23.

"The nights go on waiting for a light that never comes"

CHRISTIAN.

I'm fourteen, finally old enough to enter the circle of standing stones for the first time. Ban Drochaid-the White Bridge, as these stones are called-was once a bridge through time, for the right Keltar for the right reasons. But my clan abused the gift, and the Fae queen who'd granted it took it away.

Still, the stones hold ancient power. Only one avenue was closed to us.

I stand with my da and uncles between the dual bonfires of our great May celebration, and prepare with solemn pride to help them usher in the season of rebirth with ritual and chant.

Our women, no less strong than our men, gather round, clad in the old ways, with brightly colored skirts, laced blouses, and bare feet, in honor of the coming feast, which will be attended by the entire village that thrives in the valley below our mountain.

The night sky is black and crystal clear, with thousands of glittering stars scattered like diamonds on a cloak of mink. Diamonds.

I want a girl with a mind like a diamond ...

"Dani," I whisper through lips that are cracked from dehydration. I taste blood, it bubbles in my throat, choking me. Pain lances my ribs, my gut, my groin.

Focus.

The heather has not yet begun to bloom, and although the gra.s.s is still recovering from April's unexpectedly frosty kiss, yellow May flowers have blossomed and are strewn everywhere, on doors and windows, on the livestock, around the necks and in the hair of our women, scattered around the stones.

My da and uncles awe me, tease me, push me, teach me. I want to be like them when I am a man: wide-shouldered, with a ready laugh, a spine of steel, and courage beyond compare.

Was she worth this? Dying over and over? You gave yourself up so she could fight for those sheep. f.u.c.k sheep. You're not a sheepdog anymore. You're a rabid wolf.

I gave myself up to watch her shine. Because I knew what the ma.s.sacre of so many people that she loved would do to her. Steal the light from her eyes. I wanted to watch her save the world, and feel on top of it.

I inhale sharply. I just stumbled as I pa.s.sed between my uncles, took an inadvertent elbow in my stomach, nothing more.

There's Tara, our housekeeper's daughter and Colleen's best friend. Later tonight a group of us will go for a midnight swim in the loch and shriek from the icy slap as we plunge deep. I'll try hard not to stare at Tara's wet blouse when she gets out, but och, the la.s.s is growing in all the right places and I stare in spite of myself. She always spots me, tosses her head of fiery curls, catches the tip of her pretty pink tongue between her lips and smiles, eyes shining.

Near her stand Jamie, Quinn, and Jonah, the elderly, impoverished MacBean's grandsons, orphaned when their parents died last year in a car crash. This is their first Beltane without them. They join us nearly every evening for supper, lonely but not alone, as food is more plentiful in our household than theirs. Old MacBean was injured a decade ago, walks with a cane and has only the food he can harvest from the land.

I look around, smiling, filled with plans. I will one day be laird, as my da before me. I'll live in a mighty old rambling wonderful stone castle filled with history and tradition, take a bonny la.s.s to wife- Dani is unprotected and that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Ryodan is- Pain rips through my entrails and I scream.

I know why I'm obsessed with her. She's the innocence I've lost. As I was going dark, she was getting nothing but brighter. She's the ready smile of a fourteen-year-old that believes the world is one long, incredible adventure. Her dreams are still intact. She's everything I'm not anymore. She tackles life with abandon, lives in the moment, never gives up.

She reminds me of Tara, dead three years now, of a rare bone disease. I wept at the funeral for the girl who smiled all the way through her brief but brutal decline, to the twilight that came too soon.

I see the ghosts in Dani's eyes. You'd have to be blind not to.

I want to chase them, as nothing can chase mine.

I want to keep her from ever changing into something so terrible as I've become.

I want to shelter her from the hard truth that life takes from you, whittles away at your hope and sc.r.a.pes the flesh from your bone and leaves you so changed you can't even recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.

I want her to always be Dani, as she is now, but the thing I was becoming got so f.u.c.ked up about it. I hope the last action I chose to make as a free man cancels some of it out.

I thought turning Unseelie Prince was the most difficult battle I would ever face.

I was wrong. I thought I was in h.e.l.l. Then I found out what h.e.l.l really was. It's enough to wrench a laugh from my cracked lips at the sheer absurdity of it.

