The Highlander (Victorian Rebels Book 3)

The Highland woods were a mystical place on any given night, but to Mena, Samhain had taken on a distinct dreamlike quality. An iridescent mist crept in from the sea and settled on the soft floor of the forest. The dense fog, turned an eerie shade of blue by the moonlight and some unexplainable force of nature, carried the scent of loamy brine and evergreens.

Mena’s skirts displaced the vapor as she picked her way through the thickest parts of undergrowth, wondering just where she should pause.

And wait for him to come for her.

Dear Lord, what was she doing? It had been easy enough to look deep into Liam’s dark eyes and to drown in the desire she saw burning there. To let the scent of him arouse and intoxicate her. Soap, whisky, autumn spices, and that masculine essence that was so unique to him. The one that told her she was safe.

Or that she wasn’t.

Whatever it was, she knew that scent—her soul knew it—and she’d inhaled him deep, as though she could hold a memory in the most minuscule fibers of her body, like she could a breath.

How a man like him could seduce her so easily, so absolutely, still astounded her. He was an enigma. A man with a great deal of sense and the temper of a demon. A good man with a frightening past. A violent man with a wish for peace.

It was the paradox that drew her. He was a puzzle, a complication, someone whom she didn’t understand and who was not at all like her but who, in his own way, arrived at the very same conclusions she did. About many things.

It worried her how incompatible they were.

It amazed her how perfect they were for each other.

Liam was a hero who’d come to hate himself for the sins of his past, and she was a refugee with a secret shame. How fitting that they should find redemption in each other’s arms.

And passion, one couldn’t forget that.

She’d never known a man with such passion. Riddled with so much fathomless need. She’d never been the object of such ardent, fervent attentions. Mena shivered more from the memory of his touch than the chill in the air. Some womanly instinct whispered that the passion he’d shown her thus far was merely the surface of a roiling volcano. The pressure was building, boiling, and churning the air between them until it’d reached the point of eruption. There was simply no containing it anymore.

No denying it. He was relentless, the Demon Highlander. He would not be resisted. He would not be deterred. And Mena was tired. In the absolute way that even her bones felt tired of supporting not just her body, but the weight she carried within her soul. Tired of pretending not to want him, tired of fearing what may occur in the morning. And above all, tired of being alone and afraid.

There was going to be a moment when she regretted the decision to surrender to Liam Mackenzie. But tonight was not that night, and this moment was not that moment.

Mena stumbled upon a small clearing. As she drifted into it, soft mosses cushioned her boots, muffling the sound of her footfalls. A rock the length of a tall man leaned against two shorter, hulking stones in such a way, it reminded Mena of an altar that she’d seen in one of the Great Hall tapestries.

This was the place.

The moonlight slanted down on the tiny glen, lending its azure magic to the enchanted atmosphere of the site. Mena felt every bit the sacrificial virgin being led to meet her fate at the hands of some demanding god. The altar would be the perfect spot to make herself into an offering.

Virgin or not.

For if ever a pagan deity roamed the earth, he surely would take the form of Liam Mackenzie.

A ripple of anticipation seized her, followed by a chill of apprehension, and the mist seemed to respond, swirling as though scattered by a form much bigger and stronger than she. His name escaped her lips on a husky whisper, and she turned to greet Liam, her would-be lover.

Red eyes stared back at her from a face so hideously disfigured, that revulsion rose just as suddenly as terror. Both reactions closed her throat against a scream.

The Brollachan.

He wore no hood this time, no cloak to cover the horror that was his face. The creature had no nose to protect the two dark slits beneath the bridge between his eyes. A gleaming web of flesh dripped down the right side of his head. The left was oddly flat, as though he’d lain on one side for an eternity, and the skin had decided to melt in that direction after a time.

“How sad, lass, that ye didna heed my warning,” the demon hissed from behind lips that couldn’t really close, and thereby didn’t deserve the distinction. “For now, I fear, it is too late.

