Spell of the Highlander

Page 111

They’d been making love for hours, and had just been laughing about how they wanted to go raid the kitchen, but neither of them had the strength to move.
As their laughter died, there was one of those long moments that stretched uncomfortably. They’d been occurring more and more often of late, as there were so many things both of them were being excruciatingly careful not to say.
“What if we broke the mirror, Cian?” she blurted into the strained silence. “What would happen?”
He cupped the back of her head, threading his fingers into her curls. “The glass is but my window, or door, if you will, on the world, Jessica. The actual Unseelie prison I inhabit exists in another realm. I would be trapped inside that Unseelie place, with no way out. Then, when the tithe was not paid, both Lucan and I would die. He in your world, I in a windowless broch of stone.”
She shuddered, hating that image. “If you knew that breaking the mirror was a sure way to keep Lucan from passing the tithe through, why didn’t you do it before you ever came to Chicago?”
“Och, lass, prior to meeting you, I had no one to summon me out, or I might have. I attempted to persuade the thief to release me, but he thought he was going mad and crated the mirror up. After that debacle I concluded mayhap ’twould be wiser to let time and distance separate me from Lucan. Trevayne searches constantly for relics of power and has many contacts. I knew not which merchants might have ties to him and feared if I continued showing myself word might get back to him and he would succeed in reclaiming the mirror before Samhain. Then, once I’d met you I had to be able to leave the glass in order to protect you. ’Twas why I was so concerned it not be broken, so you would not be left defenseless.” He paused, then added softly, “There was also the small fact that I never wanted to live more greatly than I did the moment I saw you, lass. For over a thousand years, life had meant naught to me but vengeance. Then the moment my vengeance was at hand, life suddenly meant everything. ’Twas a bitter pill to swallow.”
Jessi was choking on the bitterness of that pill herself. As each precious day slipped by, as Drustan and Dageus continued to shake their heads and say they’d still not found a way to save him, so, too, did her grip on herself slip.
Cian might have accepted his death as a necessity, but she never would.
Each night, at some point, she ended up in the darkened library, sitting in front of the computer, her hands clenched in her lap. The past few nights she’d not even dared to turn it on.
Because each day she was weakening. Ethics? What were ethics? She wasn’t even sure she could spell the word. Wasn’t in any dictionary she knew.
“What if it was broken when you were outside it?” she pressed.
“The same. ’Tis not the mirror I’m actually reclaimed back into, but that place in the Unseelie realm. When whatever hours of my freedom I was allotted that day expired, I would be returned there again, with no way out. Again, as the tithe could no longer be paid at Samhain’s end, we would die.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she cried, pulling away from him. Sitting up, she punched the mattress with a fist. “I’m surrounded by magic! The three of you are Druids. On top of that, you’re a sorcerer and Dageus was possessed by thirteen ancient, evil beings! Don’t any of you know a spell or enchantment or something that can undo this stupid indenture?”
Cian shook his head. “One would think so, but nay. The Keltar were chosen to protect Seelie lore, not Unseelie. Though some of us are wont to dabble with things best left alone, we ken very little of the ways of Dark Magyck, even less about the darker half of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.”
“There has to be another way, Cian!”
He sat up and grabbed her by the shoulders, his whisky gaze fierce. “Och, Christ, lass, do you think I wish to die? Doona you think if there were any other way to stop Lucan that I would seize it? I love you, woman! I would do anything to live! But the simple fact is, ’tis my very life that keeps Trevayne immortal, and nothing but my death can take that away from him. In time, he will find the Dark Book. He cannot be permitted to have that time. ’Tis not merely our lives at stake, ’tis the lives of many, ’tis the very future of your world. I can stop him now. Before long, no one will be able to.”
“And you can’t live with that,” Jessi said, unable to keep the note of bitterness from her voice. “You have to be the hero.”
He shook his head. “Nay, lass. I’ve never been the hero, and I’m not trying to be one now. ’Tis but that there are things a man can live with and things he can’t.” He took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. “I told you I was tricked into the mirror and that much is true. But I didn’t tell you that I wanted the Unseelie Dark Glass too.”