The Immortal Highlander

Page 89

He’d not blow this chance. Nor would he give the Elder a chance to screw things up again with his lust for vengeance. He’d summon Darroc only at the last possible minute, and if Darroc didn’t kill him fast enough for his liking, Bastion himself would see to Adam’s death.
21
Aoibheal paced a tract of silica sand on the Isle of Morar, staring out at a frothing turquoise sea, her iridescent eyes flashing.
Time, usually of no relevance to her, a thing of which she was, indeed, scarcely aware, had suddenly become a pressing concern.
A short amount of it ago, she’d sensed an unfamiliar sensation, a growing lack of cohesion in the fabric of the realms she’d created for her race. Because she’d not felt such a thing before, she’d not immediately comprehended what it was.
The walls between the realms of Tuatha Dé and Man were thinning.
It took her yet another amount of time to pinpoint the origin of distress in the weft and weave of worlds: The Keltar Druids had not yet performed the ritual of Lughnassadh, the ancient rite that was to be completed at break of the feast day, as it had been for millennia.
She shook her head, astonished. By Danu, would they test her mercy again?
She narrowed her eyes, looking not outward but inward, stretching her far-vision across time and place. Seeking which Keltar was failing her now.
Stunned to find it was the same ones. Again.
Stretching farther to know the why of it . . .
She snapped ramrod straight, eyes wide with disbelief.
“Amadan,” she hissed. “How dare you?”
Perhaps even more to the point, how could he?
She’d stripped him of everything, rendered him powerless—or at least she thought she had—unable to be seen, heard, felt. She’d consigned him to a vile existence, insubstantial as a ghost, and cast him into the human realm. Banished him, cut him off, denied him even the merest glimpse of his own kind.
She’d chosen the parameters of his punishment carefully, to force him to taste the bitterness of the human condition with none of the attendant sweetness, to cure him of his foolish fascination with mortals once and for all.
Her repeated indulgence of her favored prince—the only one of her people who ever managed to surprise her, and surprise was nectar of the gods to a sixty-thousand-year-old queen—had cast her in an unfavorable light with both her courtiers and her advisers. Not to mention the eternal cleaning up after him she was obliged to do.
The High Council had been insisting she take action for centuries and, after his most recent defiance, she’d had no choice but to agree. Adam had argued against her in front of her court and council, a thing she could never permit, lest her sovereignty be questioned, lest she be blatantly challenged. Though she was the most powerful of the Seelie, that power was hers only so long as she held the support of the majority of her people. That power could be taken from her.
She’d been certain fifty or so years of such punishment would be enough to make him grateful to be Tuatha Dé, to bring him to heel, to stop him from meddling with humans.
She’d not believed it possible for him to find a way to meddle in the form she’d given him.
Oh, how wrong she’d been. As always, if a loophole existed, her iconoclastic D’Jai prince found it. And in a mere few months’ time. There he was, on the Keltar estate, and there was no doubt in her mind that he’d created this problem. Even cursed and powerless, he’d somehow found a way to do something to keep the Keltar from performing the ritual.
She stretched her senses again, feeling for dimensional faults. The ramifications of the thinning walls would first be felt in Scotland, then would spread quickly to Ireland and England. It had, in fact, already begun. The effects would radiate outward until, by nightfall, hidden Tuatha Dé realms would rise up all over the world in the midst of human ones.
By nightfall, any Tuatha Dé walking among humans in anything less than full human glamour would be exposed.
By nightfall, even the silica sands of Morar would gleam palely beneath a human moon.
Dimensions would bleed into one another, temporal portals would open. The Unseelie would be freed.
In a nutshell, all hell would break loose.
Adam was sitting with Gabrielle in the great hall, in the waning afternoon light, when he sensed the queen drawing near. About bloody time, he thought. Even he’d begun to get a little edgy waiting, wondering what was taking her so long.
He had no words for how he sensed her, was, in fact, rather surprised he could, being human and all, but there was a tensing in his body, a pressure inside his skull. He tightened his arms protectively around Gabrielle.