“What he ‘must’ is debatable. ’Twould not necessarily come to that,” Drustan replied icily.
“Och, aye, it would, you bloody fool. Leave Lucan to me. Stay out of it.”
“I cannot believe this Trevayne is so much more powerful than we.”
Cian’s smile dripped dark amusement. “Ah—and there’s the vaunted Keltar ego! I wondered when I’d see it. I made the same mistake. Believed I was so much more powerful. And I was. Yet here I am. And I didn’t see it coming. I will deal with Lucan. You’ve but to grant us sanctuary here until the Feast of All Saints. I will need to lay additional wards when next I am free. Permit that. ’Tis all I ask.”
Dageus had remained silent while his brother and Cian argued. But now he cocked his head, his golden eyes shimmering strangely. “Now I understand,” he said. “So that’s why you plan to do it. It made no sense to me. Especially after last eve.”
Was it her imagination, or had Cian suddenly gone tense? Jessi eyed him intently.
Her Highland lover’s shrug seemed a bit overdone when he said, “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Aye, you do.”
“You can’t deep-listen to me, not with my guards up, and I’ve not let them down since we met. You’re good, but you’re not that good.”
“Yet. And I doona need to be. I understand this tithing business.”
“Mayhap the knowledge you acquired from those evil Draghar of yours is inaccurate, Druid,” Cian said coolly. “I’m sure even they made the occasional error.”
“Nay,” Dageus said just as coolly. “This I learned from our tomes in the underground chamber while searching for a way to be rid of the thirteen. And I know you’ve read them too.”
“What?” Jessi said, staring from one to the other, sensing the deadly undertow in the ocean of things they weren’t saying. “What are you two talking about?”
“Doona do it, kinsman,” Cian said abruptly, low and intense. “Leave it. Man to man.”
“Nay, ’tis too big a thing to continue speaking around. She has the right to know.”
“‘Tis not your decision to make.”
“I wouldn’t have to make it if you hadn’t made the wrong one by not telling her.”
“‘Not telling her’ what?” Jessi demanded.
“‘Tis naught of your concern. Stay the bloody hell out of it,” Cian snarled at Dageus.
“Nay. Not after what transpired between the two of you last eve. She has a right to know. Either you tell her, or I will. ’Tis the only mercy I’ll grant.”
“Cian?” Jessi implored questioningly.
He gazed at her a long silent moment. A muscle in his jaw leapt. He turned abruptly in the mirror.
And disappeared into the silver. It rippled behind him and went flat.
Jessi stared at the looking glass in disbelief. What could be so terrible that, after the incredible intimacy they’d just shared, he would turn his back on her and walk away?
“What’s going on?” She turned a plaintive gaze on Dageus. There was a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, and she knew, just knew, she was about to hear something that was going to make her wish she’d cut her ears off instead.
When Jessi heard Cian murmur a short chant, she knew what was coming and a cry of alarm escaped her. The jeweled blade that had slain the room-service assassin whipped out of the glass and lodged in a wall—behind and a hairsbreadth to the left of Dageus’s temple.
“Doona answer her, you bastard,” came the savage growl from the silvery glass.
“Harm any of mine and I’ll break your blethering mirror,” Drustan said very, very quietly. “Were I not certain you missed deliberately, I’d have done it already.”
Another savage sound rumbled within the mirror, rattling the glass in its frame.
“What?” Jessi repeated weakly. “Tell me what?”
Dageus sighed, his chiseled features grim. “All Tuatha Dé bindings, lass—whether Seelie compacts or Unseelie indentures—must be periodically reaffirmed by gold. The Keltar Compact, for example, was forged in purest gold, and need only be reaffirmed if something within it is changed, or if ’tis violated by a party to the agreement. But Dark Arts run counter to the nature of things and require higher and more frequent tithes. As Cian said, the Dark Glass must be paid every one hundred years, on the anniversary of the original date of binding, at midnight.”
Sorrowful gold eyes locked with hers, and that sinking sensation became a pit of acid in her stomach.
