Kiss of the Highlander (16 page)

She closed trembling fingers over the fabric.

“Listen,” he cried. His gaze swept over her and passion blazed in his eyes. Then he cocked his head as if hearing something she couldn’t hear and glanced beyond her as if seeing something she couldn’t see. His lips moved one last time.

The moment you see him you must tell him…show him—

“What?” she cried. “Tell who what?” Flying leaves and limbs rained down upon them. When he ducked and shielded his face to avert a blow from a particularly large branch, she missed most of what he was saying. Tell and show who
what?

Abruptly, he was gone. Vanished as completely as the symbols had vanished from his chest in the cave days ago.

With his disappearance, the maelstrom died and the hail ceased abruptly. The night fell silent, the mist dissipated on a last, bitter gust of wind.

Gwen remained frozen, in shock, bruised and wind-burned and aching.

She didn’t trust herself to take even one step on a leg that moments ago had not been her leg at all but her leg
and
something else, something the bristling scientist was still pacing back and forth in a white lab coat protesting stridently. She wasn’t certain any part of her would obey simple orders, so knotted up was her mind.

“Drustan,” she called weakly. Then louder:
“Drustan!”

A terrible silence greeted her. She shivered uncontrollably, belatedly remembering she was nude. Woodenly, she pulled his plaid around her and scrambled across the slippery ground toward the fire.

But there was no fire. The storm must have put it out.

She dropped to her knees on the hail-covered ground, clutching his plaid, huddling within it for warmth. Dazedly, she glanced about and was astonished to see the hail was so thick on the ground that it looked as if the heavens had opened up and simply iced the top of the mountain. It could take hours for it to melt in the warm autumn night. And then she fell still and thought no more about the strange storm, as she replayed their entire encounter through her mind, finally seeing the pattern.

He had said he would
prove
to her that he was telling the truth, but he could only do it at the stones. He’d said that if she didn’t believe him, she would be free of him. She now realized he’d always chosen his words cautiously, couching double meanings.

Now she understood exactly what he’d meant. “You
left
me,” she whispered. “You really showed me, huh?” She snorted and started crying at the same time. “Incontrovertible proof. Uh-huh. Ever the doubter here, that’s me.”

He’d bullied her into guiding him through her time to the stones, made incredible love to her, proved his story true, then returned himself to his own time—leaving her in the twenty-first century, alone.

He hadn’t been deranged after all. She’d had a genuine time-traveling sixteenth-century warrior in her arms, and she mocked him at every turn. Treated him with disbelief, even patronized him on occasion.

Oh, she’d screwed this one up royally. She’d fallen for him at terminal velocity. In the space of three days, she’d grown attached to him as she’d never thought possible. She’d been building a life with him in her mind, rationalizing away his delusions, weaving him into her world.

And he’d
left
her. He’d not even offered to take her with him!

Would you have gone? Would you have said yes?
the scientist asked dryly.
Plunged into a century you knew nothing about? Left this one behind for good?

Hell, yes, I would have said yes! What do I have here? I was falling in love, and I’d go anywhere, do anything for that!

For a novel change, the scientist within her had no caustic comeback.

Gwen cried, feeling suddenly old, regretting the loss of a thing she’d not truly appreciated and understood while she’d held it in her hand.

She had no idea how long she lay in the clearing, replaying things through her mind, lingering over their lovemaking, seeing everything in a different light.

When she finally sat up, she was trembling. Her knees were frozen from huddling on the ice, and her toes were stinging.
I feel, MacKeltar. You taught me that. I hope you’re happy with yourself—showing me I had a heart by hurting me.

She pushed herself up and slipped around the circle, searching for her clothes in the dark. Shaking off a fresh desire to weep, she blew out a breath. Where the hell were her boots? For that matter, where were her backpack and her flashlight? She was starting to suffer a severe nicotine craving; emotional distress always made her crave a cigarette.

How was she ever going to get over him? How would she cope with the knowledge that the man she’d lost her heart to had been dead for hundreds of years?

Panic gripped her as she circled the stone slab, searching for her belongings. They were gone. Could the freakish and violent windstorm have carried it all off?

Stunned, she glanced about, then up at the sky, and caught a glimpse—for the first time since Drustan had disappeared—of what lay beyond the stones.

Where previously there had been nothing, tons upon tons of stone rose up from the earth.

She gaped in astonishment, her gaze drifting from tower to turret, to bigger stone tower, past walls capped by those toothy stone things one saw on castles everywhere in Scotland, and to yet another turret and a square tower again. Blinking, she looked left to right and back again.

An alarm went off in her brain, but she couldn’t respond to it. She couldn’t respond to anything. She started hyperventilating; tiny breaths slammed into each other and piled up in her throat.

