Kiss of the Highlander (41 page)
Read Kiss of the Highlander Online
Authors: Karen Marie Moning
And this time when they made love it was tender and slow and sweeter than e’er before.
“Where will we live?” she asked finally, combing her fingers through his silky hair. She simply couldn’t stop touching him. Couldn’t believe he was here. Couldn’t believe the sacrifice he’d made to be with her.
He grinned. “I took care of that. The estate was divided into thirds in 1518. My third is to the south. Dageus oversaw the construction of our home. It awaits us even now. Maggie and Christopher assured me they opened it and all is in readiness.”
Dageus
, Gwen thought. She needed to tell him about Dageus vanishing, but there would time for that later. She didn’t want anything to spoil the moment.
“You doona mind living in Scotland, do you, lass?” he teased lightly, but she sensed a hint of vulnerability in his question. It would be hard for him to adjust to a new century. It would be even more difficult if she dragged him off to America. In time, she suspected he would like to travel, for he was a curious man, but Scotland would always be his home. Which was fine, she had no desire to go back to the States.
The enormity of what he’d done, how much he’d given up for her, overwhelmed her.
“Drustan,” she breathed, “you gave it all up—”
He pulled her onto his chest and brushed his lips against hers. “And I would do it all over again, sweet Gwen.”
“But your family, your century, your home—”
“Och, lass, doona you know? Your heart
my home.”
Dear reader:
I’d like to share with you a letter that neither Gwen nor Drustan have yet seen. I’m sure you noticed the connection between the two portraits missing in the MacKeltar hall, and Dageus “vanishing” in 1521.
There are actually
two
legacies handed down over the centuries, but rather than spoil Gwen and Drustan’s reunion, Maggie and Christopher agreed to hold off on revealing the second one.
You see, they have a letter addressed to Drustan and Gwen, from Silvan, as well as two shocking portraits of Dageus to show them. Yet they wished for Gwen and Drustan to have a few more stolen moments for loving before their new journey begins.
Scroll down the page for a peek at Silvan’s letter, from
Dark Highlander,
coming in the fall of 2002….
Drustan, my son:
I have missed you. I wish you could have met your brothers and sisters, but your heart was with Gwen, and ’twas where it wisely belonged. I wish the two of you every happiness, but rue to tell you your trials are not yet o’er.
First, the gentler news. Beloved Nell consented to be my wife. She has made every moment a joy. We left a few things for the two of you in the tower. Count over three stones on the base of the slab, second stone from the bottom. Life has been rich and full, more than I e’er dreamed. I have no regrets but one.
I should have watched Dageus more closely after you went into the tower. I should have seen what was happening. There you slumbered, enchanted, waiting for your mate, here I sat, with mine.
Yet Dageus grew e’er more solitary. Blinded by my own happiness, I didn’t see what was happening until it was too late. I shall be scant with the details, but suffice it to say as time passed, he became…obsessed with you. He worried that something would happen to prevent you from surviving until you found Gwen again.
And it did. I have no memory of it, mayhap an odd wrinkle in my mind, but he confessed to me that three years after we placed your enchanted body in the northeast tower, that wing of the castle caught fire and you were burned and died.
Dageus broke his oath, went back in time through the stones to the day of the fire, and prevented the fire from occurring. He saved you, but in so doing, turned Dark. The old legends were true.
If you are reading this, he succeeded in his course, for he appointed himself your dark guardian, his sole purpose to see you safely to Gwen. He vowed to watch over you, then disappeared. Dageus is a strong man, and I believe such a vow has kept him sane.
I hope it has, for I tasted the evil within him.
I believe, however, the moment you awaken and are reunited, there will be nothing to hold his darkness at bay. His purpose accomplished, the thin thread that binds him to the light will snap.
Och, my son, ’tis sorry I am to be sayin’ this, but you must find him.
You must save him.
And if you cannot save him, you must kill him.
