The Highlander (34 page)

“How quick yer woman is to defend ye,” he taunted. “I wonder, Miss Lockhart, if ye would still think so highly of him if ye'd ever seen him as I have. Bathed in the blood of his quarry, drunk on his own rage, the indiscriminate killer. The Demon Highlander.”

A shadow moved in the trees, and Hamish brandished her at the night like a shield.

“Come forward and I spill her blood!” he called, tucking the knife tighter against her, this time nicking the skin. “Stay out there and I'll spill yer secrets. Ye decide, Liam.”

His hand released her arm from behind her, sliding up her spine with sickening lethargy. Mena didn't dare move; the blade at her throat rendered her an absolute prisoner.

His hand wrenched her neck to the side so she could no longer scan the tree line in front of them, only the inky darkness that led down to the western sea.

“Ye decide!” He laughed again, this time maniacally. “Either way she dies.”

*   *   *

At the sound of Mena's scream, Liam had dropped low into the mist and pulled his dirk from his boot. The blood that simmered with the heat of anticipatory arousal instantly boiled with the lust for vengeance.

His predatory instincts flared, and he prowled forward with all the sleek stealth of a wolf, hungry to rip out the throat of an enemy.

But the blood he would spill was blood he shared.

Hamish.

Skirting the moonlit clearing, Liam ducked errant tree branches and navigated his way through the mist. He processed a multitude of terrors as fast as his disbelieving eyes allowed.

His brother, alive. A scarred mass of rage and retribution. He had Mena. Held a dagger to her throat.

Fury threatened to smother all sense of reason or thought. Primal instinct screamed at him to attack, to lunge forward and slash at his brother until nothing was left of the monster but bones and carnage.

But Mena would never make it, Liam knew. Hamish was a terror with a blade.

Almost as good as Liam, himself.

Moving as close as he dared, Liam conducted a quick assessment of Mena. Moonlight turned her hair into waves of dark crimson, the color of spilled blood. Her porcelain features glowed with an ethereal purity. Through the mist and the darkness, he couldn't tell if she was injured. Something had made her scream, and there had been pain in the sound. That fact tortured him with a violence he'd never thought possible.

Her voice wavered as she spoke, but there was a calm to it, an evenness that he hung all his hope for salvation on.

Somewhere to the east, the sound of a twig snapping rang through the forest like a cannon blast.

“I know ye're out there, brother!” Hamish had screamed, as Liam maneuvered to the west, away from the sound, never allowing his head to rise above the line of the gathering mist.

His dirk felt solid in his hand, every bit as sharp and lethal as Hamish's, but it was useless until he found exactly the right time. He could try to get Hamish from behind, but then he'd lose sight of Mena, and thereby wouldn't know when to strike.

Then he heard the words that instantly turned his blood from molten iron to shards of ice in his veins.

“Either way, she dies.”

Hamish had no intention of setting her free.

For the first time in his adult life, abject terror threatened to paralyze him. Why Mena? Why now? Hamish had been a morally corrupt man over the course of his life, but then, he'd had to be. Liam had always known that. He was a bastard, the eldest son who would inherit nothing from their father but a taste for blood and fear.

Liam had to calculate the strategy of his next move perfectly, because he would die before Mena became another casualty of his many sins.

Using a trick he'd learned from a Turkish puppeteer, Liam flattened his back against the trunk of an old elm and threw his voice across the meadow, making it seem to vault off the tree line in the east.

“Let her go, Hamish,” he said. “She has nothing to do with this business between us.”

His ruse was successful. Hamish's neck whipped in the direction Liam had hoped it would.

“We do have business, Liam.” Hamish said his name as though it were a rotten thing on his tongue that he needed to spit out. “Ye didna keep yer end of the bargain. Ye were supposed to die on the battlefield. To leave Ravencroft to
me
.”

“I tried.” Liam volleyed his voice farther this time, hoping to get Hamish to turn toward it.

He might be trying to distract his brother long enough for him to take the knife from Mena's throat, but he also spoke the truth. He'd set everything up perfectly to make reparations upon the event of his inevitable demise.

