The Dark Highlander (10 page)

The man turned at her gasp. “I’m sorry I startled you, ma’am,” he apologized gently. “Might Dageus MacKeltar be about?”

British accent, she noted. And a funny tattoo on his neck. Didn’t seem quite in character with the rest of him. He didn’t seem the tattoo sort.

“I didn’t hear you knock,” Chloe said. She didn’t think he had. Maybe Dageus’s friends didn’t. “Are you a friend of his?”

“Yes. I’m Giles Jones,” he said. “Is he in?”

“Not at the moment, but I’ll be happy to tell him you stopped by.” She peered at him, curiosity never dormant. Here was one of Dageus’s friends. What might he tell her about him? “Are you a
close
friend of his?” she fished.

“Yes.” He smiled. “And who might you be? I can’t believe he’s not mentioned such a lovely woman to me.”

“Chloe Zanders.”

“Ah, he has exquisite taste,” Giles said softly.

She blushed. “Thank you.”

“Where did he go? Will he be returning soon? Might I wait?”

“It’ll probably be an hour or so. Can I give him a message for you?”

“An hour?” he echoed. “Are you certain? Perhaps I could wait; he might be back sooner.” He glanced questioningly at her.

Chloe shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Jones. He went to get some things for me; we’re leaving for Scotland later and—”

She broke off as the man’s demeanor changed abruptly.

Gone was the disarming smile. Gone was the appreciative gaze.

Replaced by a cold, calculating expression. And—her brain seemed to resist processing this fact—there was suddenly, bewilderingly, a knife in his hand.

She shook her head sharply, unable to absorb the bizarre turn of events.

With a menacing smile, he moved toward her.

Still trying to get some dim grasp on the situation, she said stupidly. “You’re n-not his f-friend.”
Oh, gee, did the knife give it away, Zanders?
she snapped at herself silently.
Get a grip. Find a blasted weapon.
She inched slowly backward, into the kitchen, afraid to make a sudden move.

“Not yet,” was the man’s bizarre reply as he paced her.

“What do you want? If it’s money, he has lots of money. Tons of money. And he’ll happily give it to you. And there are artifacts,” she babbled. She was almost there. Surely there was a knife lying on the counter somewhere. “Worth a fortune. I’ll help you pack them up. There are oodles of things here you can take. I won’t get in your way a bit. I promise, I’ll just—”

“It’s not money I’m after.”

Oh, God.
A dozen horrid scenarios, each worse than the last, flashed through her mind. He’d duped her into freely admitting that she was alone for an hour by pretending to know Dageus. How gullible she’d been!
You can take the girl out of Kansas, but you can’t take Kansas out of the girl,
she thought, hysteria bubbling inside her.

“Oh, would you look at that! I’ve mistaken the time! He’s due back any minute—”

A sharp bark of laughter. “Nice try.”

When he lunged for her, she scrambled backward, adrenaline flooding her. Frantically, with hands made clumsy by fear, she snatched things off the counter and flung them at him. The thermal coffeepot bounced off his shoulder, spewing coffee everywhere; the butcher block hit him squarely in the chest. Flailing behind her, she grabbed one Baccarat goblet after another from the sink and flung them at his head. He ducked and dodged, and glass after glass exploded against the wall behind him, raining down on the floor.

He hissed with fury and kept coming.

Gasping for breath, dangerously close to hyperventilating, Chloe groped for more arsenal. A pot, a colander, some keys, a timer, a skillet, spice jars, more glasses. She needed a freaking weapon! In the midst of this damned museum, surely she could get her hands on one blasted knife! But her bare feet kept slipping in coffee as she tried to avoid both her assailant and the broken glass.

Afraid to take her eyes off him, she fumbled for a drawer behind her and felt frantically about: towels.

The next drawer: trash bags and Reynolds Wrap. She flung both boxes at him.

Glass crunching beneath his shoes, he advanced, backing her against the counter.