The demon seized her, and the scream of fright turned into a cry of pain as he wrenched her around and yanked her neck to the side. He pressed her back against his chest, as he twisted one arm painfully behind her in a brutal hold.

“Scream all ye like, lass,” he hissed, drawing another desperate sound from her throat as he pulled on her arm hard enough for pain to rip through her shoulder. “Yer screams are just what he wanted to hear tonight. And we should oblige the Demon Highlander, should we not?” An unmistakable metallic grind was as loud as any scream to her ear. Mena knew what that sound meant before she felt the kiss of his unsheathed dagger beneath her neck.

Frozen against the very hard, very real body of the specter who’d stalked the shadows of Ravencroft Keep since she’d arrived, an absurd question permeated the cold terror coursing through her.

What would a demon need with a blade?

Now that Mena knew he wanted her to scream, to summon Liam, she pressed her lips together. The hold he had on her arm wasn’t immobilizing, but the dagger point he held beneath her throat certainly was.

She found it a mercy that she didn’t have to look at him, that his horrific features wouldn’t be the last thing she saw in this world.

“He’s not coming for me,” she lied, hating how small and frightened her voice made her sound. “You’re mistaken. He remained at the festival.”

It was the dark chuckle that confirmed to Mena who he was. Rough, caustic, full of rasping masculinity and devoid of any humor. Only three other men on this earth had ever made a sound like that.

Liam Mackenzie, Gavin St. James, and Dorian Blackwell.

Brothers.

“Hamish,” Mena whispered. “You’re alive?”

“And ye’re a clever sort.” His serpentine head lowered so that she could hear the slight whistle of air through the pitiable slits in the center of his face. “Though not so clever as ye think if you consider this a life.”

The blade against her throat radiated the chill of the evening, paradoxically burning against the soft, tender skin of her throat. Mena was terrified, but felt oddly detached. A frigid chill that put the ice baths to shame washed over her, but instead of seizing her mind with those fingers of ice, it somehow liberated her.

She’d survived violence before. She’d been struck, threatened, choked, and terrorized. Somehow, through it all, she’d learned to keep her head in a dangerous situation. To cycle through the fear and pain threatening to cloud her thoughts, and pluck from the nebula of knowledge, instead.

Her newfound strength would be priceless in this situation.

Mena knew she wasn’t his true quarry, that she was a means to an end. Which could prove to be her salvation, unless she proved to be useless to him. First she must ascertain what his motives were, and then she could formulate a plan.

“That night I thought I dreamed of you.” A chill speared her at the memory, and she had to straighten her spine to keep it at bay. “You were in my bedroom?”

“I tried to warn ye then, woman,” he confirmed. “I told ye to run. I had revenge to reap and ye were in my way. I regret it had to come to this.”

“It still doesn’t have to,” Mena ventured. “You said that night that Liam promised you something. That you felt he owed you.”

“He does owe me,” Hamish insisted, his pressure tightening on her neck, the blade biting into the soft skin right beneath her chin.

“What?” The question sounded shrill and desperate, even to her. “What did he promise you? I’m certain he’ll give it, he’s a man of his word.”

A crack sounded in the woods beyond the feeble reach of the moon. The snap of a tree limb, perhaps?

Mena’s heart caught. Could it be Liam? She both desired and dreaded the sight of his sinister features.

Hamish had heard it, as well.

“I know ye’re out there, brother.” That terrible, almost beautiful laugh vibrated the air around them, and seemed to even disturb the mists now rising past their knees and inching up their thighs as though meaning to swallow them.

“How quick yer woman is to defend ye,” he taunted. “I wonder, Miss Lockhart, if ye would still think so highly of him if ye’d ever seen him as I have. Bathed in the blood of his quarry, drunk on his own rage, the indiscriminate killer. The Demon Highlander.”

A shadow moved in the trees, and Hamish brandished her at the night like a shield.

