“You will be silent and cease looking at us. The four of you will turn and face the wall. Now,” Cian said coolly.
Jessi rolled her eyes. Obviously Cian MacKeltar had been some kind of aristocrat or member of the ruling class in his time. A feudal lord, maybe, perhaps even a relation to one of the ancient Pict kings, or Kenneth MacAlpin himself. He behaved like a tyrannical dictator, expecting the world to obey his slightest whims. Cease looking at us, indeed!
“Oh, please, you don’t really think they’re going to—” Jessi scoffed, only to break off in stunned disbelief.
Four people had just turned, as one, to face the wall behind the Check-In desk, without uttering so much as another peep. Not a curse, not a protest, not even an ill-concealed, disgruntled sigh.
She blinked at the bizarre sight. Then gaped up at Cian. Then back at the obedient little sheep.
“You will not attempt to follow us when we leave,” Cian added. “You will remain silent and unmoving until well after we’re gone.”
His words reminded her of the way he’d dispatched Mark in the hallway, how he’d ordered the valets about and dominated the desk clerk when they’d checked in.
How was he doing it? What was Cian MacKeltar?
“Come, lass,” he said.
She stood rooted to the ground for a moment, assessing herself suspiciously, trying to decide whether she was feeling, in the least little way, compelled in some strange way to obey him.
Nope.
She inched away from him, just to be sure. Tipped up her nose defiantly. Made a face at him.
Ducky. She felt just like her usual self, chock-full of free will.
But apparently they weren’t, she thought, looking at people at the desk again.
“What did you do to them?” she demanded.
“ ’Twould require a lengthy explana—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted peevishly, “and we don’t have time, right? Fine. Just tell me this: Could you make them erase all record of my having been here from their computers?”
He looked perplexed a moment, then slow understanding dawned in his whisky eyes. “Ah, you mean so you cannot be linked to the blood-stained room! Aye, I can do that. You must direct me, though. There is much about your century that eludes me.”
They hastened to the desk, where Jessi told him what to do.
He issued a series of terse commands to the clerks, and Jessi watched in abject fascination as they complied without hesitation, pulling up their files for Room 2112. They rescinded all credit transactions, deleted all records, and wiped her clean from the hotel’s memory banks. Whatever he was doing and however he was doing it, the man packed a serious punch in the charismatic persuasion department.
There was one great big problem solved. Gone were her visions of oversized beetles and roaches, and calling her mother from some Third-World country.
As they were finishing up, Jessi stepped away from Cian and circled around him to stare at the bodybuilder and his wife. They were motionless, silent, staring at the wall. Their eyes had the same glazed, eerily vacant expression as the clerk’s. Somehow she’d overlooked that before, too, probably because she’d always been too busy looking at the sexy Highlander to really notice much about the people around him.
“What did you do to them? How?”
Tucking the mirror back beneath his arm, he took her hand. “Not now, lass. We must make haste.”
“ ‘Not now,’ ” she grumbled. “How come whenever I have questions, it’s always ‘not now’? Will it ever be now?”
* * *
12
“Can you not make greater haste?” Cian glanced at Jessica over the top of the mirror that was once again propped on its side between the auto’s bucket seats.
He hated not knowing how long he had. It imbued everything with a heightened sense of urgency.
“Only if you can somehow order rush-hour traffic in Chicago on a rainy Friday morning to go somewhere else,” she said with a roll of her eyes, waving a hand at the wall-to-wall cars packing the streets. Then she frowned at him over the mirror. “You can’t, right?”
“Nay. Lass, you must go as fast as ’tis possible. Seize any opportunity to escape this pandemonium.”
Returning to full immersion in his thoughts, he barely heard her sardonic “Aye, aye, sir.”
The second attack had come long before he’d expected it. Truth be told, he’d not expected it at all. Not once they’d checked into her immense “hotel.”
It had made him realize that he was at a tremendous disadvantage in her century, one for which he couldn’t compensate. For, though he’d devoured tomes and papers and incessantly studied the world beyond Lucan’s window—preparing, always preparing for any opportunity to take his chance at vengeance—though he knew of such things as computers and cars and airplanes and televisions, he knew also the world’s current population. And the ninth-century Highlander in him had believed—as far as they’d traveled from her university into the heart of a city of such proportions—that they’d be as difficult to locate as a dust mote in a haystack the size of all of Scotland.