Wine bottle. Full.
Thank you, God.
She kept it behind her back and went motionless.

He did exactly what she’d hoped. Gave her the bum’s rush, and she smashed the bottle down on his head with all her might, drenching them both with glass-spiked wine.

He grabbed her around the waist as he went down, taking her with him. She was no match for the wiry strength of the man as he wrestled her onto her back beneath him.

She caught a flash of silver perilously close to her face. She went limp for a moment, just long enough to make him wonder, then twisted and went for his groin with her knee and his eyes with her thumbs, whispering a silent thank-you to Jon Stanton in Kansas, who’d taught her “ten dirty tricks” when they’d dated in high school.

“Ow, you bloody
bitch
!” When he convulsed reflexively, Chloe pounded at him with her fists, scrabbling desperately to get out from beneath him.

His hand locked on her ankle. She grabbed a piece of glass, heedless of her numerous cuts and turned on him, hissing and spitting like a cat.

And when she slashed at his hand on her ankle, a fierce triumph filled her. She may be on the floor, bloody and crying, but she was
not
going to die without one hell of a fight.

Dageus stepped into the anteroom, wondering if Chloe might still be in the shower. He entertained a brief vision of her, gloriously nude and wet with all that lovely hair trailing down her back. Hand on the doorknob, he smiled, then flinched when he heard a crash, followed by cursing.

Pushing the door open, he gaped, incredulity and shock paralyzing him for a precious moment.

Chloe—dripping red liquid that his mind
refused
to accept might be blood—was standing in the living room, turned toward the kitchen, her back to him, clutching the claymore from above the fireplace with both hands, crying and hiccuping violently.

A man stepped out of the kitchen, his murderous gaze fixed on Chloe, a knife in his hand.

Neither of them registered his presence.

“Chloe-lass, back away,” Dageus hissed. Instinctively, he used the Voice of Power, lacing the order with a spell of Druid compulsion, lest she be too frightened to move on her own.

The man startled and saw him then, his face registering shock and . . . something more, a thing Dageus couldn’t quite define. An expression that made no sense to him. Recognition? Awe? The intruder’s gaze darted to the door behind Dageus, then to the open doors leading to the rain-slicked terrace.

Snarling, Dageus began stalking. No need to rush, the man had no place to go. Chloe had responded to his command and backed away toward the fireplace, where she stood clutching the claymore tightly, white as a ghost. She was still standing. That was a good sign. Surely the red stains couldn’t
all
be blood.

“Are you all right, lass?” Dageus kept his gaze fixed on the intruder. Power was roiling inside him. Ancient power, power that was not his, power that was untrustworthy and bloodthirsty, goading him to destroy the man using archaic, forbidden curses. To make him die a slow and horrific death for daring to touch his woman.

Fisting his hands, Dageus struggled to close his mind to it. He was a man, not an ancient evil. More than man enough to handle this himself. He knew—though he knew not how he knew—that should he use the dark power within him to kill, it would seal his doom.

Hiccup. “Uh-huh, I think so.” More sobs.

“You son of a bitch. You hurt my woman,” Dageus growled, moving inexorably forward, backing the man out onto the terrace. Forty-three floors above the street.

The intruder glanced over his shoulder at the low stone wall encircling the terrace, as if gauging the distance, then back at Dageus again.

What he did next was so strange and unexpected that Dageus failed to react in time to stop him.

His eyes blazing with fanatic zeal, the man bowed his head. “May I serve the Draghar with my death, as I failed with my life.”

Dageus was still trying to process the fact that he’d said “the Draghar” when the man spun about, leaped up onto the wall, and took a swan dive into forty-three floors of nothingness.

9

“What
is
that stuff?” Chloe asked, wincing.

“Easy, lass. ’Tis but a salve that will speed the healing.” Dageus smoothed it on her myriad cuts, murmuring healing spells in an ancient tongue she’d not know. A language so long dead that the scholars of her century had no name for it. The sticky red on her clothing had been wine not blood. She’d come away remarkably unscathed, all considered, with cuts on her hands and feet, a few scratches on her arms, but no debilitating injury.