Pain stabs through my abdomen, sears and rips and gnaws with tiny razor teeth right down into my groin as I'm flayed alive. I scream again, flee back to the Highlands, and see the ...

Bonfires.

The crisp air smells of roast pig and gently charring peppers and potatoes. We're about to walk the livestock between the twin fires, twins like Colleen and me, like my uncles Dageus and Drustan, before driving them out to the summer pastures. We'll relight the doused fires in our castles from the sacred, protective flames of Beltane. We'll feast and my family and friends will dance and life will seem like one perfect, long dream from which I plan to never awaken.

I have no idea how long I've been staked to the side of a cliff. I've recounted every day that I can recall, relived it in extraordinary detail.

It has kept me from falling.

It has kept me from going mad.

Unexpectedly, it has also silenced the monster I was becoming.

I no longer loathe and fear what was happening to me, because so much worse has happened to me. Perspective is a funny thing. You think your back is to the wall, then something worse corners you, and the first threat looks puny in comparison.

There is only me now, a Keltar who's been mutated with immense power and perhaps will always be, but each time I've died on this cliff and held my own, maintained my sanity, reminded myself of my heritage, who I was born to be, the madness of the Unseelie Prince faded a little more. Strengthened by my ordeal, staked to the side of this b.l.o.o.d.y G.o.dforsaken cliff, the prince overtaking me was overtaken.

I am not a man that was once a Highlander, who got swallowed alive by the depravity and homicidal mania of a death-by-s.e.x Fae.

I am a Keltar druid who now happens to possess Unseelie power and a b.l.o.o.d.y enormous s.e.x drive. Not sure that last part's much of a change.

My head sags forward, blood gushes from my cracked lips. She's at it again, needling away, yanking out my entrails and knitting feverishly on a gown that will never be complete.

The cruelty of it is intolerable. My entire body is on fire with pain.

Fires.

The Highlands.

Beltane.

I recall this particular night of my fourteenth year for three reasons.

It was the first night I was recognized as a Keltar druid. Heady stuff for a young lad.

It was also the night Uncle Dageus warned me, made me suspect my happy dream would end before I was ready.

Like Tara.

Like I won't let it for Dani.

When Da and the others place the sacred chalice and staff on the slab, Uncle Dageus moves close and puts a hand on my shoulder, pulls me aside and gazes down. Golden eyes so like my own stare into mine.

Fire purifies and distills, he says. Fire transforms. You must remember that when the time comes it seems only to ravage and destroy.

So, too, does pain.

One day you will walk through flames, lad.

Of the Beltane fires? I ask curiously. This was not a tradition with which I was familiar, but many of our more complex druid rituals were cloaked in secrecy until certain ages.

Flames of another kind. h.e.l.lfire. You will believe you canna possibly endure the agony.

At ten and four, I shiver, startled by the solemnness and sorrow in his eyes. There's gravity in his low voice that makes me more than uneasy; a young man that prides himself on his courage, I taste the sudden ash of fear.

I canna prevent it. The stones are closed to us now. I would spare you if I could.

Are you foretelling my future? I ask warily. Do I lose my virginity this year? I add quickly. I'd pose that question to none other of my uncles, but Dageus was different. The eyes of women follow him everywhere. I want to be like him one day, lady killer (but not a lady murderer) with the same slow, s.e.xy smile that melts my (pretty darned hot, she's only ten years older than me) aunt Chloe every time.

I'm ready. I want Tara to be the one.

He smiles sadly.

It's whispered among my clan that Dageus has glimpsed moments in the years to come. That when he traveled through time-before the Seelie Queen took away our power to navigate the centuries in hours of need-he saw hours, even days, of our lives. He's never spoken of it, but we've always suspected. He has a canny sense of premonition that's proved invaluable on more than one occasion.

I doona ken the how and when it happens, so I doona ken how to prevent it, short of locking you away and that's no' a life. Time is tricky. It may or may not come to pa.s.s, but if it does it will test you beyond imagining. If that hour comes, you must hold on to one thing.

I shiver again. What?

Love. You can only be broken without it. So long as the smallest spark of love, pure, protective, and good, exists within you, that which is Keltar in you will survive. You will return.

