He'd smiled and rolled her onto her stomach. Kissed her sweet, warm, and willing body from head to toe. Dragged his tongue over every inch, then taken her, ridden her, and when he'd finished with her she'd been crying with pleasure.
She'd either forgotten her question or had thought better of it. Katie O'Malley was not a fool. She knew there was more to him than she really wanted to know. She wanted him for sex, nothing more. Which was well and fine, because he was incapable of more.
I wait for my brother, lass, he hadn't said. I wait for the day Drustan wearies of my refusal to return to Scotland. For the day his wife is not so pregnant that he fears to leave her side. For the day he finally acknowledges what he already knows in his heart, though he so desperately dings to my lies: that I am dark as the night sky, with but a few starlike flickers of light left within me.
Och, aye, he was waiting for the day his twin brother would cross the ocean and come for him.
See him for the animal he was.
If he permitted that day to arrive, he knew one of them would die.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS LATER
Chapter 2
Across the ocean in not Scotland but England, a land where Drustan MacKeltar had once erroneously claimed the Druids scarce possessed enough knowledge to weave a simple sleep spell, a hushed and urgent conversation was taking place.
"Have you made contact?"
"I dare not, Simon. The transformation is not yet complete."
"But it has been many months since the Draghar took him!"
"He is a Keltar. Though he cannot win, still he resists. It is the power that will corrupt him, and he refuses to use it."
A long silence. Then Simon said, "We have waited thousands of years for their return, as was promised us in the Prophecy. I weary of waiting. Push him. Give him reason to need the power, we will not lose the battle this time."
A quick nod. "I will take care of it."
"Be subtle, Giles. Do not yet alert him to our existence. When the time is right, I will do so. And should anything go wrong… well, you know what to do."
Another quick nod, an anticipatory smile, a flutter of cloth and his companion was gone, leaving him alone in the circle of stones beneath a fiery English dawn.
The man who'd given the order, Simon Barton-Drew, master of the Druid sect of the Draghar, leaned back against a mossy stone, absently stroking the winged-serpent tattoo on his neck, his gaze skimming the ancient monoliths. A tall, lean man with salt-and-pepper hair, a narrow foxlike face and restless gray eyes that missed nothing, he was honored that such an auspicious moment had come in his hour of rule. He'd been waiting thirty-two years for this moment, since the birth of his first son, which had coincided with the day he'd been initiated into the sect's inner sanctum. There were those like the Keltar, who served the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and there were those like himself, who served the Draghar. The Druid sect of the Draghar had kept the faith for thousands of years, handing the Prophecy down from one generation to the next: the promise of the return of their ancient leaders, the promise of the one who would lead them to glory. The one who would take back all the power the Tuatha Dé Danaan had stolen from them so long ago.
He smiled. How fitting that one of the Tuatha Dé's own cherished Keltar now held within him the power of the ancient Draghar—the league of thirteen most powerful Druids that had ever lived. How poetic that one of the Tuatha Dé's very own would finally destroy them.
And reclaim the Druids' rightful place in the world.
Not as the much maligned, tree-hugging, mistletoe-gathering fools they'd permitted the world to believe them to be.
But as rulers of mankind.
"You've got to be kidding me," Chloe Zanders snapped, raking her long curly hair from her face with both hands. "You want me to take the third Book of Manannan—and yes, I know it's only a reproduction of a portion of the original, but it's still priceless—to some man on the East Side who's probably going to eat popcorn while he paws through it? It's not as if he might actually read it. The parts that aren't in Latin are in old Gaelic." Fists at her waist, she glared up at her boss, one of several cocurators of the medieval collection housed in The Cloisters and The Met. "What does he want it for? Did he say?"
"I didn't ask," Tom replied, shrugging.
"Oh, that's just great. You didn't ask." Chloe shook her head disbelievingly. Though the copy her fingers currently rested delicately upon was not illuminated, and was a mere five centuries old—nearly a thousand years younger than the original texts that resided in the National Museum of Ireland—it was a sacred bit of history, demanding utmost reverence and respect.