The Dark Highlander

by Karen Marie Moning

  Och, aye, the men in the room looked decidedly uneasy. Uneasy was good. Violent dissension would be even better.

  “You’ll be releasing a power that you can’t possibly begin to understand and have no hope of mastering.” Dageus gave him a chilling smile.

  After a tense silence, Simon waved a dismissive hand. “Enough. I am not going to fall for your ruse. The Draghar would not try to return because they would run the risk of being imprisoned again. They will never risk that.”

  “So you say, when in truth, you know nothing about them. I do.”

  Simon’s jaw set and he motioned to two of the men standing nearby. “I will not be swayed from the course of the Prophecy. It is my sworn duty to fulfill it. And I may not know as much about the Draghar as I’d like, but I do know much about you.” He glanced at the men. “Bring her,” he ordered.

  The men hastened from the chamber.

  Dageus went rigid. Her—who? he nearly roared. There was no way, he told himself. Chloe was safe and sleeping within the castle’s warded walls.

  He was so very wrong.

  When they returned a few moments later, his gut clenched. “Nay,” he whispered, lips scarce moving. “Och, nay, lass.”

  “Och, aye, Keltar,” Simon mocked. “A lovely woman, isn’t she? We tried to get to her in Manhattan. But fear not, you may have all of her you want once you’ve yielded to the inevitable. I suspect the Draghar will be hungry for a woman after four thousand years.”

  The men roughly half-dragged, half-carried Chloe forward. Her hands and feet were bound and her face ashen, streaked with tears.

  “I’m so sorry, Dageus,” she gasped. “I woke up when I heard the car door slam and ran outside, trying to catch you—”

  One of the men cuffed her into silence, and every muscle in Dageus’s body screamed. He closed his eyes, fighting the dark storm rising in him. I am a man and a Keltar. I will not lash out blindly, he told himself over and again. It was several moments before he managed to open them again and when he did, their gazes locked.

  I love you, she mouthed. I’m so sorry!

  He shook his head, rejecting her apology, hoping she understood that he was saying no apology was necessary. It was his fault, not hers. I love you too, lass, he shaped the words silently.

  “How touching,” Simon said dryly. He motioned the men holding Chloe to bring her forward, stopping them half a dozen paces from the column to which Dageus was bound. “Having a private plane has its uses,” he said, smiling. “She was here before you’d even landed in London. And now my men will kill her unless you’d care to prevent it. Being bound should present no obstacle for a man with such power.”

  “You son of a bitch.” Dageus strained violently against the chains, but to no avail. Without magic, he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Rage consumed him, accompanied by the fierce temptation to use the most horrific power at his disposal. He could taste the potency of the ancient ones, piling up in the back of his throat, begging to be freed. The words that brought death coiled on the tip of his tongue. He wanted blood, and the beings inside him were lusting to spill it.

  Simon had planned his strategy well. He’d drugged Dageus so he wouldn’t be able to control the amount of magic he used, taken captive the woman Dageus loved more than life itself, and was now going to kill her, unless Dageus used magic to prevent it.

  And if he used magic to save her, he would transform.

  It was inevitable, he realized with a peculiar detachment. This was it. He was backed into a corner with no way out. There was no way he would permit Chloe to be harmed. Ever. She was his mate, she held his Selvar. His life was her shield.

  For a split second, a curiously suspended instant in time, it was as if he were there in the catacombs, yet not there. His mind slipped to a quiet place where memories flashed in swift conjunction.

  He was seeing Chloe for the first time, standing in the misting rain on a bustling street in Manhattan. He was discovering her beneath his bed. He was feeling the lushness of her lips when he’d stolen that first kiss.

  He was feeding her bites of salmon. Listening to her haver incessantly away about some obscure tome, her eyes sparkling. Watching her puff on a fat cigar.

  He was seeing her sleepy-sexy eyes when he’d brought her to her first peak on the airplane. Making love to her in a sparkling pool beneath an endless blue sky in his beloved Highlands. Spilling inside her, becoming part of her. Watching, as she perched on a chair and practiced saying that she loved him to a shield, then turning to shout it at him. Saying it again, after he’d told her his darkest secret. Remaining steadfastly at his side.

  And in that strange quiet moment, he realized that had he not broken his oath, had he not gone through the stones to save Drustan, he would never have met Chloe. Ironic, he mused, that his fate had required his own fall to lead him to the woman who’d been his salvation in so many ways. Had he been given the choice, to go back in time and choose not to break his oath and never meet Chloe Zanders, he would have resolutely walked into the stones and done it all over again, with full awareness that it would lead to this moment.

  Simply to have the joy of loving Chloe for what time he’d had.

  From that quiet place, his mind glided swiftly to another: to the bitterly cold night he’d danced upon his ice-slicked terrace wall. He’d done it because he’d always known that he could end it all by dying. Simple solution, really. No vessel—no resurrection. Mate, endgame, and match.

  A part of him had been so weary of fighting.

  But he’d resolved that eve to continue fighting, and relegated thoughts of suicide to his arsenal of the last resort, loathing the notion of it.

  Then he’d met Chloe, who’d given him a thousand reasons to live.