Hamish would overtake Ravencroft Keep and the distillery, and the Wester Ross lands would be kept in trust for Andrew when Hamish died. Rhianna and Andrew would go to London to live with their maternal grandmother, Lady Eloise Gleason, a kindly old woman who was very fond of her tragically ill only daughter's children. Andrew would become marquess, and would maintain all London holdings.

But Hamish had been killed in that ship explosion, or so everyone had assumed, and Liam had proven damnably hard to exterminate. His recklessness only brought him glory.

“They were supposed to hate ye,” Hamish hissed. “The clan was supposed to think ye cursed by the
Brollachan,
to turn against ye. But despite my best efforts, it seems ye truly have made some deal with the devil.”

“The fire in the fields and the toppled barrel at the distillery,” Liam realized aloud. “That was ye?”

“Thwarted by a rainstorm and a bit of luck,” Hamish spat. “And it was a pure miracle that carriage didna tumble down the Bealach na Bá with a shorn linchpin.”

“Ye put innocent people in harm's way just to get yer revenge,” Liam growled. For that he would pay.

“Doona let this so-called Demon Highlander play the hero for yer benefit.” His bastard older brother almost sounded gleeful as he addressed Mena. “Innocent lives have never meant much to either of us. We are similar creatures with different predilections.”

“I was never like ye.” Liam's hard voice echoed around the glen now, before it dissipated through the canopy of trees.

“Nonsense, whatever monstrous things Father neglected to teach me, ye filled in the spaces,” Hamish said conversationally. “Doona ye remember the things ye said? That open battle is effective for casualties, but that the battles we wage with terror gain us even greater results. That the personal kill is the most satisfying. Ye taught me that if ye snap a bone just right, it makes a clean, crisp sound that ye can feel ricochet in yer own skeleton. Ye taught me that ye attain glory on the battlefield, but to gain true infamy, ye attack at dinner, or a party. Or maybe when yer enemy is putting their children to bed … Or …
making love
.” Hamish bared his teeth from behind those hideously disfigured lips, and made as though he were going to bite into Mena's bare shoulder.

“Ye're wrong.” Liam battled the desperation threatening to creep into his tone, convinced his brother's injuries, and his hatred, had tainted his memory. “Ye're confused,” he corrected as evenly as he could. “That was his grace, Lord Trenwyth.
I
was the demon on the battlefield,
he
was the phantom in the darkness. It was always thus.”

“Collin Talmage, the sodding Duke of Trenwyth.” Hamish spat into the mist. “I'll settle that score once I'm through here.”

Liam didn't take the time to wonder what his brother meant. His every thought, every molecule in his body, was focused on Mena. “Let her go,” Liam had meant to cajole, but it escaped as a command. “I'll trade ye across, my life for hers. I'll take ye to Trenwyth if ye want.”

Hamish made a snide sound of victory. “Why this sudden weakness for women?” he sneered. “Could kill yer own father in cold blood, and whip a whore to death. But watching the English bitch die will break ye?”

Liam closed his eyes for a brief moment, unable to bring himself to face the look of horror and terror Mena must be wearing. That
alone
would break him. He wouldn't survive her loss. Not the part of him that was human, anyhow. Liam somehow knew that seeing her blood would turn him into the monster he'd spent forty years trying not to become.

He didn't miss her sharp gasp, though, and neither did Hamish. Now she knew his darkest secrets, the two main reasons his soul was eternally damned.

It started with Tessa McGrath, and patricide had sealed his eternal fate.

He'd killed his own father, left his brother for dead, and helplessly allowed his mad wife to take her own life.

He truly did destroy those closest to him.

But he'd die before letting the woman he loved fall prey to his demon curse.

“Father
deserved
to die for what he did.” Liam had forgotten to misdirect his voice that time, and Hamish's head swiveled in his direction. “For what he forced
us
to do.”

*   *   *

Mena's calm had deserted her. She'd become a shivering pile of liquid bones and frozen blood. Only the blade at her throat and the monster behind her kept her from dissolving into a puddle of panic and soaking into the marshy ground.