SOURCES
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
, Edwin A. Abbott, Dover Publications
A Brief History of Time
, Stephen Hawking, Bantam Books
Infinity and the Mind, The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite
, Rudy Rucker, Princeton University Press
The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes
, Rudy Rucker, Houghton Mifflin Company
Stephen Hawking’s Universe: The Cosmos Explained
, Stephen Hawking, Basic Books
The Handy Physics Answer Book
, P. Erik Gundersen, Visible Ink Press
The Celtic Reader: Selections from Celtic Legend, Scholarship and Story,
John Matthews, ed., Thorsons
A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literature,
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, ed., Penguin Classics
The Story of the Irish Race
, Seumas MacManus, The Devin-Adair Company
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KAREN MARIE MONING graduated from Purdue University with a bachelor’s degree in Society & Law. Her novels have appeared on the
New York Times, USA Today,
and
Publishers Weekly
bestseller lists and have won numerous awards, including the prestigious RITA Award. She can be reached at
www.karenmoning.com
.
Read on for a preview of
BLOODFEVER
, the latest installment in Karen Marie Moning’s “addictively dark, erotic and even shocking”
*
new series.
Bloodfever
by
Karen Marie Moning
Available now in hardcover from Delacorte Press Soon to be released in paperback September 2008
Prologue
All of us have our little problems and insecurities. I’m no different. Back in high school when I used to feel insecure about something, I would console myself with two thoughts: I’m pretty, and my parents love me. Between those two, I could survive anything.
Since then I’ve come to understand how little the former matters, and how bitterly the latter can be tested. What’s left then? Nothing about our appearance or who loves or hates us. Nothing about our brainpower—which, like beauty, is an unearned gift of genetics—nor even anything about what we say.
It’s our actions that define us. What we choose. What we resist. What we’re willing to die for.
My name is MacKayla Lane. I think. Some say my last name is really O’Connor. That’s another of my insecurities right now: who I am. Although, at the moment, I’m in no hurry to find out.
What
I am is disturbing enough.
I’m from Ashford, Georgia. I think. Lately I’ve realized I have some tricky memories I can’t quite sort through.
I’m in Ireland. When my sister, Alina, was found dead in a trash-filled alley on Dublin’s north side, the local police closed her case in record time, so I flew over to see what I could do about getting justice.
Okay, so maybe I’m not that pure.
What I really came over for was revenge. And now, after everything I’ve seen, I want it twice as bad.
I used to think my sister and I were just two nice southern girls who would get married in a few years, have babies, and settle down to a life of sipping sweet tea on a porch swing under the shade of waxy-blossomed magnolias, raising our children together near Mom and Dad and each other.
Then I discovered Alina and I descend not from good, wholesome southern stock but from an ancient Celtic bloodline of powerful
sidhe
-seers, people who can see the Fae, a terrifying race of otherworldly beings that have lived secretly among us for thousands of years, cloaked in illusions and lies. Governed loosely by a queen, and even more loosely by a Compact few support and many ignore, they have preyed on humans for millennia.
Supposedly I’m one of the most powerful
sidhe
-seers ever born. Not only can I see the Fae, I can sense their sacred relics that hold the deadliest and most powerful of their magic.
I can’t find them.
I can
use
them.
I’ve already found the mythic Spear of Luin, one of only two weapons capable of killing an immortal Fae. I’m also a Null—a person who can temporarily freeze a Fae and cancel out its power with the mere touch of my hands. It helps me kick butt when I need to, and lately, every time I turn around, I need to.
My world began falling apart with the death of my sister, and hasn’t stopped since. And it’s not just my world that’s in trouble; it’s your world, too.
The walls between Man and Faery are coming down.
I don’t know why or how. I only know they are. I know it in my
sidhe
-seer blood. On a dark Fae wind, I taste the metallic tang of a bloody and terrible war coming. In the distant air, I hear the thunderclap of sharp-bladed hooves as Fae stallions circle impatiently, ready to charge down on us in the ancient, forbidden Wild Hunt.
