Beyond the Highland Myst(760)

Sorrowful gold eyes locked with hers, and that sinking sensation became a pit of acid in her stomach.

“Cian was bound on Samhain, lass. If the tithe is not paid by he who initiated the indenture—in this instance, Lucan—at precisely midnight on October thirty-first, the indenture will be violated, and all the years that Cian and Lucan have lived that were not theirs to live, will be called due. At once. In a single moment.”

Silence blanketed the room. It lay there, heavy, suffocating.

“Wh-what are you s-saying?” Jessi stammered.

“You know what I’m saying, Jessica,” Dageus said gently. “Cian came back to Scotland for one reason: to die. That’s his vengeance. That’s his way of keeping Lucan from getting the Dark Book and ending things for once and for all. When the tithe is not paid, they will both die. It’s all over. The immortal sorcerer will be slain, without so much as a drop of blood spilled. All Cian must do is stay out of Lucan’s hands until twelve-oh-one on November first. And he’s right, ’tis truly the simplest, most effective way to end it. Quite tidy, indeed. Drustan and I can then track down the Dark Book and attempt to either restore it to its guardians or protect it ourselves.”

Jessi gaped at Dageus. Abruptly, everything Cian had told her since they’d met—and she now realized it was precious little—tumbled through her mind, and she apprehended it all in a vastly different light. She shook her head, pressing a hand to her mouth.

Now that she knew the truth, it fit together so neatly that she was stunned that she’d not guessed at it before.

Not once had he ever spoken of any moment beyond his “deadline.” Not even when she’d asked what he intended to do once the spell was broken. There’d never been a “God, it’ll be so good to be free again!” There’d never been any mention of something he might like to do once he’d killed Lucan—maybe see a movie, have a feast, travel the world and stretch his legs a bit. In fact, there’d never even been any mention of him killing Lucan at all. And why would there have been? He’d never planned to actually physically “kill” him.

No new beginnings, he’d said.

He’d known all along he wasn’t going to be free in fifteen days.

He was going to be dead in fifteen days.

Precisely two weeks and one day from today, Cian MacKeltar—the man with whom she’d just spent the most amazing, scorchingly passionate, dazzling night of her life—was going to be no more than a one-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty-three-year-old pile of dust.

She turned numbly toward the mirror. Her own horrified reflection looked back at her. Cian was nowhere to be seen.

The coward.

Her face was pale, her eyes enormous.

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” she breathed.

Right before she burst into tears.





Quod not cogit amor?

(Is there anything love couldn’t make us do?)

—MARTIAL, C.E. c.40–104



* * *





23



Jessi stood at the open window of the Silver Chamber, staring down through the dreary day at the misty castle grounds.

Cian was striding across the vast, manicured expanse of front lawn. He’d removed the braids from his hair and it was slicked wetly back from his regal face in a long dark fall. The sky was leaden, the horizon of mountains obscured by dark thunderheads. A light, drizzling rain was falling, and patches of fog clung, here and there, to damp thatches of grass, gusting in drowsy, dreamy swirls as Cian sliced through them.

He was wearing only a plaid, slung low around his hips, and soft leather boots, despite the chill in the air. He looked like a magnificent half-savage ninth-century Highland laird out surveying his mountain domain.

God, he was beautiful.

He was bleeding.

Blood trickled down his rain-slicked chest, slipped between the ridges of muscles in that sculpted stomach that, only the night before last, she’d tasted with her tongue, covered with kisses.

Freshly dyed tattoos covered the right side of his chest and part of his right arm, the tiny needle pricks still beading with a wet sheen of blood. More mystic runes climbed up over his right shoulder and, as he turned down a cobbled stone walkway, she could see that either he or one of the twins had branded a fair portion of his back crimson and black, as well.

Protection runes. They hold the repercussions of meddling with black magycks at bay, Chloe had said.

She was so absorbed in watching him that she didn’t hear the door to the bedchamber open and someone slip in until Gwen said softly, “He’s transmuting the soil, Jessi. He saw you up here and sent me to find you. He asked me to ask you not to watch.”

“Why?” Jessi said tonelessly.