To Love a Highland Dragon (14 page)

“Aye. I fear he’s doing a better job blocking the tunnel than he did last time.”

“That won’t be a problem, will it?”

Lachlan drew the breeks up his legs and fastened them. Then he pulled Maggie against him. The lass was trying to sound brave, but he’d heard the tremor in her voice. “Nay, lass. I can use magic to move us out of here. Gather your things.”

She ducked from under his embrace and picked up her bag and sweater. “I have everything.”

Exhorting the dragon to lend his power, Lachlan wove complicated magic. Their underground location meant he couldn’t simply blast Rhukon to the ninth circle of hell without compromising the integrity of the cave’s structure. Though he’d told Maggie about the red wyvern and the Morrigan, he didn’t mention them now. No reason to alarm her since he didn’t know for sure if they were a part of Rhukon’s current maneuvering.

The truth of things was, he wasn’t absolutely certain he had enough power to subvert all three. If he and Kheladin couldn’t spring them from the cave, he’d have to find a way to reach Gwydion and Arawn.

Because it couldn’t hurt, and the lass needed to entrain her power, he bent close. “I know ye’re green as the grasses that dot the moors, but look through your third eye, and add your power to mine when I ask for it.”

Maggie’s hands balled into fists so hard her nails cut into her palms. It didn’t take magic, or her well-honed intuition, to tell her Lachlan was holding something back. For him to ask for an infusion of power from her must mean things were far more desperate than he was letting on. She stared at him. His hands wove in intricate patterns, and the air around him fairly buzzed with power. If she looked through her third eye as instructed, she thought she could see a huge, dragoneque form hover around him. Coppery light arced between them.

Kheladin?
The harder she stared, the more indistinct the dragon essence became, almost as if he didn’t want to be identified.

Maggie fought against helplessness. She’d never cared for the sensation of being mired in a tar pit. Adrenaline soured her stomach and set her nerves jangling. Knowing it was her fight-or-flight response, and that her current level of discomfort was because both avenues were unavailable, didn’t help her control her body’s autonomic nervous system.

She opened her mouth to talk with Lachlan and then clacked it shut. He appeared to be concentrating—intensely. She didn’t want to sabotage their chances of escape by diverting his attention. Rocks showered down from above. A sensation of drowning, of being buried beneath tons of earth, nearly undid her.

So she wouldn’t start screaming, Maggie forced herself to breathe. One steadying breath in, followed by an equally deep exhale. As she repeated the cycle, she took stock of her body. Aware of every synapse, every nerve ending, Maggie felt intensely, vibrantly alive. She swallowed hard; the life she’d been living was a mere parody of what being alive could mean. She’d emerged from a long sleep into bright, searing daylight. Her body thrummed with dazzling energy, but lust for the man standing a foot away with magic churning around him trumped everything.

Though far from a virgin, she’d never felt such an intense physical connection with her other lovers. In fact, sex had been so blasé, it hadn’t felt like a sacrifice to do without it. The men who’d wandered through her life had never truly interested her. There’d been points when she’d wondered if she were gay, but women didn’t ring her chimes either. In her worst moments, she’d seen herself as asexual.

Mid-breath, she bit back a chortle. If today were any marker, asexual wasn’t anywhere on the table. Despite danger blossoming about them, if Lachlan dragged her to the cave’s sandy floor and pressed his glorious cock against her pussy lips, she’d welcome him back inside. Desire knifed through her at the thought of him. He had a physical magnetism that literally took her breath away. Was that what had been wrong with her twenty-first century lovers? Had they been too…domesticated? Too tame?

Or maybe I was waiting for him all my life and just didn’t know it.

Grannie knew
.

Maggie considered that. Her grandmother had known…something. When Maggie had walked away from the coven and their training, she’d walled herself off from magics that were only taught to acolytes who signed the coven’s pact with their blood.

“Lass.”

Though she’d never taken her gaze from him, Lachlan’s voice startled her. “Yes?”

