The Immortal Highlander

by Karen Marie Moning

  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 w
eakness, 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 eno
ugh 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.