Beyond the Highland Myst(650)

Adam jerked his head once in a tight nod.

A rush of sound spilled from her lips in Tuatha Dé tongue. Beside him. Gabrielle shivered intensely.

"You will wear the féth fiada until this is done, Amadan."

"Bloody hell," Adam muttered savagely. "I hate being invisible."

"And, Keltar," Aoibheal said in a voice like sudden thunder, with a glance up at the balustrade. "Henceforth I would advise against tampering with my curses. Perform the Lughnassadh ritual now or face my wrath."

"Aye, Queen Aoibheal," Dageus and Drustan replied together, stepping out from behind stone columns bracketing the stairs.

Adam smiled faintly. He should have known no Highlander would flee, only retreat to a higher vantage— take to the hills, in a manner of speaking— waiting in silent readiness should battle be necessary.

Gabby went limp beside him with a soft whoosh of breath.

The queen was gone.





22





Early the next morning, Gabby and Adam packed to leave Castle Keltar and catch a flight back to the States.

As Adam was invisible again, they would be traveling cloaked, and Gabby was surprised to realize she was rather looking forward to it. There was a certain intriguing impunity one felt, concealed by the féth fiada. There was also the fact that it meant they'd be touching constantly, and she simply couldn't get enough of touching him.

Immediately upon the queen's departure yesterday, Dageus and Drustan had performed the ritual of Lughnassadh. Once the walls were again secured, they'd sat down and rehashed the afternoon's events, with Gabby serving as Adam's intermediary.

She'd been surprised by how wired with excitement Chloe and Gwen had been to see— sort of, out of the comers of their eyes as well— the queen of the Tuatha Dé. It seemed Chloe had felt quite cheated that Dageus had encountered her once before and had failed to take a complete accounting of her.

Their reaction— one not of fear but of interest and curiosity— had served to solidify her new slant on things. Yes, the Tuatha Dé Danaan (as Gabby was now calling them) were otherworldly, different, but not the heartless, emotionless creatures she'd been raised to believe they were.

As Gwen had said, they were another race, a highly advanced race. And though the inexplicable could be frightening, learning about it went a long way toward allaying one's fears.

Further toward that end, the MacKeltars had taken her, with the once-more-invisible Adam in tow, to the other Keltar castle last night, where Christopher and Maggie MacKeltar lived, and shown her the underground chamber library that housed all the ancient Druid lore, dating all the way back to when The Compact had first been negotiated.

Gabby had gotten to see the actual treaty between the races, etched on a sheet of pure gold, scribed in a language no scholar alive could identify. Adam had translated passages of it, emphasizing the part about Sidhe-seers: that "those who see the Fae belong to the Fae," yet they were not to be killed or enslaved but permitted to live in peace and comfort in any Fae realm they chose, their every desire met, except, of course, for their freedom. I told you we didn't harm them, he'd said.

On the way back to Dageus and Drustan's castle, while Chloe and Gwen had been talking about the queen again, Adam had insisted Gabby convey his irritation with them for leaving by the front door and circling straight around to the rear entrance of the castle to sneak back in.

I told you we expected you to have our backs if the need arose, Drustan had reminded him through her. I also told you that we would be having yours.

And when Gabby'd passed on those words, she'd glimpsed a flicker of emotion in Adam's dark gaze that had made the breath catch softly in her throat.

How could she have ever thought that Adam Black felt no emotion? Even the queen had displayed emotion. That was a fallacy in the O'Callaghan Books she'd be swiftly amending. Along with about a zillion others.

Still, she could understand how her ancestors had gotten it so wrong. If she'd had to go on the mere appearance of Queen Aoibheal, or of the Hunters, or even of Adam, without ever having interacted with them, without having come to understand so much about their world, she'd have thought the same things.

But she knew so much better now.

She'd spent another scorching, delicious, decadent night in Adam's arms.

He was the kind of lover she'd never imagined existed, not even in her most heated fantasies. And she'd had some pretty darned heated ones.

He was inexhaustible, alternately tender and wild, playful, then staring into her eyes with deadly intensity. He made a woman feel as if nothing existed but her, as if the entire world had melted away and there was nothing more pressing than her next soft gasp, her next smile, their next kiss.