“Cian was bound on Samhain, lass. If the tithe is not paid by he who initiated the indenture—in this instance, Lucan—at precisely midnight on October thirty-first, the indenture will be violated, and all the years that Cian and Lucan have lived that were not theirs to live, will be called due. At once. In a single moment.”
Silence blanketed the room. It lay there, heavy, suffocating.
“Wh-what are you s-saying?” Jessi stammered.
“You know what I’m saying, Jessica,” Dageus said gently. “Cian came back to Scotland for one reason: to die. That’s his vengeance. That’s his way of keeping Lucan from getting the Dark Book and ending things for once and for all. When the tithe is not paid, they will both die. It’s all over. The immortal sorcerer will be slain, without so much as a drop of blood spilled. All Cian must do is stay out of Lucan’s hands until twelve-oh-one on November first. And he’s right, ’tis truly the simplest, most effective way to end it. Quite tidy, indeed. Drustan and I can then track down the Dark Book and attempt to either restore it to its guardians or protect it ourselves.”
Jessi gaped at Dageus. Abruptly, everything Cian had told her since they’d met—and she now realized it was precious little—tumbled through her mind, and she apprehended it all in a vastly different light. She shook her head, pressing a hand to her mouth.
Now that she knew the truth, it fit together so neatly that she was stunned that she’d not guessed at it before.
Not once had he ever spoken of any moment beyond his “deadline.” Not even when she’d asked what he intended to do once the spell was broken. There’d never been a “God, it’ll be so good to be free again!” There’d never been any mention of something he might like to do once he’d killed Lucan—maybe see a movie, have a feast, travel the world and stretch his legs a bit. In fact, there’d never even been any mention of him killing Lucan at all. And why would there have been? He’d never planned to actually physically “kill” him.
No new beginnings, he’d said.
He’d known all along he wasn’t going to be free in fifteen days.
He was going to be dead in fifteen days.
Precisely two weeks and one day from today, Cian MacKeltar—the man with whom she’d just spent the most amazing, scorchingly passionate, dazzling night of her life—was going to be no more than a one-thousand-one-hundred-and-sixty-three-year-old pile of dust.
She turned numbly toward the mirror. Her own horrified reflection looked back at her. Cian was nowhere to be seen.
The coward.
Her face was pale, her eyes enormous.
“Oh, you son of a bitch,” she breathed.
Right before she burst into tears.
Quod not cogit amor?
(Is there anything love couldn’t make us do?)
—MARTIAL, C.E. c.40–104
23
Jessi stood at the open window of the Silver Chamber, staring down through the dreary day at the misty castle grounds.
Cian was striding across the vast, manicured expanse of front lawn. He’d removed the braids from his hair and it was slicked wetly back from his regal face in a long dark fall. The sky was leaden, the horizon of mountains obscured by dark thunderheads. A light, drizzling rain was falling, and patches of fog clung, here and there, to damp thatches of grass, gusting in drowsy, dreamy swirls as Cian sliced through them.
He was wearing only a plaid, slung low around his hips, and soft leather boots, despite the chill in the air. He looked li
ke a magnificent half-savage ninth-century Highland laird out surveying his mountain domain.
God, he was beautiful.
He was bleeding.
Blood trickled down his rain-slicked chest, slipped between the ridges of muscles in that sculpted stomach that, only the night before last, she’d tasted with her tongue, covered with kisses.
Freshly dyed tattoos covered the right side of his chest and part of his right arm, the tiny needle pricks still beading with a wet sheen of blood. More mystic runes climbed up over his right shoulder and, as he turned down a cobbled stone walkway, she could see that either he or one of the twins had branded a fair portion of his back crimson and black, as well.
Protection runes. They hold the repercussions of meddling with black magycks at bay, Chloe had said.
She was so absorbed in watching him that she didn’t hear the door to the bedchamber open and someone slip in until Gwen said softly, “He’s transmuting the soil, Jessi. He saw you up here and sent me to find you. He asked me to ask you not to watch.”
