Beyond the Highland Myst(741)

Which wasn’t to say that she hadn’t been pissed when he’d vanished. She had. She’d left her purse inside her backpack in the SUV, figuring she wouldn’t need it because Cian could Voice her whatever she wanted, and her forty-two dollars and seventeen cents certainly wasn’t going to go very far.

Then, when he’d so abruptly disappeared, she’d stood in the grocery with a cart full of lovely snacks, her stomach growling hungrily, and realized that she was going to have to leave all that scrumptious food, because she didn’t have even a few dollars stuffed in a pocket somewhere, and couldn’t buy so much as a measly candy bar to get her through for a while.

She’d been so hungry that she’d actually considered shoplifting. It had not been a stab of conscience that had prevented her from embarking on a larcenous spree—hunger was a brutally compelling motive—but fear of being caught, because then what would happen to Cian?

With that worry foremost in her mind, stomach protesting her every retreating step, she’d left the grocery and dashed off to find him.

Only to find this—a great big, empty parking space.

Where was he?

She slumped down onto the curb and perched on the edge of it, propping her elbows on her knees, her chin on her fists.

She couldn’t believe that Lucan could have found them so quickly.

If he had, wouldn’t she be dead? Or at least under attack right now? She glanced hastily, warily around.

No one was staring at her or moving toward her in a menacing manner.

Which left only two other possibilities that she could think of: 1) a thief had stolen their stolen auto, which—in addition to pushing the limits of the absurd—sucked because, for the life of her, she couldn’t see a way she was going to be able to track down a thief by herself, nor could she report a stolen vehicle stolen to the police, because the police were dread possibility number two; 2) the police had spotted it and impounded it and Jessi St. James was now wanted for Grand Theft Auto (thanks to half a dozen pieces of identification in her purse) in addition to being wanted for theft of the mirror and probably all the stuff Cian had Voiced from Tiedemann’s, and possibly Murder One (though she was really hoping deletion of the hotel records had gotten her out of that), as well as Just Plain Dead by one evil sorcerer.

She’d never been wanted for so many things in her life.

And not a single one of them any good.



Dageus grimaced as he tugged the Dark Glass from the back of the SUV.

Though he had no desire to make contact with it (mostly because he had every desire to make contact with it), he wanted it in the castle proper, the most heavily warded portion of the estate. ’Twould be safest there, and he hoped mayhap those wards would diminish the pull it was exerting on him.

There were no protection spells laid around the vast, detached garage behind the castle, where he’d parked the purloined SUV. ’Twas too new of a building, and one of which he’d not overseen the construction. He intended to properly ward it soon, for he hoped to make much use of it. He was developing quite a liking for modern modes of transportation. They were far easier on a man’s privates than a horse betwixt the thighs.

He was already sorry he’d left his Hummer down in Inverness. The muscle-packed H1 Alpha was the first vehicle he’d purchased since he’d been living in the twenty-first century, and ’twas a truly magnificent machine. A man could go virtually anywhere in the rugged Highlands in it. He’d gotten attached to it in the manner a lad did his first fine stallion. He hoped his barbaric ancestor was a responsible driver.

“Arrogant Neanderthal,” Dageus muttered, standing the mirror up on end, at arm’s length, and taking a good look at it.

He inhaled a sharp, fascinated breath.

The legendary Dark Glass. In his hands.

Astonishing. He traced his fingers lightly over the cool silvery surface, then across the runes chiseled deep into the golden frame.

Not even the thirteen within him, who’d lived side by side with the Tuatha Dé many millennia ago, knew the language with which the frame was adorned.

It was said that the Seelie and Unseelie Hallows had been spoken into existence by the sheer magic of the Tuatha Dé tongue. The sacred relics had been spelled into being by words and song—and not in the tongue of Adam Black and his contemporaries—but in a far more ancient language that had been spoken eons past, long before the Tuatha Dé had come to this world. A language allegedly forgotten by all but the most ancient among them.

A chill was inching up his arms.

’Twas not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

In fact, ’twas strangely invigorating. Made him feel positively powerful. Not good. Not good at all.