What was he doing here? How had he gotten here? Where had he been for the past eleven centuries? Who was the woman with him?
He’d tried probing her while she’d stood at Cian’s side, but had encountered some kind of sleek, smooth barrier. Was she a practitioner of magycks, too? His deep-listening talents had been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few months and he should have been able to pick up something. But he’d not gotten a flicker of a thought or emotion from her.
“Drustan’s not going to like this,” he muttered darkly. “Nay, he’s not going to like it at all.”
If a willingness to sacrifice everything for those he loved characterized Dageus, an abiding, unrelenting honor and a desire for a simple life uncomplicated by matters of Druidry and the Fae characterized his elder twin Drustan.
When he heard tell of this latest news, Drustan would undoubtedly say, “Why the blethering hell can’t people stay where they belong, in their own century and out of mine?”
At which point his wife, Gwen, would remind him that it wasn’t his century. That, in fact, it was he who’d begun it all by refusing to stay in the sixteenth century where he belonged. That if Drustan hadn’t opted to slumber for five hundred years in a Rom enchantment so he could be reunited with Gwen in the twenty-first century, he never would have died in the fire that night so long ago. And if he’d not died in the fire, Dageus wouldn’t have had to breach Keltar oaths and use the standing stones of the Ban Drochaid in violation of the sacred Compact between Man and the Tuatha Dé Danaan for personal gain, to go back in time and save Drustan’s life. And if Dageus hadn’t breached those oaths, he never would have been possessed by the souls of the thirteen evil Draghar, and forced to come forward himself to the twenty-first century, seeking a way to escape them.
And by the time his brainy physicist sister-in-law was done, Dageus had no doubt she’d have found some way to postulate an obscure yet peculiarly synchronistic link between Dageus and Cian himself, and Drustan would heap the blame for this new visitor soundly at Dageus’s feet.
Which was beyond far-fetched. There was no way he was taking the blame for the sudden appearance of their controversial ninth-century ancestor. He’d only been reading up on him, not trying to summon him.
He rubbed his jaw, frowning, wishing he could be entirely certain of that last fact.
The problem was, months ago in London, when Aoibheal, Queen of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, had personally appeared and wielded her immense power to strip away the souls of the thirteen evil Druids possessing him, freeing him from their dark control, she’d left their memories inside him, and he wasn’t always certain of precisely what he was capable or not.
Initially, when the Queen had removed the thirteen souls of the Draghar from him, he’d believed himself entirely free. After suffering the din of thirteen rapacious, twisted, demanding entities inside him, the silence inside his skull had made him think them completely eradicated.
It had been some time before he’d realized that, although their consciousnesses were gone, every last memory of thirteen entire lives had been left in him, buried deep in his subconscious. He’d not wanted to believe that he still contained the terrible and forbidden lore the Draghar had so long ago amassed and, at first, when inexplicable knowledge had begun popping into his head, he’d denied it.
But he no longer could. Each day he discovered something new about himself. And on occasion, of late, he’d caught himself muttering bits of a spell beneath his breath that he’d never read or practiced, and he knew he’d somehow plucked it from the endless vaults of the Draghar within him, as if his subconscious was sorting through the banks of memories, filing them away according to some mysterious design.
Had he inadvertently used a spell?
He sighed.
If he had, this was his fault and he had to fix it.
If he hadn’t, he still had to do something. He couldn’t just let the oversized heathen stalk and stomp about their Highlands, using Voice on all and sundry, stealing goods from simple merchants honestly endeavoring to support their clansmen.
As if you’ve ne’er stolen anything, his conscience jabbed.
“Aye, but I always gave it back, eventually.” And he had. He didn’t think Cian MacKeltar had any intention of making eventual amends. He didn’t look like an eventual-amends kind of man.
Sighing, he tucked the box containing Chloe’s hiking boots beneath his arm and walked out the door after his ninth-century ancestor.
As he stepped into the sunny Highland morn, he looked left, then right. He spied neither hide nor hair of Cian MacKeltar.