The Highland Dragon's Lady (7 page)

“What—what—”

Reggie needed to stop stammering. She needed to catch her breath. She needed to remember how to say more than one word. Her brain was not cooperating on any of the above, her corsets were stabbing her in the ribs, and she understood for the first time why people fainted. She felt numb and light, about to crack down the middle.

She focused and pulled in air. “What in the name of God
was
that?”

Not much of an improvement, that question.
That
was the ceiling falling in,
idiot
, and Colin was looking down at her, frowning with concern, probably over her physical welfare but quite possibly because she sounded completely dense.

He
could have his wits about him. He’d lived more than a hundred years, which was bound to give a man some experience with both lust and danger. She had comparatively little of either. Also, perhaps dragon minds could handle going from exquisite torment to stunned terror in a matter of seconds. The human brain was not built for it.

Damned if she wouldn’t try and rise to the occasion, though.

Before Colin could answer her, Reggie summoned what remained of her self-possession. “I mean, was that magic? Did you sense anything this time?”

“No,” he said. His lips quirked upward, and he added, “But then, I wasna’ in much of a condition to notice.”

Even now, the husky tone that crept into his voice made Reggie’s insides melt a little—and even now, she was satisfied to hear Colin say it first. That probably betrayed a sad lack of perspective on her part, but she was a flawed creature. She’d accepted that much years ago.

She did wonder if he was sincere, or if some version of “Oh, I was carried away by lust, of course” was simply what one said to women after. Not that this was really
after
, since they’d still been in
before
when the ceiling had fallen in, or possibly
during
, but she thought the reassuring phrases would be the same either way.

She didn’t know, and that didn’t sit much easier with her than the collapsed ceiling did.

“Are you all right?” Colin asked.

“Ye-es,” she said, taking a moment to be certain of it. “Well done. You move very fast.”

Fast
wasn’t half of it. She remembered a flash of movement and that was all, except that remembering made her conscious that she was still lying underneath Colin, his body solid and warm against hers. He was still aroused too. She felt the evidence pressing into her thigh. Her own body throbbed in response, but now was very much not the time to act on it.

Colin seemed to realize that when she did. He got to his feet in one graceful motion, then offered her a hand.

Reggie took it and pulled herself to her feet, aware of how much more awkward skirts and corsets and being human made her. Beneath Colin’s gaze, she flushed with embarrassment and unreasonable anger. Did he have to
watch
her? Was he hiding a smirk?

Yes, he did, or at least it was easier to help someone up when you were looking at her, and no, he probably wasn’t. Reggie knew these things, and still she wanted to slap him.

Reaction, said the sensible part of her. You want to slap
someone
and he’s what’s around.

She sighed. “We’d better go down,” she said, pulling her mind toward organization and reaction, toward things that had to be done. “Otherwise—”

“Good God, what
happened
?” Edmund asked, stepping through the attic door. Mouth hanging open, he looked from Reggie and Colin to the pile of rubble in the middle of the room and the hole that gaped just above it, rain falling steadily through. “Are the two of you all right? Anything broken?”

“Master Edmund?” one of the maids said from below. “I heard a crash.”

Reggie closed her eyes and watched pink and green blobs collide in front of her vision.

Suddenly, fainting seemed not just understandable but perhaps the best option going.

* * *

She didn’t faint. It wasn’t the sort of thing one could honestly do on command. Pretending was a gambit the Miss Heseltons of the world practiced, and Reggie wasn’t a wonderful actress. Also, it was a safe bet that fainting would have just brought on more hysterics.

“I’m sending for workmen,” said Mater, pacing the upstairs drawing room. Her skirt swirled out behind her at every turn, adding to the theatrical effect. Reggie decided that it wasn’t the time to tell her about the painting they’d found. “We should’ve had that roof redone long ago. I don’t
care
whether they preserve the original character of the house,” she added, with a sharp look at her husband.

“The workmen might be in just as much danger,” said Mr. Talbot-Jones. “Perhaps more, if they’re unprepared.”

“As far as we know, it was only a bad roof. I’m certain they’d be prepared for
that
,” said Mrs. Talbot-Jones. “And we’ve had men in before without much trouble. Drink the rest of your tea, Reggie. How are you feeling?”

Slightly homicidal, she thought.

“I’m fine,” she said for approximately the fiftieth time in the last quarter hour. “Not injured at all. Mr. MacAlasdair was very alert.”

Unable to help herself, she glanced over at Colin, who was lounging in an armchair by the hearth—and out of the line of fire. He looked slightly amused and perfectly composed, as if he spent half his life pulling girls out of the way of collapsing ceilings. Maybe he did; he probably spent enough time seducing them.

