The Immortal Highlander (24 page)

And his elixir of life reeked of Faustian overtones:
Here, take this and you can live forever, for the small price of your immortal soul.
She could almost smell the acrid brimstone of hellfire. Hear the rustle of unholy contracts scribed on thick, yellowed parchments, signed in blood. Feel the breeze from the leathery flapping of winged Hunters coming to collect.

She shivered. She didn’t count herself a superstitious person, yet it got to her on a visceral level. Made her blood run cold.

A soft bitter laugh cut into her thoughts. “Not interested in living forever, Gabrielle? Not liking the terms?”

Oh, that tone was like nothing she’d ever heard him use. Wicked, cynical, twisted. A voice truly befitting the blackest Fae.

She glanced at him.

And sucked in a sharp breath.

He looked utterly devilish, his black eyes bottomless, ancient, cold. Nostrils flared, lips curled in something only a fool might call a smile. He was, at that moment, every inch an inhuman Fae prince, otherworldly, dangerous. This, she realized, was the face of the
Sin Siriche Du;
the face her ancestors had glimpsed on long-ago battlefields, as he’d watched the brutal slaughter, smiling.

“Didn’t think so.” Silky sarcasm dripped from that deep, strangely accented voice.

A dozen thoughts collided in her mind and she floundered mentally, trying to figure out where to step next in this conversation that had started out so innocuously, only to become such a quagmire.

He looked so remote, so detached, as if nothing could touch him, as if nothing she could say would matter anyway. And a little doubt niggled at her: Was this, then, how he was when he was fully Tuatha Dé?

She couldn’t believe that. She
wouldn’t
believe that. She
knew
him. He was a good man.

Leap, Gabby,
an inner voice whispered.
Tell him how you feel. Throw it all on the line.

She swallowed. Hard. Were Gwen and Chloe here, she knew they would echo that counsel. They’d taken such leaps, and look where it had gotten them. Who was to say it wouldn’t work for her?

There was only one way to find out. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

She drew a deep, fortifying breath.
I love you,
she whispered the words in her mind. She hadn’t had a lot of practice with those words, had only ever said them to Gram, and long ago to parents, both of whom had gone away. She wet her lips. “Adam, I—”

“Bloody hell, spare me whatever sniveling excuses you’re about to offer,” he snarled. “I didn’t frigging ask you to take the elixir, did I,
Irish
?”

Tears filled her eyes and her teeth clacked shut. Oh, she hadn’t needed that reminder! She was all too aware of that fact. And that he’d never said so much as one word about any kind of future together. Nor a single word that seemed to hint at any degree of commitment or emotion. Oh, there’d been sweet words in bed, even out of it, but none of those things to which a woman was so attuned, those seemingly casually spoken phrases that hinted at a tomorrow and a dozen tomorrows after that. No mentions of an upcoming holiday, or a place or thing he’d like her to see. No subtle words that were really subtle pledges, testing the water, seeking like response.

Not one.

Her declaration clotted in her throat. And suddenly she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sit in the car with him one moment more.

She slammed on the brakes, jammed the car into park, and hopped out onto the road, walking blindly, scooping angrily at fog. The external environs too accurately mirrored her internal landscape: Nothing was clear, she couldn’t see ten steps ahead of her, couldn’t get a fix on where she’d just been.

Behind her, she heard his car door slam.

“Stop, Gabrielle! Come back here,” he commanded roughly.

“Just give me a few minutes
alone,
okay?”

“Gabrielle, we’re not on Keltar land,” he thundered. “Come back here.”

“Oh!” She stopped and turned abruptly. She hadn’t realized that. When had they left Keltar land?

“No,” a cool voice said as Darroc stepped out of the fog between them, “you’re not, are you?”

Then Darroc was turning toward Adam, and she heard a sudden, sharp, short burst of automatic gunfire.

And Adam was flinching, jerking, great splashes of red spreading across that cream fisherman’s sweater, his dark head flying back, arms outflung. Falling back, going down.

And Hunters were closing in all around her.

She felt their talons on her skin, felt a broken sob clawing its way up her throat.

And then she fainted and felt no more.

Ah,
ka-lyrra,
I look at you and you make me want to live a man’s life with you. To wake with you and sleep with you, argue with you and make love with you, to get a silly human job and take walks in the park and live so tiny beneath such a vast sky.

But I will never stay with another human woman and watch her die. Never.

—
FROM THE (GREATLY REVISED) BLACK EDITION OF
THE O’CALLAGHAN
Book of the Sin Siriche Du

23

Gabby raised the plastic shade over the plane window and stared out into the dark night sky.

