The Immortal Highlander

Page 72

“Is it forbidden magic?” Drustan asked Dageus.
“Nay. But ’tis the old Tuatha Dé magic. Not something we were necessarily given to use, though considering the queen left me it, well . . .” He shrugged.
“Do you feel ’tis dangerous in any way?” Drustan pressed.
“Nay, ’tis but a chant in their tongue.”
“For Christ’s sake, would you say it already?” Adam hissed. “I need to be seen. I can’t stand this bloody frigging invisibility.”
“ ’tis your choice, brother. I leave it to your judgment,” Drustan said.
After a moment’s reflection, Dageus said, “I see no harm in it.” Of Gabby, he inquired, “Where is he?”
When she pointed, Dageus rose and, circling the area she’d indicated, began to speak.
Or rather, Gabby thought, he opened his mouth and sound came out, but he wasn’t speaking. It wasn’t a single voice that issued from his lips but myriad voices, dozens layered atop one another, rising and falling, swelling and breaking. It was melodic yet chillingly dissonant, beautiful yet strangely awful. Like fire that one could crawl inside of trying to get warm, only to end up freezing to death in it.
It raised all the fine hair on Gabby’s body, and she realized that if this was the old Tuatha Dé tongue, it was not a language Adam had ever spoken around her.
Whatever tongue he’d been speaking on those infrequent occasions wasn’t this. This was a voice of raw power. Such sound could mesmerize, could seduce against a person’s will. It was old magic, undiluted and pure. The kind she’d always imagined the Hunters possessed. A terrible magic.
As it built to a crescendo, she shuddered, closing her eyes.
“Easy, ka-lyrra; it’s because you’re a Sidhe-seer that it affects you so,” she heard Adam say softly. “It’s why I’ve not spoken my tongue around you. Your instincts to guard, to gather your people and flee, are being roused. In ancient days you would have heard us coming on the wind and secreted your villagers away. Breathe. Slow and deep.”
She did as he said, pursing her lips and breathing through her mouth, trying to wait it out, hoping it would end soon. He was right, the mere sound of the ancient tongue was filling her with a bizarre kind of battle-readiness, a bone-deep urge to round up the MacKeltars and make them hide. Then to ride through the nearby towns, sounding the alarm.
Finally Dageus finished, and she heard Gwen and Chloe say simultaneously, breathlessly: “Oh, my God.”
Gabby opened her eyes.
Drustan had risen to his feet and was scowling, an expression mirrored by his twin. Both were glaring at Adam—whom they obviously could now see. Then at their wives, then back at Adam.
Gabby absorbed the looks on Chloe’s and Gwen’s faces, and suddenly felt so much better about having had such a hard time ignoring the Fae all her life.
It isn’t just me, she thought gratefully. She wasn’t a woman of weak moral turpitude, a spineless, undisciplined fairy-abduction-waiting-to-happen; the Fae did have something magnetic and inordinately seductive, something women simply couldn’t resist. Adam was affecting Chloe and Gwen in the same way he affected her.
And how could he not? she thought, seeing him anew through their eyes. He was nearly six and a half feet of powerful, gold-skinned Fae prince, his body sculpted of pure muscle, his long black hair spilling to his waist in a dark silky tangle. Clad in those tattooed jeans, boots, an ivory sweater, and leather coat, gold torque gleaming at his neck, he dripped dark, otherworldly eroticism. His chiseled face was savagely beautiful, shadowed with a few days’ dark stubble. Ancient intelligence and barely banked sexual heat glittered in his exotic, dual-colored eyes. The faint fragrance of jasmine, sandalwood, and spicy man that always clung to him seemed suddenly to fill the room with his heady, intoxicating scent. She wondered, not for the first time, if there were some kind of chemical in the scent a Fae gave off that worked as an aphrodisiac on humans of the opposite sex.
He was, quite simply, a living, breathing fantasy, exuding an irresistible come-hither that held an intrinsic, unspoken caveat of danger. He had a come-and-get-me-baby-I’m-pure-trouble-and-you’re-gonna-love-it kind of attitude that provoked a woman’s most primitive sexual drives. Drew her even as she knew she should be running like hell in the opposite direction. Drew her, in fact, in some perverse way, because she knew she should be running like hell in the opposite direction.
And now that she was seeing the looks on Gwen’s and Chloe’s faces, she wondered how she’d managed to stay out of bed with him as long as she had.