That wasn’t entirely fair. She’d been enthusiastic. And she wasn’t jealous—at least, she didn’t think so. Of course Colin had been with other women. He was male, and more than a hundred years old, and she had no claim on him, nor did she want one. It was just…it had been so easy for him to make her beg and squirm. He’d kept so much of his own self-control. Reggie was a worldly girl and could meet his eyes without blushing even now, but remembering the noises she’d made and the way she’d moved against him was not comfortable, and not just for pleasant physical reasons.

She looked away, down at her teacup. Miss Heselton was having the vapors now, talking about how awful it would have been and how she didn’t think she could have endured it. Mater was demanding to know why Edmund had left Reggie and Colin up there in the first place, and while seeing the future was
not
one of Reggie’s freakish talents, she knew that the conversation would not take any pleasant paths.

“We found that portrait,” she said, speaking loudly enough to interrupt the others and gesturing to the corner, where the eighteenth-century lady smiled her thin smile from the painting propped against the wall. Edmund had brought it down, but everyone had been too busy fussing to discuss it yet. In Reggie’s opinion, the time had most definitely come. “I don’t know if it’s important, but she’s the first face or name we encountered up there. And it wasn’t hung up like the rest, though it’s no worse than most of them.”

The walls of Whitehill had come complete with sundry portraits of its previous owners. A lady from Regency times looked soulfully out from between the dining-room windows, and a bilious Tudor lord glowered on the wall opposite Reggie’s room. As surly as that gentleman seemed, she’d never gotten the sense of cruelty and even danger from him that she’d felt from the woman in the attic portrait.

She didn’t mention that. Talking about vague feelings that she “just had” didn’t usually help a situation.

“Bring it over into the light,” said Pater. When Edmund had obliged him, he squinted down at the nameplate. “There’s certainly a
J
here, and an
M
for the last name—though that’s no surprise. She’d be a Morgan, at least by marriage.”

“That might be a place to start,” said Mr. Heselton, speaking up for the first time since they’d gathered in the drawing room. “The church records don’t go back more than a hundred years or so—there was a fire—but we could look in the village cemetery. She was one of the family, and the gravestones were good quality. Hers would probably have lasted.”

“I’ll have one of the girls polish the nameplate,” said Mrs. Talbot-Jones, “and we’ll see what’s to be seen. Reggie, do you think you should lie down?”

“No,” said Reggie decisively. “Did you and Miss Heselton find anything?”

“A book,” said Mater, her mouth tightening at the memory. “Or part of one. Evidently it’d been in a fire, like your records,” she added, glancing at Mr. Heselton. “However, it looks to be a journal, and a rather old one at that, and the remaining pages might well be useful. It’s mostly in French, though, and I think some Latin as well.”

“I don’t think any of the family came from France,” said Mr. Heselton, frowning as he tried to remember.

“Wouldn’t have to be French themselves,” said Reggie. “You write foreign when you want to make it harder for people to snoop.” The others turned to her, curious, and she shrugged. “Girls’ school. Six years.”

“Can you read it, then?” Pater asked.

Reggie shook her head. “I never bothered keeping a journal. Or reading other people’s.”

“That speaks very well of you,” said Miss Heselton. “So many girls these days are furtive and dishonest.”

Making rude noises probably wouldn’t pass, even if Mater was inclined to be sympathetic right now, and Reggie couldn’t explain that she’d merely had her fill of other people’s heads by the time she’d started school. She sought refuge in her tea.

It was only a brief respite. “But you
took
French,” said Mater.

“I can order off a menu and buy a hat,” said Reggie. “I’m lost at reading.”

“George can read both,” said Miss Heselton, gesturing to her brother, “but it’s quite a daunting job for one person, and we might not have very much time. I thought that, perhaps…” She trailed off, looking at Edmund. “Your father says you went to Eton and Oxford.”

“Went, yes. But it’s been years, and I only passed Latin by the skin of my teeth.”

“And the cuffs of your sleeves,” said Reggie.

“I’m glad to hear your time—and school fees—were so well-spent,” said Pater, but he was grinning just a shade less obviously than Edmund. “And I’m afraid too much time might have passed for me as well, though I’d certainly be glad to make the attempt.”

“Halves, then,” said Colin, “as I’m a fair hand with both. At least until we’re more certain about the book. Unless the ladies upstairs can assist us.”

“Mrs. Osbourne won’t be well enough to help,” said Mr. Heselton, “and I wouldn’t want to tax Miss Browne further. Thirds it is—assigned as you like, Mr. MacAlasdair, once we see the book. At least we’ve profited by the afternoon’s…adventures.”

“We might have,” said Mrs. Talbot-Jones. “It could be that neither of the things we found has anything to do with the ghost. Let’s not get our hopes up too quickly.”

