Highland Shapeshifter (10 page)

He lifted his chin, feigning amusement against her weapons and magic. “What d’ye intend with that?” He kept his voice indifferent.

A small shoulder lifted in a shrug and she pointed the cylinder downward. “You are kind of exposed.”

Col felt himself shrivel.

Her eyes tipped back to his face. “What do you want with Charity?” Anger strained the delicate features. Col cocked his head, studying the desperate tension of her limbs. She was scared. Not for herself. Protective. Of Charity.

As was he.

He lifted his palms outward. “I mean her no harm. Ye’ve my oath on that.” His heart pounded just thinking about this one narrow opportunity he had and what would be if he missed it. “She hasn’t gone yet, has she?”

“Gone yet?” The color leeched from the lass’s skin. “What does that mean?”

His intentions weren’t to upset her. He wasn’t sure how much to reveal or if he could trust her. She’d purchased him from the ogre, for rood’s pity. He should not lose sight of that.

Col looked her up and down, uncertain what to do next. He didn’t want to frighten her off, not if she could take him to Charity. Although she obviously didn’t frighten easily. Though slight, she’d faced the ogre thrice her size unflinchingly, not to mention an unclothed stranger in a darkened alley.

Fearless, his little Fae was.

She glared at him in silence and then suddenly her eyes widened a fraction and her lips parted.

“Col?”

He flinched at the use of his name. He hadn’t heard it for more than a fortnight since he’d been thrown into the rift. No one of this century knew him. Or so he thought.

She must have caught his reaction because her eyes widened larger and she flung a hand over her mouth.

Col’s mouth went dry. “You know me?”

“Oh crap,” she wailed. “Oh crap, crap, crap. You are him! Col Limont!” A sharp tremor shook her slim frame. “What’s going on? How did you get here? What’s going to happen to my sister?”

Sister?

He took in her features again, the pert nose and the way she firmed those stubborn lips. He should have realized. Charity’s sister. Which…was the most promising event to favor him thus far. As long as he gained the lass’s cooperation, he could get to Charity. Get home.

“Ye’re Charity’s sister then?” He smiled. “Praise the gods. I need to find Charity before…” How much to reveal? “I need to get to her.”

“Before what? You need to get to my sister before what? Before your sorcerer brother comes through time? Because he’s already done that.”

Everything went numb. A sword could have stabbed through him and he wouldn’t have felt it. Every thought stilled, save one. “Toren? Toren’s already come? And Charity? She’s still here?”

“Still here?” the lass shrieked. Her face flushed pink. She aimed her cylinder at him in a shaky hand. “Quit saying that. What do you know? You spill now.”

“I—“ Col plowed his hand through his hair, reeling. Toren had already come and gone. He’d missed him. He’d missed his chance for Toren to send him home.

He stumbled back, swiveled around, looking for answers on the dirty street that weren’t there. A hole as vast as the ocean tore inside his chest. A loud roar thundered in his ears.

He was stuck here. In this hideous time. He’d failed. They’d all failed to maintain the balance of magic. Darkness had overcome the light and there wasn’t a cursed thing he could do to set it right.

“Hey, hey.” The lass held his arm and was apparently taking the brunt of his weight on her. He hadn’t noticed he’d been slowly sinking toward the ground.

The sudden slap on his cheek was more irritating than hurtful. He blinked up.

Frightened violet eyes bore into his. “I don’t know what is going on with you and your brother. But you both need to leave my sister out of it and go back to your own time.”

He laughed, that pained muddled type of sound that came out when a person was on the verge of losing it. “I can’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since I arrived in this gods forsaken time!” He blinked and pulled away from her, the hopelessness of the situation sinking in. He straightened to…he didn’t know what. He had nowhere to go. He stood naked in the alleyway, solely adrift, his breath pulling in huge painful drafts, and barely whispered, “I can’t. Not alone.” He needed Toren.

 
“You’re stuck here.” Her voice softened.

He felt himself nod, unable to say the words out loud.

“Geez.” She blew out a breath behind him. “That’s why you’re looking for Charity.” Intelligent lass, she’d grasped the situation. “You knew he’d come to her. But how could you know?”

“Ah, lass. She, Charity, she told me,” he answered flatly and winced at her gasp.

She came around to face him. “That can’t be true. The only way you could—“ She clamped her hands over her mouth again, all her hand-won color draining from her face. “No.”

Col didn’t say anything. She gave herself a bare moment of distress before her features hardened with resolve. Her hand clamped onto his wrist and she tugged. “You’re coming with me. I want to know everything. I knew it. I knew it this morning when she took grandma’s spell book. Damn it, Charity.” Great, she was back to swearing even without any mobster ogres around. What a day.