Alone, hence visible, she’d had no choice but to book a flight, putting it on her credit card. The only flight available had been the red-eye, and she had three lengthy layovers to look forward to, in Edinburgh, London, and Chicago.

When she’d regained consciousness, she’d been lying in the road.

Alone. With a sick, horrid feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Watching the man she loved being brutally shot had been the purest hell.

She’d heard the bullets ripping into his body with dull, wet sounds, she’d seen his blood spurting, and—if it had indeed been only an illusion courtesy of the queen, as she prayed it had been—the look of pain and shock on Adam’s face had been stunningly, horrifyingly real.

She’d forced herself up on shaky legs, trembling, desperately looking around for someone to tell her that it hadn’t really happened. That the queen hadn’t really let him die.

But there’d been no one there to reassure her. Only thick, swirling fog and aching silence.

Apparently, Faery was done with her.

There wasn’t even any blood anywhere; no sign that anyone had ever been on that road but her.

So what,
she’d raged, shaking her fist at the dense bank of clouds above her,
I don’t even get to know what happened? That’s bullshit. If you think I’m just walking away without explanations, you are so wrong! Where is Adam? What happened? Show him to me! Tell me he’s okay!

But walk away, or rather drag her miserable self away, was exactly what she’d finally ended up doing.

She’d been out of her head for a time. She’d raged and shouted until her throat was raw, until she was capable of making only broken croaking sounds. She’d stalked and paced and stomped until her legs had given out, until she’d slumped against the car, then slid to the ground in exhaustion.

She’d huddled, shivering in the chilly fog while the day turned to night around her, waiting.

Absolutely certain that at any moment Adam would “pop” in, flash her that lazy-sexy smile, tell her he was okay, then finish the stupid, awful conversation they’d been having.

She would tell him that she loved him. And somehow everything would be all right. So, he didn’t have a soul or a heart. So, he was physiologically different from her, sprung of an alien race. So, she could never become immortal.

So what.

She would take what Morganna had taken: a life with him. Whatever she could have of him. They could make things work, she knew they could. It might not be her idealistic teenage fantasy, but it would be enough. It would be far better than having nothing of him.

Fourteen hours later it had dimly penetrated that she couldn’t sit in the middle of the road forever. That she was stiff and cold and hungry and needed desperately to go to the bathroom.

That she was slowly going crazy sitting in the dark by herself, torturing herself with imaginings.

Surely the queen hadn’t let him die. Surely Aoibheal wasn’t so callous, would never sacrifice one of her own. Surely she’d swept him away and healed him. Surely she’d kept her word and restored him.

But those “surelys” weren’t entirely comforting, because
if
he was okay and restored, then where was he?

If he was okay, how could he just leave her sitting in the middle of the road, with no answers, no matter how messy of an argument they’d gotten into?

Unless, unless, unless . . .

Oh, the “unlesses” just sucked!

Unless he hadn’t really cared about her at all.

Unless it had all just been a brief diversion for him.

Unless she’d never been anything more than a means to an end.

No. She refused to believe that. Just as she refused to believe he was dead.

“He’s okay,” she whispered to herself. “And he’s going to come back. Any minute now.”

Any minute became any day became any week.

Gabby moved woodenly through time. Detachedly going through the motions, void of passion, an automaton.

Though, upon returning home, a part of her had wanted nothing more than to barricade herself in her house and hide, to curl in bed with the covers snug over her head, there was a bigger part of her that harbored a special and very personal hatred of quitters, of people who just gave up and left.

It was something she could never permit herself to do.

So the very next morning after returning to the States, she’d gone in to work at Little & Staller, acting as if she’d never even been gone.

And just as she’d figured, no one had bothered to clean out her desk. Cases were still stacked every bit as high and haphazardly as ever they’d been. Cleaning it out would have taken time, and all the interns at Little & Staller were overworked. Besides, anyone foolish enough to clean off another person’s desk inevitably got stuck with their caseload.

No, her desk would have sat untouched until one plaintiff or another had called, demanding to know why their case hadn’t been heard yet. Until some fire had needed putting out.

Without saying a word to anyone, she’d walked in, plunked her double-shot espresso on the desk, sat down, and begun working on arbitrations. Woodenly. With brisk efficiency. Refusing to think about anything but the case at hand. Losing herself in her work. In the innocent people who needed her to help them, needed her expertise.

And when Jeff Staller had stalked over, red-faced and blustering, furiously demanding to know where the hell she’d been—and was she some kind of idiot to think she still had a job after disappearing like that?—she’d merely glanced coolly up at him and said,
Have you taken a good look at my win ratio? You want to fire me? Fine. Fire me. Say the word.

