Spell of the Highlander (3 page)

Was that the sound of a sharply indrawn breath
behind
her? Followed by a muttered curse?

Impossible!

She dare not turn. Dare not take her eyes off her attacker for even a moment. Dare not give in to the sob of fear that was trying to claw its way up the back of her throat.

His gaze darted over her shoulder, his eyes flared, then his gaze latched back on her. “No, you won’t. You preserve history. You don’t destroy it. That thing is priceless. And it
is
as old as I said it was. It is conceivably the single most important relic any archaeologist has ever laid eyes on. It debunks thousands of years of your so-called ‘history.’ Think of the impact it could have on your world.”

“Mine personally? Gee, like, uh,
none,
if I’m dead. Back off, mister, if you want it in one piece. And I think you do. I think it’s not worth a thing to you broken.” If he was going to kill her, she had nothing to lose by smashing it into a gazillion silvery little pieces; no matter that her inner historian violently protested such sacrilege. If she was going down, she was taking whatever he wanted with her. If she was going to be dead, by God, he was going to be miserable too.

A muscle worked in his jaw. His gaze skidded between her and the mirror and back again. He tensed as if to take a step.

“Don’t do it,” she warned. “I’m serious.” She shifted her grip on the lamp, prepared to swing it into the mirror if he so much as breathed wrong. If nothing else, maybe they’d struggle atop the shards of glass; he’d slip, cut himself, and bleed to death. One never knew.

“Impasse,” he murmured. “Interesting. You’ve more spirit than I’d thought.”

“If you are wishing to live, lass,” came the deep, rich purr of a brogue behind her, “best summon me out now.”

A chill shuddered through her entire body, and the baby-fine hair at the nape of her neck stood up, quivering on end. Just like on Friday, the room felt suddenly . . . wrong. Not quite the size and shape it was supposed to be. As if a door that by all conventions of reality couldn’t possibly be there had suddenly opened, skewing the known dimensions of her world.

“Shut the hell up,” her assailant clipped, his gaze fixed over her shoulder, “or I’ll smash you myself.”

Dark, mocking laughter rolled behind her. It made her shiver. “You wouldn’t dare and well you ken it. ’Tis why you’ve not rushed her. Lucan sent you with precise instructions. Bring it back intact, nay? The mere possibility that the mirror might be shattered makes your blood ice. You know what he’d do to you. You’d be begging for death.”

“Huh-uh, no way,” Jessi whispered, eyes going wide. She could feel the blood draining from her face, knew she’d gone white as snow. “Not believing this.” She took a shaky little breath. “Any of this.”

Logic insisted there couldn’t possibly be anyone behind her. And certainly not anyone
inside a mirror,
for heaven’s sake!

But her gut was of a different opinion.

Her gut sensed “Man” with a capital “M” behind her, and he was throwing off all the heat of a small, fiery forge at her back. Enough that it made the sides and front of her feel abruptly cold. Made her neck ache with the effort of keeping her gaze fixed firmly on her would-be murderer, and not turning to gape at the looking glass. She could
feel
him behind her. Something. Someone. Caged power. Caged sexuality. Whatever was behind her was formidable.

“Doona turn, woman,” he—it—whatever it was—counseled. “Keep your eyes on him and speak after me—”

“I’d advise against that,” the blond man warned, locking gazes with her. “You’ve no idea what you’d be letting out of that mirror.”

Jessi took another shallow breath. She could sense the blond man’s tightly leashed fury, knew if he thought, for even a split second, that she might not actually break the mirror, she was dead. She was afraid to so much as blink, afraid he would lunge during that brief moment of vulnerability. And there was something behind her that couldn’t possibly be there, at least not according to any laws of physics
she
understood. Admittedly, there were many laws of physics she didn’t understand, but she felt confident enough of those she did to protest faintly, “This is crazy.”

“‘Crazy’ would be letting him out,” the blond man said. “Step away from the mirror. Do as I say and I’ll see to it he doesn’t harm you.”

“Oh, like I’m believing that. Now you’re my
protector
?”

“Summon me out, woman.
I
am your protector,” came the command at her back.

“This isn’t happening.” It couldn’t be. None of it. Her mind was incapable of processing it, and the sensation of dreamlike detachment was increasing exponentially. She felt as if she were standing, bewildered, on a stage set, as actors played their parts around her, and if somebody had a playbill with one of those helpful little plot synopsis thingies, she sure hadn’t gotten to see it.