“Come forward and I spill her blood!” he called, tucking the knife tighter against her, this time nicking the skin. “Stay out there and I’ll spill yer secrets. Ye decide, Liam.”

His hand released her arm from behind her, sliding up her spine with sickening lethargy. Mena didn’t dare move; the blade at her throat rendered her an absolute prisoner.

His hand wrenched her neck to the side so she could no longer scan the tree line in front of them, only the inky darkness that led down to the western sea.

“Ye decide!” He laughed again, this time maniacally. “Either way she dies.”

*   *   *

At the sound of Mena’s scream, Liam had dropped low into the mist and pulled his dirk from his boot. The blood that simmered with the heat of anticipatory arousal instantly boiled with the lust for vengeance.

His predatory instincts flared, and he prowled forward with all the sleek stealth of a wolf, hungry to rip out the throat of an enemy.

But the blood he would spill was blood he shared.

Hamish.

Skirting the moonlit clearing, Liam ducked errant tree branches and navigated his way through the mist. He processed a multitude of terrors as fast as his disbelieving eyes allowed.

His brother, alive. A scarred mass of rage and retribution. He had Mena. Held a dagger to her throat.

Fury threatened to smother all sense of reason or thought. Primal instinct screamed at him to attack, to lunge forward and slash at his brother until nothing was left of the monster but bones and carnage.

But Mena would never make it, Liam knew. Hamish was a terror with a blade.

Almost as good as Liam, himself.

Moving as close as he dared, Liam conducted a quick assessment of Mena. Moonlight turned her hair into waves of dark crimson, the color of spilled blood. Her porcelain features glowed with an ethereal purity. Through the mist and the darkness, he couldn’t tell if she was injured. Something had made her scream, and there had been pain in the sound. That fact tortured him with a violence he’d never thought possible.

Her voice wavered as she spoke, but there was a calm to it, an evenness that he hung all his hope for salvation on.

Somewhere to the east, the sound of a twig snapping rang through the forest like a cannon blast.

“I know ye’re out there, brother!” Hamish had screamed, as Liam maneuvered to the west, away from the sound, never allowing his head to rise above the line of the gathering mist.

His dirk felt solid in his hand, every bit as sharp and lethal as Hamish’s, but it was useless until he found exactly the right time. He could try to get Hamish from behind, but then he’d lose sight of Mena, and thereby wouldn’t know when to strike.

Then he heard the words that instantly turned his blood from molten iron to shards of ice in his veins.

“Either way, she dies.”

Hamish had no intention of setting her free.

For the first time in his adult life, abject terror threatened to paralyze him. Why Mena? Why now? Hamish had been a morally corrupt man over the course of his life, but then, he’d had to be. Liam had always known that. He was a bastard, the eldest son who would inherit nothing from their father but a taste for blood and fear.

Liam had to calculate the strategy of his next move perfectly, because he would die before Mena became another casualty of his many sins.

Using a trick he’d learned from a Turkish puppeteer, Liam flattened his back against the trunk of an old elm and threw his voice across the meadow, making it seem to vault off the tree line in the east.

“Let her go, Hamish,” he said. “She has nothing to do with this business between us.”

His ruse was successful. Hamish’s neck whipped in the direction Liam had hoped it would.

“We do have business, Liam.” Hamish said his name as though it were a rotten thing on his tongue that he needed to spit out. “Ye didna keep yer end of the bargain. Ye were supposed to die on the battlefield. To leave Ravencroft to me.”

“I tried.” Liam volleyed his voice farther this time, hoping to get Hamish to turn toward it.

He might be trying to distract his brother long enough for him to take the knife from Mena’s throat, but he also spoke the truth. He’d set everything up perfectly to make reparations upon the event of his inevitable demise.

Hamish would overtake Ravencroft Keep and the distillery, and the Wester Ross lands would be kept in trust for Andrew when Hamish died. Rhianna and Andrew would go to London to live with their maternal grandmother, Lady Eloise Gleason, a kindly old woman who was very fond of her tragically ill only daughter’s children. Andrew would become marquess, and would maintain all London holdings.