It had been nearly a month since their little confrontation and he’d still not said “the word.”

And she knew he never would.

Funny, she was dead inside, yet Jay had commented just the other day on how “together” she seemed. How great she looked, and he didn’t know where her new confidence had come from, but,
It’s kick-ass, Gabby. You’re really rocking.

She’d smiled faintly, bitterly amused by the irony of it: how not giving a shit about anything came off looking like confidence. It occurred to her that perhaps she should try interviewing with TT&T again.

But she didn’t, because change was more than she was capable of dealing with at the moment.

Besides, at Little & Staller, she’d developed a routine that kept her nicely numb.

And if, on occasion, a sneaky little memory of a stunningly gorgeous Fae prince perched on the wall of her cubicle slipped past her tightly erected defenses, she quashed it immediately.

Filed another case. Asked for more work. Became a veritable arbitration machine.

She slogged through the days, pretending they weren’t made of wet concrete and she wasn’t wearing lead boots. Pretending that each step didn’t require Herculean effort. Pretending it wasn’t taking all her will merely to force herself to eat, to shower, to get dressed each day.

She lost weight and, in an effort to kill time she might have otherwise been tempted to spend thinking (there would be no thinking, no, none of that at all!), she used some of her suddenly superfluous escape-the-fairy fund to refurbish her wardrobe. She bought new clothes. Got her hair cut, started wearing it in a sexy new style.

A part of her knew she was only staving off the inevitable. Knew eventually it was going to catch up with her.

Knew that at some point she would have to face one of two inescapable facts:

A) The queen had let Adam die.

B) Adam had used her.

Bottom line was, she intended to avoid facing either of those two heartbreaking options for as long as she possibly could.

24

Adam was in a vile temper.

Not only had the queen let him get shot—and he’d suffered every ounce of burning agony involved in it, the bite of each and every bullet—she’d yanked him out of the human realm, tossed him back to Faery smack into the middle of the Tuatha Dé Danaan’s High Council chambers, healed him but
not
restored him, then confined him to those chambers until she’d returned.

And when she’d returned—what felt like a bloody aeon later—he’d been forced to sit through the entire blasted, infernal, formal hearing, to testify to all he’d seen and all Darroc had done, to answer the most minute and ridiculous questions, all the while seething with impatience to get back to Gabrielle and do what he now understood had to be done.

“Bloody hell,” he hissed, “are we
finished
here yet?”

The heads of eight High Council members turned to regard him with imperious, offended stares.

It was impermissible to speak out of turn in council. An unspeakable insult. An unforgivable breach of ritual court manners.

Screw the council. Screw court manners. He had things to take care of. Urgent matters. Not piddling courtly crap.

Adam shot an irritated glare at Aoibheal. “You said I could decide his punishment and that you would restore me. Get on with it already. Restore me.”

“You speak with a mortal’s impatience,” Aoibheal said coolly.

“Maybe,” he growled, “because I’m stuck in a mortal form.
Fix
me already.”

She arched a delicate brow, shrugged. Spoke softly in a rush of Tuatha Dé words.

And Adam sighed with pleasure as he felt himself changing. Becoming himself again.

Immortality.

Invincibility.

A veritable demigod.

Pure power thrumming through his . . . well, he no longer had veins. But who needed veins when there was splendid, glorious, intoxicating power at his very core? Energy, heat, prowess, strength. All the possibilities in the universe at his fingertips.

And, bloody hell, it felt good.
He
felt good. There were no aches, no pains in Tuatha Dé form. There was no weakness, no hunger, no weariness, no need to eat or drink or piss.

Absolute power. Absolute control.

The world again at his disposal, again his favorite toy.

“Now you may cry sentence, Adam,” Aoibheal said.

Adam pondered Darroc in silence.

Aoibheal whispered a soft command and suddenly the Sword of Light, the hallowed weapon capable of killing an immortal, the blade with which he’d long ago scarred Darroc, appeared in her hand.

And he knew that she expected him to demand Darroc’s immediate soulless death. It was what he, too, had believed he would claim.

But suddenly that seemed far too merciful. The bastard had tried to kill his petite
ka-lyrra,
to extinguish the life of his passionate, sexy, vibrant Gabrielle.

“Do it,” Darroc snarled, staring fixedly at him. “Get it over with.”

“A soulless death by blade is too good for you, Darroc.”

Darroc snorted. “You live like a beast in a cage, and you no longer even see the bars. I was only trying to free you, free us all.”

“And enslave the human race.”

“They were born to be enslaved. By their very nature. Weak, puny things.”

