Immortal Warriors 01 - Return of the Highlander Read online

  * * *

  RETURN OF THE HIGHLANDER

  By

  Sara MacKenzie

  * * *

  He was here

  and he was real…

  She had thought she was dreaming, when he made love to her by the Cailleach Stones. She could feel his wrist beneath her hands, the rough hairs and the powerful muscles corded under his skin. And his pulse, as real warm blood pounded through his veins.

  That deep Scottish voice—like warm whiskey seeping into her every pore.

  "Where are you?" Bella asked the empty room.

  "I'm seated on your bed, lass."

  "I can't see you," she whispered.

  "You saw me once," he whispered back.

  Bella blinked. The brief, vivid image of the Scotsman in the kilt. Big, tall, dark-haired, with eyes the color of the evening sky…

  MacLean.

  * * *

  Also by Sara Mackenzie

  Coming October 2006

  Secrets of the Highwayman

  * * *

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint of HarperCollins Publisbers

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, New York 10022-5299

  Copyright © 2006 by Kaye Dobbie

  Excerpt from Secrets of the Highwayman copyright © 2006 by Kaye Dobbie

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-079540-5

  ISBN-10: 0-06-079540-9

  www.avonromance.com

  First Avon Books paperback printing: August 2006

  Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries, Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.

  HarperCollins® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks to Nancy Yost and Erika Tsang for their help on this project. I truly couldn't have done it without you! And for Anne Grade and Sandy Curtis, who were there when the panic set in.

  And I'd like to thank Donald Macdonald for his kind assistance with the Gaelic words and pronunciation. For those who would like to know how to say these words aloud, there is a glossary at the back of the book. For those who would like to visit Donald's website, the address is: www3.sympatico.ca/donaldmacdonald/

  * * *

  Prologue

  He felt it first. A sensation he could remember but had not experienced in a long, long time. His fingers uncurled, feeling, stretching out. He was in a cold and silent place, with the faint echo of breathing. He felt marble, smooth and icy. It was beneath his body, an unbending slab of stone, and he was lying upon it.

  He opened his eyes.

  Sunlight poured through the windows on both sides of the building, golden shafts that intersected as they reached the floor. The rest of the interior was dim. Gloomy and splendidly solemn.

  Cautiously, wondering if he should, he pushed down with his palms and sat up. He was in a great cathedral, the architecture soaring above him, the stained glass of the windows brilliant as they were struck by the light outside. The air was cool, scented with incense and age. Beneath him was a marble tomb, only there was no effigy on the top of it.

  He was the effigy.

  As he turned his head, gazing about him, he saw the others. They lay upon their marble tombs, still and pale, as if they had been sculptured. But they were men, living men, with only the faint lift of their chests to tell him they were still breathing.

  Nothing else moved.

  The Highlander swung his long legs over the edge of the tomb and stood up. He felt remarkably strong and fit for a man who had been sleeping for… but how long was it? He did not know. And he did not really understand why he had been awakened now, at last. He was grateful, of course he was, but a sense of unease flickered across his senses.

  "Your time has come."

  The voice was close by, but it seemed to echo all about him. The Highlander turned swiftly to face his foe, his kilt swinging about his powerful legs, the claidheamh mor at his hip ringing as he drew it from its scabbard.

  There was no one there.

  Now the Highlander turned, slowly, holding the blade before him. The chapel was empty, and the effigies who were men did not move.

  "Who is there? Show yourself!" he demanded, with all the arrogance natural to him in his previous life.

  Once he knew he would have been obeyed instantly, and in his heart and mind he still expected that immediate response. The voice came again, above him this time.

  "The world has moved on. Things have changed."

  The vaulted ceiling soared overhead, but it was empty.

  "You must change, too, Highlander."

  "Where are you?" he spoke through his teeth. His dark hair swung loose about his shoulders as he turned from side to side.

  "Once you were too blind to see. Now you will learn what it is not to be seen."

  A step behind him, the swish of cloth over stone. The Highlander turned and there, at last, was his adversary. He blinked in surprise.

  It was a woman, and though he knew it was a fact that women weren't any match for a man like himself, this one increased his tension rather than eased it. And so he kept his sword between them.

  She was small, her face round and sweet like an angel's, her hair as red as flames. She wore a cloak, silver fur that gleamed like ice in the sun where the light from the windows touched her. Her eyes were ocean-blue and calm, and yet when he caught her gaze there was something dreadful in it that made his breath hitch in awe.

  He knew that this was no ordinary woman. This was a Fiosaiche. A Gaelic Sorceress.

  "I can only give you one chance to make recompense. To show me you are the man I think you are. To redeem yourself and cast off the burden you carry upon your soul." She shook her head at him, her expression fierce. "So many lives lost unnecessarily, Highlander. You must right this wrong."

