Page 13 of To Wed a Highlander
Sobering thought, that.
She reverently extracted a tome that appeared ancient, even by his standards. The leather was too light to be animal, too thin to be sea creature, and tinted in only a way that a man who’d seen as much death ashewould recognize.
Tannedhumanskin.
Blue wodish runes swirled in sacred spirals around the corners of the book and stretched toward the center in tribal arcs. There, in a script long forgotten, was a name he couldn’t read written in a language far too ancient to still be uttered by a living soul.
Perhaps the first language of the first man. Or maybe the language of the Gods.
A kiss of power and lust touched the base of his spine, thrilling through his darker urges with the innate greed of man. This book wasn’t exactly good, but neither could he call the feeling evil. Just potent on a scale he’d never before contemplated.
She handled it with reverence and not a little bit of misgiving, and opened its pages with the appropriate care. “This is the Doomsday Grimoire,” she explained. “It is the book from which all other holy books were produced.”
Niall’s eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “Even—”
“Allof them,” she nodded solemnly.
“Contained within these pages is every prophecy, truth, mythology, and spell known to mankind.” She caressed a page with suspiciously russet calligraphy that could have been ink, but was mostly likely dried blood.
Niall swallowed, truly feeling for the first time the direness of their situation.
“You see, the Goddess lends her power to three Druids of de Moray every generation. It has been thus since the evolution of man.”
“Evolution?”
Kenna waved her hand, as though to signal that was for another conversation and continued. “We are wielders of the four elements and keepers of the seasons. For example, Malcolm is Earth and Spring, I am Summer and Fire, and Morgana is Autumn and Water. You may note the absence of Air and Winter, and that is because the Goddess decided that four elemental Druids on the earth at once would be too much power for us mortals to wield, even though we’re wielding them onherbehalf.”
“You said the Wyrd sisters were de Morays,” he prompted with a growing sense of dread.
She nodded, as though pleased he understood which direction she lead him. “The most terrifying, powerful, and inevitable prediction is the Doomsday Prophecy, itself.” She laid her hand on a page, reading a passage from a long paragraph scrawled in tiny symbols, her husky voice layered with the veracity of divination.
“Verily, when four elements are born to one house and are behind one gate, the seven seals will break. The first, Conquest, on his white horse with a crown. The second, War, on his red horse with his sword. Pestilence is third, on his black horse with his scales of balance. And finally, Death on his pale horse and he shall bring with him the might of the Underworld.” She paused, taking in a shuddering breath and rubbing her arms. When the four Druids wield together from the Grimoire, they will hear thunder, the heavens will weep, the earth will tremble, the air will burn, and the rest of the seals will be broken, one by one.”
Niall’s own hairs lifted with trepidation. “Don’t stop there.” He chuckled, if only to let the air out of his burning lungs. “It was just getting good.”
“The fifth seal has to do with raising an army of the dead,” she continued. “An army of the slain innocent, the burned witches, and the wrongly executed to reap their vengeance upon the world. The sixth is elemental devastation as wrought by the four horsemen. You know, civil unrest, earthquakes, plague, war, dark suns, the moon dripping with blood— that whole bit. And then…” She looked up, her eyes swimming with moisture that comes from the shiver of truth.
“And then?” Niall asked breathlessly.
“Thereckoning.”
The ominous word speared his blood with ice.
“What reckoning?”
She shook her head. “It does not say, but I imagine with all that precedes it, it cannot be pleasant.” Her eyes found his and they shared a desperate look. “Like I said before, the Wyrd sisters are of the de Moray line. They’re of our house, so to speak. And with them is the witch Badb, and her element is Air and her season winter. You see, they’ve been after the Grimoire for two hundred years. It is their plan to set the apocalypse into motion, and now that there is an Earth Druid, Malcolm, that makes usfour.
“When we realized King Duncan was dead and Morgana captured, Malcolm sent me away on his fastest horse. We knew the Wyrd sisters were after himandthe book, and that we weren’t powerful enough to fight them just yet. If they caught both Malcolm and the Grimoire in one place, all would be lost. So we decided I was to hide with the book somewhere the Wyrd sisters would never look, and as long as I didn’t use fire magick, they couldn’t find me.” Her eyes became sad, tortured, and a desperate pain lodged in Niall’s chest. “I’d heard that Macbeth had given Malcolm to the Wyrd sisters in exchange for the throne. I think they did terrible things to him. He didn’t look the same…”
“And so when you used fire to save a bunch of thankless nuns from my Berserker…” Niall trailed off as a lead weight settled in his belly, realizing the true cost of his actions. He’d unwittingly set in motion the end of the world.
Well… Fuck.
His people had been raiders for generations. They celebrated the strong and preyed upon the weak. It was the way of nature. The way of the world. The strong survived, thrived,deservedto be here. The weak were culled and pillaged, preyed upon. But as he looked at his stalwart little mate, he realized that power came in many forms, and that he had a lot to think about.
The first consideration being that Kenna de Moray washismate. More to the point, he was hers.
And if he had to stop the fucking Apocalypse to get her to accept him, then so be it.