Growing up, Reggie had heard
that
warning more times than she could count. Mater had cautioned her against expecting too much from the weather, from new horses, from balls and friends and men. More often than Reggie would have preferred, she’d been right.

“It’s our only place to start right now,” she said. “Going forward is better than doing nothing.”

His actions are a disgrace to our blood and our name. As undutiful as it may be, I cannot but blame Father, at least in part, for failing to correct such tendencies before they became truly and indelibly marked. Now it is left to me to deal with their repercussions. Sarah will certainly be of no use—she’s never had a strong will where our family is concerned.

Colin put his pen down and lifted his head, not sure whether to rub his eyes or his wrist first. He did, as he’d said, know both French and Latin, but the French in the journal had been old when he was born. The writer’s hand was graceful enough but small, and neither age nor fire had made his task any easier.

In his progress through the first few intact pages, he’d read a great deal of frustration. The writer clearly felt that he or she was the only moral and responsible person for at least fifty miles. Over centuries of undeath, that could well have turned into the rage that had ended the séance. The writer talked about family blood too. As Edmund had said, the ghost could have been speaking of that.

Colin had found no name, though, and no identifying details, and the whole project was slow going. It was easy to let his mind wander.

Dinner that night had been a quiet affair, though it had lacked the morning’s unease. With a clear plan of action before them, however ineffective it might prove to be, everyone had eaten a little heartier, and their silence had been as much planning as brooding.

Mrs. Talbot-Jones had placed Reggie between her and Edmund, perhaps surrounding her daughter with people who would spot any signs of infirmity. Colin, at the other end of the table, had shot a few glances her way, but had been looking for other signs entirely, though he couldn’t have said exactly what.

He hadn’t been expecting a nocturnal invitation from her. He wouldn’t have accepted one. The rest of the household was bound to watch Reggie’s movements especially carefully that night. Delightful as Reggie was, no woman was worth the likelihood of getting thrown out on his ear and missing further events at the house thereby. Girls—even pretty, bright, daring girls—came along often enough in a man’s lifetime. Genuinely haunted houses were far rarer.

He still wished she’d look back at him more, and for longer. Instead she’d seemed very intent on her dinner, and on the conversation with her mother and brother. The one time Colin had managed to catch her eye, she had flashed him a grin of unusual and, he thought, unwarranted fierceness, as if she was daring him to do something.

Or perhaps to think something.

As dearly as he would have liked to investigate the subject, Colin had managed no chance to do so. Reggie’s parents had, through a variety of not-very-subtle hints, hustled her off to bed shortly after dinner. Miss Browne’s genuine weariness had provided an excellent opportunity to begin the suggestions. Reggie had waited until Edmund had retired, though. If the events of the day had troubled her, they hadn’t done so badly enough for her to forget that she was trying to be her brother’s chaperone.

The memory made Colin smile.

Now he was at his desk with a cup of tea at his left hand, and the journal and an almost-blank copybook at his right. The situation inspired much less good humor than his memory of Reggie. He wasn’t surprised that his mind roamed back to her whenever he allowed it to stray from the work at hand.

There wouldn’t be too much more work for him tonight, Colin knew. Already the words in the journal were starting to blur in front of his eyes. His dragon side gave him night vision and other forms of perception, but it had no facility for words, nor for close-up sight. If he tried to push himself harder, he’d begin to make mistakes—possibly fatal ones, given the forces he was dealing with.

After another paragraph in which the writer railed against his or her brother for what sounded like an unfortunate liaison, Colin shut the journal. The footman who was serving as his valet—Loch Arach had yet to send him a suitable replacement, and he didn’t like traveling with strangers—had long since gone to bed, and Colin didn’t have the heart to wake him. He’d undressed himself before; he could do it again. He turned to leave his desk.

A face peered in at him through the window.

He only got a momentary glimpse before the figure saw him and vanished. He saw that the face was the color of raw dough and almost as formless. The mouth was a lipless gash, the eyes indentations, the nose nonexistent. It was a sketch of a human shape, done by a not-too-bright child.

When the figure vanished, it
vanished
. One second it was there; the next, as Colin choked out a low Gaelic curse, it was gone. He dashed to the window, but the landscape that met his eyes was as still and empty as any other country night would have been.

It was empty to human sight, anyhow. But he knew a trick or two.

He spoke a quick stream of Latin, triggering one of the universe’s hidden rules, and the world around him changed. Now the bedroom was full of gray mist, turning faintly rose around the bed and blue by the desk. Outside, faint shades of green and brown rippled through the gray—and by the window, traces of putrid green lingered. The color was fading quickly, but now it was still sharp.

