Scowling, he turned, hurrying with it from the garage. The moment he stepped from the cool, windowless interior into the brilliant sunshine, he felt better, stronger.
Still, he wasn’t about to dally with the infernal thing in his hands.
Tucking the glass beneath his arm with the silvery side facing him so as not to blind anyone who might be looking his way, he walked around the castle and began heading across the front lawn.
“YOU BLOODY FUCKING IDIOT!” the mirror roared. “HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE GONE AND DONE?”
Dageus was so startled by the bizarreness of the Dark Glass roaring at him that he did what most men would have done.
He dropped it.
Drustan lay flat on his back, his arm around his wife, breathing hard. ’Twas high noon and he was still in bed. Which wasn’t to say he was a lazy man and hadn’t yet been up that morn. He’d been up. And up. With his lovely wee Gwendolyn in his arms, he was nigh always up.
“God, that was amazing,” his wife said fervently just then, curling closer into his side, one of her small, dainty hands caressing his lightly stubbled jaw.
He had a sudden urge to leap from the bed and proudly pound his chest with his fists. He settled instead for turning his head, kissing her palm, and saying with studied casualness, “Mean you the third or the fourth time, lass?”
She laughed. “All times. As it has been since our first time, Drustan. You’re always amazing.”
“I love you, woman,” he said fiercely, recalling their first time. ’Twas a night he’d never forget, not a detail of it: not the crimson kitten thong he’d believed a fancy hair ribbon when he’d glimpsed it in her pack—until she’d slipped her shorts down that night, showing him what it was really meant for. Not the intense way they’d made love right there in God’s great wide-open, beneath a star-drenched sky, in the center of the standing stones of Ban Drochaid. Nor the way she’d later stood, so true of heart and trusting, as he’d cast her back in time.
Gwen Cassidy was his soul mate, they were bound in the ancient Druid way, forever and beyond, and every moment of life with her was priceless. She’d enriched his world in so many ways, not the least of which had been the recent gift of two beautiful dark-haired twin daughters who, at scarce five months of age, were already showing rather startling signs of intelligence. And why shouldn’t they, he thought proudly, betwixt his Druid gifts and his wee Gwendolyn’s brilliant physicist’s mind?
On the topic of their babes . . .
“Think you we should—”
“Yes,” she agreed instantly. “I’m missing them too.”
He smiled. Though they’d been wed for little over a year, they knew each other’s mind and heart as well as their own. And although they had the best of care for their daughters with two live-in nannies, they were reluctant to be parted from their bairn for long. Unless they were tooping, of course. Then they tended to forget the whole world.
When she peeled herself from his side and moved toward the shower, he rose to join her.
But as he passed the tall windows of their bedchamber, a flicker of motion beyond them caught his eye. He paused, glancing out.
His brother was standing out on the lawn, gazing down at the grass.
Drustan’s smile deepened.
They’d been through a time of it when Dageus had turned dark. It had been hellish there for a while, but his brother was once again free and, by Amergin, life was rich and sweet and full! His da Silvan and their next-mother Nell would be delighted to know how well their sons fared in the modern day.
He had all he’d ever wanted: a cherished wife, a burgeoning clan, his brother wed and blissfully happy, and the prospect of a long, simple, good life in his beloved Highlands.
Och, there’d been a bit of a ruckus last month when one of the Tuatha Dé, Adam Black, had appeared, but things had swiftly settled back into an easy cadence, and he was looking forward to a long time of—
He blinked.
Dageus was conversing with a mirror.
Standing in the middle of the front lawn, holding it gingerly by the sides, and speaking heatedly to it.
Drustan rubbed his jaw, perplexed.
Why was his brother talking to a mirror? Was it some strange twenty-first-century way of mulling things over, of—literally—consulting with oneself?
Come to think of it, he mused, where had the mirror come from?
It hadn’t been there moments ago. It was taller than his brother. Wider too. ’Twas hardly as if Dageus might have been concealing it in a pocket or beneath a fold in his kilt, not that he was wearing a kilt. They’d both adopted modern modes of dress and were slowly adapting to new ways.