Spell of the Highlander

Page 53

His dark, chiseled face was a fortress. If he felt any emotion at all, it was completely concealed. Gaze remote, he inclined his head, a single time.
Behind him, lightning flashed, brilliant and jagged, against the grim, steely Indiana sky.
A short, caustic laugh escaped her. “And it didn’t work, did it? For some reason, it doesn’t work on me at all, does it?”
He gave a single shake of his head. “None of my magyck does.”
Jessi stared at him, struggling to take in this new information that put such a different slant on the way she’d so naively believed things to be. She’d been walking around thinking that the good guy was keeping her safe from the bad guy.
Only to find out that there were no good guys in Jessi St. James’s world.
Just bad and badder.
She wanted to know exactly how bad. “So how far would you have taken it, Mister Poor-me-I’m-trapped-in-a-mirror-dark-sorcerer? If it had worked, if I’d ‘removed my woolen and shown you my breasts,’ how far would you have pushed?”
“How the bloody hell far do you think?”
“I’m asking you. How far?” she demanded.
“I haven’t fucked in eleven hundred and thirty-three years, Jessica,” he said flatly. “I am a man.”
“How far?” she repeated frostily.
“All the way, woman. All the frigging way. Now get in the damned car.” A flash of lightning, followed by a booming thunderclap, punctuated his final words, as if Nature herself conspired with him.
Jessi stared at him in silence, rain dripping down her face, splattering on her chest, pondering her options. Being brutally honest with herself.
She could walk away now. Try it on her own. See if she could manage to disappear for the next nineteen days.
She was being hunted by a bona fide, ninth-century sorcerer who wanted her dead.
She was being kept alive by another bona fide ninth-century sorcerer who wanted to have sex with her and was willing to use magic to score.
Her life or her “virtue.”
It bore considering that it was a virtue she’d very nearly given him of her own accord.
Granted, she’d hardly been in her right mind at the time, but still.
She got in the damned car.
13
They were flying at a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean when the Dark Glass reclaimed him.
At least they hadn’t been about to have sex this time, so Jessi wasn’t left with a bad case of hostile hormones, and aghast at herself for yet another appalling lapse in moral fiber.
She glanced hastily around when he vanished, and caught several other passengers doing double takes. It didn’t surprise her to discover other people were looking straight at him when he disappeared. He was just that kind of man, the kind people watched. Some because they wondered what it would be like to have sex with such a gorgeous, dangerous-looking hunk of testosterone (the category she was in), others because they were concerned about their purses, wallets, or lives (the category she was in).
None of the onlookers said a word. Assuming any of them believed it had genuinely happened, not one of them appeared in any hurry to talk about it.
She smothered a dry laugh. Been there, done that, thought I was going nuts, too, the first few times I saw him.
Tugging the worn blue airline blanket up to her chin, she pretended nothing was amiss, that she’d boarded alone, and been alone all this time. She’d been braced for him to disappear. He’d told her before they’d embarked that the Dark Glass would no doubt reclaim him long before they got to Scotland.
Scotland. Crimeny. She was on her way out of the country! Life as she’d known it—work, school, and all her tidily scheduled plans—were slipping away from her at the astonishing rate of 565 miles per hour.
She’d not believed they were going to be able to pull it off until they’d arrived at the Indianapolis airport and he’d proceeded to give her a mind-boggling display of his formidable “talents.”
He’d used his “Voice” to coerce airport employees to crate and ship the mirror to Edinburgh. Unwilling to generate any records of their passage, he’d bypassed procuring tickets, and instead “persuaded” their way through security, past armed officers. There’d not been a direct flight available to Scotland, and he’d refused to go through London, as it would take them too close to Lucan for his comfort, so he’d “Voiced” them onto a Boeing 747 bound first for Paris, showing only his palm as necessary documentation, accompanied by terse commands.
She’d watched in abject amazement. Quite simply anything the man said, people believed and obeyed. Mutely, docilely, blankly. He’d used a few “forgetting” commands as well, though he’d told her they were tricky things and he was employing mild ones only to buy them all the time possible. He’d told her that a true forgetting spell took much time and was risky, as the mind endeavored to retain the imprints it bore, and stripping away one memory frequently damaged many others. It was a damage he was clearly reluctant to be the cause of, which she found interesting for a Druid-turned-dark-sorcerer.