“That does feel better,” she exclaimed.

He glanced at her, forcing himself to look in her eyes, not at the lush, delectable curves scarce concealed by her delicate, lacy bra and panties. After the man had jumped, Dageus had stripped Chloe more roughly than he’d intended, frantic to know the extent of her wounds. Now she sat beside him on the sofa, facing him, her wee feet in his lap as he tended them.

“Here, lass.” He snatched the cashmere throw from the back of the sofa and draped it around her shoulders, pulling it snugly about her so it covered her from neck to ankles. She blinked slowly, as if only now realizing her state of undress, and he knew her mind was still numb from her ordeal.

He forced his attention back to her feet. The healing spells were pushing him ever nearer the limits of his control. He’d used too much magic in the past few days. He needed a long space of time with no spells to recover.

Or her.

The longest he’d ever gone without a woman, since the eve he’d turned dark, was a sennight. At the end of it, he’d been up on that terrace wall himself. Clutching a bottle of whisky, dancing a Scots reel atop the slippery stones in the midst of an ice storm, letting fate choose which side he fell off first.

“He lied to me,” she said, raking her hair, still damp from the shower, back from her face with a bandaged hand. “He said he was a friend of yours and I told him you wouldn’t be back for an hour.” Her eyes widened. “Why
did
you come back?”

“I forgot the key, lass.”

“Oh, God,” she breathed, looking panicked all over again. “What if you hadn’t?”

“But I did. You’re safe now.”
Never again will I permit danger to touch you.

“You didn’t know him, did you? I mean, he just said that to find out how long you’d be gone, right?”

“Nay, lass, I’d never seen the man before.” That much was true. “’Tis as you thought, he lied to find out when I’d be returning, how long you’d be alone. He may have gotten my name anywhere. The mail call, the phone book.” He wasn’t listed in either of those places. But she didn’t need to know that.

“Why would Security let him up?”

Dageus shrugged. “I’m sure they didn’t. There are ways to circumvent Security,” he evaded, scanning the damage resultant from the attack. He needed to tidy the kitchen before the police inevitably came to question the occupants on his side of the building. Fortunately, there were twenty-eight terraces below his, down to the fourteenth level, and the police would, he knew, in that wide berth the rich were ceded in any century, leave the penthouse level for last.

His mind raced over details: eradicate all sign of a tussle, pack up the last two tomes, stop at her place for her passport, take her artifacts to the bank, get them to the airport. He was glad they were leaving today. He’d dragged her into something even he didn’t understand, and only he could protect her.

And he would protect her. She was keeper of his
Selvar
. His life was now her shield.

May I serve the Draghar . . .
the man had said.

It made no sense to him. He’d been so startled to hear those words on the man’s lips that he’d stared blankly. He was furious with himself because, had he moved or spoken more quickly, he could have forced answers from the man. Apparently, someone knew more about his problem than he himself did. How? Who could
possibly
know what he’d gotten himself into? Not even Drustan knew for certain! Who the blethering hell were the Draghar? And in what fashion had the man been serving them?

If they were, as he’d considered earlier, some part of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and if they had indeed decided to hunt him down, why harm an innocent woman? And if they were the allegedly immortal race, why send a mortal to do their bidding? There was no question the man had been mortal. Dageus had seen him. He’d landed on a car, or rather, merged with the car.

While he’d cleansed Chloe’s wounds, he’d quizzed her thoroughly about the intruder, in part to keep her talking so she wouldn’t go into shock. The man had identified himself to her as Giles Jones, though Dageus suffered no illusions ’twas his real name. The man had recognized him somehow. He might not have known Giles Jones, but Giles Jones had known him. How long had the man been watching him? Spying on him. Waiting for a moment to strike.

A sudden fear for his brother and Gwen gripped him. If he was being watched, was Drustan also? What curse had he brought down upon himself and his clan?

