sorry, he’d replied, drawing her into his arms. ’Twas I who should have told you from the—
Don’t! She’d pressed her finger to his lips. No regrets. Don’t you dare. I have none.
A lie. They were eating her alive. Regret that she’d not slept with him that first night in the hotel room, knowing what she now knew. Regret that she’d not stayed that first night in Professor Keene’s office and summoned him out then, and gotten to have more time with him.
Regret that she was such a coward.
That she couldn’t say “Screw the world! Let them fend for themselves against Lucan. Let somebody else save everybody’s ass. Not my man. What about me?”
She bit her lip, hard, staring at the screen. Reached for the mouse. Pulled away. Reached again, her finger hovering above it. Even without contact, she could feel the chill.
Her choices: lose Cian by letting him die to kill Lucan, or lose Cian by betraying him, by allying with his enemy to keep him alive.
Either way, she’d lose him.
And if she kept him alive, he would surely hate her. “I can’t do it,” she whispered, shaking her head.
A few moments later, she powered down the computer and left the library.
As the door closed behind her, from deep in the shadows, concealed behind a velvety drape, Dageus watched the display go dark and sighed.
Earlier that day, after Lucan had gone, Jessica had cornered Dageus as he’d been hurrying—unnoticed, he’d thought—in the back entrance to the castle, in an attempt to avoid contact with Cian, as he’d been doing for several days now, unwilling to risk his powerful ancestor trying to deep-read him.
Dageus, do those ancient people, the Draghar inside you, know anything? Is there any way to save him? she’d asked, her face wan, her jade eyes dark with grief.
He’d drawn a deep breath and given her the same answer he’d given Drustan when, a few days ago, his brother had asked him the same question.
Nay, lass, he’d lied.
* * *
26
Memory/Day Nine: Cian and I were married today!
It wasn’t anything like I used to imagine my wedding would be, and it couldn’t have been more perfect.
We wrote our own vows and had a private ceremony in the estate chapel. When it was over, we scribed our names in the Keltar Bible, on thick ivory parchment edged in gold.
Jessica MacKeltar, wife of Cian MacKeltar.
Drustan, Gwen, and Chloe stood as witnesses, but Dageus wasn’t feeling well, so he couldn’t come.
Cian is my husband now!
We had a wedding breakfast of cake and champagne and honeymooned a long, rainy day away in a big four-poster bed before a roaring fire in a magnificent, five-hundred-year-old Scottish castle.
His vows were beautiful, so much better than mine. I know the MacKeltars thought so too, because Gwen and Chloe both caught their breath and got teary-eyed. Even Drustan seemed affected by them.
I wanted to say the same thing back to him, but Cian refused to let me. He got really funny about it. He placed his hand on my heart and mine on his—it was so romantic—and he said:
If aught must be lost, ’twill be my honor for yours.
If one must be forsaken, ’twill be my soul for yours.
Should death come anon, ’twill my life for yours.
I am Given.
The words gave me chills through my whole body.God, how I love the man!
Memory/Day Eight: We decided on names for our children this morning. He wants girls that look like me and I want boys that look like him, so we decided to have four, two of each.
(I’d settle for one. So, if anyone’s listening up there: I’D SETTLE FOR ONE, PLEASE.)
Memory/Day Five: Damn the man—he asked me not to be there when it happens!
Jessi didn’t see it coming. The conversation began innocuously enough. They were lying in bed in the Silver Chamber, Cian stretched on his back, Jessi sprawled, blissfully sated, on top of him. Her breasts were pillowed against his hard chest, her legs were parted across one of his thighs (and every time he moved the slightest bit she got a delicious residual tingle from the orgasm she’d just had), and her face was pressed into the warm hollow where his chest met his neck.
They’d been making love for hours, and had just been laughing about how they wanted to go raid the kitchen, but neither of them had the strength to move.
As their laughter died, there was one of those long moments that stretched uncomfortably. They’d been occurring more and more often of late, as there were so many things both of them were being excruciatingly careful not to say.
“What if we broke the mirror, Cian?” she blurted into the strained silence. “What would happen?”
He cupped the back of her head, threading his fingers into her curls. “The glass is but my window, or door, if you will, on the world, Jessica. The actual Unseelie prison I inhabit exists in another realm. I would be trapped inside that Unseelie place, with no way out. Then, when the tithe was not paid, both Lucan and I would die. He in your world, I in a windowless broch of stone.”
She shuddered, hating that image. “If you knew that breaking the mirror was a sure way to keep Lucan from passing the tithe through, why didn’t you do it before you ever came to Chicago?”