A monstrous castle lay beyond the circle of stones.

Huge, forbidding, yet beautiful, it was fashioned of massive gray stone walls that vaulted smoothly skyward. A center rectangular tower stood tallest and had two smaller round towers flanking it. Wings spread east to west consuming the horizon, with large square towers at the farthest east and west ends. A milky fog dusted the ridges and capped the turrets.

Her jaw dropped.

Still as the cold stones that encircled her, she stared.

Could it be that she had not lost him after all?

With a painful surge of adrenaline that made her heart beat much too fast, she bolted from the circle of stones and burst into a terraced courtyard. Pathways forked in various directions, one leading straight to the front steps of the castle itself.

She spun in a slow circle, heedless of her icy toes. Dimly, her mind registered the fact that the hail had fallen only within the circle of stones. The ground beyond it was warm and dry.

He’d told her that in his century, the stones of
Ban Drochaid
had been enclosed within the perimeter walls of his estate, but the
Ban Drochaid
she’d entered an hour ago had resided in the midst of a wasteland of crumbled stone and grass.

Yet now she was completely encircled by high walls, within a veritable fortress.

She glanced at the night sky. It was dense black with no distant glow on the horizon in any direction, which was impossible, because Alborath lay in the valley beyond, and only last night, while sitting on the hood of the rental car, she’d rued that the lights of the village spoiled her view of the stars.

Turning back to the castle that hadn’t been there five minutes ago, she fingered the folds of his plaid. Suddenly, the words he’d shouted—words she’d ignored because they hadn’t made any sense at the time—now made perfect sense.

I went back too far. I thought I could come with you, but I cannot.

Save my clan.

J
ULY
18
1518

         
11
         
 

The nightmare was beyond anything Drustan
MacKeltar’s slumbering mind had ever managed to conjure, replete with a taste so vile, he knew it for what it was: the taste of death.

Shadowy images taunted him at the periphery of his vision, and he felt a monstrous leech suckle onto him, and they grappled, then suddenly there were two discrete yet similar beings inside his body.

I am possessed of a demon,
the sleeping Drustan thought, struggling to spew the atrocity forth.
I will not permit this.
Enraged, he resisted the new presence violently, lashing out to destroy it without even trying to identify it. It was foreign and as strong as he was, and that was all he needed to know.

He focused his mind, isolating the intruder, cocooning it with his will, and with immense effort thrust it from his body.

Then suddenly there were two of him in his nightmare, but the other him looked older, and anguished. Mortally weary.

Get thee hence, devil,
Drustan shouted.

Listen to me, you fool.

Drustan clamped his hands over his ears.
I will hear none of your lies, demon.
Somewhere in the distance—in the nightmare place that defied his mind’s ability to either comprehend or fabricate—Drustan scented a woman. She was indistinct, but he could feel her, even smell the fragrant heat of her skin. A rush of longing consumed him, nearly shattering his resolve to hold the other him at bay.

Sensing the weakness, the replica leaped forward, but Drustan flexed his will and knocked him aside.

They glared at each other, and Drustan wondered at the play of emotions on the replica’s face. Fear. Sorrow so deep it might cleave a man asunder. And as he watched, a sudden understanding flickered in the false Drustan’s eyes, even as the replica seemed to be losing solidity.

You would fight me to the death,
the counterfeit’s lips moved soundlessly.
I see. I see now why only one lives. ’Tis not Nature, which is innately indifferent, but our own fear that causes us to destroy each other. I beg you, accept me. Let us both be.

I will never accept you,
Drustan roared.

The replica faded, then grew more solid, then faded around the edges again.
You are in terrible danger—

Speak no more! I will believe naught you say!
Drustan lashed out at the shadow-him viciously.

The shadow-him glanced over his shoulder and shouted to someone Drustan couldn’t see:
The moment you see him you must tell him the first rhyme I taught you, remember it? The verse in the car, and show him the backpack and all will be well.

Be gone, demon!
Drustan roared, shoving at him with his will.

The other him speared Drustan with his gaze.
Love her,
the counterfeit whispered, and then he vanished.

Drustan shot bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.

He clawed at his throat, pounded his fists on his chest, and finally managed to suck in a painful breath. He was sweating. Icy and feverish at the same time, he’d shredded his linens in his sleep. Previously soft animal skins were now mere tufts of sweat-slicked fur, and his head pounded.

He fumbled for the mug of wine at his bedside. It took him several attempts before he succeeded in wrapping his fingers securely around it. Trembling, he drank deep, until the mug was empty. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.

His heart thundered and he felt as if he’d just been more bitterly threatened than ever in his life. As if something had crept into his body and tried to claim territorial rights.