“He
will
kill you, lass,” rolled the deep Scots burr behind her, “and you know it. You doona ken the same of me. Sure death or a mayhap death, ’tis a simple choice.”

“And that’s supposed to be reassuring?” she snapped over her shoulder, to whatever it was that was there that couldn’t really be there.

The blond man smiled coldly. “Oh, he’ll kill you, and far more brutally than I. Step aside and I’ll let you live. I’ll collect the mirror and leave. I give you my word.”

Jessi shook her head from side to side, once. “Leave. Now. And I won’t smash the mirror.”

“He won’t leave, lass, ’til you’re dead. He cannot. He is bound to serve one who would punish him were he to leave you alive now that you’ve seen the Dark Glass. I’ve no means to convince you to trust me. You must hang your bonnet on faith. Him. Or me. Choose. Now.”

“He was imprisoned in such a fashion because he is a ruthless killer that couldn’t be contained any other way. He was locked away for the safety of the world. It took the power of formidable Druids—”

“Woman, choose! Repeat this:
Lialth bree che bree, Cian MacKeltar, drachme se-sidh!
”

Jessi echoed the strange words without missing a beat the moment she heard them.

Because she finally understood what was going on.

She was right—none of this was happening.

What was happening was that she’d let herself in Professor Keene’s office and, rather than going to the bookshelf as she’d thought, she’d sat down for a moment on the plush leather Chesterfield sofa to rest her eyes. But she’d ended up getting too horizontal. And she was currently snoozing soundly away, having the most bizarre of dreams.

And everyone knew nothing mattered in dreams. One always woke up. Always. So why not let the man out of the mirror? Who cared?

She echoed the odd incantation twice, for good measure. Brilliant golden light flashed, the heat behind her increased markedly, and the room suddenly seemed too small for all that was in it. The sensation of spatial distortion increased almost unbearably.

The lamp was plucked from her limp grasp and placed elsewhere. Strong hands closed on her waist from behind. Lifted her from the floor and swept her aside. Deposited her behind him, sheltering her with his body.

She caught scent of him then—God, had she ever smelled such a scent? The female muscles deep in her lower belly clenched. He bore no chemical traces of aftershave or deodorant. Nothing artificial. Just pure man: a blend of sun-warmed leather on skin, a kiss of something spicy like clove, a touch of sweat, and the raw, unspoken promise of sex. If male sexual dominion had a scent, he reeked of it, and it worked on her like the ultimate pheromone, bringing her nipples and groin to intense, painful sexual awareness.

She glanced up. And up.

It was the same towering, gorgeous, muscle-ripped man from her Friday-night fantasy, his long dark hair a tangle of dozens of braids bound with gold, silver, and copper beads, falling halfway down his back. His bare, oh-so-beautiful, velvet-skinned back.

“Whuh,”
she breathed. In all her voyeuristic forays, she’d never seen a man so savagely, splendidly masculine. Figured he existed only in her subconscious.

It occurred to her then that since it
was
her subconscious at work, it was high time she transformed her id’s twisted little everyone’s-trying-to-kill-Jessi-today dream into something more to her liking: one toe-curling, scorchingly hot sex-dream.

Usually even the most intractable of bad dreams needed only a tiny nudge.

Nudge she would. With this fantasy man? Happily. Blissfully, even. She slid her palms up that perfect, powerful back, gliding over the ridges of muscle.

Fisted her hands in all that magnificent dark hair. Rubbed up against him, molding herself like Saran Wrap to his muscular, deliciously tight ass.

And licked him.

Slipped her tongue right up his spine. Tasted the salt and man and heat of him.

His entire body jerked with a violence that she would have found frightening, were she awake and any of it real. He sucked in a sharp breath between his teeth, a long, tight indrawn hiss, as if he were in exquisite pain. He went completely still, and made a guttural sound deep in his throat.

“You try me, woman,” he hissed.

He tossed his head—hard—yanking his braids free of her hands. In two strides he was through the door, slamming it behind him.

Only then did Jessi realize her assailant, too, was gone. He must have fled the moment she’d freed the man from the mirror.

With a gusty sigh, she went and slumped down on the couch. After a moment, she lay down, stretched out, and folded her arms behind her head.