Col went with her docilely. What else was he to do? He no longer had the means to help himself return home.

“Wait.” He stopped suddenly, throwing the lass off-balance. Charity was going to cast a spell to return to the moment Toren appeared. Then she was going to impossibly go back to his century through the rift Toren created. ‘Twas a foolhardy addle-minded thing she had done, yet she had done it all the same. Mayhap all was not lost. “How long ago?”

“What?”

“When, lass? When did my brother come?”

Chapter Ten

“That’s not possible.”

Lenore marched, more like dragged the shapeshifter—Col. Col Limont, ancient Guardian of Magic from the thirteen century, holy crap—to the car. Just another stroll through the alleys with a hot naked man in tow.

The few people out in this part of town gawked, but Col didn’t seem to care as he rambled out his ordeal. Uninhibited or what? He stopped speaking the minute they came to the corvette and simply stood there staring. A huge smile played over his face.

Lenore folded her arms. “It’s a car.”

“’Tis a rare beauty of a car.”

Lenore rolled her eyes. Guys and their love of chrome and leather apparently spanned across centuries.
 
Who would have thought?

Reaching in, Lenore sorted through Gabe’s gym bag and came up with long basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt. Briefs would have been nice, but hey, the guy was an ancient Scotsman so probably was accustomed to going around commando beneath his kilt anyway.

“Lenore,” she told him.

He glanced up from pulling the shorts on, puzzled.

“My name. Call me Lenore, not lass.”

“Oh.” His lips quirked just before he drew the T-shirt over his head and climbed into the passenger seat, looking around at the interior, and nodded appreciatively. Then he was rambling again, about Charity going back through time and helping them liberate his sorcerer brother. He told her about the evil witch and the battle.

Evil witch
. It was crazy. Highlander in basketball shorts. His story was a whopper, hard to believe. She didn’t want to believe it. If Charity hadn’t come to her this morning and told her about the visit from one Toren Limont, she wouldn’t give any of this credit. It was insane.

She wanted to kick the guy to the curb and run to Charity, stop her, even while her heart went out to Col. He’d been with his family, battling a witch…and Charity had been there too. And didn’t that just make her throat clamp up tight? Next thing he knows, Col is flung into a time rift and spat out to the here and now, lost, completely alone and out of his element among technology and cars and artificial lighting and just about everything. It’s a miracle he made it to Oregon and was closing in on Seattle when Starch’s guys scooped him up.

And the cherry to top it off: he’d missed his brother by a day.

A day.

What were the odds he’d even been spat out in time close to this time period?

“She’s going to go back to the point Toren first arrived.”

Lenore hit the brakes, nearly missing a stop sign. “What?” Because
what
? “Oh no she is not. I’m ending this right now. Charity is not getting mixed up in this.”

Dark brows drew down. “But it’s already happened.”

“Not for us. Not yet. And it’s not going to happen.”

“It’s too late for me to go back. I’ve missed my chance.” Pain pulled in the way he creased his brows before he smoothed his features. “But I can send a message to my family through her. They have to know what’s happened.”

Lenore squeezed the steering wheel. “I can’t lose my sister.”

The green of his eyes deepened, spearing into her soul, his own wounded soul on display. He had lost his entire family, his clan, everyone he knew…

She broke away from the intensity of his gaze. “I’m sorry. I just…I can’t.”

“Charity saves my brother.” His voice was as soft and untouched as snow falling on a quiet night. “Without her, the witch will…” His Adam’s apple bobbed.

Lenore drove through the intersection and turned onto the street leading into Charity’s apartment complex, feeling like the worst kind of scum, but she would never sacrifice her sister. Not even if the entire human race depended on it.

“I’m sorry,” once again she offered. “But Charity is not going. You need to leave us alone.”

Col’s mouth opened to say something and the windshield shattered, exploding glass shards over them. A leathery wrinkled beast half-emerged into the car and dragged Col out onto the hood.

Chapter Eleven

Lenore slammed on the brakes, jerking the wheel, and the corvette skidded to a stop sideways across two lanes.

What were those things? No wonder Gabe called them Morlocks, holy crap. Gabe had pegged them right. Absolutely right. They were like monsters that could have stepped right out of a movie. She’d never seen anything like them. Lenore fumbled with the door and bailed out of the car, wasp and hornet spray in hand.

The beasts surrounded her, well, more to the point, Col. They were definitely after Col.

