The Dark Highlander
Page 54

Cautiously, when Dageus turned his back to him and busied himself opening a new bottle of whisky, Drustan reached out with his Druid senses, curious to know more about what they were dealing with.
He nearly doubled over. The whisky he’d sipped, curdled in his gut and tried to claw its way back up.
He retracted instantly, frantically, violently. By Amergin, how did Dageus stand it? A monstrous, icy, rapacious beast pulsed beneath his skin, snaking through him, coiled, but barely. It had a fierce, gluttonous appetite. It was huge and twisted and suffocating. How could he breathe?
Dageus turned, one brow arched, his gaze icy. “Never do that again,” he warned softly. Without bothering to ask, he poured Drustan a refill.
Drustan snatched it from his hand and tossed it back swiftly. Only after the heat of it had exploded in his chest, did he trust himself to speak. He’d not kept his senses open long enough to explore the thing. His throat constricted by whisky and shock, he said hoarsely, “How did you know I was doing it? I scarce even—”
“I felt you. So did they. You doona want them to. Leave them alone.”
“Aye,” Drustan rasped. He hadn’t needed the warning; he had no intention of opening his senses around his brother again. “Are they different personalities, Dageus?” he forced out.
“Nay. They have no separateness, no voice.” As yet, Dageus thought darkly. He suspected the day might well come when they found a voice. The moment Drustan had reached out, they’d stirred, sensing power, and for a moment he’d had the terrible suspicion that what was in him could drain Drustan, suck him dry somehow.
“So, it’s not as if you can actually hear them?”
“ ’Tis—och, how can I explain this?” Dageus fell silent a moment, then said, “I feel them inside me, their knowledge as my own, their hunger as my own. It intensifies my desire for even simple things such as food and drink, to say nothing of women. There’s a constant temptation to use magic and the more I use it, the colder I feel. The colder I feel, the more reasonable it seems to use it, and the stronger my desires become. I suspect there’s a line that, should I cross, I will no longer be myself. This thing inside me will take over. I doona know what would happen to me then. I think I would be gone.”
Drustan inhaled sharply. He could see a man being devoured by such a thing.
“My thought patterns change. They become primitive. Naught matters but what I want.”
“But you’ve controlled it this long.” How? Drustan marveled. How did a man survive with such a thing in him?
“ ’Tis more difficult here. ’Tis why I left in the first place. What did Da tell you to do, Drustan?”
“He told me to save you. And we will.” He deliberately omitted the last line of their father’s letter. And if you cannot save him, you must kill him. Now he knew why.
Dageus searched his gaze intently, as if not convinced that was the entirety of what Silvan had said. Drustan knew he was about to push, so he launched an offensive of his own.
“What of the lass you brought? How much does she know?” Though he was amazed that Dageus could still feel anything at all with that inside him, he’d not missed the possessiveness in Dageus’s gaze, or the reluctance with which he’d left her in Gwen’s care.
“Chloe knows me as naught more than a man.”
“She doesn’t feel it in you?” Lucky lass, Drustan thought.
“She senses something. She watches me strangely at times, as if perplexed.”
“And how long do you think you’ll be able to maintain the pretense?”
“Christ, Drustan, give a man a moment to catch his breath, will you?”
“Do you plan to tell her?”
“How?” Dageus asked flatly. “Och, lass, I’m a Druid from the sixteenth century and I broke an oath and now I’m possessed by the souls of four-thousand-year-old evil Druids and if I doona find a way to get rid of them I will turn into a scourge upon the earth and the only thing that keeps me sane is tooping?”
“What?” Drustan blinked. “What was that about tooping?”
“It makes the darkness ease. When I begin to feel cold and detached, for some reason bedding a wench makes me feel human again. Naught else seems to work.”
“Ah, that’s why you brought her.”
Dageus gave him a dark look. “She resists.”
Drustan choked on a swallow of whisky. Dageus needed tooping to keep that heinous beast at bay, yet he’d brought a woman with him who refused his bed? “Why haven’t you seduced her?” he exclaimed.