She crossed her legs. Uncrossed them. Rubbed her eyes. Pinched herself experimentally a time or two.

God, she was horny. She couldn’t remember ever being so horny. The instant she’d pressed up against him she’d felt the strangest . . . well . . .
jolt,
for lack of a better word, sizzle through her entire body, and she’d gotten instantly ready. Panties-slick, ready-for-sex, no-foreplay-necessary ready.

So
this
is a wet dream,
she thought with a little snort of amusement.

A worrisomely vivid, detailed wet dream, but a dream nonetheless.

She was going to wake up any minute now.

Yup. Any minute now.

3

Jessi awakened stiff, cold, and with the beginnings of what promised to be a perfectly vicious headache.

Her neck was crinked from sleeping funny and she must have pushed her pillow off the bed in the middle of the night, because there was nothing remotely downy beneath her head. She opened her eyes and pushed herself up, intending to take some Advil, retrieve her pillow, and lie back down for a few minutes, but the moment she opened her eyes, she had to add utterly-perplexed-as-to-her-current-location-in-the-universe to her list of complaints.

Unfortunately, her cranky, sleep-muddled respite from reality was far too brief. As soon as she sat up, she discovered she was not in her bed as she’d thought, but on the sofa in Professor Keene’s office, and the events of last night sledgehammered back into her brain.

Groaning, she dropped her head forward and clutched it with both hands.

Impossible events: a stranger in the office who’d tried to kill her; an absurd tale that the mirror was Old Stone Age; a man inside the mirror whom she’d freed—allegedly a ruthless killer.

Insane
events.

Face buried in her palms, she whimpered, “What’s
happening
to me?”

But she knew what was happening to her; it was painfully obvious. She was losing it, that was what. And she wouldn’t be the first graduate student to crack under the strain of an overly ambitious load. Hardly a term passed without one or two dropping out of the program. The survivors always shook their heads and gossiped mercilessly about how so-and-so “just couldn’t take the pressure.” She knew; she’d been among them.

But I
can
take the pressure! I’m doing great; look at my GPA!
she protested inwardly.

Right. Uh-huh,
logic countered flatly,
so what other explanation is there for the crazy hallucinations—or dreams—or whatever they are—that you’ve been suffering for the past few days?

She sighed. There was no denying it; in the past few days she’d had two distinct bouts of . . . well, something . . . during which she’d not only been incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy, she’d not even been in charge of her own fantasy.

Which hardly seemed fair, she thought, biting back a bubble of near-hysterical laughter. If a girl was going to lose her mind, shouldn’t she at least get to enjoy it? Why on earth would she conjure the perfect male specimen, the most incendiary of hotties, then make herself the hapless victim of some bizarre murder plot?

“I just don’t get it.” Gingerly, she rubbed the pads of her index fingers in small circles on her throbbing temples.

Unless it had actually
happened
.

“Right. Uh-huh.” A man in a mirror. Sure.

Still holding her temples, she raised her head, peering about the dimly lit office, seeking clues. There was no indication that anyone but she had ever been there. Oh, the lamp was on the floor, rather than in its usual perch on the table, and a book was lying on the rug near the wall, but neither of those things could be construed as conclusive evidence that someone else had been in the office with her last night. People were known to sleepwalk in the midst of highly vivid dreams.

She forced herself to look in the mirror. Directly into it.

Hard silvered glass. Nothing more.

Forced herself to stand up. Walk over to it. Place her cold palms against the colder glass.

Hard silvered glass. Nothing more. No way anything had come out of that.

Squaring her shoulders, she turned her back on the relic.

Moving stiffly, she retrieved her backpack from the floor, scooped up the books the professor wanted, stuffed them into her bag, let herself out, and locked up the office.

For the first time in the entire history of her academic career, Jessi did the unthinkable: She ditched classes, went home, took some aspirin, tugged on her favorite
Godsmack
T-shirt, crawled into bed, pulled the covers up over her head.

And hid.

She never gave up. Never abandoned her plans and schedule. Never failed to meet things head-on. As tight as her schedule was, if she let a single thing slip or fall behind, a dozen others were affected. One tiny lapse could initiate a wildly entropic downward spiral. Ergo, everything had to be tackled and completed as planned.