“Why?” Jessi said tonelessly.
Gwen drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “It’s Dark Magyck, Jessi. It has some ghastly side effects, but even Drustan agreed that it was necessary, and believe me, if Drustan agrees to any kind of Dark Magyck or alchemy being used on Keltar land, there’s a really good reason for it.”
A faint, bitter smile curved Jessi’s lips. There was so much love and pride in Gwen’s voice for her husband. She knew she would have felt the same about Cian in time—if she’d been given the time. But he’d never had any intention of giving her more than a few weeks from the very first.
“It will neutralize Lucan’s powers if he comes here,” Gwen told her, “and Cian is convinced he will.”
“If the bastard comes here, can we kill him?” Jessi said fiercely. “If the wards have neutralized him?”
“No. The glass keeps him immortal, just like Cian, Jessi. He can’t be killed. The wards will only inhibit his use of sorcery on Keltar land. He won’t be able to work spells and he won’t be able to enter the castle proper. Cian is doing the most intense warding around the perimeter of the castle walls. It’s why he wants you not to watch. Apparently, if anything is dead within the castle grounds, his wards will raise it until he, well . . . er . . . inters it again with a ritual burial somewhere else.”
“Let me guess. Without his protection runes, those reanimated dead things might turn on him?”
“He didn’t say. But that’s kind of what I guessed too. And in Scottish soil, God-only-knows-where people and things are buried. This country’s had quite the turbulent past.”
Jessi shivered and fell silent again. Sorcerers, spells, and now dead-things-walking. She shook her head. How strange and terrible her life had become.
In the past forty-eight hours, she’d soared to the greatest heights she’d ever known, only to plummet into the deepest abyss. She’d been blissfully, idiotically thinking she’d found her soul mate, only to discover that said soul mate was not only going to die in two weeks’ time, but she was going to be forced to occupy a front-row seat to the spectacle.
Dageus and Drustan had confined her to the castle. She was not allowed to leave unless and until they said otherwise. They believed that if she left, Lucan would either try to use her to get to Cian (frankly, she wasn’t sure he’d care—why care about her body when he’d not cared about her heart?) or kill her outright if he got his hands on her. She bought into the killing-her-outright part, which meant she had to stay put if she wanted to survive.
Which meant she had to watch her Highlander die.
“Dageus and Drustan are trying to find another way, Jessi,” Gwen said softly. “Some alternative to get Cian out of the glass and defeat Lucan.”
“If Cian knows of no way, then do you really think they’ll be able to find one? Nothing against your husband and his brother, but Cian is the only one here that seems to know anything about sorcery.”
“You can’t give up hope, Jessi.”
“Why not? Cian did,” she said bitterly. “He’s ready to die.”
Gwen sucked in a breath. “It’s the only way he knows to stop Lucan, Jessi. At least right now it is. Let my husband and Dageus work on it. You’d be amazed at what the two of them can accomplish. But don’t hate Cian for this. Oh, he was wrong not to tell you—you’ll get no argument from me there. I’d be devastated too. And furious. And hurt. And devastated and furious and hurt all over again. But I think you need to ponder why he didn’t tell you. And think about this, too: you’re twenty-something years old, right?”
Jessi nodded. Below her, Cian was entering a small copse of rowan trees, moving with sleekly muscled, animal grace through gossamer milky-white tendrils of fog. “Twenty-four.”
“Well, he’s lived, let’s see—forty-seven-point-one-six times that long—almost fifty times as long as you have, trapped inside a looking glass. Living not even a mere reflection of a life. For more than a thousand years he’s been by himself, imprisoned, powerless. He told us a bit last night, after supper, while you were sleeping. He has no physical needs in there. He has had nothing with which to pass the time. Lucan never gave him any word of his clan once he’d incarcerated him. He’d believed, for the past millennium, that Lucan had wiped out his entire family, that the Keltar line had been destroyed. It’s why he never thought of looking for any descendants; why it didn’t occur to him that Dageus might be a Keltar when they met. The only companion he had in that mirror with him was his bitter regret and his determination to kill Lucan one day. The opportunity finally presented itself. Is it really a wonder to you that he might be willing to die to take down his enemy, rather than continue living in such a hellish fashion? It’s a wonder to me that the man didn’t go insane centuries ago.”