“Och, lass, prior to meeting you, I had no one to summon me out, or I might have. I attempted to persuade the thief to release me, but he thought he was going mad and crated the mirror up. After that debacle I concluded mayhap ’twould be wiser to let time and distance separate me from Lucan. Trevayne searches constantly for relics of power and has many contacts. I knew not which merchants might have ties to him and feared if I continued showing myself word might get back to him and he would succeed in reclaiming the mirror before Samhain. Then, once I’d met you I had to be able to leave the glass in order to protect you. ’Twas why I was so concerned it not be broken, so you would not be left defenseless.” He paused, then added softly, “There was also the small fact that I never wanted to live more greatly than I did the moment I saw you, lass. For over a thousand years, life had meant naught to me but vengeance. Then the moment my vengeance was at hand, life suddenly meant everything. ’Twas a bitter pill to swallow.”
Jessi was choking on the bitterness of that pill herself. As each precious day slipped by, as Drustan and Dageus continued to shake their heads and say they’d still not found a way to save him, so, too, did her grip on herself slip.
Cian might have accepted his death as a necessity, but she never would.
Each night, at some point, she ended up in the darkened library, sitting in front of the computer, her hands clenched in her lap. The past few nights she’d not even dared to turn it on.
Because each day she was weakening. Ethics? What were ethics? She wasn’t even sure she could spell the word. Wasn’t in any dictionary she knew.
“What if it was broken when you were outside it?” she pressed.
“The same. ’Tis not the mirror I’m actually reclaimed back into, but that place in the Unseelie realm. When whatever hours of my freedom I was allotted that day expired, I would be returned there again, with no way out. Again, as the tithe could no longer be paid at Samhain’
s end, we would die.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she cried, pulling away from him. Sitting up, she punched the mattress with a fist. “I’m surrounded by magic! The three of you are Druids. On top of that, you’re a sorcerer and Dageus was possessed by thirteen ancient, evil beings! Don’t any of you know a spell or enchantment or something that can undo this stupid indenture?”
Cian shook his head. “One would think so, but nay. The Keltar were chosen to protect Seelie lore, not Unseelie. Though some of us are wont to dabble with things best left alone, we ken very little of the ways of Dark Magyck, even less about the darker half of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.”
“There has to be another way, Cian!”
He sat up and grabbed her by the shoulders, his whisky gaze fierce. “Och, Christ, lass, do you think I wish to die? Doona you think if there were any other way to stop Lucan that I would seize it? I love you, woman! I would do anything to live! But the simple fact is, ’tis my very life that keeps Trevayne immortal, and nothing but my death can take that away from him. In time, he will find the Dark Book. He cannot be permitted to have that time. ’Tis not merely our lives at stake, ’tis the lives of many, ’tis the very future of your world. I can stop him now. Before long, no one will be able to.”
“And you can’t live with that,” Jessi said, unable to keep the note of bitterness from her voice. “You have to be the hero.”
He shook his head. “Nay, lass. I’ve never been the hero, and I’m not trying to be one now. ’Tis but that there are things a man can live with and things he can’t.” He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. “I told you I was tricked into the mirror and that much is true. But I didn’t tell you that I wanted the Unseelie Dark Glass too.”
Jessi went very still. “Why?” Was he finally going to tell her what happened to him so long ago?
“Lucan and I were once friends, or so I thought. I later learned he was naught but subterfuge and deceit from the beginning.”
“Didn’t you do that deep-listening thing to him?”
Cian nodded. “Aye, I did, for my mother cared naught for the man. But when a surface probe yielded nothing, I didn’t push. I arrogantly thought myself so superior in power and lore that I didn’t deem Lucan a significant threat. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I didn’t know that he’d sought me out deliberately to get the Dark Glass. Or that he was born a bastard, sired by an unknown Druid father on a village whore, and had been shunned all his life by other Druids. They refused to teach him, refused him entrance to their inner circle.
“What lore Lucan had managed to acquire before we met had been gained through violence and bloodshed. For years he’d been systematically capturing and torturing lesser Druids for their teachings. Even more powerful ones had begun to cede him wide berth. But he couldn’t overwhelm and take captive a Druid who knew the art of Voice, and he needed that art desperately.
“He learned of me somehow and came to Scotland, to my mountains where, isolated from so much of the world, I’d not heard of him. I learned later all of Wales, Ireland, and much of Scotland had heard tales of this Lucan ‘Merlin’ Trevayne. But not I. He befriended me. We began to exchange knowledge and lore, to push each other, to see what we could do. He told me of the Scrying Glass and, before long, he offered to help me get it if I would teach him the art of Voice first.”
“The Scrying Glass?” Jessi repeated.
“Aye.” He smiled bitterly. “Lucan lied about what it was. He said ’twas used to foretell the future in fine detail. That with it one could alter certain events before they ever happened. ’Twas an enticing power to me. Especially since I’d begun to wonder what my own life held. I’d begun to doubt there was a Keltar mate for me. After all, I was nigh a score and ten, quite old for a man to have never been wed in my century.”
“A Keltar mate?”
“ ’Tis legend that there is one true mate for each Keltar Druid, his perfect match, his other half, the one who completes him with her love. If he finds her, they can exchange the Druid binding vows and bind their souls together for all time, through whatever is to come, beyond death, unto eternity.” He paused briefly, his gaze turning inward. “If, however,” he murmured, “only one of them takes the vow, only that one will be forever bound. The other remains free to love another, if he or she so chooses.”