“Take my hand. Gather what power ye have, and imagine it streaming into me.” His voice held a desperate edge.

Maggie closed the short distance between them; she grasped his outstretched hand. Contact with him jolted her like an electric charge and reinforced her earlier impression that her other life seemed like a photographic negative. She imagined her essence flowing into him.

“Aye, beloved,” he murmured. “Give it all to me. Imagine our bodies joined, and send the energy into me.”

She tried hard to do what he asked. Once she touched him, her consciousness of the doom surrounding them escalated dramatically, as did her sense of the dragon’s burning core. Kheladin was furious they were under attack. He wanted to lay waste to the world with fire, but Lachlan held him back.

The peril they faced came into sharp focus and scared the living shit out of her. Her gut tightened. She wanted to shriek her fury and her fear, to rake her nails down Rhukon’s tawdry beauty and mar him for life. Her gaze swept the cave. Her eyes said they were alone, but her other senses, the more arcane ones, told her otherwise.

“Ye’re not concentrating.” Lachlan closed his other hand over hers, sandwiching it. Thunderous booming sounded above them. More dirt drifted down, mingled with thick, choking dust and small rocks.

Truth rammed home. Maggie’s teeth chattered. Talking took gargantuan effort, as if by giving voice to her terror, it might be one step closer to coming true. “Rhukon’s trying to bury us alive.”

“If ye help me, he willna succeed. Ye’ve power within you. Throw the floodgates open. Doona worry, I can channel all ye have.”

A chant from her childhood rose from some forgotten pit in her psyche. Maggie mouthed the words and felt power coil upward from the base of her spine. “Aye, lass. There’s my bonny lass. Keep it coming. Goddess’s tits, but ye’re strong. I knew it.” Exultant laughter rose from him; smoke and fire spewed from his mouth.

Maggie sensed Kheladin’s magic. It was deep, eldritch, and different from Lachlan’s. She opened her mind to their three powers. It was like watching three waterfalls, pouring multi-hued water down a rocky cliff. The water braided together. Once joined, it exploded, showering everything in its path with destructive force. No stranger to focusing the power of her mind on outcomes, she imagined Rhukon
dead
. Dead, goddammit.

Hell, I’ll take dismantled, disemboweled, imprisoned by the Celts. Anything.
She dug deeper within herself. The cave walls flickered and dimmed, then reformed. Understanding at an instinctual level that they’d nearly escaped, she dragged every last ounce of strength from her psyche.

This time, they fairly shot from the cave. When the world stopped spinning, they were in the circle of beech and ash where they’d started. Maggie’s gut seized. She flipped over onto her belly in time to vomit what little was in her stomach into the dirt. Dry heaves shook her, but she couldn’t stop them. Strong hands rubbed her back and shoulders. “Naught to be ashamed of, lass. ’Tis the magic. It always exerts a price, but ’tis higher when ye’re untrained.”

“I— I’m all right,” she managed through chattering teeth. “Adrenaline overload.” She pushed herself away from where she’d been sick and rolled into a cross-legged sit. Maggie dragged her sleeve across her mouth. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, gratified the bower of trees was still there. “We got out.” Tears pricked behind her lids. “Christ! I wouldn’t let myself think about it, but I was afraid I was going to die down there, crushed under tons of rocks.”

“Aye, lass.” He moved next to her and gathered her shaking body against his. “’Twas your magic made the difference. Ye should be proud.” He hesitated, and then added, “Your grandmother will most certainly be. I have never seen such an impressive display of power from one so untrained as ye are.”

She pulled away and sat straight. “Grandma. Shit! What time is it?” Maggie scrabbled through her bag, which she’d miraculously held onto, and got her iPhone. She blew out a breath. “Only eleven-thirty. Thank God. We still have plenty of time.”

“Are ye sound enough to drive that contraption ye call a car?”

Maggie snorted. “I like being taken care of, but if the options are me driving or you, I’ll take me any day.”

“I could learn.”

