The Immortal Highlander
Page 95

“Your Books were right about many things,” he said coldly. “You know that. You knew it when you took me as your lover. You took me anyway.”
“You really don’t have a soul?” Of all he’d just told her, she found that the most unfathomable. How could it be? She couldn’t get her brain around it, not now that she knew him. Things that didn’t have souls were . . . well, evil, weren’t they? Adam wasn’t evil. He was a good man. Better than most, if not all, she’d ever met.
“Nope. No soul, Gabrielle. That’s me, Adam Black, iridescent-eyed, soulless, deadly fairy.”
Ouch, she’d said that to him once. Seemed a lifetime ago.
She stared into the fog for a time, driving on autopilot.
And she tried not to ask it, but she’d just begun to believe that maybe the Tuatha Dé weren’t quite so different from humans, only to find out that they were, and she couldn’t stop herself. She had to know how different. Precisely what she was dealing with. “Hearts? Do the Tuatha Dé have hearts?”
“No physiological equivalent.” Bored-now voice.
“Oh.” Upon discovering how erroneous so much of the O’Callaghan lore was, she’d pretty much ejected the bulk of it from her mind, tossed it out with her many preconceptions. But parts of it had been right after all. Big parts.
More driving. More silence.
You’re not falling for me, are you, Irish? he’d said.
And she’d had a minor meltdown because that was precisely the problem. She wasn’t falling. She’d fallen. As in, past tense. Way past tense. She was hopelessly in love with him. She’d been building a dream future for them inside her head, embellishing it with the tiniest and most tender of details.
Gwen and Chloe had been absolutely right, and Gabby’d known it herself, even then. Just hadn’t wanted to admit it. Just as she hadn’t wanted to admit that the reason she’d wanted so desperately to know why Morganna had refused the elixir was because Gabby had been secretly hoping that he would fall in love with her, too, she could become immortal, and they could love each other forever. They could have an eternal Happily-Ever-After.
But she wasn’t stupid. Ever since he’d told her about Morganna refusing the chance to live forever, she’d known there had to be a catch. Just hadn’t known what a whopper of a catch it was.
Immortality and the immortal soul are incompatible.
Though she’d never considered herself a particularly religious person, she was deeply spiritual, and the soul was, well . . . the sacred essence of a person, the imprint of self, the source of one’s capacity for goodness, for love. It was what was reborn again and again on one’s journey to evolve. A soul was the inner divine, the very breath of God.
And his elixir of life reeked of Faustian overtones: Here, take this and you can live forever, for the small price of your immortal soul. She could almost smell the acrid brimstone of hellfire. Hear the rustle of unholy contracts scribed on thick, yellowed parchments, signed in blood. Feel the breeze from the leathery flapping of winged Hunters coming to collect.
She shivered. She didn’t count herself a superstitious person, yet it got to her on a visceral level. Made her blood run cold.
A soft bitter laugh cut into her thoughts. “Not interested in living forever, Gabrielle? Not liking the terms?”
Oh, that tone was like nothing she’d ever heard him use. Wicked, cynical, twisted. A voice truly befitting the blackest Fae.
She glanced at him.
And sucked in a sharp breath.
He looked utterly devilish, his black eyes bottomless, ancient, cold. Nostrils flared, lips curled in something only a fool might call a smile. He was, at that moment, every inch an inhuman Fae prince, otherworldly, dangerous. This, she realized, was the face of the Sin Siriche Du; the face her ancestors had glimpsed on long-ago battlefields, as he’d watched the brutal slaughter, smiling.
“Didn’t think so.” Silky sarcasm dripped from that deep, strangely accented voice.
A dozen thoughts collided in her mind and she floundered mentally, trying to figure out where to step next in this conversation that had started out so innocuously, only to become such a quagmire.
He looked so remote, so detached, as if nothing could touch him, as if nothing she could say would matter anyway. And a little doubt niggled at her: Was this, then, how he was when he was fully Tuatha Dé?
She couldn’t believe that. She wouldn’t believe that. She knew him. He was a good man.
Leap, Gabby, an inner voice whispered. Tell him how you feel. Throw it all on the line.