Last winter, she’d trudged to class in the middle of one of Chicago’s most brutal snowstorms, trembling from head to toe with violent flu-chills, so sick that all the millions of tiny pores in her skin stung like little needle pricks. She’d lectured on more than one occasion while bordering on laryngitis, forcing her voice only with the aid of a disgustingly vile tea of orange peel, olive oil, and varied unmentionables she still shuddered to think about. She’d graded papers with a fever of a hundred and two.

But craziness wasn’t something one could tackle and complete, moving on to the next project.

And she had no clue how to deal with it.

Figuring chocolate was a start, as soon as she stepped through the door of her apartment, she grabbed a bag of Hershey’s Kisses she kept stashed away for emergencies (i.e., bad hair, severe PMS, or just one of those good old men-are-stupid-and-suck days) and in her warm cocoon beneath the blankets, began making short work of the decadent, melty little morsels.

After devouring the entire bag, she fell asleep.

She slept straight through until nine o’clock that night.

Upon awakening, she felt so much better that it occurred to her perhaps all she’d really needed was a good, solid ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. That perhaps, now that she was getting older—after all, she wasn’t a freshman anymore, she was twenty-four years old!—her frequent all-nighters exacted more of a toll than they used to. That perhaps she should start taking vitamins. Drink more milk. Eat her vegetables.

She wasn’t crazy, she thought, shaking her head and smiling faintly at the sheer absurdity of the notion. Those two intensely vivid dream/hallucinations she’d suffered had been merely an isolated occurrence of stress coupled with lack of sleep, and she was making a big deal out of nothing.

“I was just exhausted,” she told herself with a perfunctory, optimistic little nod.

Chocolate and sleep had buoyed her spirits. Fortified her to begin anew.

She was ready to start all over again, to face the day, or night, as it may be, and prove to herself that there was nothing wrong with her.

At least that was how she felt
before
she turned on the TV.

Vengeance.

’Twas the possibility that had kept Cian MacKeltar from going stark raving mad during the past 1,133 years of his incarceration in the Dark Glass.

From without, the glass looked to be little more than an elaborate mirror. From within, it was a circular stone prison, fifteen paces across at any point one chose to walk it. And he’d walked it a lot. Counted every bloody stone. Stone floor. Stones walls. Stone ceiling. Gray. Drab. Cold.

He’d stayed heated over the centuries by one thought only, burning like liquid fire in his veins.

Vengeance.

He’d lived it, breathed it,
become
it, caged and waiting, ever since the day Lucan Myrddin Trevayne, a man he’d once counted his closest friend and boon companion in the arts, had bound him to the Dark Glass, thereby securing immortality for himself.

Given the extent of the binding spells Lucan had used on him—coupled with his powerlessness within the glass and his inability to exit it, unless granted a brief freedom by the chanting of a summoning spell by someone beyond it—some might have dismissed his hope for vengeance as an impossibility.

But being a Druid, and a Keltar at that, Cian understood things that seemed impossible rarely were.

What impossible truly meant was “hasn’t happened
yet
.”

A fact that had been demonstrated well enough when, three and a half months ago, a thief had broken into Trevayne’s London stronghold—an impossibility in itself—and carted off half the bastard’s most prized relics, including the Dark Glass, scant months before the tithe that bound Cian to the Hallow was due.

Chance had favored him at long last. Lucan had lost possession of the mirror just when he needed it the most.

Now it was the tenth day of the tenth month, and Cian need only stay out of Lucan’s hands for a mere twenty-two more days—until just after midnight on All Hallows’ Eve, the anniversary of his original binding—in order to satisfy his millennium-old lust for vengeance. And bloody hell, he was starved for it!

Now that Lucan had a solid lead on the Dark Book, the most dangerous of all the Unseelie Hallows, it was even more critical Cian shatter the cursed Compact imprisoning him. Fulcrum for some of the deadliest black magyck known to man, the Dark Book in the hands of any man was a recipe for cataclysmic destruction. In the hands of Lucan “Merlin” Trevayne, it could brew the end of the world as the world knew it. Lucan could rewrite history, change time itself, if he managed to decipher some of the intricate spells therein. Cian
had
to stop him from getting the book. He had to defeat his ancient enemy once and for all.

He’d thought success within his grasp, had believed, given how many hands the Dark Glass had been passed through, and how far it had been sent, that Lucan would never find it in time, but yesterday had illustrated otherwise. He’d indeed been found, and his time had run out.

