Spell of the Highlander (17 page)

She’d been laughing often as they’d talked. She was a woman who seemed able to find something humorous in nearly all things, even her own grim lot right now, which was a warrior’s strength in Cian’s estimation. Fear accomplished nothing. Nor did regret—sweet Christ, he knew that. All the regret in the world wouldn’t change a damn thing now. Not what had been. Nor what would be.

Still, humor and tenacity could frequently see one through the most difficult of times, and she possessed both in spades.

At his urging, she’d been telling him about her trials and tribulations while trying to reclaim his mirror at the airport.

When she grew excited about one part or another, she spoke with her hands, accompanying her words with gestures, and her fingertips would brush his glass. He was so physically attuned to her that it gave him the kiss of a shiver each time, as if she were brushing her fingers against
him,
not a cool mirror.

For the first time in over a millennium, he got to watch the night take his Highlands—a thing he’d missed fiercely—yet he found himself savoring even more listening to Jessica’s tale, laughing at the images she painted for him. He could see this wee hellion vaulting over the counter, bashing the contrary woman, and stuffing her in a closet. There was a bit of a heathen inside Jessica St. James.

It was just one more thing he liked about the lass, he thought, smiling faintly.

He stared, drinking her in, his smile fading. She had his plaid draped around her shoulders, and was snuggled into its warmth as the sun worked its way slowly down to kiss the dark ridge of mountains filling the horizon. It did something to him, seeing her in his tartan. Though it wasn’t the Keltar weave or colors, only a bit of Scots-woven cloth he’d swiped centuries ago, heartsick for his home, he still thought of it as his. ’Twas as if she belonged in it. Crimson and black suited her well. She was a vibrant woman, fashioned by a generous creator of bold jewel tones: jade and raven and rose and skin of sun-kissed gold.

They’d been talking for some time now. For the first time since they’d cast their lots together, all manner of calamity was not erupting around them. He could do nothing further to ensure her safety at this time from inside the mirror, so he’d seized the opportunity to learn more about Jessica St. James.

Where had she grown up? Did she have clan? How many, who, and where were they? What was she learning at her university? What kind of things did she one day dream of doing?

I’m learning about digging in the dirt,
she’d told him with a cheeky smile,
and that’s what I one day dream of doing.
Once she’d explained what she really meant, he realized ’twas but another thing that drew him to her. She was curious as a Druid about things. In his mind’s eye he could see her toiling in the soil for treasures of the past, delightedly unearthing pottery shards and bits of armor and weapons. Och, Christ, how he’d like to be there beside her while she did it! To tell her stories of those things she found and, later, take her beneath him and show her another real, live artifact.

If she could have anything in the world, he’d asked her, what would it be?

She’d answered that one without hesitation: a best friend. She’d hastily added,
a truly, seriously best friend; one that I couldn’t wait to talk to first thing in the morning as soon as I woke up, and one that I still wanted to be talking
to,
right up to the last minute before I went to sleep.

He’d smiled faintly. You mean a soul mate, he’d thought but not said. She’d meant a man, a lifetime lover. He could see it in her eyes.

Now she was telling him how she’d decided to be an archaeologist; that she’d read a book when she was young that had inspired her and set her on her path.

He listened intently, watched intently. He fancied he could sit like this for two eternities, mayhap more, drinking her in. He wanted to hear the minute details of her life, to know as much of this woman as he possibly could.

“So there I was, in college, second year into my major, realizing that it wasn’t going to be like Anne Rice’s book The Mummy at all. That it wasn’t glamour and travel and the thrill of discovery. That it was really a lot of grunt work and paperwork. Most archaeologists never get to dig in the dirt.”

“But by then it was too late,” she told him with a sheepish smile, “I’d fallen in love with it for totally different reasons. I’d gotten addicted to the history. I’d been sucked in by the mysteries of our origins, of the world’s origins, of trying to piece together the big picture.”

