The Highlander's Touch

“But you don’t look forty-one,” she protested, eager to object to any small part of such madness.

“I wasn’t when Adam changed me. I was, as near as I can calculate, nearer thirty than forty. He never would admit exactly when he slipped me the potion. But when I confronted him, he confessed that he had indeed poisoned my wine.”

“Why? And who is this man that possesses the power to make you live forever? Who is this Adam who could send me home? What is he?”

Circenn sighed. There was no point in trying to rush away now. He would give her a few answers to consider while he was gone. When he returned, he would tell her all, and offer her the flask again—to drink, this time. “He is of the old race called the Tuatha de Danaan. He is what some call the fairy.”

“Fairy?” Lisa was incredulous. “You expect me to believe in fairies?”

Circenn smiled bitterly. “You accept that you have traveled seven hundred years across time, yet dispute the existence of creatures who predate us by millennia and possess unusual powers? You cannot pick and choose your madnesses, lass.”

“The fairy,” Lisa repeated, sagging against the edge of the rotated hearth. “No wonder my traveling through time didn’t seem so strange to you. I thought you’d accepted it unusually well.”

“Think not of the fairies as wispy, ethereal creatures, flitting about on wings—they are not. They are an advanced civilization that inhabited some faraway world before they came to ours in a cloud of mist, thousands of years ago. No one knows whence they came. No one knows who or what they really are, but they are powerful beyond compare. They are immortal, and they are capable of sifting time.”

“But why did he make you immortal?”

Circenn exhaled a bitter sigh. “He said he did it because his race had selected me as guardian of their treasures, of which the damned flask is one. That is why he made me swear to kill whoever found it. He said his race had long been looking for someone who could keep their hallows safe; they needed someone who would never die and could not be bested in battle.”

“So you will truly live … forever?”

Circenn said nothing, his eyes dark with emotion. He nodded.

Lisa shook her head, beyond coherent thought. Her gaze swept over him, disbelievingly.

“Lisa—”

“No.” She raised her hands as if to protect herself. “No more. That’s it. I’ve heard enough for today. That’s all I can hear. My ears are full.”

“Is it so terrible a thing to accept? I accepted that you were from my future,” he said. “Haud yer wheesht!” he roared, thumping on the floor again.

“Just let me have time to think. Please? Go. Go off to your war,” she said, pointing to the door. Then a small, half-hysterical laugh escaped her.

“Lisa, I am not leaving you like this.”

“Oh yes you are,” she said firmly, “because according to my recollection of events, you and your Templars are necessary at Bannockburn.” She needed desperately to be alone, to think. It was not hard for her to push him out to war, now that she knew he could not die. “But you bled when I poked you with the knife,” she added, as an afterthought.

“Beneath my shirt the wound closed instantly, lass. I can bleed, briefly.”

Footsteps thundered down the corridor; his men had exceeded their patience.

Circenn nudged her back a step and swiftly sealed the chamber. “You said my Templars were necessary at Bannockburn. You know of this battle?” he said, his gaze brooding.

“Yes.”

“So it seems perhaps we’ve both been withholding information from each other,” he pointed out quietly. “Is there anything else I should know?”

“Is there anything else I should know?” she countered.

Suddenly he looked weary. “Just that I love you with all my heart, lass.”

He kissed her swiftly and was gone.

IMMORTAL. CIRCENN BRODIE WAS IMMORTAL.

How ironic, she thought. In the twenty-first century, she’d raged against her mother’s mortality. Now, in the fourteenth, she was raging against his immortality.

Her life couldn’t be a simple one of going to college and collecting kisses from handsome and mostly harmless young men. That just wouldn’t do for Lisa Stone. She suddenly understood how bewildered and put-upon Buffy must have felt upon discovering it was her plight in life to slay vampires.

She hurt.

He rode miles away from her, but their bond did not diminish. She was battered by his feelings, buffeted by his anger and sorrow and guilt. She found herself pushing it away, relegating it to the background. She could not afford to feel what he was feeling right now. She needed to feel only her own emotions, to sort through them undistracted by his pulsing intensity.