Spell of the Highlander
Page 9

He stepped away from the door, moved deeper into the room. “I understand it was delivered this past Friday. Has anyone else seen it?”
Jessi thought a moment, shook her head. “I don’t think so. The deliverymen opened it up, but other than that, just me. Why?”
He glanced around the office. “There’s been no cleaning crew in since then? No other persons such as yourself with a key?”
Jessi frowned, perplexed by the direction of his questions. And getting irked that he wasn’t answering any of hers. “No. The cleaners come on Wednesdays and the only reason I have a key is because I’m Professor Keene’s assistant.”
“I see.” He eased forward another step.
And that was when Jessi felt it.
Menace. Rolling off him. She’d not picked up on it right away, disarmed by his good looks, curious about the artifact, peripherally distracted by her own brooding. But it was there—a wolf beneath the sheep’s clothing. For all his seeming civility, there was something cold and dangerous beneath that elegant suit. And it was focused on her.
Why? It didn’t make any sense!
And suddenly the tiny niggling detail that had eluded her when she’d turned the key in the door swam up from the murky waters of her subconscious: It had already been unlocked! He must have been inside the office, concealing himself behind the door when she’d pushed it open!
Keep him talking, she thought, fighting panic. She drew a careful, deep breath. Adrenaline was kicking in, upping her heart rate, making her hands and legs feel shaky. She concentrated on betraying no sign of her belated recognition of danger. Surprise might be the only advantage she had. Somewhere in the office was something she could use as a weapon, something more threatening than a book. She just had to get her hands on it before he figured out she was on to him. She snatched a surreptitious glance to her right.
Yes! Just as she’d thought, there lay one of the professor’s replica blades on a nearby curio table. Though a reproduction piece, fashioned of steel not gem-encrusted gold, it was every bit as lethal as the real thing.
“So how old is the mirror, anyway?” she asked, donning her best wide-eyed, I’m-not-the-brightest-bulb-in-the-box look.
He moved again. Smooth, like a well-muscled animal. A few more steps and he’d be past the desk. She eased right a tad.
It seemed he was pondering whether or not to answer her for a moment, then he shrugged. “You would probably place it in the Old Stone Age.”
Jessi sucked in a breath and for just a moment, the briefest of instants, fear fell by the wayside. The Old Stone Age? Was he kidding?
Wait—of course he was. He had to be! It was patently impossible. The earliest forms of writing, cuneiform and hieroglyphics, weren’t even in existence until the mid to end of the fourth century B.C.E.! And those etchings on the mirror were some kind of writing.
“Ha, ha. I’m not that stupid.” Well, today, she ceded dismally, she certainly seemed to be, on just about all fronts, but normally she wasn’t. Normally she suffered only one or two stupid fronts, not this all-encompassing, blanket idiocy. “That would put it at pre-ten-thousand B.C.E.,” she scoffed, as she stole a few more inches. Had he noticed what she was doing? If so, he was giving no indication.
“Yes, indeed it would. Considerably ‘pre.’ ” He took another step forward.
She considered screaming but she was nearly certain there was no one else in the south wing this late at night, and suspected it would be wiser to conserve her energy to defend herself with. “Okay, I’ll go with this a minute,” she said, inching, inching. Just a little farther. Keep him talking. Dare she make a leap for it? “You’re claiming the frame is from the Old Stone Age. Right? And the carvings were added later, and the mirror inserted in the last century or so.”
“No. The entire piece, in sum, Old Stone Age.”
Her jaw dropped. She snapped her mouth closed, but it fell open again. She searched his face, detected no sign of jest. “Impossible! Symbols aside, that’s a glass mirror!”
He laughed softly. “Not . . . quite. Nothing about an Unseelie piece is ever . . . quite what it seems.”
“‘An Unseelie piece’?” she echoed blankly. “I’m not familiar with that classification.” Her fingers curled, she braced herself to dive for the blade, doing a mental five-count . . . four . . . three . . .
“Not many are. It denotes relics few ever see and live to tell of. Ancient Hallows fashioned by those darkest among the Tuatha Dé Danaan.” He paused the space of a heartbeat. “Don’t worry, Jessica St. James—”