They were like troglodytes come to life, all long muscled arms, and leathery flappy skin that looked like it would slide off with the least bit of coaxing. Most alarming were the rows of small daggered teeth, like baby rats. Gray. Everything about them was different hues of gray.

Col was on his back, having been dragged to the road. Beneath those gray teeth. She aimed the spray. No, he was up, kicking one of the trogs in its slurpy stomach and rolling into another’s legs and up again to his feet.

Lenore’s jaw dropped at the sheer beauty of his movements as though he had an innate sense of where the creatures would be and he hit them with lethal precision.

He flung one of the beasts away and Lenore showered it with a flume of wasp spray. The thing dropped to the ground, shrieking, gouging at it eyes. Kills wasps, hornets, bees and your everyday household smelly monster. Or at least got their attention.

Stunned, the other beasts jerked their heads toward her. Low growls emitted from rubbery throats. She hadn’t been a target before, but she’d just made herself one.

“Run!” Col shouted, elbowing a beastie in the jaw while another latched around his waist and took a bite.

Right. Because she was the type of girl to tuck tail and run. She sprayed two more Morlocks that came at her.
 
It seemed to take effect, kind of, somehow penetrating those weird eye scars or maybe just throwing their other senses out of whack. Who knew? But if it worked, it worked. Blinded for sure now, or at least desensitized, Thing One and Thing Two spun and ran into each other, claws out and doing damage. Okay now, she liked that. Lenore dodged them as they swerved past, and she ran to Col. She gave a quick spurt of spray in a wide arc, afraid to get too close and disable him. He was down and bleeding beneath a handful of the monsters.

She kicked at one, sending it face-planting in the street at the same time a swollen hand clamped around her ankle and ripped her off her feet.

The back of her head bounced on the pavement and she saw stars. Funny, she always thought that was something they made up.

Stars. Blue stars, zipping like meteors above her head.

The monsters howled. The closest one stiffened, bones rattling, making a sort of sloshing sound and caved to its knees. More blue stars flew by with the same effect.

Morlocks howled, leaping away over swerving, honking cars.

What the…?

Lenore craned her head back and found the yuppie woman striding straight for them, firing her freaky wide-butt ray gun. Her two companions ran behind her, catching monsters left and right as they scurried away.

Emboldened, one of the beasts launched into the woman, taking her down. “Get him!” she screamed, swinging her gun against the malformed head.

The guys turned their weapons toward Col, taking out the monsters battling him. He tossed the last one off, ran full-bore between the men who kept firing at the beasts after him. Then he bent and scooped Lenore up and over his shoulder.

Her fuzzy head swung into his back and she grinned, loopy-happy that he hadn’t run off and left her. That was twice, she thought, keeping score. Geez, she couldn’t pin a thought down.

“Stop!” The blond guy pointed his gun at Col.

Finding that terribly funny, Lenore pushed a hand on Col’s shifting butt to lift herself up a bit and sprayed the wasp spray straight into Malibu Ken’s face.

He went down howling. The gun clattered to the ground and Col sprinted away. Bouncing upside down, her head rioting, Lenore was going to be sick.

A blue car streamed down the street, screeching on its brakes, spinning to a stop with the odor of burning rubber.

A door banged open. “Get in!”

Dazedly, Lenore craned her face up. “Grandma?”

Chapter Twelve

It was a wild ride through the streets with Grandma’s Lexus sporting new dents as trogs thudded into the car. Lenore couldn’t be sure, but she thought grandma drove into a few of them.

Lenore struggled to sit upright for a better view, but Col had her pinned securely to his side in the back seat, the palm of his large hand at the back of her head.

It was…nice.

She snuggled her face into the soft folds of his gore-splattered T-shirt, pressing into the hard contours of his stomach beneath. He was hard and soft. Like a hard-shelled candy, she sighed, her thoughts floating away on a hazy river of mud. She should know that about him, his soft sweet interior she’d never guess by the rough exterior. But she knew because she’d been up close and personal inside his essence. She knew how fiercely he loved his family and how hard he fought to protect them. Which was sweet. A sweet protector. Soft and hard.

She liked that. She liked that a lot.

And he had protected her as well. He saved her twice now. She twisted to get a better look at him, her protector candy. The car flew over a bump and pain ricocheted off the back of her head, blinding her.

She must have moaned because Col’s arm tightened and his hand curled with more pressure against her head.

“What’s wrong with my granddaughter?” Grandma’s voice floated across the back of her seat like the liquid neon curlicues of a bar sign. Lenore squinted, wishing the words would stop dancing because she was seriously about to hurl all over Col’s soft and hard lap.