Reggie wasn’t the only one who could climb out windows.

Colin spent a moment to make sure that the green residue
was
just residue, leftover aura from whatever the figure had been, and not hostile in itself. He spent another second checking for other traps. Seeing none, he wrenched open the window and sprang out onto the balcony.

From his new perspective, the green traces trailed away into midair. Nothing had climbed up to the balcony. The tree from which Reggie had entered bore no tracks, and neither did either of the walls beside the balcony. Colin leaned over the iron railing, looked out across the lawns of Whitehill, and saw no figures, human or eldritch. There were only the trees, the hedges, and a few swooping owls and bats silhouetted against the sky.

He could almost have thought that he’d imagined the shape outside his window—but he’d never been particularly given to hallucinations, and the traces of its rotting aura
did
hang in the air, even now.

With the night air cool against his face and the balcony cold beneath his feet, he tapped his fingers on the rail and thought of possibilities. He’d been sincere in telling Reggie that he didn’t have much experience with ghosts, and he didn’t think that the creature stalking Whitehill was anything else—he’d have been able to sense much more about a demon. Colin had lived long enough to know when he was over his head, and even to admit it sometimes, particularly to himself.

A few basic principles should still apply.

To wit: the creature had been at his window. He couldn’t see where it had gone or how. Thus, either it could transport itself instantly elsewhere or it had moved up—though one might as well say down or sideways or
blue
, since human directions didn’t really apply in these circumstances—to a different level of existence. Neither course would have left traces that Colin could perceive, even with magic.

Not in human form.

Responding to his thoughts, his fingers stretched out, reaching to their full length and then longer than any man’s would have been. Silver claws and blue scales glimmered in the moonlight, and Colin heard iron bending beneath his grip.

No. Not yet. Think first.
He pulled his human shape back around him like a man adjusting a coat and looked down at his hands in what he wouldn’t allow to be alarm. Such lapses in self-control were rare, at least for him.

It was the prospect of a hunt that provoked him, maybe, such as he hadn’t truly had in decades: a hunt beneath the open sky with an enemy who deserved no mercy. He had never thrown himself into such matters as his father had, or as Judith and Stephen did, but the instincts of his blood were still there and evidently still clamored to be heard.

Old, hostile magic almost certainly didn’t help, and neither did rolling around on the floor with Reggie, though none of the dancers or maids or other women in Colin’s past had brought his other self so close to the skin. Then again, few of them had made him so dizzy with lust, either.

He shook his head, tossing hair out of his eyes, and made himself let go of the railing.

What his dragon side wanted didn’t matter. The reasons for it didn’t signify, either. It was time to be practical, recognizing that the dragon had talents the man didn’t. The dragon was also not a shape to assume on the second-story balcony of an old house, and even if he went to the ground to transform, he would be…deeply conspicuous, to say the least.

Colin couldn’t see anyone on the lawn. That didn’t mean everyone was asleep—looking to either side, he could see light shining through the windows nearby, tinted red and blue by various sets of curtains—or even inclined to stay indoors. Nor did he know where chasing the ghost would take him and who he might encounter there.

He turned his face to the sky where a crescent moon hung in the velvet darkness. It was waning, thinner than it had been the night before, but it still cast too much light.

In a day or two, changing his shape would be far less of a risk.

If, in a day or two, the ghost had vanished, or if it no longer came around his window, Colin was certain he’d regret the decision to wait—but he couldn’t worry much about those possibilities. The figure had come that night. Whether the magic of Colin’s dual nature drew it or it was simply curious about one of the new arrivals, he doubted that it had gotten what it wanted. It would be back.

Turning from the balcony railing, Colin saw the door leading back to his room. A moment or two of thought, and he could have spared himself the climb out the window. He could have spared himself the climb back in too—he was certain that the door was locked from the inside.

He couldn’t regret much, though. There were times for haste—if that Ecclesiastes verse didn’t say as much, it should have—and besides, a man who always went by safe paths grew old before his time.

Colin didn’t exactly know what his time was, but he was in no hurry. Placing one hand on the windowsill, he swung himself up and in, and landed lightly on the floor of his room.

Sleep would be a long time coming. The shock of the figure and the excursion out-of-doors had gotten his blood up, and he paced the floor a few times but knew that he would never tire himself that way.

He didn’t think it likely that Reggie would climb up to his window again, either, but he wished otherwise—strongly enough to surprise him and impractically enough too. Mortal girls were out of their depth in this business—but she hadn’t seemed out of her depth at the séance, or no more than he’d been. Colin didn’t think she’d have screamed or fainted at the sight of the ghost, and he did wonder what she would have said about it.

Miss Talbot-Jones, he was beginning to think, was no more ordinary than her house.