I know who killed my sister. I’ve stared into the murderous eyes of the one who seduced, used, and destroyed her. Not quite Fae, not quite human, he calls himself the Lord Master, and he’s been opening portals between realms, bringing Unseelie through to our world.
The Fae consist of two adversarial courts with their own Royal Houses and unique castes: the Light or Seelie Court, and the Dark or Unseelie Court. Don’t let the light and dark stuff deceive you: they’re both deadly. Scary thing is the Seelie considered their darker brethren, the Unseelie, so abominable that they imprisoned them
themselves
a few hundred eons ago. When one Fae fears another Fae, you know they’ve got problems.
Now the Lord Master is freeing the darkest, most dangerous of our enemies, turning them loose on our world, and teaching them to infiltrate our society. When these monsters walk down our streets, you see only the “glamour” they throw: the illusion of a beautiful woman, man, or child.
I
see what they really are.
I have no doubt I would have ended up every bit as dead as my sister shortly after I arrived in Dublin, if I’d not stumbled into a bookstore owned by the enigmatic Jericho Barrons. I have no idea who or what he is, or what he’s after, but he knows more about what I am and what’s going on out there than anyone else I’ve met, and I need that knowledge.
When I had no place to turn, Jericho Barrons took me in, taught me, opened my eyes, and helped me survive. Granted, he didn’t do it nicely, but I’m no longer quite so picky about how I survive, as long as I do.
Because it was safer than my cheap room at the inn, I moved into his bookstore. It’s well protected against most of my enemies with wards and assorted nasty tricks, and stands bastion at the edge of what I call a Dark Zone: a neighborhood that has been taken over by Shades, amorphous Unseelie that thrive in darkness and feed off humans.
Barrons and I have formed an uneasy alliance based on mutual need: we both want the
Sinsar Dubh
—a million-year-old book of the blackest magic imaginable, allegedly scribed by the Unseelie King himself, that holds the key to power over both the worlds of Fae and Man.
I want it because it was Alina’s dying request that I find it, and I suspect it holds the key to saving our world.
He wants it because he says he collects books. Right.
Everyone else I’ve encountered is after it, too. The hunt is dangerous, the stakes enormous.
Because the
Sinsar Dubh
is a Fae relic, I can sense it when it’s near. Barrons can’t. But he knows where to look for it, and I don’t. So now we’re partners in crime who don’t trust each other one bit.
Nothing in my sheltered, pampered life prepared me for the past few weeks. Gone is my long blond hair, chopped short for the sake of anonymity and dyed dark. Gone are my pretty pastel outfits, replaced by drab colors that don’t show blood. I’ve learned to cuss, steal, lie, and kill. I’ve been assaulted by a death-by-sex Fae and made to strip, not once but twice, in public. I discovered that I was adopted. I nearly died.
With Barrons at my side, I’ve robbed a mobster and his henchmen and led them to their deaths. I’ve fought and killed dozens of Unseelie. I battled the vampire Mallucé in a bloody showdown with the Lord Master himself.
In one short month I’ve managed to piss off virtually every being with magical power in this city. Half of those I’ve encountered want me dead; the other half want to use me to find the deadly, coveted
Sinsar Dubh.
I could run home, I suppose. Try to forget. Try to hide.
Then I think of Alina, and how she died.
Her face swims up in my mind—a face I knew as well as my own; she was more than my sister, she was my best friend—and I can almost hear her saying: Right, Junior—and risk leading a monster like Mallucé, a death-by-sex Fae, or some other Unseelie back to Ashford? Take a chance that some of the Shades might cop a ride in your luggage and devour the charming, idyllic streets of our childhood, one burnt-out streetlamp at a time? When you see the Dark Zone that used to be our home, how will you feel, Mac?
Before her voice even begins to fade, I know that I’m here until this is over.
Until either they’re dead or I am.
Alina’s death
will
be avenged.