He shook his head, sorting through dozens of questions for which he had no answers. Thinking was of no avail. Action was necessary now. He needed to get things tidied up, get them out of the country, then he could concentrate on discovering who the Draghar were.

He finished with the last cut and glanced up at her. She was watching him in silence, her eyes huge, but the color was slowly returning to her face.

“Forgive me, lass. I should have been here to protect you,” he apologized gravely. “’Twill never happen again.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” She gave a shaky little laugh. “You can’t be held responsible for all the criminals in the city. It’s obvious he wasn’t in his right mind. I mean—my God, he
jumped.
He killed himself.” She shook her head, still unable to fathom it. “Did he say something before he jumped? It looked like he did.”

She’d been too far away to hear it. “’Twas gibberish. Made no sense. I’m sure you’ve the right of it. Like as not he was crazy or . . .” He shrugged.

“On drugs,” she said, nodding. “His eyes were weird. Like he was some kind of fanatic. I really thought he was going to kill me.” A pause, then she said. “I fought back. I didn’t just collapse.”

She looked both shocked by and proud of that fact, and well she should be, he thought. How difficult it must have been for her, as wee as she was, to face a man so much larger than she, who’d been wielding a weapon with the intent to kill. It was one thing for a man of his size and girth, not to mention training, to enter battle, but her? The lass had courage.

“You did well, Chloe. You’re an extraordinary woman.” Dageus tucked a stray, damp curl behind her ear. He was beginning to lose the struggle to keep his gaze from hungrily roving her body, knowing she was nearly naked beneath the soft throw. A peculiar icy heat was flooding his veins. Dark and demanding. Need that cared not that she had been traumatized, need that endeavored to convince him that sex would make her feel better.

The tatters of his honor did not agree. But they were tatters and he needed to get her away from him. Fast.

“Are your feet better?”

She slid them from his lap to the floor, then stood, testing them.

He glanced out the window hastily, fisting his hands to keep from reaching for her. He knew if he touched her now, he would drop her, spread her and push himself inside her. His thought patterns were changing, the way they did when it had been too long. Becoming primitive, animal.

“Yes,” she said, sounding surprised. “Whatever that salve is, it’s amazing.”

“Why doona you go up and finish packing your things?” His voice sounded thick and guttural, even to his own ears. He rose swiftly and moved toward the kitchen.

“But what about the police? Shouldn’t we call the police?”

He paused, but kept his back to her. “They’re already out there, lass.”
Go,
he willed silently, desperately.

“But shouldn’t we talk to them?”

“I’ll take care of everything, Chloe.” He used a brush of compulsion that time and told her to forget about the police. Just enough magic to ease her mind, to help her trust that he would handle things. To make her not wonder later why she’d not been questioned. So far as the police would be concerned, the man hadn’t fallen from
his
terrace, but she need not know that.

He’d just entered the kitchen when she came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Dageus?”

He stiffened and closed his eyes. He didn’t turn around.
Christ, lass, please. I doona want to rape you.

“Hey, turn around,” she said, sounding mildly peeved.

Teeth clenched, he turned.

“Even though it’s not like you did it on purpose, thank you for forgetting the key,” she said, then cupped his face in her wee hands, stood on her tiptoes and pulled him down to plant a soft kiss on his lips. “You probably saved my life.”

He could feel muscles leaping in his jaw. Leaping in his entire body. Had to unclench his teeth to manage a thick, “Probably?”

“I
was
putting up a good fight,” she pointed out. “And I’d gotten to the claymore.”

A wan but cheeky smile, then, blessedly, she moved toward the stairs.

At the foot of them, she glanced back. “I know you probably don’t care, because we’re leaving, but you should tell the building manager that this penthouse has some serious heating problems. Would you mind turning it up a bit?” She rubbed her arms through the coverlet and, without waiting for an answer, hurried up the steps.

Five minutes later, he was still leaning against the wall, shaking from the battle he’d almost lost when she’d so innocently touched her lips to his. She’d kissed him as if he were honorable, in control. Safe.

