Beyond the Highland Myst

by Highlander 01-08

  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.

  As Cian had anticipated, she’d endeavored to convince herself that none of last eve had happened. On those infrequent occasions he’d been glimpsed by the uninitiated, they blamed everything and anything to deny the possibility of his existence.

  He, on the other hand, would replay over and over a single moment from last eve, convincing himself it had indeed happened.

  She’d rubbed up against him and tasted him. Crushed those round, heavy breasts to his back, nipples hard and poking him through the fabric of her woolen, and licked him.

  As if she’d hungered for the salt of his skin on her tongue.

  His cock had shot up so painfully erect that his balls had jerked and his seed had nearly exploded out of him right then and there.

  The feel of her against his body had caused a thing he’d never before experienced: a violent jolt that had speared straight to the core of his soul. It had been all he could do to force her hands from his hair and pull away. It had taken every ounce of his will to not simply turn on her, drop her to the floor, and spread her for his pleasure. Forget about her assailant entirely. Bury himself inside her and stay there until torn from her body by Dark Magyck.

  But nay, not only wouldn’t he let her life be snuffed like some frail candle flame caught in a deadly tempest not of her own making—he needed her.

  “Twenty-two days,” he murmured. After more than a millennium of biding time, his vengeance was now dependant upon a laughably finite number of days.

  Jessica St. James didn’t know it yet, but she was going to help him get them.

  If not willingly, then by means of every Dark Art he knew.

  And he knew a lot of them.

  Had practiced most of them. And excelled at all of them.

  Lucan wasn’t the only one who’d wanted the Dark Glass.

  * * *

  4

  CASTLE KELTAR—SCOTLAND

  “You’ll ne’er believe this, Drustan,” Dageus MacKeltar said, glancing up as his twin brother, elder by three minutes, strolled into the library at Castle Keltar.

  “I doona think much would surprise me after all we’ve seen, brother, but try me,” Drustan said dryly. He crossed to a handsome mahogany serving bar, artfully crafted into a section of bookshelves, and poured himself a tumbler of Macallan, fine, aged, single-malt scotch.

  Dageus flipped through a few more pages of the scuffed leather tome he held, then placed it aside and stretched out his legs, folding his hands behind his head. Beyond tall velvet-draped windows, violet smudged a cobalt sky and he paused a moment, savoring the beauty of yet another Highland gloaming. Then, “You know how we’ve ever thought Cian MacKeltar naught more than a myth?”

  “Aye,” Drustan replied, moving to join him near the fire. “The legendary and terrible Cian: the only Keltar ancestor to ever willingly cross over to the Dark Arts—”

  “Not quite true, brother. So did I,” Dageus corrected softly.

  Drustan stiffened. “Nay, you acted out of love; ’twas a vastly different thing. This Cian—who, like as not, is pure fable crafted to reinforce our adherence to our oaths—did so out of unquenchable lust for power.”

  “Mayhap. Mayhap not.” Cynicism shaped the edges of Dageus’s smile. “I would place no wagers on what our progeny might say of me a thousand years hence.” He gestured to the tome. “ ’Tis one of Cian MacKeltar’s journals.”

  Drustan stopped, halfway down into a chair, tumbler nearly to his lips. Silvery eyes, glittering with fascination, met his twin’s golden gaze. He lowered his glass, sank slowly into the chair. “Indeed?”

  “Aye, though a great many pages have been torn out, the notations were made by one Cian MacKeltar, who lived in the mid–ninth century.”

  “Is that the journal you said Da found in the hidden underground chamber library, last you went through the stones with Chloe to the sixteenth century?”

  The hidden underground library was the long, narrow chamber hewn of stone that stretched deep beneath the castle, wherein the vast majority of Keltar lore and relics, including the gold Compact struck between Tuatha Dé Danaan and Man, were housed. It had been sealed up, the entrance concealed behind a hearth, more than a millennium ago.

