Dark Victory

Sam finally said, “I am not liking this very much.”

Tabby stared closely. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Sam’s expression became bland. “We don’t keep secrets, Tab.”

Kit said, “She should stay here, Sam. We were meant to be here today. This is the first time she’s ever felt evil—and by God, she felt it across time. This is a medieval Celtic exhibit. Melvaig is in the Highlands.”

Kit thought the exhibit related to the Highlanders who were fighting this war with them—but from medieval times, Tabby thought, surprised. She didn’t buy that. This was about a suffering boy and a woman with lots of black power. And it was about that amulet.

But why did everything feel so familiar?

Sam was grim. “That was spoken like a Rose,” she said to Kit.

“Hanging around you two, I feel like a Rose sometimes,” she quipped, her eyes sparkling.

“You know I can hold my own when it counts,” Tabby said, which was true.

“Okay,” Sam said, shrugging. “You’re a big girl and this is obviously in the Big Game Plan. Don’t know what got into me.”

Tabby walked back with them as far as the closest water fountain. She preferred Giuliani Water to the bottled stuff, anyway. When Sam and Kit were gone and she’d had a drink, she hurried back to the exhibit.

The closer she got to the glass case with the amulet, the stranger she began to feel. Dizzy, expectant, nervous, afraid…and angered.

She paused before the bright gold palm, light-headed and tense, uneasy. She’d been waiting for the sky to fall and it was falling now—this was it, she thought anxiously. The white moonstone blinked merrily at her. She remained aware of the boy and the woman with black power, of all the emotions that were somehow associated with the amulet, or An Tùir-Tara, or Blayde and the warring clans. Just as she had the odd notion that the amulet was protecting her from getting too close to emotions that might be dangerous for her—or a life that might be dangerous for her—so much grief consumed Tabby that she cried out.

It sent her right down to her knees.

It was the kind of grief she’d never felt in her life. It resonated with so much male warrior power and so much rage. On her hands and knees, Tabby somehow looked up.

A Highlander towered over her. He was a huge and muscular man, dark of complexion and hair, his face a mask of fury. His face was blistered, burned and bleeding. She recoiled in fear. He was holding a long sword, his knuckles blistered and bloody, too, and a red-and-black plaid was pinned to one shoulder. Otherwise he was clad in a short-sleeved tunic that hit mid-thigh, and it was charred and sooty. She inhaled—his arms and thighs were also burned and bloody!

His enraged and anguished blue eyes locked with hers.

In his grief, the Highlander looked ready to commit murder.

Uncertain if he was real or not, she somehow got up and reached for his hand. Her fingers grazed his.

Her heart leaped as they made contact for one split second.

And then he vanished.

Tabby reeled backward, her fingers burning from the heat of his hands, until she leaned against the case. Her heart was pounding with explosive force. She somehow saw a Met security officer begin to hurry toward her, but she couldn’t move off the display. She was shaken to the very core of her soul, his blue eyes engraved in her mind. Finally, she whispered, “Come back. Let me help you.”

The security officer grabbed her arm. “You can’t lean on the case, miss. Are you all right?”

Tabby barely heard him. She pulled away, rushing to the nearest bench, where she collapsed. She inhaled, her mind racing. She had to cast a spell to bring him back to her while he was still close, before he vanished into time. She had to help him.

Tabby closed her eyes. Beginning to perspire, focused as never before, she murmured, “Come to me, Highlander, come to me now. Come to my healing power. Come to me, Highlander.”

She knew she had to help him. Somehow, it was the most important moment of her life.

Tabby waited.

CHAPTER TWO

The Past

Blayde, Scotland

1298

“YE HAVE NO HEART!”

“Aye.” The Black Macleod stared coldly down at his mortal enemy. The man crouched on his hands and knees, shaking like a leaf, as pale as any ghost, clearly terrified. Panic showed in his eyes. Macleod felt nothing in return.

Alasdair would die that day. It was that simple. He could beg for mercy, but there would be none. He had been hunting down the MacDougall kinsmen since he was fourteen years old. He had lost tally of all the MacDougall men he had wounded, maimed and killed. He did not even care what that count was. Maybe, as his enemies said, his heart was truly made of stone.

“A Uilleam,” he said softly.

Images from the past flashed. He fought them, unwilling to ever see them again. His father being stabbed, repeatedly, while he helplessly watched…his father, a still and lifeless corpse, being sent to his burial at sea…Blayde in ruins, a pile of scorched black stone, the sun bloodred as it was rising in the smoke-filled dawn…and a jumbled, unfocused image of the desperate, grief-stricken boy he’d once been.

“My wife is with child, Macleod, I beg ye!” The MacDougall of Melvaig screamed. “What happened at Blayde was long ago. I wasna even born yet! Yer father tried to make peace, Macleod. Let us do what our fathers failed to do!”

His father, William, had tried to make peace—and instead, the entire clan had been murdered in a bloody midnight massacre. His life had become revenge that day. It remained revenge now.

“A Elasaid,” he said harshly. Deep within himself, he felt the anger roiling. In war, he never allowed it free rein. “A Blayde.”

He knew better than to try to use his god-given powers to murder the other man. A master swordsman, Alasdair’s scream sounded and was cut off as Macleod’s sword sliced through skin and flesh, tendon and bone, severing his head from his body.

For one moment, Macleod stood there coldly, watching the headless man topple over and finally begin to tumble down the slope. The boy felt a bit closer now. His choked sobs became mere hiccups. Macleod looked at the wide-eyed, severed head, aware that the boy was the only one present who cared. Sightlessly, Alasdair stared back at him.

Sometimes he wished that the boy had died that day, too.

His heart was beating, though, slow and steady, telling him that he did have a heart—contrary to what popular opinion held. His expression never changing, his mouth remaining hard and tight, Macleod reached down, seized Alasdair’s head by his golden hair and flung it away, into the ravine and river below. “Join yer ancestors in hell.”

The ground rolled ominously beneath his feet. The sky overhead was the color of wildflowers, but thunder boomed directly above him and lightning split the sky. The gods were furious with him.

Again.

He did not care. He looked up and laughed at them—scorning their wishes, their commands.

They could curse him and threaten him, and even spoil his powers, but he was their grandson and he feared no one…not even an angry god. “Do as ye will,” he said, and for the first time that day, his interest was actually piqued.

Their response was immediate. Lightning split a nearby tree, and it crashed over at his feet.

He smiled with amusement. Did they think that would scare him?

Then he turned his attention to the fear and fury roiling below him.