  He smiled bitterly. He couldn’t call forth the magic necessary to free her and see her safe without also releasing the Draghar, which put him in an impossible position.

  He would never usher in that “epoch of darkness more brutal than mankind has ever known,” of which the Prophecy foretold. There was no telling how many millions might die. What if those words he’d taunted Simon with truly were what the thirteen planned to do? What if they did intend to go back in time? Mayhap fight the war all over again? Mayhap win this time?

  It would utterly change four thousand years of mankind’s history. Man might no longer even exist in present times by the time they were done.

  Nay. His choices, his chances, had all been exhausted.

  Och, love, he grieved, it wasn’t supposed to end this way.

  When he opened his eyes, it was to discover that they’d stuffed a gag in Chloe’s mouth. Her aquamarine eyes sparkled with tears.

  “Cut her,” Simon said softly. “Show him her blood.”

  Dageus bit down on his tongue, filling his mouth with a bitter metallic taste. He knew he had to time it to perfection. He had to make certain he inflicted a sufficiently mortal wound on himself that he would die before the transformation was complete, but not before the sect members were dead and Chloe was free. He steeled himself to act with flawless resolution. A single moment of hesitation could undo him. He had to be one hundred percent committed to dying.

  And that was a damned hard thing to be when looking at Chloe.

  One of the men drew a blade over the skin of her neck, and crimson droplets welled. Chloe writhed in their arms, bucking and struggling.

  Now, he told himself, even as he whispered a soft “good-bye” to his mate. Grief flooded him so acutely, so intensely, that he tossed his head back and howled from the very depths of his soul.

  Then, for the first time since the eve they’d claimed possession of him, he dropped his guard and stopped resisting the thirteen.

  He opened himself up to them. He invited them. He embraced them.

  The response was instantaneous. Power, cunning, and madness flooded him. He was suddenly bombarded with bits and pieces of thirteen lives, filled with the phenomenal force of twelve men and one woman wh
ose lust for life had been so intense that they’d wanted to live forever. But far surpassing any sense of them as individuals was their united rage and hatred of their gaolers, a driving incessant determination to see the Tuatha Dé destroyed, even if they had to destroy all the realms in the process.

  As they swarmed into him, he ripped into Simon’s mind, brutally probing. Though the answer would be of no use to him now, he still wanted to know. He wanted to know how things might have played out differently, had he acted less rashly, been wiser.

  The answer he discovered made him laugh. The irony of it was rich: he’d come tonight with so much hope, yet now knew that, even had Chloe not been taken, this had always been his only alternative.

  Simon indeed knew the way to reimprison the thirteen.

  Dageus had to die.

  Chloe struggled in her assailants’ arms, blinking back tears. She’d been such an idiot, running out of the castle, but damn him for trying to do it alone! How was she to know men would jump on her the moment she walked outside? She’d not even gotten the opportunity to scream and warn Drustan and Gwen that she was being taken.

  She chewed desperately on her gag, but it was no use, she couldn’t make so much as a whimper. Oh, Dageus, she thought helplessly, watching him. He looked at her and his lips moved, but she couldn’t make out what he’d said.

  Then suddenly he made a sound of raw agony, and his dark head slammed back into the stone column with such force that Chloe nearly stopped breathing, screaming silently inside. His neck arched, and his body strained as if he were being pulled on a rack.

  The man called Simon cried out and collapsed to the floor, clutching his head.

  Dageus laughed, and the sound chilled Chloe’s blood. Dageus had never—would never—make such a twisted dark sound. Shaking violently, she watched as his head tipped slowly down. When she saw his eyes, she choked on the gag.

  They were almost full black.

  A tiny sliver of white rimmed them, hardly there at all. She ceased struggling, frozen by horror.

  An icy gale rushed into the chamber, scattering books from the shelves, toppling tables and chairs, whipping sheets of paper and parchment through the air.

  Suddenly the two men holding her were gone. The knife at her neck shot away through the air, and she lost sight of it amid the flying debris. The ropes at her wrists and ankles snapped, and the gag was abruptly torn from her mouth.

  As if from a far distance, she heard Dageus’s voice—but not quite his voice, it was more like dozens of voices layered upon each other—telling her to close her eyes, telling her that she would see and hear nothing till he commanded otherwise. And she knew that he’d done something to her, used some magic on her, because suddenly she was blind and deaf. Panicked by the loss of her senses, she dropped to the floor and held very still.

  That time of sightless silence seemed to go on for an eternity. The only sensation left to her was feeling the chilling caress of that bitter, dark wind.

  She huddled on the floor, refusing to contemplate what might be going on. Refusing to believe what she thought she’d seen before all hell had broken loose. She knew Dageus; he would never do such a thing. Not even for her. He was too honorable at the core. He would never choose her life over the fate of the world.

  Then why had it looked like he was becoming the Draghar?

  26

  Silence was all Chloe heard when she could hear again, though it wasn’t exactly silence, for, in contrast to the utter vacuum of deafness, silence was a mishmash of white noise: the faint hum of fluorescent lighting, the soft push of air from dehumidifiers installed to protect the ancient texts. She’d never been so grateful for such simple, comforting sounds in her life. It had been terrifying to be stripped of the ability to both see and hear.

