The Immortal Highlander

Page 60

And the line in her mind between man and fairy was getting ever more blurred.
Closing her eyes, she leaned back into him, telling herself to try to get some sleep while she could, because it was anyone’s guess when or where she might get to sleep next.
She’d just begun to drift off into a light doze when he shook her gently; they disembarked and caught a shuttle to the airport.
“A flight’s leaving now, ka-lyrra,” he said, scanning departures. “There’s no time for me to play with their computers and get you a ticket. You’ll have to hold my hand. Come. We must hurry to catch it.”
Scotland. They were going to Scotland. Right now.
Blinking, stupefied by what her life had become, she slipped her hand into his.
Invisible, they passed through security and made for the gate. She glanced up at his profile. His jaw was set, his eyes narrowed and focused straight ahead, and he was walking so fast that he was practically dragging her.
His pace didn’t slow until they’d boarded the plane.
It was Monday, she thought with a kind of distant wonder as she sank into a window seat beside him, holding tightly to his hand.
She should be home, at work. She should be getting ready to make her stand with Jeff. She had dry cleaning to pick up, plants that needed to be watered, a dentist appointment this afternoon, and dinner plans with Elizabeth tonight.
Instead, she was on a plane, cloaked by the féth fiada, temporarily noncorporeal, about to fly halfway across the world, being chased by otherworldly demons, and half-seduced by an otherworldly prince. Would have—if she had to be brutally honest with herself—probably been wholly seduced, if not for the interruption of said otherworldly demons, and wouldn’t that have made a fine mess of the already fine mess in her head?
It was a measure of how surreal her existence had become that, in the midst of all she could be worrying about, indeed, should be worrying about, her most prevalent concern was that she really, really hoped everyone had already boarded, and they would just stay in their own seats and not sit in her.
You were firing questions at me today, trying to get inside my head.
You asked if I believe in God.
I told you of course I do—I’ve always had a strong sense of self.
Your house is quiet now, you’re sleeping upstairs and I’m alone with this blasted, idiotic book that purports to tally the sum of my life, and the fact is, maybe I do.
But maybe, ka-lyrra, your God doesn’t believe in me.
—FROM THE (GREATLY REVISED) BLACK EDITION OF
THE O’CALLAGHAN Book of the Sin Siriche Du
16
Scotland. The Highlands.
In Adam’s opinion, there was no finer place in all the world. He’d passed much of his existence sporting a human glamour amid her lush vales and rocky tors. He’d lived for a time, back in the seventh century, in the guise of a battle-scarred warrior, with a Highland clan called the McIllioch, eaten and “tooped” and fought beside them. And when one of their many battles had grown too fierce, he’d bequeathed a Fae gift upon the McIllioch males, saving their line from extinction.
He’d set up his smithy here and there, for a time at Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea, for a time at Caithness, among too many other places to name. He’d infiltrated the Templars when they’d fallen, guiding them to Circenn at Dunnotar, to be used in battle by Robert the Bruce, and then to the Sinclair at Rosslyn, where to this day their fantastic legacy endured.
And the Keltar, well, he’d been fascinated by that Highland clan of Druids since the day they’d been chosen to negotiate and uphold The Compact with the Tuatha Dé, but he’d been especially fascinated by
the twin MacKeltars, Dageus and Drustan—dark, powerful, sometimes barbaric—sixteenth-century Highlanders who’d forsaken love, only to find it in the bleakest hours of their existence.
And now he was in human form, driving into those mountains at the side of a human woman, about to meet those very Keltar in the flesh.
What would they make of him? Would his reception be fair or foul? He was, after all, of the race that had made the Keltars’ lives so difficult; one of those responsible for generations uncounted of MacKeltar being feared, touted as “pagan” and “evil” for continuing to adhere to the Old Ways when Gaul abandoned their Druids first to the Romans and then to the equally tender mercies of Christianity.
Would they know of him? Would his reputation have preceded him? Would Dageus have any memory of Adam healing him? The mighty Highlander’s heart had stopped beating completely by the time Adam had knelt beside him on the Isle of Morar.