As if he weren’t the man who’d been about to take her virginity by force. As if he weren’t dark and dangerous. Once, he’d gone to Katherine when he’d been in nearly as bad a state. He’d seen the fear mixed with the excitement in her eyes when he’d taken her roughly, without speaking a word, in her kitchen where he’d found her. Had known she’d sensed it in him, the darkness. Had known it had turned her on.

But not Chloe. She’d kissed him gently. Beast and all.

Trevor watched Dageus MacKeltar and his companion from a distance as they exited the building onto Fifth Avenue. The police had been crawling all over the place for hours, removing Giles’s body, and questioning witnesses, but by midafternoon, had moved on, leaving two grizzled and grouchy detectives in their wake.

He felt no grief for Giles; his death had been swift, and death was not a thing they feared, as the Druid sect of the Draghar believed in the transmigration of the soul. Giles would live again in some other body, some other time.

As the Draghar would live again in the Scotsman’s body, once they’d taken full possession of him.

Trevor was awed that the man had managed thus far to fend off the transformation. As powerful as the Draghar were, Dageus MacKeltar must be uncommonly powerful in his own right.

But Trevor had no doubt the Prophecy would come to pass as had been promised. No man could contain such power and fail to use it. Day by day, it would seep into him until he no longer knew he was being transformed. They simply needed to provoke him, to goad and corner him. The use of dark magic for dark purposes would plunge him into an abyss from which there was no escape.

Then, the Draghar would walk the earth again. Then, all the power, all the knowledge the Tuatha Dé Danaan had stolen from them millennia ago would be restored. The Draghar would teach them the Voice of Power that brought death with a mere word, and the secret ways to move through time. When their numbers were many and strong, they would hunt the Tuatha Dé Danaan and take what should have been theirs long ago. That which the Tuatha Dé Danaan had ever denied the Draghar: the secret of immortality. Eternal life, no chancy rebirth necessary.

They would be gods.

Trevor studied the woman intently. Tiny little bit, she was, and he wondered how Giles had ended up going over that terrace. Had it been by choice? Had Dageus MacKeltar thrown him off? Surely the small female hadn’t done it. She didn’t amount to much. Barely topped five feet.

The Scot towered over her. The Draghar had been given a mighty vessel, his form strong, that of a warrior. Men would respond well to his innate authority. Even as Trevor thought that, he noted how the crowds parted for him, instinctively moving out of his way, and he strode as if he knew they would. No hesitation in the man, none whatsoever. Even from his safe distance, he could feel the power rolling off him.

When the Scot glanced down at the woman, Trevor’s eyes narrowed.

Possessiveness in his gaze. Protectiveness in the way he shielded her body from passersby, his intent gaze constantly scrutinizing his surroundings. Simon would not be pleased.

Before Trevor had found his calling in the Order, he’d run the con, quite successfully, and the cardinal rule of such business applied here: isolate the mark; the quarry falls faster alone.

He paced them, at a cautious distance.

They paused outside a bank and Trevor glided closer, dropped a few coins and bent to scoop them up. Listening, to see if he could overhear any conversation.

And finally he heard what he needed; they were planning to fly out to Scotland some time this evening.

He melted back into a small cluster of pedestrians and slipped out a cell phone. It would be a simple matter to have one of his computer-savvy brethren find out from which airport and when, and book him on the flight as well.

Speaking swiftly, he filled Simon in.

And Simon’s instructions were precisely what he expected.

Hours later, Trevor slid into a seat a dozen rows behind them. He would have preferred to sit nearer, but the flight wasn’t full, and he worried that the Scot might spot him.

He’d shadowed them all afternoon and not once gotten the chance to strike. Blades were his sect’s weapon of choice, each spilling of blood a ritual in and of itself, yet he’d had to abandon his weapons before boarding. His tie would have served well to strangle her, if he’d only been able to get a moment with her alone.