She spoke of Druid things now, the things that had always fascinated him. Life was full of tiny slices of truth and knowledge, here and there, and a wise man or woman endeavored to collect them.

An unwise man endeavored to collect other things. Like Unseelie Hallows.

And paid the price. Och, Christ, and paid the price!

“My mother hates my choice of major,” she confided. “She can’t understand why I’m not married and popping out babies left and right. She can’t imagine how I could prefer to spend time with artifacts when I could be out trying to find a husband.”

His gut twisted.
Out trying to find a husband. He hated those words. They pissed him off to the last sorcerous, fiery drop of blood in his veins. “Why have you no man?” he said tightly.

Her smile faded. She was quiet a moment. Then she smiled again, but this one was softer, older than her years, and achingly bittersweet. “I think I’m misplaced in time, Cian. I think that’s part of the reason I’m drawn to the past. I’m an old-fashioned girl. My mother has had four husbands and she’s already looking for the next.”

“Do they die, lass?” he asked. He wondered if she had any idea what she did to him, sitting there like that. Plaid soft and rumpled around her shoulders, her dainty hands relaxed in her lap, her palms upward, fingers half-curled. She was utterly unself-conscious, reflective, her shimmering jade gaze turned inward.

“Nope,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “They just seem to decide they don’t love each other anymore. If they ever did. Usually she leaves them.”

“And they let her?” Were mother aught like her daughter, ’twas unfathomable that a man would let her go, inconceivable that a husband wouldn’t do all in his power to make her happy, to breathe life into every last one of his woman’s dreams.

He would never understand modern marriages. Divorce was beyond his comprehension. Though at times he made light of it, the truth was, a Keltar Druid lived for his binding vows and the day he could give them.

For him, that day would never come. But for him, many days would never come. Canceled out by too many days gone wrong.

“I doona ken it, Jessica. Love, once given, is forever. It canna simply go away. Do they not love her, these men she marries?”

She shrugged, looking as baffled by it as he felt. “I don’t know. I wonder sometimes if people even know what love is anymore. Some days, when I’m watching my friends at school change lovers as unperturbedly as they change shoes, I think the world just got filled with too many people, and all our technological advances made things so easy that it cheapened our most basic, essential values somehow,” she told him. “It’s like spouses are commodities nowadays: disposable, constantly getting tossed back out for trade on the market, and everyone’s trying to trade up, up—like there is a ‘trading up’ in love.” She rolled her eyes. “No way. That’s not for me. I’m having one husband. I’m getting married once. When you know going in that you’re staying for life, it makes you think harder about it, go slower, choose really well.”

When she fell pensively silent, Cian smiled bitterly, brooding over the vagaries of fate. Jessica St. James was strong, impassioned, true of heart, funny, fierce, and sexy as hell.

She was perfect for him. Right down to his frustrating inability to deep-read her or compel her. She, alone, was forever beyond his magic, that wild talent that had always made his life so easy. Too damnably easy. Dangerously easy.

This woman had been custom-crafted for a man of his ilk.

“What about you?” she said finally. “Were you married in your century?”

He didn’t miss the shadow that flickered in her lovely sparkling eyes. She didn’t like the thought that he might have been wed. She didn’t like the thought of him loving another woman. That knowledge eased some of the pain in that twisted place in his gut. A twisted place that he knew would only grow worse again, and continue to worsen, day by day. “Nay, lass. I’d not found the woman for me before I was imprisoned in the Dark
Glass.”

Her brow furrowed and she looked as if she would pursue that thought further, but then she seemed to change her mind. “God, there are so many questions I keep wanting to ask you but I never seem to get around to them! How old are you, anyway? I mean, excluding the time you’ve been in the mirror.”

“A score and ten. I’d gained a new year shortly before I was imprisoned. And you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“In my time, you would have—”

“I know, I know, I would have been an old maid, right?” She laughed. “You and my mother.”

“Nay,” he told her, “you’d not have been unwed. Like as not, you’d have been on your third or fourth husband. Beauty such as yours would have been highly sought by the richest men in the land. Unfortunately, they were often the oldest.”