  Over time, the existence of the chamber had been completely forgotten. Vague tales that once the Keltar had possessed much more in the way of lore existed, but few believed and fewer still had searched for it, and those to no avail. It wasn’t until the castle housekeeper, Nell—who’d later wed their da, Silvan, and become their next-mother—had inadvertently triggered the opening mechanism while dusting one day, that it had been found again. Still, she’d said naught about it, believing Silvan knew, and would be upset if she had knowledge of his clan’s private doings. She would likely never have mentioned it to Silvan had Dageus not been in such desperate straits.

  Their da had briefly opened that chamber in the sixteenth century, but had resealed it in hopes of not altering events that had already transpired between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Drustan had recently agreed to make it again accessible for future generations. Since reopening it, Dageus had been translating the most ancient of the scrolls therein, recopying the fragile documents, and learning much more about their ancient benefactors in the process. And now, about one of their ancient ancestors.

  “Nay. That journal was but a record of recent events: handfastings, births, deaths. This journal deals with his studies into the Druid arts, much of it in cipher. ’Twas hidden beneath a cracked flagstone o’er which Chloe tripped. She suspects there may be more concealed about the chamber.”

  Dageus’s wife, Chloe, an avid historian, had set her heart on systematically cataloging the contents of the underground repository and, as Dageus couldn’t bear to be parted from her for any length of time, he’d resigned himself to spending a great deal of time (meaning, probably until the very moment his lovely, pregnant wife was about to deliver) in the dusty, subterranean compartment, hence the scribing task he’d assigned himself.

  He smiled. Better a dank chamber with his cherished Chloe than the sunniest Highland vista without her. Och, he amended fiercely, better Hell with Chloe than Heaven without her. Such was the depth of his love for the woman whom he’d taken captive in his darkest hour, who’d pledged her heart to him despite his actions, despite the evil within him.

  “So what does it tell us of this ancestor of ours?” Drustan said curiously, jarring him from his thoughts.

  Dageus snorted, disgruntled. He’d hoped for much more, and planned to dig deeper in the chamber to see what else he could uncover about their epic ancestor. He believed an understanding of the past was necessary to ensure a bright future, that those who forgot the past were condemned to repeat it. “From the parts I’ve managed to decipher, little more than that he was, in truth, a man, not a fable, and
that the chamber was not forgotten but deliberately hidden from us. Da believed there’d been a battle or illness that had taken many lives abruptly, including all those who knew of the chamber. But ’twas not the case. The final entry in the journal is not his, but a warning about the use of magycks. Whoever made the entry also made the decision to seal the chamber, altering the rooms above to forever conceal it.”

  “Indeed?” Drustan’s brows rose.

  “Aye. So many pages have been torn out, I doona ken what Cian MacKeltar did that was so terrible, or what became his fate, but the last entry makes it plain that the chamber was secreted away because of him.”

  “Hmm,” Drustan mused, sipping his scotch. “It makes one wonder what a man might have done to cause such drastic measures to be taken—the separating of all future generations of Keltar from the bulk of our knowledge and power. ’Twas no small thing to divide us from our heritage.”

  “Aye,” Dageus said thoughtfully, “indeed, it does make one wonder.”

  “Can you frigging believe it, man? Somebody broke the guy’s neck and left him there on the commons, dead as a doornail!”

  “Great. That’s just what we need. More crime. The university’ll use it as another excuse to put the screws to us and raise tuition again.”

  Jessi shook her head, pushed her way through the group of undergrads loitering at the coffee bar. As she placed her order, she wondered if she’d ever been so young, or so faux-jaded. She hoped not.

  Campus was abuzz with gossip. The police had released few details, so everyone was pretending to know something. Funny thing was, she really did know something about the blond, well-dressed “John Doe” found dead on the campus commons yesterday, and she was the only one not talking.

  And she wasn’t about to.

  When she’d flipped on the TV last night, only to discover the local news featuring a story on the murder of one of the two men she’d spent most of the day convincing herself weren’t real, she’d sat, stunned, staring blankly at the screen long after the segment had ended.