Spell of the Highlander

Page 3

Ring! Ring!
She gulped another fascinated look at the unabashed display of sex-on-the-sidewalk, then reluctantly boosted herself inside the kitchen window. She shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it, then pulled down the shade. What she couldn’t see, couldn’t torture her. At least not much, anyway.
Riiiiing!
Where was that blasted phone?
She finally spied it on the sofa, nearly buried beneath pillows, candy wrappers, and a pizza box that contained—eew—something fuzzy and phosphorescent green. As she gingerly pushed aside the box, she hesitated, hand suspended in midair above the phone.
For a moment—the briefest, most peculiar of interludes—she suffered the inexplicable, intense feeling that she shouldn’t pick it up.
That she should just let it ring and ring.
Maybe let it ring all weekend.
Later, Jessi would recall that feeling.
Time itself seemed to stand still for that odd, pregnant slice of time, and she had the weirdest sensation that the universe itself had stopped breathing and was waiting to see what she would do next.
She wrinkled her nose at the ridiculous, egocentric thought.
As if the universe ever even noticed Jessi St. James.
She picked up the phone.
Lucan Myrddin Trevayne paced before the fire.
When employing a sorcerer’s spell to conceal his true appearance—which he did whenever he wasn’t completely alone—he was tall, in his early forties, handsome, powerfully built, his thick black hair dashed at the temples with silver. He was a man who turned women’s heads, and made men take an instinctive step back when he walked by. His mien said one thing: Power—I have it, you don’t. And if you think you do—try me. His features were Old World, his eyes cold gray as a loch beneath a stormy sky. His true appearance was far less appealing.
He’d amassed tremendous wealth and power in his lifetime, which had been considerably longer than most. He held controlling interest in many and varied enterprises, from banks to media to oil. He kept residences in a dozen cities. He retained a select group of uniquely trained men and the occasional woman to handle his most private affairs.
To his left, seated in a deep armchair, one of those men waited tensely.
“This is absurd, Roman,” Lucan growled. “What the hell’s taking so long?”
Roman shifted defensively in his chair. He was aptly named, his features as classically handsome as those on an ancient coin, his hair long and blond. “I’ve got men on it, Mr. Trevayne,” he said with the trace of a Russian accent. “The best men we’ve got. The problem is, they went in a dozen different directions. They were sold on the black market. No one has names. It’s going to take time—”
“Time is the one thing I don’t have,” Lucan cut him off sharply. “Every hour, every moment that passes, makes it less likely they’ll be recovered. Those damned things must be found.”
“Those damned things” were the Dark or “Unseelie” Hallows of the Tuatha Dé Danaan—artifacts of immense power created by an ancient civilization that had passed, centuries ago and quite erroneously, into Man’s history books as a mythical race: the Daoine Sidhe or the Fae.
Lucan had believed there was no better place to safekeep his prized treasures than in his well-warded private residence in London.
He’d been wrong.
Critically wrong.
He wasn’t certain what had happened a few months ago while he’d been out of the country pursuing a lead on the Dark Book, the final and most powerful of the four Unseelie Hallows, but something had transpired somewhere in London—its epicenter in the east side, he could feel the lingering traces of power—that had reverberated through all of England. An immense and ancient power had risen for a brief time, so strong that it had neutralized all other magic in Britain.
Which he wouldn’t have cared about since whatever it was had departed as swiftly as it had come, except for the fact that its rising had shattered formidable, allegedly unbreakable wards that protected his most prized possessions. Protected them so well that he’d found the notion of a modern-day security system laughable.
Not so laughable now.
He’d had a state-of-the-art system installed, with cameras in every room, sweeping every angle, because while he’d been away, a thief had broken into his museum of a home and stolen artifacts that had belonged to him for centuries—including his irreplaceable Hallows: the box, amulet, and mirror.
Fortunately the thief had been spotted by neighbors while hauling away his loot. Unfortunately, by the time Lucan’s select staff had managed to identify and track the bastard, he’d already sold the artifacts to the first in a series of elusive middlemen.