“Yes, but not between now and when we need to be in Glasgow.” A soft smile curved the ends of her mouth. “Help me up. I hate to admit it, but I still feel like I got run down by a train.”

He pushed to his feet and held out his hands to help her. “I’m not familiar with the word, but I assume ’tis equivalent to being tied to four horses and having them all run in different directions.”

“Maybe not quite so bad as being drawn and quartered,” she murmured and let herself be coaxed back into his arms. There was a soothing quality to his hands and voice that steadied her nerves.

He laughed quietly. “Aye, and ye’re familiar with the concept.”

She nodded. “I have an advantage. I studied history. While I don’t know everything about the time you lived in, I know far more about it than you know about the world I come from. Walk with me.” She headed for her car. “I’d like to rinse my mouth out with some of the tea in my trunk and maybe eat the sandwiches I made.”

Maggie led the way across the deserted street. It seemed like another lifetime when she’d made those sandwiches in her kitchen. Maybe they could find a pub and get something more substantial. Her belly felt hollow; she had the shaky feeling she got when she overdid it exercising, and her blood sugar got too low.

There’d been a pub on their way out of Inverness. Because they’d inhaled the peanut butter sandwiches and were still half-starved, Maggie had run in and gotten the bartender to make them up a couple of ham sandwiches with all the trimmings. They ate as they drove, with Lachlan breaking off small bites and handing them to her. They had plenty of time, so she stopped frequently, even pulled off onto a back road to give Lachlan a chance to see what it felt like behind the wheel. As she’d expected, his first few attempts to coordinate the gas and clutch were laughable, but by the end of forty minutes, she was confident he could drive in a pinch—if he had to. At least he’d be able to move the vehicle in a straight line and turn it. Traffic signs, and understanding how to operate in an environment with other cars was a whole different story.

Mmph. If it comes down to him having to drive, I’ll just hope he gets us to where we need to be before the cops pull him over and haul him off to jail…

Questions swirled through her mind, but she forced herself to sit on all of them, at least until they were done eating. She needed energy and didn’t want information that would twist her stomach into burning knots of tension.

The darkened highway stretched before them. At a hundred kilometers an hour, her Fiat ate the distance as if it wasn’t there. “Do ye wish for any more?”

Maggie shook her head and then said. “I’ve had enough. You can finish whatever’s left.”

“How did ye guess I was still hungry?”

“You’re a man, aren’t you?”

He laughed long and hard. The rough edges of his mirth warmed her heart. “Aye, if ye doona watch us, we’ll eat whatever’s not tacked down.”

Maggie stared at the stars visible through the windshield. A quarter moon sat low on the horizon. The countryside smelled damp and green through the window she’d cracked to get a bit of fresh air into the car. She considered how to organize the questions she had for Lachlan. Her mind recoiled; the knowledge would change her irrevocably. She’d never again be able to walk away from the power simmering inside her.

What the hell? I can’t do that
now
.

Years ago she’d established what felt like détente with her latent abilities. Sort of an I’ll-leave-you-alone-if-you-don’t-nag-me agreement.
Hmph.
Blew the lid right off that arrangement, didn’t I?
She girded herself. There really were things she had to know—before Rhukon struck again.

“My stomach’s full. The next thing I need is a few answers.” Maggie listened to the words as they rolled out of her mouth and sat between them in the darkened car. If she didn’t know better, she could have sworn they were written against the gray of the console, glittering a challenge.

“Aye, I figured ye’d get around to asking a question or two. I’d have volunteered information but thought it best if ye came to wanting it on your own.” He crumpled the paper the sandwiches had been wrapped in and shoved it back into the paper sack. Lachlan fingered the bag. “In my day, all such things were woven from cloth.”

“Probably better. Less waste.” She licked her lips and took a slug of tea from the bottle balanced in the car’s console. “Ecology’s the last thing on my mind right now. My mind’s still jumbled, but could you tell me what happened in your cave? Just hit the high points, and keep it simple.”