He plunged shaking hands into his hair, lunged from the bed, and began to pace. He glanced back at the bed warily, expecting a succubus to be lurking in the pile of destroyed linens.

By Amergin! What strange dream had been visited upon him?
He could recall naught of it now but a bitter sense of violation, and a hollow sense of victory.

His attention was snared by a brilliant flash of light beyond the window of his bedchamber. A low growl of thunder followed it, and he tugged aside the tapestry and gazed out through the glass into the night.

Drustan stood by the window for a long time, taking slow, deep breaths and trying to regain a measure of calm. He rarely suffered nightmares and preferred to forget this one, for the dream reeked of madness. He firmly corralled it in a deep, dark place in his mind, burying it where it would never see the light of day.

The storm died as suddenly as it had arisen, and the Highland night fell still and silent again.

Think think think,
Gwen berated herself.
You’re supposed to be so brainy, use it.
But her brain felt numb and clumsy. After the day she’d just had—the incredible passion, the bizarre storm, the fuzziness of her mind from nicotine withdrawal—she was in no condition to be brilliant. She was hardly in any condition to manage average.

Pacing gingerly upon the melting hail, she tallied the tangible facts, because the intangible ones, at the moment, scared the bejeezus out of her. She was desperate to find some factual, logical conclusion to explain away the illogic of her whereabouts.

She shivered, eyeing the castle. The prospect of confronting what it held both fascinated and terrified her.

But there was something she had to do first. Not that she was the disbelieving type, no way, not her. But she did prefer to view hard evidence with her own two eyes.

Drawing a bracing breath, she plunged into the darkness beyond the circle and sped away from the castle. When she reached the estate wall, she flung herself up on a pile of casks, pressed her cheek to a narrow slit in the wall, and peered out into the valley at the city of Alborath.

It wasn’t there. Suspicion confirmed.

Her shoulders slumped. She hadn’t expected it to be, but its absence was shocking nonetheless.

I went back too far.

In other words, she mused, sorting through what she knew about the theories of time travel, he’d probably tried to go back to shortly after he’d been abducted, but had gotten the symbols wrong. He’d returned to a time when the past him was there in the castle, and common theory held that if time travel were possible, the fabric of the universe would not suffer two identical selves in a single moment. The future him had somehow been canceled out.

Time travel!
the scientist shouted in her head.
Analyze!

We have to save him. Analyze that. We’ll contemplate the ramifications of multiverses later.

If the future him had been canceled out, that meant the Drustan she’d fallen in love with no longer existed, but she would find him in the castle, pre-enchantment, and with no knowledge of her whatsoever.

That thought made her heart hurt. She was in no rush to look into his silvery eyes, which had gazed at her so intimately but an hour ago, and see an utter lack of recognition.

Promise me you will not fear me.

Fear him? Why would she have feared him? Because he could manipulate time? Sheesh, that only increased her fascination with him!

Save my clan.

She would
not
fail him.

Squaring her shoulders, she hurried back through the stones, toward the castle, and flew up the stairs. Fisting her hand, she knocked on an enormous door that made her feel like a shrunken Alice in a hostile Wonderland. Once, twice, and again. “Halloo, halloo!” she cried. She flung her small frame at it, pounding with her shoulder.

There was no answer. No convenient doorbell either. Her mind duly noted more tangible evidence that what she was knocking on was not a twenty-first-century door. She would contemplate the medieval door later. From the inside. At the moment, she was feeling as if she might faint at any moment. The strangeness of it all left her feeling utterly overwhelmed. And so what if she was a physicist, supposedly capable of heightened comprehension—she was totally freaked out.

“Oh, puh-lease!” she cried, turning around and using her bottom as a battering ram on the thick door.
Thump-thump, thump-thump.
It hurt her more than it hurt the door, and made about as much noise as a downy pillow. She’d be damned if she was getting sent back to save him, only to be denied entrance.

She stepped back and eyed the windows. Perhaps she could toss something through the glass?

Not exactly a wise way to petition shelter from strangers, she decided. Someone might shoot at her. Arrows, or something equally archaic. Perhaps toss boiling oil down the walls.

She cast a glance about and spied a pile of chopped wood. She scurried over to it, freed a wedge, and slammed one end against the door. “Please, open up,” she called.

“I’m coming,” a sleepy voice replied. “I heard ye the first time. Impatient, aren’t ye?” There was the sound of metal sliding against wood, and the door was finally, blessedly opened. Gwen sank to her knees with relief.

A buxom fortyish woman clad in a long gown and lacy cap stood in the doorway, blinking sleep from her eyes. Her eyes widened as she took in the sight huddling on the doorstep, nearly naked.