“She’s taken a hard clop to the head.” His accent blazed a path of heat along her skin.

The tires squealed beneath them and the patch of sky behind the rear windows spun crazily. Lenore squeezed her eyes closed against the red bludgeoning in her head and fled into blackness.

She came to and felt herself cradled against a chest, where slapping footsteps echoed the rhythm of a heartbeat against the side of her face.

“Put her down here.”

She had been up?

More shifting, more spikes of pain and her brain sloshed around inside her skull. Col’s warmth drifted away and she keenly missed his presence. She wanted him back, felt her arms lift like a child asking to be picked up again.

An abrupt heat poured into her chest and spread through her veins, moving upward into her neck where it tingled across her scalp. Healing energy, her mind filled in vaguely. The focused pain at the back of her head drained to a dull ache and the haziness cleared.

A tap to her wrist brought her eyes open.

Her grandmother counted her pulse, gaze intent on her wrist watch.

A new kind of warmth spilled through Lenore. “Thanks, Grandma.”

Judith Greves had served as a nurse in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy during World War Two. She was also a healer extraordinaire, far more skilled than she or Charity could ever hope to become, though Grandma maintained that they had the gift in full, yet the quality of magic available to access from the earth had lessened with each generation.

Grandma nodded and Lenore’s gaze shifted to Col. He crouched beside her, bleeding cuts and bruises darkening his face, his eyes so full of unmasked concern she thought she’d burn beneath the intensity.

“Hey,” she slurred.

His eyes crinkled. “Ye dinna tell me ye were of the Highlands.” Ah. He must have gathered as much from her grandma’s burr.

He tugged at a strand of her hair. “I should have recognized ‘twas so by yer streak of stubbornness. Yer a braw lass.”

She didn’t know what that meant, but felt heat creep into her cheeks.

“’Tis all well and good,” Grandma clucked. “Now let’s see to you, shifter.”

Instantly alarmed, remembering the Morlock sinking its baby shark teeth into Col’s waist, Lenore pulled up in her seat. Or rather, the bed she was on, as apparently they were in an indescript hotel room, seaside landscape nailed to the wall and all. As though anyone would want to steal a lousy print.

Lenore took in the wet red stain coating Col’s shirt and shorts. Not that ruining Gabe’s ugly gym wear was a tragedy. From the moment she’d pulled Starch’s tarp off of him, he’d been cut and bruised and the Morlocks had only done worse and worse to him.
 
“You should have healed him instead.”

As skilled as Grandma was, she only had so much magic in her to spare. A healer’s magic replenished, but it took time.

“You believe he gave me that choice,” she clucked. “He’d have none of that until I saw to you.” Grandma’s features softened, before going firm and dragging Col up by the arm. “But he’ll do as he’s told now, aye?”

Eyes widening, Col let her maneuver him to the bed complacently, hissing as he sat.

“I’ll need your help, luv.”

Lenore nodded, uncertain. The teeth marks were bad, torn through flesh as the little monster had been ripped from him. She’d never attempted to heal anything this bad before and what of possible infection? Who knew what kind of decay rotted on those nasty little rat teeth? They’d have to look for any infection and pull it from him before it took hold.

“’Tis really not that bad.” Col attempted to get up.

Grandma was having none of that and pressed down on his shoulder to keep him in place, which, of course, was laughable with his size, but apparently he wasn’t the type to fight an old woman. “This is going to hurt. Lenore?”

Lenore nodded, not all that comfortable with doing this. What if she couldn’t? Her grandmother was already weakened from healing her. Who was she kidding? She was afraid of him, of falling into his essence again and this time not having the fortitude to leave him, especially after being with him while he was conscious, knowing how deeply he cared for people—how he hadn’t left her to the monsters or the yuppie gang. Plus, what would Grandma think? She’d see right through whatever this was that was going on between her and the Highlander. She didn’t understand it herself and she certainly wasn’t ready for that kind of scrutiny.

As though reading her misgivings, Grandma clasped Lenore’s hand and placed it on top of the bloodied shirt above Col’s heart. “I’ll guide you.”

Chapter Thirteen

The pain was undeniable. Col gritted his teeth against the tide and concentrated on the two women. Their hands were heavy upon the material of his shirt, warm as their healing magic entered him.
 

‘Twas a strange feeling. He’d endured healings before, of course. Many times. One didn’t live among a clan of magic wielders, the youngest doted upon member of the four sibling guardians, without the slightest broken arm or bruised head being focused upon by one of the several healers within the village.