He’d recognized the Russian assassin the moment he’d slipped into the office last eve. He’d glimpsed him several times in the past when Roman had visited Trevayne’s London residence, where Cian had hung high on a wall in Lucan’s private study, being taunted by a view out a wall of windows that overlooked a busy London street in a world in which he would never live again.

At least he’d had a view. Had Lucan hung him
toward
the wall, he wasn’t certain even lust for vengeance would have kept him sane. Nor would it have afforded him the opportunity to test the mirror when his gaoler was away and learn to summon in inert objects that were within his line of vision. In such a fashion, he’d kept up with time’s fierce trot forward, devouring every book, periodical, and newspaper that passed through Lucan’s study over the centuries, occasionally even seeing a bit of television, while his view beyond the window metamorphosed from a sweetly rolling meadow to a small town, and finally to a sophisticated, bustling city.

Much like this “Chicago” in which he’d walked last eve.

Free, sweet Christ, he’d walked free again for a time! He’d felt the crush of grass beneath his boots, savored the wind in his face!

There were days inside the mirror when he felt he might willingly cut off his right arm for a single deep breath of a peat fire heaped with sheaves of fragrant heather, or a few lungfuls of briny air on Scotia’s wild shore. Or to sprawl on his back atop a high ben, as close to the heavens as one could get only in the Highlands, and watch the gloaming take the sky, streak and smudge it with violet and crimson, then turn it to a black velvet canopy sprinkled with starry diamonds.

He’d not seen his beloved Scotia in eleven hundred and thirty-three years. That was hell right there for a Highlander, to live exiled from his motherland.

Though Lucan had occasionally granted him freedoms in exchange for aid with a particularly difficult spell or a dark deed he wanted done—the bastard had stayed on intricately warded ground the entire time, so Cian couldn’t touch him—the last had been over a hundred and twenty years ago, and such freedoms were agonizingly brief. The Dark Glass’s magic always reclaimed him after a time, despite his resistance. It didn’t matter how fast or far from it he fled, didn’t matter what Druid wards he wove about himself, after a time—and it was never the same interval; once, an entire day; another time, no more than a single hour—he was simply no longer wherever he’d been: one moment free; the next, back in his prison.

It had taken him some time last night to track Roman and, because he’d been concerned the mirror might reclaim him before he’d succeeded, he’d focused single-mindedly on the task. He had no doubt another of Lucan’s men would soon be coming. And another and another,
ad infinitum,
until the mirror had been collected and all trace of any who’d so much as glimpsed it, eradicated.

It was the way of men of their ilk—men of magycks, light and dark, those who practiced
draiodheacht—
to conceal such things as the Hallows from the world. Cian—because common man should not be troubled by the existence of such things. Lucan—because there were many other sorcerers out there (scrupulously staying off one another’s radar) who would stop at nothing to steal the coveted, dangerous Dark Hallows, were they to learn he had them. Contrary to what many thought, sorcerers and witches were a flourishing breed.

A Keltar Druid would have worked a complex memory spell to harmlessly—if properly and painstakingly done—erase the forbidden knowledge from the minds of any who’d encountered it.

But not Lucan. Simpler to kill: minimum effort, maximum pleasure and gain. Lucan thrived on power over life and death. He always had.

Cian smiled bitterly. Anyone in his path was expendable, and the woman was in his path. She was in mortal danger that she couldn’t possibly begin to fathom or hope to survive.

His thoughts both gentled and grew fiercer as they turned toward her. Fiery, determined, courageous, she was a stunning woman, with short glossy black hair curling softly back from a heart-shaped, delicate-featured face, and the most perfect, bountiful, lusciously rounded breasts he’d ever seen. A delectable ass too. He’d seen in great detail each intimate curve in her low-slung blue jeans and snug peach sweater. He’d even glimpsed part of her panties—which couldn’t have covered more than a fraction of her generous bottom, fashioned as they were from little more than ribbons—peeking up from the waistband of her jeans. The orange lacy stuff had been adorned by a bright pink butterfly at the base of her spine, making it seem her panties had been designed to slide up from her jeans to taunt a man’s eye.
Men must be paragons of restraint in this century,
he’d thought, staring fixedly at the scrap of frothy fabric rising from between the twin globes of her ass,
or a bunch of bloody eunuchs
. Creamy sun-kissed skin, eyes of jade, mouth of a temptress, Lucan’s assassin had called her Jessica.