Her eyes widened ever so slightly and her lips moved. “‘Beauty such as—’ ” She broke off with a blush. “Thank you,” she said softly. Then she flashed him a cheeky smile. “Ugh. Great. I get married; he dies. I get married; he dies. And it’s not like I would have been left a wealthy widow to do what I wanted, either. Some male relative would have just married me off again, wouldn’t he? Keeping me in the family so they could hold the dowry and lands?”

Cian nodded. “Though my clan was not so barbaric. Having seven sisters who could all talk at once—and
very loudly when fashed—taught me a thing or two.”

Jessica laughed. They both fell silent.

Then she opened her mouth, shut it. Hesitated, then opened it again. Leaning forward, she said in a hushed voice, “How did it happen, Cian? How did you end up in the mirror?”

He drew ripples of silver around him, sliding deeper into his prison.

“Another time,” he said. Though, on occasion, some perverse part of him seemed determined to make her think the worst of him, he relished the intimacy taking root between them. He had no desire to besmirch it with tales of ancient sins. “For now sleep, sweet Jessica. We have much to do on the morrow.”

Later that night, Cian stood naked behind the silvery Unseelie veil, armed with knives and guns, watching over Jessica as she slept.

Clad in an assortment of oversized garments, she was curled on a pallet of his clothing at the foot of the mirror. Over the centuries, he’d accumulated various items of attire. As full night had fallen and the temperature dropped still more, he’d tossed out every last piece of it to her, right down to the jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing, in an effort to warm her against the chilly October night.

Sleep was obsolete within his mirror, as were all physical needs. He would stand guard until she awoke. He’d made her as safe as he could for now. It was not nearly as safe as he could and would make her, using any and all means at his disposal, no matter the cost.

It was the truth that they had much to do on the coming day. On the morrow, they would return to Inverness and gather supplies. On the morrow he would walk the perimeter of their retreat and bury wardstones at eight points and chant spells at sixty-four.

On the morrow he would find something to tattoo himself with, for he would need more protection runes on his body to keep him safe from the backlash of the black arts he must call upon to lay the traps necessary to ensure her safety from Lucan and any of Lucan’s minions. On the morrow he would transmute the soil, in the fashion those most ancient of burial grounds had once been alchemized, brutally forcing the earth to change, calling it alive, making it answerable to him and only him.

If there were anything dead in the soil he’d chosen, things could get . . . unpleasant, but he would shield her. If he had to tattoo himself from head to toe, shave his hair, and dye-brand his scalp, the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, and his tongue, he would shield her.

One day you’ll have tattooed your entire body.
Tears had shimmered in his mother’s eyes when she’d spotted the fresh crimson tattoos on his neck, so fresh his own blood was still beading, mingled inseparably with the dye.
Then how will you safeguard your soul? Cian, you must stop. Send him away.

He’d laughed at her.
I’ve scarce yielded a tenth of my body, Mother. And Lucan may be a learned man, but he hasn’t enough power to be dangerous.

You’re wrong. And he’s making
you
dangerous.

You know naught of what you speak.

But she’d known. From that first blustery winter’s eve the dark Welsh stranger had appeared at their gates petitioning shelter, claiming to have lost his way in the storm, she’d known.

Turn him away, Cian,
she’d begged.
He comes to our step with darkness at his back in more ways than one.
His mother had often been sought for her touch of prescience.

We’ll but feed and shelter him for an eve,
he’d said to please her. There’d been a time when pleasing those he loved had pleased him most. His sisters and mother especially. The eight of them had been a cluster of bright, feminine butterflies, swooping through his days, brilliantly coloring his existence, making him impatient for a mate of his own.

But then he’d discovered a fellow Druid in the man across his table that eve; a thing he’d not encountered before, and he’d been too curious to turn him away. His da had died before his birth, he’d had no brothers, and he’d never heard of another like himself in all of Albania.