Spell of the Highlander

Page 45

“I’ll do that. Thanks.” Go. Away.
As the footfalls faded down the hall, she sagged limply against the door. She made the mistake of rubbing her eyes and compounded it by looking at her hands.
Her lips parted. Breath rushed into her lungs, prelude to a scream.
“Doona do it, lass,” Cian hissed. “He won’t believe you twice.”
Pursing her lips, she forced the air back out in small, silent explosions. She puffed short, shallow bursts, as if breathing in a paper bag. I am not going to scream. I am not going to scream.
“Why did you kill her?” she asked a few minutes later, when she trusted herself to speak.
“Look in the woman’s hand. I cannot make out what it is, but she meant to harm you with it.”
Steeling herself, Jessi moved reluctantly back into the room and gazed down at the dead woman. Her left hand was closed around something. Jessi nudged it with her foot. A syringe spilled from her fingers and rolled across the blood-spattered carpet. Jessi shivered.
“Jessica, try to summon me out.”
Neither of them expected it to work. It didn’t.
“Remove the comforter from the bed and cover the body with it.”
Gingerly, she did so.
It didn’t help much. Instead of a dead body in the same room with her that she could see, now there was a dead body in the same room with her she couldn’t see, and that creeped her out even more. Everybody knew villains never really died. Just when you thought you were safe, they got up again, eyes terrifying abysses, arms sickly groping for you like in Night of the Living Dead.
“You will go bathe now, Jessica.”
She didn’t move. She wasn’t about to go off and get in the shower, only to end up having a Psycho moment.
“She’s dead, lass. I swear. She was human, nothing out of the ordinary. Now go bathe,” he said in a voice that brooked no resistance. “I will protect you. Go.”
After searching his burnt-scotch gaze a moment, Jessi went.
Near dawn on Friday, October thirteenth, Jessi stared into the mirror, blew out an exasperated breath, and muttered the spell to release Cian for the gazillionth time.
It finally worked.
Hours had passed since the long, scalding shower she’d taken, using up two entire bars of those little pink soaps.
Cian had kept her occupied with tales of life in the ninth century. He’d told her of his seven doting sisters, his mother who tried to manage them all, of his eventual attempts to secure them worthy husbands.
He’d spoken in great, loving detail of his castle in the mountains, and of the rugged bens and sparkling burns surrounding it. It was obvious he’d adored his home, his family, and his clan.
He’d told her of the heather that grew wild along the hillsides and so fragrantly scented a fire; he spoke at length of the savory Scots meals that he’d been missing for centuries.
His words had brought the Highlands brilliantly to life in her mind’s eye, and the constant purr of his deep rich burr had soothed. She knew he’d been trying to keep her from going nuts while killing time in a room with a dead body, and it had worked.
As the shock of yet another attempt on her life and Cian’s swift dispatch of the would-be assassin faded, Jessi faced the cold, hard facts.
Fact: The woman had intended to kill her. Fact: One of them had to go. Fact: Jessi was glad it hadn’t been her.
Problem: In a short time, she’d be slinking out of a room that had blood splattered all over it, leaving a dead body in it. Even if they somehow managed to get the body out of the room—and she couldn’t see how they could possibly sneak it from the hotel without being seen—there was no way they could get rid of all the blood.
Fact: She was now a fugitive.
That was the fact that could make her nuts. PhD, life, future—all of it gone to hell.
What was she going to do now?
She had a sudden, horrible vision of herself at some point in the not-so-distant future, calling her mom from a strange, frightening foreign country where the beetles and roaches were the size of small rats, trying to assure Lilly St. James that she really hadn’t done whatever the police were saying she’d done.
On top of it all, she didn’t even have clothes to sneak out of the hotel in. Though she’d been able to get some of the blood out of her jeans, her sweater was a lost cause. Though her panties had been salvageable, her bra was not.
She could hardly walk out into downtown Chicago in the blanket she was wearing. One might be able to pull that kind of thing off in New York City, but not in Shy-town.
As brilliant golden light blazed from those mysterious runes on the frame, and the sensation of spatial distortion grated across her already frayed nerve endings, she tugged the blanket more securely around her.