  The Highlander's brain was turning over her words, trying to make sense of them.

  "Why?" he asked, and though he would not beg, he would never beg, his voice was husky with pain and inner turmoil. "Where am I? What must I do?"

  "You have been asleep in the between-worlds for over two hundred and fifty years, neither living nor dead," said the woman with the eyes that could see into his soul.

  "The between-worlds?" He cast a quick glance about him, at the chapel, the windows, the sunlight outside. The between-worlds was dark and frightening, nothing like this, he remembered that much.

  "I have created this place from memories of my own past," she said with a little smile. "It is not what you think. Nothing is as you think it, Highlander."

  "I am dead, then?"

  "You last walked this earth as a mortal man in 1746, but you will do so again. You are going home."

  The Fiosaiche smiled. He felt dizzy and shocked at the same time, as if he had looked upon something he should not. "Take the chance I give you, Highlander," she whispered. "Use it."

  There was a flapping, a whirling of the still air in the cathedral. A large eagle brushed past him and he ducked down, suddenly afraid. The Fiosaiche was gone, and so was the bird, and he was once more alone with the effigies. Other men, sleeping as he had been. Only now he was awake.

  The Highlander slid his broadsword back into its scabbard. There was a doorway through the thin arches that formed a path forward. He began to walk toward i
t, his boots ringing out on the stone floor.

  He didn't understand what he was doing here. The Fiosaiche's words meant nothing to him. What wrong must he right? The Highlander never admitted he was wrong, not about anything. Such admissions meant weakness and the Highlander had never been weak. He was a chief, a leader of his clan, a king to his people.

  He pushed the half-open door and stepped out and suddenly the light was too bright, blinding him, and he covered his eyes with a cry of pain. When he felt able, he peered through his fingers, and realized the brilliance was gone. He looked about him at the grim, deserted hills. He took a deep breath and the air was chill and sweet.

  And it smelled good.

  It smelled like home.

  * * *

  Chapter One

  Late Summer

  Drumaird Cottage

  Present day

  "I'm waiting for MacLean."

  Bella was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming, but it seemed so real. She was standing in the ruins of Castle Drumaird and there was someone with her, an old, old woman with a green plaid or arisaid wrapped over her white hair, her skull-like face peeping out. It was a hag, a creature common in Scottish myth and folklore. Bella had dreamed about her before, but she had always been on the fringes of the dream, a distant figure who watched but did not speak. This time she was center stage.

  "He's been away for two hundred and fifty years, and now he's almost home. At last this day is come."

  The hag leaned closer and Bella flinched. This was definitely no living creature, despite the rasp of her sour breath. No woman could neglect her skin care quite this badly.

  "With him comes danger for us all, but redemption, too, if he is brave and lucky. Aye, he is coming." Her voice grew sly. "Braw, handsome MacLean. Soon, soon…"

  Bella was waking up.

  But the hag's face was pressed up against hers and would not go away. "You must beware, Arabella Ryan," it whispered.

  "Of MacLean?"

  The hag breathed a laugh. "Och, no, but there is danger. The door has been breached and she does no' know it yet."

  "She? Who are you talking about?"

  "She! The Fiosaiche. The door has been breached and the creatures of the between-worlds can come through. You must beware especially of the each-uisge, the water-horse. It will harm ye if it can."

  Bella's eyes opened and she groaned. What a weird dream. Her dreams had been particularly vivid lately, but this one hadn't really seemed like a dream at all.

  He is coming…

  Bella shuddered. She eased her toes onto the floor by her bed and whimpered. It was cold. Make that freezing. The Highland version of central heating had failed to come on again.

  Moving quickly, she snatched up her sweater and pulled it over her head, wincing when her long dark hair became tangled. She slipped on her red woolen coat, and wrapped it around her, ignoring the way it stretched over her rounded hips and large boobs. She wasn't a small girl and never had been. Bella was voluptuous, a look that was very much out of fashion these days, but she had been born this way and usually it didn't bother her. Except that, recently, she had begun to feel more self-conscious about her size than ever before.

  Brian's doing.

  There were warm socks on the chair and she pulled those on, too, and then her sweatpants. Better, but it was still icy. Her breath was forming her own personal cloud in front of her as she made her way down the narrow, creaking stairs and into the kitchen.

  At least the fire in the Aga was still alive and well. It had taken months of her landlord's patient instruction, but Bella felt as if she had finally mastered the difficulties of getting peat to burn properly.

  Bella reached out her hands and felt the warmth. She sighed and drew a chair up close, enjoying the sensation of thawing out. Much better.