But Hamish had been killed in that ship explosion, or so everyone had assumed, and Liam had proven damnably hard to exterminate. His recklessness only brought him glory.

“They were supposed to hate ye,” Hamish hissed. “The clan was supposed to think ye cursed by the Brollachan, to turn against ye. But despite my best efforts, it seems ye truly have made some deal with the devil.”

“The fire in the fields and the toppled barrel at the distillery,” Liam realized aloud. “That was ye?”

“Thwarted by a rainstorm and a bit of luck,” Hamish spat. “And it was a pure miracle that carriage didna tumble down the Bealach na Bá with a shorn linchpin.”

“Ye put innocent people in harm’s way just to get yer revenge,” Liam growled. For that he would pay.

“Doona let this so-called Demon Highlander play the hero for yer benefit.” His bastard older brother almost sounded gleeful as he addressed Mena. “Innocent lives have never meant much to either of us. We are similar creatures with different predilections.”

“I was never like ye.” Liam’s hard voice echoed around the glen now, before it dissipated through the canopy of trees.

“Nonsense, whatever monstrous things Father neglected to teach me, ye filled in the spaces,” Hamish said conversationally. “Doona ye remember the things ye said? That open battle is effective for casualties, but that the battles we wage with terror gain us even greater results. That the personal kill is the most satisfying. Ye taught me that if ye snap a bone just right, it makes a clean, crisp sound that ye can feel ricochet in yer own skeleton. Ye taught me that ye attain glory on the battlefield, but to gain true infamy, ye attack at dinner, or a party. Or maybe when yer enemy is putting their children to bed … Or … making love.” Hamish bared his teeth from behind those hideously disfigured lips, and made as though he were going to bite into Mena’s bare shoulder.

“Ye’re wrong.” Liam battled the desperation threatening to creep into his tone, convinced his brother’s injuries, and his hatred, had tainted his memory. “Ye’re confused,” he corrected as evenly as he could. “That was his grace, Lord Trenwyth. I was the demon on the battlefield, he was the phantom in the darkness. It was always thus.”

“Collin Talmage, the sodding Duke of Trenwyth.” Hamish spat into the mist. “I’ll settle that score once I’m through here.”

Liam didn’t take the time to wonder what his brother meant. His every thought, every molecule in his body, was focused on Mena. “Let her go,” Liam had meant to cajole, but it escaped as a command. “I’ll trade ye across, my life for hers. I’ll take ye to Trenwyth if ye want.”

Hamish made a snide sound of victory. “Why this sudden weakness for women?” he sneered. “Could kill yer own father in cold blood, and whip a whore to death. But watching the English bitch die will break ye?”

Liam closed his eyes for a brief moment, unable to bring himself to face the look of horror and terror Mena must be wearing. That alone would break him. He wouldn’t survive her loss. Not the part of him that was human, anyhow. Liam somehow knew that seeing her blood would turn him into the monster he’d spent forty years trying not to become.

He didn’t miss her sharp gasp, though, and neither did Hamish. Now she knew his darkest secrets, the two main reasons his soul was eternally damned.

It started with Tessa McGrath, and patricide had sealed his eternal fate.

He’d killed his own father, left his brother for dead, and helplessly allowed his mad wife to take her own life.

He truly did destroy those closest to him.

But he’d die before letting the woman he loved fall prey to his demon curse.

“Father deserved to die for what he did.” Liam had forgotten to misdirect his voice that time, and Hamish’s head swiveled in his direction. “For what he forced us to do.”

*   *   *

Mena’s calm had deserted her. She’d become a shivering pile of liquid bones and frozen blood. Only the blade at her throat and the monster behind her kept her from dissolving into a puddle of panic and soaking into the marshy ground.

