Beyond the Highland Myst(678)

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.