Liam seemed to be everywhere at once. First to the east, and then in the shadows where her imprisoned gaze was trained to the west.

He'd offered himself for her. Mena's heart swelled at the fervency in his voice. A part of her wished Hamish would take the offer. That he'd toss her away. But in her heart, she knew that she'd never be able to live with herself if she'd had any hand in Liam's demise. His children needed him. His clan and kin relied on his leadership.

She, however, could disappear into the mist and none would be the wiser. She had no family but the one who had locked her away. A handful of people would mourn her tragedy, hold their loved ones closer, and then move on.

Hamish's words pulled her from her encroaching despondency.

Liam had whipped a woman … and killed his own evil father.
Dear God.
She'd assumed it was any number of heinous war crimes that haunted him. Or the circumstances of Hamish's death. But no, Liam hadn't only killed people in the name of queen and country, he'd committed
murder
.

Her breath caught as she considered his answer. What had the elder Hamish Mackenzie done to incur Liam's wrath?

“It was one tavern slut, Liam, and she was paid handsomely for her services.” Hamish almost moved the hand with the blade at her throat, as though he wanted to make a frustrated gesture. Remembering himself, he tightened his hold on her, repositioning the dagger in a more dangerous place than before.

Mena would have whimpered, but she refrained, fearing that even the slightest swallow would impale her upon its point.

“No amount of money could prove recompense for what he made us do to her.” Even through the confines of her own terror, Mena wept for the hollow shame in Liam's voice. Wept for the poor girl and the humiliations that were too awful even for the Demon Highlander to lend them words. The hot tears scalded her chilly skin and ran down the cold blade.

“He was turning us into men,” Hamish spat.

“He was turning us into monsters.”

“I still doona see why ye felt ye had to do away with him,” Hamish expounded. “Ye canna really rape a whore, can ye? Besides, ye were weak even then. Ye couldna go through with it.”

Hearing that caused a tear of relief to join the steady trickle of moisture from Mena's eyes.

“I found her body in Bryneloch Bog.” Liam's temper was overcoming his caution; she could tell by the heat in his voice. “Ye know he murdered her to keep her silent, so she wouldna stir the clan against him.”

“That's what's always been wrong with ye, Liam. Ye think that her insignificant life was worth the death of a great man.”

“He was an evil man,” Liam snarled. “He
killed
innocent people. His own clan.”

Hamish scoffed at that. “All great men do evil things.”

“Ye're wrong.”

“How would ye know? Ye're neither a great man nor a righteous one. But ye're not famous for yer good deeds, are ye?”

The darkness was silent for several heartbeats. Hamish's taunt had hit its mark.

“What about Dougan?” Liam's soft, tortured question barely traversed the distance between them. “Father ordered the death of his own son.”

“Dougan was just as much a monster as any of us. Worse, I'd wager. He murdered a bloody priest before he saw the age of fifteen.”

Mena's heart bled. She wanted to tell Liam that she still thought he was a good man. A great man. That she was glad his father had answered for all the vicious, unspeakable things he did. She hesitated because it seemed that Hamish had all but forgotten her. His hold didn't waver, but he no longer seemed to be focused on her death.

“One would think, dear brother, that ye ought to have more sympathy for our father's bastards.” Gavin St. James startled both Mena and Hamish as he strode into the clearing from the east, looking relaxed as you please. “Seeing as ye are one.”

“Sod off, Thorne,” Hamish snarled. Every muscle in his mangled body tensed, and Mena cried out as his grip on the back of her neck tightened. He blessedly took the knife he held beneath Mena's chin and brandished it at Gavin. “I should have smothered ye the second yer wretched mother whelped ye into this—”

Mena heard the slight whoosh of air as the dagger left the shadows, twirling end over end until it whirled by her ear.

Hamish screamed as it found its mark, and Mena was released just in time to duck as the Demon Highlander rose from the mist, leaped to the altar rock, and vaulted for his brother.

 

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