Liam seemed to be everywhere at once. First to the east, and then in the shadows where her imprisoned gaze was trained to the west.

He’d offered himself for her. Mena’s heart swelled at the fervency in his voice. A part of her wished Hamish would take the offer. That he’d toss her away. But in her heart, she knew that she’d never be able to live with herself if she’d had any hand in Liam’s demise. His children needed him. His clan and kin relied on his leadership.

She, however, could disappear into the mist and none would be the wiser. She had no family but the one who had locked her away. A handful of people would mourn her tragedy, hold their loved ones closer, and then move on.

Hamish’s words pulled her from her encroaching despondency.

Liam had whipped a woman … and killed his own evil father. Dear God. She’d assumed it was any number of heinous war crimes that haunted him. Or the circumstances of Hamish’s death. But no, Liam hadn’t only killed people in the name of queen and country, he’d committed murder.

Her breath caught as she considered his answer. What had the elder Hamish Mackenzie done to incur Liam’s wrath?

“It was one tavern slut, Liam, and she was paid handsomely for her services.” Hamish almost moved the hand with the blade at her throat, as though he wanted to make a frustrated gesture. Remembering himself, he tightened his hold on her, repositioning the dagger in a more dangerous place than before.

Mena would have whimpered, but she refrained, fearing that even the slightest swallow would impale her upon its point.

“No amount of money could prove recompense for what he made us do to her.” Even through the confines of her own terror, Mena wept for the hollow shame in Liam’s voice. Wept for the poor girl and the humiliations that were too awful even for the Demon Highlander to lend them words. The hot tears scalded her chilly skin and ran down the cold blade.

“He was turning us into men,” Hamish spat.

“He was turning us into monsters.”

“I still doona see why ye felt ye had to do away with him,” Hamish expounded. “Ye canna really rape a whore, can ye? Besides, ye were weak even then. Ye couldna go through with it.”

Hearing that caused a tear of relief to join the steady trickle of moisture from Mena’s eyes.

“I found her body in Bryneloch Bog.” Liam’s temper was overcoming his caution; she could tell by the heat in his voice. “Ye know he murdered her to keep her silent, so she wouldna stir the clan against him.”

“That’s what’s always been wrong with ye, Liam. Ye think that her insignificant life was worth the death of a great man.”

“He was an evil man,” Liam snarled. “He killed innocent people. His own clan.”

Hamish scoffed at that. “All great men do evil things.”

“Ye’re wrong.”

“How would ye know? Ye’re neither a great man nor a righteous one. But ye’re not famous for yer good deeds, are ye?”

The darkness was silent for several heartbeats. Hamish’s taunt had hit its mark.

“What about Dougan?” Liam’s soft, tortured question barely traversed the distance between them. “Father ordered the death of his own son.”

“Dougan was just as much a monster as any of us. Worse, I’d wager. He murdered a bloody priest before he saw the age of fifteen.”

Mena’s heart bled. She wanted to tell Liam that she still thought he was a good man. A great man. That she was glad his father had answered for all the vicious, unspeakable things he did. She hesitated because it seemed that Hamish had all but forgotten her. His hold didn’t waver, but he no longer seemed to be focused on her death.

“One would think, dear brother, that ye ought to have more sympathy for our father’s bastards.” Gavin St. James startled both Mena and Hamish as he strode into the clearing from the east, looking relaxed as you please. “Seeing as ye are one.”

“Sod off, Thorne,” Hamish snarled. Every muscle in his mangled body tensed, and Mena cried out as his grip on the back of her neck tightened. He blessedly took the knife he held beneath Mena’s chin and brandished it at Gavin. “I should have smothered ye the second yer wretched mother whelped ye into this—”

Mena heard the slight whoosh of air as the dagger left the shadows, twirling end over end until it whirled by her ear.

Hamish screamed as it found its mark, and Mena was released just in time to duck as the Demon Highlander rose from the mist, leaped to the altar rock, and vaulted for his brother.