  But she still couldn’t see, and she suffered another moment of absolute panic before realizing that her eyes were closed. Opening them, she pushed herself shakily up from the floor into a sitting position. Her gaze flew to the stone column, but Dageus was no longer chained to it. Frantically, she skimmed the room.

  Once, twice, three times she looked through the wreckage.

  And jerked her head in abject denial.

  There was blood all over the place. Puddles of it. Still more sprayed across the tables and chairs, and the chaos of books and papers on the floor.

  Yet more blood on the stone column.

  And there wasn’t a single other person—not even a body—in the room with her.

  Time is a companion that goes with us

  on a journey.

  It reminds us to cherish each moment,

  because it will never come again.

  What we leave behind is not as important

  ashow we have lived.

  —JEAN LUC PICARD, captain of the Enterprise

  27

  “I don’t want you to go,” Gwen said for what Chloe was certain must be the hundredth time. “Please, stay with us, Chloe.”

  Chloe shook her head wearily. Over the past two weeks, she and Gwen had grown close, which both soothed and chafed, for it made Chloe think about how incredible her life could have been if things had worked out differently. She had no doubt that she and Dageus would have gotten married, remained in Scotland, and bought a house near Gwen and Drustan. She and Gwen were similar in many ways, and in time Gwen would have become the sister she’d never had.

  What a perfect, blissful dream that would have been! Living in the Highlands, surrounded by family, married to the man she loved.

  But everything had gone so damn wrong and those things would never be, and her growing affection for the brilliant, nurturing woman who’d stayed tirelessly at her side since that terrible night, had begun to hurt more than it helped.

  “I’ve stayed as long as I can, Gwen,” Chloe said, continuing her grimly determined march toward the security gate. They were in the airport, and she was desperate to be in the air, to escape so many painful reminders. If she didn’t get out of there soon, she was afraid she might start screaming and just never stop. She couldn’t look at Drustan one more time. Couldn’t bear being in the castle Dageus had built.

  Couldn’t bear being in Scotland without him even one more second.

  It had been two weeks since the horrible night that she’d been awakened by the sound of a car door slamming. Two weeks since she’d run outside after him, only to be taken hostage by sect members who’d been waiting for just such an opportunity.

  Two weeks since she’d fled, sobbing, from the heart of the catacombs, and stumbled out of The Belthew Building to call Gwen and Drustan from a pay phone.

  Two weeks since they’d joined her in London and searched every inch of the damned building.

  At first, when Gwen and Drustan had taken her back to Castle Keltar, she’d been in shock, incapable of talking. She’d huddled in a darkened bedchamber, dimly aware that they were hovering nearby. Eventually, she’d managed to tell them what had happened—the part of it she’d seen—then she’d curled in bed, replaying it over and over in her mind, trying to fathom what had really transpired.

  Realizing that they would never know for sure.

  All they knew for certain was that Dageus was gone.

  For two weeks, Chloe lived in a kind of excruciating suspension, a bundle of tension and grief . . . and treacherous hope. It wasn’t as if she’d actually seen his dead body. So, maybe . . .

  So, nothing.

  Two weeks of waiting, praying, hoping against hope.

  And each day of watching Gwen and Drustan together had been the purest kind of hell. Drustan touched Gwen with Dageus’s hands. He lowered Dageus’s face to kiss her. He spoke with Dageus’s deep, sexy voice.

  And he wasn’t Dageus. He wasn’t hers to hold, though he looked like he should be. He was Gwen’s, and Gwen was pregnant, and Chloe wasn’t. She knew, because Gwen had persuaded her to take an EPT a few days ago, arguing that if she tested positive it would give her something to hold onto. Unfortunately, she
hadn’t gotten the cheery news Gwen had gotten seven months ago.

  Her test result had been negative.

  Like her life. A great big fat negative.

  “I don’t think you should be alone,” Gwen protested.

  She tried to smile reassuringly, but from the look on Gwen’s face, she suspected she’d managed only a frightening baring of teeth. “I’ll be okay, Gwen. I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t stand seeing . . .” She trailed off, not wanting to hurt Gwen’s feelings.

  “I understand,” Gwen said, wincing. She’d felt much the same when she’d thought Drustan was forever lost to her, and had met his descendants. She could only imagine what Chloe must feel each time she looked at Dageus’s twin. And Chloe didn’t have the promise of his babies to cling to as she’d had.

  The worst of it was, there were no answers. Dageus was simply gone. Gwen had clung to hope too, in those first few days, until Drustan had confided that since the night his brother had disappeared he’d not been able to feel the unique twin-bond he and Dageus had always shared.

  They’d decided not to tell Chloe that just yet. Gwen still wasn’t sure they’d made the right decision. She knew a part of Chloe was still hoping.

  “We’ll be coming to Manhattan in a few weeks, Chloe,” Gwen told her, hugging her tightly. They clung to each other for a time, then Chloe tore herself away and practically ran to the security gate, as if she couldn’t get out of Scotland fast enough.

  Gwen wept for her as she watched her go.