Jessi’s breath caught in her throat. How does a Keltar Druid recognize his mate? Am I yours? she wanted desperately to ask. But there was no way she was asking, because if he said no, it might just kill her. Then his last comment penetrated. “Wait a minute—do you mean that if only one of them takes the vow, that person’s heart is forever bound to another person who might never love them back, not just in this life but through all eternity?”
“Aye,” he said softly.
“But that would be awful,” she exclaimed.
He shrugged. “ ’Twould depend on the circumstances. Mayhap, one might think it a gift.” He resumed his tale briskly. “I agreed to the bargain. I taught him Voice, and we rode out one morning for a village in Ireland where the Dark Glass was being guarded in the center of a veritable fortress by a dozen holy men and a band of warriors a thousand strong.
“Trevayne had given me an ancient sleep spell to employ upon our approach. Our plan was to render the guards unconscious, ride in and take the mirror, then ride out again. I saw no reason to distrust him. He’d demonstrated the spell several times himself, and it had merely made the subject slip into a deep slumber. He’d deferred the task to me because he wasn’t strong enough to affect the entire village, and I was. I’d done my best to teach him, but he simply wasn’t good enough at Voice to compel more than a handful of people in the same room with him. Though the art of it can be taught, the power that infuses it is something a man is either born with—or not. His power lay in other areas.”
“Oh, God,” Jessi breathed. “Tell me this isn’t going where I think it is.”
He nodded, his gaze distant, far away and long ago, in ninth-century Ireland. “It caused only slumber when Lucan used it, only because he lacked the power to invoke the Spell of Death. I didn’t. Though I didn’t know it, along with all the other ‘talents’ with which I’d been born was a horrific one that appeared so rarely in our bloodline that I’d never given it any thought. I believed ’twas a sleep spell I’d worked right up until that final moment I knelt in the inner chamber beside the Dark Glass and touched the holy man who lay sprawled on the floor. I think he’d tried to break the glass rather than let it be taken, but my spell had been too potent, too quick.
“He was dead. And as I sat there, even then not fully comprehending that I’d been betrayed, not able to fathom what Lucan might be after, he wove the dark binding spell around me. He had the chant, the gold, the man to ensorcel, and I’d just spilled the blood of innocents for him.
“The next thing I knew, I was looking out at Lucan from inside the Dark Glass.
“As we left the village, he gave me a view, to ensure I saw what I’d done. With one spell, I’d killed not only those guarding the glass but the entire village of Capscorth. Men, women, and children, all dead where they’d been standing; hundreds upon hundreds of them, lying in the streets, as if a plague had ripped through their world. I was that plague.” He closed his eyes, as if trying to shut out the terrible vision he’d seen that day.
“But you didn’t mean to,” Jessi defended. Damn Lucan! She knew Cian—somewhere inside him he bore the weight of each and every life he’d taken so long ago. “It’s not like you rode in there intending to kill anyone!”
He opened his eyes and smiled faintly. “I ken it, lass,” he said, “and in truth, I no longer hate myself for what transpired that day. There are things a man can change, and there are things a man lives with. I live with it.”
He cupped her face and gazed into her eyes. “But what I cannot live with is putting into Lucan Trevayne’s hands the kind of power that would make him unstoppable. ’Twas a village then. With the Dark Book, he could des
troy entire cities, even a world. Only my death can prevent that.” He paused. “Sweet Jessica, you must cry peace with this, as must I. I have no choice.”
“I can’t,” she cried, shaking her head, blinking back tears. “You can’t expect me to.”
“Lass, you must promise me something,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I’ve been thinking much on this. I doona want you there when the time comes.”
Jessi felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She’d deliberately refused to let herself think that far ahead, to let her mind linger over the details of the night it would actually happen. To the night she would stand before a mirror and watch her Highlander age more than a thousand years in a single moment.
And disintegrate into a pile of dust.
“We’ll spend what time I can be free together that day, then you will go elsewhere with the others. Promise me this,” he pushed. “Drustan has pledged to break the mirror once it’s done, so none can ever be taken captive again.”
“That’s not fair, Cian, you can’t—”
“I can, and am. ’Tis a dying man’s last request,” he said roughly. “I want you to remember me as a man, lass, as your man. Not as a prisoner of Dark Magycks. I doona want you to watch me die. Promise me you won’t, Jessica. Promise me and mean it.”
Jessi was no longer able to hold the tears at bay. Hot and wet, they scalded her cheeks.
As she stared at him through the tears, a lifetime of hopes and dreams, of wishes and desires, of love and family and children she would never get to have, flashed before her mind’s eye.
It was too much.
When she spoke again, her voice was low and fervent. “I promise you, Cian MacKeltar, that I will not watch you die.”
When he drew her into his arms to kiss her, she closed her eyes and counted her blessings for the privacy of a steel-plated mind.
For, though she’d pledged him the promise he’d sought, she’d not meant what he’d meant by it at all.
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