The Immortal Highlander

Page 44

She sighed in her sleep and curled closer, nestling her cheek against his chest. He understood what was responsible for the sudden change in her demeanor, what had caused the lamb to slump down in exhaustion against the wolf. Not trust, no, not from his fiery Sidhe-seer (though he was beginning to see some signs of thawing); circumstances alone had driven her into his arms. Until late this afternoon she’d perceived him as her greatest threat. Now there was a greater threat, and he was suddenly her only ally against it.
No matter the reason, he liked feeling her soft and yielding to his strength. Unconscious, vulnerable, entrusted to his care while her mind was steeped in dreams. He liked it a great deal. Enough, in fact, that he—who had no patience with physical discomfort—would put up with pain rather than wake her. Fortunately, the bullet had only grazed him, presenting no significant threat to his mortal form.
Hunters carrying guns. He rubbed his jaw and shook his head. When she’d told him what she’d seen, during the few pauses he’d permitted them while sifting place, he’d been incensed.
At himself.
What a fool he’d been. A week ago, he’d thought his most pressing problem a severe case of frustration and boredom. Then he’d found Gabrielle, and his most pressing problem had been how best to seduce her.
Now his most pressing problem was how the bloody hell to keep them both alive.
It didn’t take Tuatha Dé genius to understand the significance of Hunters carrying human weapons. Not in the presence of Darroc.
How swiftly he’d forgotten all he’d left behind in Faery upon being banished from that realm—the complications, the tensions, the incessant court intrigues—but he’d been thoroughly wallowing in his aggravation at being human. What a fool he’d been to forget Darroc for even a moment. The bad blood between him and the High Council Elder stretched back four and a half millennia, to a time before The Compact between Fae and Man. To a time before the deadly spear and lethal sword his race had brought with them from Danu—two of the four Hallows, and the only weapons capable of doing injury to or even killing an immortal—had been removed from Faery and secreted away. All the way back to that day Adam had taken up the sword and laid open Darroc’s face, giving him the scar he still sported.
He’d like to pretend he’d tried to kill Darroc for a noble reason, but the simple truth was they’d been fighting over a mortal woman. Adam had seen her first. But the queen had summoned him back to court for some nonsense or another, and Darroc had gotten to her first. Knowing full well Adam had wanted her.
Darroc had killed her. There were those among his race who believed that beauty and innocence could truly be savored only via their destruction. There were those among his race who, in that lawless time before The Compact, when they’d first arrived on this world and were scouting it, not yet having settled it, had fed like scavengers on the passion they could elicit from a human during sex, not caring that it killed the mortal in the process. He’d seen what Darroc had done to her when he’d returned. Gone was the laughing, teasing young maiden who’d been so vibrantly alive. Sadistically broken and forever silenced. Her death hadn’t come easy. And for no bloody frigging good reason. Her murder had been an act of bitter, senseless violence. Adam had done his fair share of killing in that lawless time, but for reasons. Always for reasons. Never just for the pleasure of it.
The loathing spawned between him and Darroc that day had never waned. Leashed by the queen, under threat of dire recompense (a soulless death at the queen’s hand, no less), they’d taken their vicious battle into the arena of court politics. An arena in which Adam had perfected his powers of subtlety and seduction, tools he’d used to defeat Darroc on many occasions. The Elder, too, had changed with time, perfecting a cunning that equaled his brutality. While Darroc secured a seat on the queen’s council, Adam managed to secure her ear in other ways. He and the Elder were by far the most powerfully persuasive figures at court, staunchly on opposing sides, and with Adam gone . . . well, he had no doubt that already the complacent courtiers were being turned to the Elder’s aims. How long, he brooded darkly, before Darroc managed to turn some of them against Aoibheal herself? Was she aware of the danger she’d created by casting Adam out?
So Darroc had tried to kill him, he mused. And with guns at that. Had he been trying to make it look as if Adam had gotten caught in stray fire from some human dispute? Knowing Darroc, he would play the odds that once Adam was gone, the queen would be able to prove nothing if Adam’s body sported only man-made wounds.