Tears burned the backs of Jessi’s eyes. And she’d thought she’d cried herself out yesterday. She’d wondered the same thing—how he’d stayed sane. But then she’d realized he was a mountain.
Yesterday had been the most awful day of her life. If she could have collected together all the tears she’d ever cried, beginning with that first wailed protest at the shock of being born, through childhood pains, adolescent indignities, and womanly hurts, they’d not have made a drop in the bucket of tears she’d wept yesterday.
When Dageus had explained to her what Cian meant to do, she’d raced from the library as fast as her feet had been able to take her. She’d tried to flee the castle, as well, but Dageus had caught up with her and stopped her, gently rerouting her upstairs to the chamber they’d readied for her.
She’d locked herself in and collapsed across the bed, weeping. Eventually she’d sobbed herself into a deep, exhausted sleep. The worst of it was, the whole time she’d been crying, hating him for making her care about him, knowing he was going to die, and not telling her, every ounce of her had nonetheless ached to go back downstairs and sit as close to his damned mirror as she could possibly get. To regain that intense, tender intimacy they’d just shared. To touch the glass, if she couldn’t touch him. To settle for anything at all.
To beg for crumbs.
She’d thought of what Gwen had said, herself, yesterday. She’d had the occasional lucid moments in her self-pitying and furious delirium.
Yes, of course she could see how he would not just be willing to die, but might actually be ready to embrace death after an eternity in a cold stone hell all by himself.
Understanding didn’t make it any better.
She’d read once, in one of those magazines like Woman’s Day or Reader’s Digest, about a nurse who’d fallen in love with one of her terminal patients, a man who had no more than ten or twelve months left to live from some disease or another. The article hadn’t been her cup of tea, but she’d gotten sucked into it, victim of the same morbid fascination that made rubberneckers of people passing the scene of a gruesome car wreck splashed with blood and strewn with body bags. She’d thought how incredibly stupid the nurse had been to let
it happen. She should have transferred his case to someone else the moment she’d started liking him, and fallen in love with a different man.
At least the nurse had gotten nearly a year.
Her terminal patient had a mere fourteen days.
“Go away, please,” Jessi said.
“Jessi, I know we don’t know each other very well—”
“You’re right, Gwen, we don’t. So, please, just leave me alone for a while. You can tell him I won’t watch. I promise.” And she meant it. She would respect his wishes. Moving woodenly, she closed the window, flipped the latch, and let the heavy damask drape fall over the mullioned panes.
There was silence behind her.
“Please go, Gwen.”
A few moments later there was a gusty sigh, then the chamber door clicked softly shut.
Lucan threaded his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back from his temples. His palms were hot, the flesh singed, his nails blackened.
No matter. In a moment, the lingering traces of Hans’s misfortune would be gone.
He stepped over the charred body dispassionately.
It smelled and needed to be removed from the pub.
Wending his way through the posh, paneled bar with its high-backed wooden booths cushioned in tufted leather upholstery, Lucan murmured a series of spells beneath his breath, concealing from the pub’s animated patrons both the man he’d just scorched to a cinder, and his true appearance.
Centuries ago, tattoos had taken what remained of his face, including his ears, eyelids, lips, and tongue, making him far too memorable to observers. Even his nails had been removed and tattooed beneath. His eyes had changed shortly after he’d finished scoring the final black-and-crimson brands inside his nose. He’d ceded his dick and testicles long before his tongue, his eyelids in advance of those sensitive inner nasal mucous membranes, though by then he’d suffered no pain. People often had a strongly unfavorable reaction to the face of a sorcerer.
He shouldn’t have agreed to meet Hans in a pub. Lately, several of his employees had displayed a preference for public meeting places.