  Except that now the worries that had kept her awake most of the night returned. First in line was: Where is Brian? They'd argued last night and he had walked out and he hadn't come back. At first she thought he was sulking at the local pub—but the local pub was in Ardloch, a two-hour trip on winding roads through the hills. Or he had gone over to Gregor's place—their landlord had a farm on the road to Ardloch and kept his sheep on the moorland around Loch Fasail—but Gregor and Brian didn't get on that well. Then she thought he might have gone back to Edinburgh to his friends' home, to soak up their sympathy. Bella knew that Hamish and Georgiana had never liked her—they made it plain enough that they considered Brian was doing her a favor by staying with her.

  "Well, the three of them deserve each other. Good riddance!"

  Did she really mean that? With a sigh, Bella stepped across to the small window above the sink and peered out. Her car was there, parked in front of the cottage, but not Brian's. As much as she sometimes wished Brian gone, being all alone here was unsettling. For a moment the view distracted her, the sweep down to Loch Fasail, the desolate lake; the stark beauty of the surrounding rocky hillsides with their skirts of heather and gorse. The sun was awake and shining, but there were clouds hovering, as they always were in this northwestern part of Scotland.

  Loch Fasail was famous for its unpredictable weather.

  She and Brian had been arguing a lot lately. She didn't like to admit it aloud, but things between them hadn't been good for a long while. Bella had hoped that living out here with no distractions would bring them together, but so far that wasn't so. Once Brian had seemed so exuberant, so much the extrovert—a big bold lion to her scholarly mouse. They were opposites attracted.

  But recently the scholarly mouse had discovered that the gap between what Brian wanted her to be and what she was had widened. He was dissatisfied with Bella's weight, her appearance, her career… everything. And where once she might have made an effort to change herself to gain his approval—well, she'd loved him, hadn't she?—now she wasn't sure she wanted to. The love had withered into mild affection and irritation, and then… What did she feel for Brian these days? More often than not he simply made her angry. She was usually a good-natured person, not easily upset, but even Bella could only be pushed so far before she exploded. The thing was, Bella could please herself or she could please Brian, but she didn't think she could please them both.

  Not any longer.

  Bella looked back at her life with a sudden, painful clarity. As a child she'd been a victim of her parents' bitter marriage breakup. Victim, such an awful word, but a six-year-old doesn't have much say in what happens between the adults in her life. They'd ended up with joint custody, but as the years went by her English mother met another man, remarried, and made a new family, and Bella ended up with her father, a U.S. diplomat. She'd lived in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris, the great cities of the world, and none of them had been home.

  Her childhood had made her self-sufficient, and despite what others saw as her air of fragility, Bella did not consider she needed looking after. She was lonely, but she'd always been alone. Despite a succession of nannies and housekeepers, Bella had only ever had herself to rely on. And her imagination.

  At thirty-two years of age, she'd taught herself to harness that imagination and make a modest living from it. Bella was a writer, and she knew she was a good writer, but she also accepted that her books had a limited market. She wrote about the lesser characters of history, not the great kings and queens but those who lived and died in their shadow. People didn't flock to buy her stories of obscure historical figures, no matter how well written, as they did thrillers about serial killers. But still she loved what she did. She wouldn't change it.

  Brian had seemed to understand that. He'd promised to take a six-month holiday to allow her to work on her book, to put her first for once, but she realized now that whatever he might say, his needs and wants would always take precedence over hers, and he simply could never imagine it otherwise.

  As for the core of loneliness deep at her center, few people even knew it was there. Brian hadn't filled it.

  Maybe no one ever would.
r />   The Highlander was walking. It hadn't taken him long to get into his stride, that loping walk that seemed to cover miles of rough country and tire him very little. He had found the old road over the pass and followed it down into the long glen that led the way north to Loch Fasail and Castle Drumaird. He met no one.

  He felt as if he were all alone in the world.

  The Fiosaiche's words repeated in his head. Had he really been asleep for two hundred and fifty years? It was several lifetimes. What had he done to deserve such a fate?

  But instead of answers, his mind was full of shadows.

  At least he had remembered his name. It was MacLean. They called him the Black MacLean, because of his hair, but he had been baptized Morven. Only his mother called him that and he had long ago ceased listening to her. Aye, he was the Black MacLean, and it was a name to be reckoned with.

  He tried to remember more, his thoughts running backward from the cathedral and the Fiosaiche. Tunnels of blackness, and wails and screams from the souls and creatures who dwelled there. The between-worlds, the place of waiting. And then back again, and misty mountains and his heart thudding as he ran. Snatches of fighting and shouting. Running hard with his men. He had the brief and tantalizing memory of a great and bloody battle. There was a woman with hair like gold and a pale, angry face—his wife maybe? And then back even further to his home, Castle Drumaird, and the peaceful splendor of Loch Fasail. Isolated, a world of its own, where he ruled absolute.

  His thoughts came to a halt as he looked about him again, suddenly uneasy. Surely there had been more folk about when he came this way before? Crofters and villagers and shepherds. And the road was different now. Hard and black, it stretched before him across the moor.