And there it was, Adam realized with a faint smile, precisely the sentence the arrogant Elder should bear. “Make him human, my Queen. Condemn him to die in the human realm.”

The queen laughed softly. “Well spoken, Adam; we are pleased. Both fitting and fair.”

“You can’t do this to me,” raged Darroc. “I will
not
live as one of them! Bloody kill me
now
!”

Adam’s smile deepened.

Aoibheal moved forward, speaking in the ancient tongue, circling around the Elder, faster and faster, until but a radiant swirl of light spun on the floor of the chamber.

As Adam watched, the light grew blindingly intense, then suddenly Darroc and the queen reappeared.

Adam eyed his ancient nemesis curiously. There was something . . . different about him. His human appearance was somehow unlike Adam’s human appearance had been. But what? Rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, he scrutinized the ex-Elder.

Tall, powerful, beautiful as all the Fae. Long gold-shot copper hair spilling to his waist. Chiseled, aristocratic face etched with disdain. Copper eyes glittering with rage—ah, his eyes! They were human eyes, with no unnatural iridescence or fiery golden sparks flickering within them.

And, although Darroc still presented an exotic, stunningly masculine beauty only rarely glimpsed in the human realm (and then usually immortalized on stage or screen), he no longer had that brush of otherworldliness that Adam had never lost. Despite an ineffable sense of ancientness, Darroc would pass as human in nearly any quarter.

“I don’t get it,” Adam murmured. “He looks different than I did.”

“Of course he does,” said Aoibheal. “He’s now human.”

“Yes, but so was I.”

The queen laughed, a silvery sound. “No you weren’t.”

Adam blinked. “Yes, I was; you made me human yourself.”

“You were never human, Adam. You were always Tuatha Dé. I merely played with your form a bit, made you as close to human as I could get you without actually transforming you into one of them. I heightened your senses, made you believe you were mortal. You yourself had diminished your essence by healing the Highlander. But you were never human. It’s the one form I cannot shapeshift our people between. Once I give a Tuatha Dé a human form, it is irreversible. What I just did to Darroc can never be undone. No one and nothing in all the realms can prevent him now from dying, human and soulless. A year, fifty years, who knows? He will die.”

“But I felt human feelings,” Adam protested.

“Impossible,” Aoibheal said flatly.

Adam frowned, confounded. But he’d
felt
them. He’d felt pain in his chest where he’d thought he’d had a heart. He’d gotten a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever Gabrielle had been in danger. He’d suffered human feelings. How was that possible if he’d never been in human form?

He shook his head abruptly, scattering the questions from his head, to puzzle over later. There were far more important matters to which he needed to attend. And quickly, before Aoibheal decided to constrain him in some new fashion for some ridiculous reason.

While the queen was occupied with summoning her guard to escort Darroc to the human realm and bring in her consort Mael, whom Darroc had betrayed as his accomplice, Adam quietly tensed to sift out.

Suddenly the queen’s head swiveled in his direction and she snapped furiously, “You will stop that this
instant, Amadan D—
”

But she’d spoken too late to compel him—he was already gone.

Adam went first to the Queen’s Royal Bower.

Once before he’d stolen the elixir of life from her private chambers.

Now he did so again.

A tiny glass vial containing a tiny amount of shimmering silvery liquid.

And as he sifted about, displacing his residue before heading for Cincinnati, he reflected on those last moments he’d spent with Gabrielle.

You’re not falling for me, are you, Irish?
he’d asked. And she’d blown up at him.

Launched into a furious, rambling diatribe that hadn’t made much sense to him, possibly because he’d tuned most of it out upon realizing after the first few sentences that there’d been no “yes” in there anywhere and she hadn’t sounded remotely as if she’d been leading up to one.

And then she’d demanded to know why Morganna had refused the elixir of life, and something inside him had snapped.

Christ, it was always souls. Souls, souls, souls. And his great, big fucking lack thereof.

He could have offered her a pretty lie—he’d fabricated several smooth ones for just such an occasion—but anger, defiance, and an age-old hurt had filled him with a wildness, a need he’d been unable to deny.

To cram his reality down her throat. To say,
This is what I am, for Christ’s sake, is it so bloody awful?

See me.
See
me!

And she’d seen him.

Ah, yes, he’d
forced
her to see him.

And she’d gazed at him with horror in those lovely green-gold eyes. Those eyes that only the night before had been dreamy with passion, soft and warm and inviting. Those eyes that had made him feel every inch a man, more alive and at peace and at home than he’d ever felt in his entire existence.

And that was when he’d finally understood.

He’d been a fool with Morganna. He’d made a huge mistake.

