Spell of the Highlander

Page 78

19
Banner day, her ass.
No bones about it—she hated that mirror.
It took Jessi nearly an hour to find her way back to the SUV.
Or rather, back to where the SUV had been in her other life—the one in which her possibilities for survival hadn’t looked quite so grim.
When they’d stormed from Tiedemann’s earlier, Cian had swiftly rearranged the mirror to his satisfaction, so their new “purchases” might not slip and slide in transit and damage it, then he’d turned and loped down the streets of Inverness at such a furious pace that it had been all she could do to keep up with him. She’d hardly glanced left or right, and hadn’t paid any attention to where they were going, nor had she even bothered trying to gather the breath to talk to him, until they’d finally stopped at the grocery store. Ergo, she’d not realized how far he’d taken her, evading his descendant, until she’d attempted to retrace her steps through the unfamiliar Scottish streets.
Then—because she’d been watching for the SUV, not the store—she’d actually sprinted past Tiedemann’s twice before realizing their stolen rental vehicle was no longer there.
“Shit, shit, shit!” she cried, staring at the empty space in front of the store.
She glanced farther down the street, thinking perhaps the SUV had inexplicably sprouted feet and moved itself while they’d been gone—stranger things had happened of late. Or maybe she’d just forgotten exactly where she’d parked it on the cobbled avenue.
Nope, not a single big, black, stolen SUV. On either side of the street.
How bad could one person’s luck get?
“Don’t answer that,” she snapped hastily, in a general upward direction. “That was a purely rhetorical question, not a show-me-proof one.” She was beginning to suffer the paranoid suspicion that the Universe was using her as the butt of a series of perverse jokes.
The whole time she’d been winding down street after street, she’d been damming a rising tidal wave of panic, assuring herself that everything was going to be just fine, that this was only a minor setback, that Cian had just been sucked back into the mirror earlier than either of them had expected, and once she got back to the SUV, she’d drive them back to their camp and they’d try again tomorrow, with greater success.
Which wasn’t to say that she hadn’t been pissed when he’d vanished. She had. She’d left her purse inside her backpack in the SUV, figuring she wouldn’t need it because Cian could Voice her whatever she wanted, and her forty-two dollars and seventeen cents certainly wasn’t going to go very far.
Then, when he’d so abruptly disappeared, she’d stood in the grocery with a cart full of lovely snacks, her stomach growling hungrily, and realized that she was going to have to leave all that scrumptious food, because she didn’t have even a few dollars stuffed in a pocket somewhere, and couldn’t buy so much as a measly candy bar to get her through for a while.
She’d been so hungry that she’d actually considered shoplifting. It had not been a stab of conscience that had prevented her from embarking on a larcenous spree—hunger was a brutally compelling motive—but fear of being caught, because then what would happen to Cian?
With that worry foremost in her mind, stomach protesting her every retreating step, she’d left the grocery and dashed off to find him.
Only to find this—a great big, empty parking space.
Where was he?
She slumped down onto the curb and perched on the edge of it, propping her elbows on her knees, her chin on her fists.
She couldn’t believe that Lucan could have found them so quickly.
If he had, wouldn’t she be dead? Or at least under attack right now? She glanced hastily, warily around.
No one was staring at her or moving toward her in a menacing manner.
Which left only two other possibilities that she could think of: 1) a thief had stolen their stolen auto, which—in addition to pushing the limits of the absurd—sucked because, for the life of her, she couldn’t see a way she was going to be able to track down a thief by herself, nor could she report a stolen vehicle stolen to the police, because the police were dread possibility number two; 2) the police had spotted it and impounded it and Jessi St. James was now wanted for Grand Theft Auto (thanks to half a dozen pieces of identification in her purse) in addition to being wanted for theft of the mirror and probably all the stuff Cian had Voiced from Tiedemann’s, and possibly Murder One (though she was really hoping deletion of the hotel records had gotten her out of that), as well as Just Plain Dead by one evil sorcerer.