Return.

I know a harsh truth.

So long as I stay in the magnificent Highlands of my mind I will never return.

You must face the fire. I doona ken how long you must endure. You must hold on, remain aware. You must be prepared when your opportunity arises, or it will fail. Uncle Dageus laughs softly. Every man's time comes eventually. It will not, however, be yours. With luck, you'll live forever.

I'd stare up at him, rejecting it, refusing to believe he had any powers of prophecy. Telling myself no one lives forever (not knowing I'd turn Unseelie Prince) and his rambling only made him half mad, likely from the constant chatter of the thirteen dead Draghar within him. Then I'd torn from his grip, raced off, and refused to speak to him for days.

Now I wish I'd asked him questions, now I wish I knew what he saw, what my opportunity is because I sure as h.e.l.l don't see one.

Love?

Can I even feel it anymore?

I've hated everyone and everything around me since the moment I began to change. I ran from those who cared about me. I concede it's possible my hatred hastened the changes, fed the wrong things, starved the right ones. But love? To feel it here and now? I'm not sure it's even possible.

Och, but of course it is.

It's what I've been doing all along. Like my da and all my clan before us, the Highlands are our greatest love. I was shielding myself without understanding the nuts and bolts of it. I'm not a man that could wed a woman, follow her to another country and live there. I'm wedded to my motherland, to the very soil of Scotland.

I add to those mountains and valleys the faces of those I ache for and would protect, etch them in vivid detail on the backs of my eyelids, my mother and father, my siblings Colleen and Cara and Cory, and Tara, och, my sweet, sweet Tara-the third reason I recall that evening so clearly, she took my virginity that starry night on a mossy bed near the loch and b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l did I love her for it, and love doesn't die just because the person does, although it would be infinitely easier if it did-my friends and villagers and the lovely, brilliant, risk-taking, c.o.c.ky Danielle O'Malley who conceals her broken heart behind a gamine grin, and I roll them all up into one ball of light and hold on.

I take a final look at my clan, inhale the scent of roast pig and potatoes, whisper a farewell to my long-dead Tara, shove away from my blessed retreat and force myself to embrace awareness.

I will be ready when my chance for escape comes.

I open my eyes and stare into the hideous face of the Crimson Hag as she slices my gut open.

Again.

24.

"And I'm gone, I'm gone, you know it"

MAC.

I have a small psychotic break, overwhelmed by too many shocks to process. My brain pulls the plug on my body.

I should run. I should figure out how to make my feet move. At the moment they are neither attached to my ankles nor controlled by conscious thought.

I flip channels, my remote stuck on three train-wreck movies I can't stop watching: Ihads.e.xwithBarronsandhetookmymemory/theyknowI'mtheSinsarDubh/JadaisDani/WTF?

Barrons and I had s.e.x the first night I met him. And he removed that memory like a thief in the night, as if he had every right to, when he had none. For months before I ended up in his bed (again!), he was walking around with a graphically detailed memory of every intimate carnal thing we'd done that night-and oh G.o.d was it graphic and intimate and carnal!-while I'd recalled none of it.

He knew what my a.s.s looked like in every possible position. He knew what my face looked like when I came and that I swallow. That night, grieving and alone in a city I didn't know, a city that had been hostile and unwelcoming since the moment I stepped foot in it, I'd become a wild thing, sc.r.a.pped all my inhibitions, had s.e.x like I'd never had it before, tried everything I'd ever wanted to try with enormous enthusiasm and not one ounce of self-consciousness.

It was no wonder he was always looking at me like he wanted to have s.e.x. We'd had s.e.x and he wanted it again. And I couldn't blame him. It had been rock-your-Id-to-its-hedonistic-core phenomenal. Raw. Dirty. Mind-blowing. Addictive. I'd painted that dilapidated room with pain and pa.s.sion, used s.e.x like a bandage for the jagged wound Alina's death had sliced into my soul.

As if that little secret exploding out of my subconscious isn't enough to deal with, the new sidhe-seers have one among them that is my worst nightmare. The willowy brunette in army-green camo pants and tank is like me: she can sense the Sinsar Dubh. Not only am I not unique anymore, I've been outed.

Oh yeah, I need to run.

My feet are roots.