He had no intention of making the same one with Gabrielle.

Now that he was all-powerful again, he would erase Gabrielle’s memory of his admission. He would eliminate all those facts that she’d found so distasteful, wipe them cleanly from her mind.

Then he would slip her the elixir of life. And he would whisk her off and keep her blissfully occupied, keep her enchanted by whatever means necessary, for as many years as it took for her immortal soul to burn out.

And when her soul was finally gone, she would no longer even
feel
those parts of herself that made her try to cling to it. She wouldn’t even know to miss it.

And she would be his
forever
.

As long as she possibly could turned out to be exactly one month, seven days, and fourteen hours.

Gabby would have made it longer, but once again, she was undone by yet another diabolical iced cup of coffee to go.

To her credit, she did briefly contemplate that giving up her addiction might greatly simplify her life. Still, by the time she’d arrived at that conclusion, it was too late.

Friday night. Date night. She stayed at the office late, knowing couples would be walking the streets of her neighborhood this evening, holding hands, talking and laughing, enjoying the light kiss of fall in the early September air.

Classes had begun again, and though her load was heavy, she’d kept her job at Little & Staller, rearranging her hours around her class schedule, in a desperate bid to stay busy enough that she couldn’t think.

Upon leaving for the evening, she ducked into Starbucks and grabbed said dastardly iced coffee before going to retrieve her shiny BMW from the upscale paid lot she’d treated herself to with a bit more of her escape-the-fairy fund.

She slid behind the wheel, pretending the faintest scent of jasmine and sandalwood did
not
still linger in the plush leather interior.

Part of her had wanted to sell the car, to erase that reminder of Adam from her life, the same way she’d packed up the crystal and china he’d left on her dining room table, his T-shirt, and all the gifts he’d given her, and tucked them away in a trunk in the attic.

Unfortunately, she’d needed something to drive and the thought of selling the car and trying to buy a new one was more than she could dredge up the energy to even contemplate doing.

Just like returning the seventeen phone messages Gwen and Chloe had left in the past week would have taken too much energy.

It seemed the note she’d sent them a few days after she’d gotten home hadn’t been enough. Granted, it had been brief:
Gwen, Chloe, things didn’t work out like I hoped. But I’m okay, just real busy at work. I’ll call you sometime. G.

She knew what they wanted. They wanted answers. Wanted to know what had happened with Darroc, with Adam. She didn’t have any answers to give them.

She hadn’t gotten the Happily-Ever-After they’d gotten, and she simply couldn’t face delving into her misery with such shiny, happy people. People who had all those things she’d hoped for: devoted husbands, beautiful babies, lives rich with love and laughter.

They would want answers about
her
. They would want to know how she was
really
feeling, and once they had her on the phone they wouldn’t permit any evasion. Their empathy and kindness would unravel her. She knew that the day she called them back would be the day she fell apart.

Hence, she wasn’t calling them back. Period.
Not falling apart. Not on the meticulously controlled agenda right now.

And if they arrived unannounced at her house, as they’d threatened in their message last night, well . . . she’d deal with that then.

Ten minutes later, Gabby pulled into the alley behind her house. Exhaling gustily, she slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed her briefcase, her gym bag, a teetering stack of files that hadn’t fit in the briefcase because she needed a
lot
of work to get her through the weekend sane, then balanced her coffee on top of it all, wedging the plastic lid firmly beneath the underside of her chin to hold it all steady.

She made it all the way into the living room before losing control of the unwieldy load.

Files slipped one way, the briefcase the other, then the coffee went, tumbling from beneath her chin, bounced off an end table, knocked over a pile of books and magazines, and drenched it all with dark, iced liquid.

Cursing under her breath, she began snatching coffee-stained files from the floor.

And that was when she saw it.

Since the day she’d gotten home from Scotland, she’d been avoiding the turret library, refusing to go in, in no frame of mind to be able to even so much as glimpse the O’Callaghan
Books of the Fae
.

Not even noticing that all this time the
Book of the Sin Siriche Du
had been lying on the end table near the sofa.

It was now facedown in a puddle of coffee.

It was going to be ruined!

She pounced on it, snatched it from the thick, muddy spill of icy liquid, and frantically dabbed it off on the sofa, heedless of the mess she was making of the flowered upholstery.

Thumbed it open to assess the damage.

And as Fate—which Gabby was seriously beginning to believe was wont to masquerade as seemingly innocuous cups of coffee—would have it, the slender black tome parted to a page that hadn’t been there before.

His elegant, arrogant, slanted cursive. She read it once, twice, a third time, flinching as the words slammed into her.