A Highlander for Christmas Read Free Page B

his beloved abbey, but tonight the darkness held a scent of evil.
    There was something almost familiar about the fear rippling along his spine. Something that felt very … old.
    “Imagination,” he said sharply. “Too many nights of solitude.”
    At his feet, a figure slid from the darkness, gray body rising to keen amber eyes. A low meow drifted over the abbey’s walls.
    “So it calls to you too, my old friend? A stirring along the spine like whispers in a cold room?”
    The cat curled around Adrian’s booted feet, once and then again. His tail flicked sharply from side to side.
    “Somewhere to the north?” Adrian turned to face the shadows beyond the moat, his face hard as the weathered granite at his feet. “You can sense it?”
    The cat paced the roof and jumped to a stone parapet. There he stopped, his body frozen, just one more creature worked among the dozens of carvings.
    “What sounds? I hear nothing.” Adrian studied the patchwork of fields touched by moonlight. “It must be that feline imagination of yours.”
    Yet even as Adrian spoke, gossamer threads of sound drifted up to his ears. Haunting. Infinitely sad.
    And somehow familiar.
    Adrian’s strong hands closed. What trick was this? Who dared work such foul illusions here, in the heart of his beloved realm?
    The cat’s ears slid forward.
    Adrian caught the thought before it was complete. “The piper? Of course I remember, but—”
    This time the low notes were beyond ignoring. Faint and rich, they crossed the black fields and soared to the abbey’s cold roof.
    Adrian listened, unmoving, his face like night itself. “If the man has come back, she will soon follow.” The thought left him reeling. To remember now, after so long. To taste the pain of failure and cold betrayal.
    He had failed her then. They all had paid the bitter price.
    As if sensing his pain, the cat turned, amber eyes keen and bright. His liquid meow touched Adrian’s mind like warm fingers.
    “Thank you, my friend.” His voice was not steady for all his efforts. Grimly, the abbey ghost paced to the roof’s edge and stared down sixty feet and more to the shimmering line of the moat. For the first time he allowed himself to remember in full clarity, despite the pain it brought.
    By the stone wall the pair had met. In a past nearly too dim to recall, fate had cast their lives and hearts together. By the bright roses they had laughed and bent to their first sweet kiss. And there by the roses Adrian had failed them. Never mind that he’d had a different name then, a different form. His guilt was exactly the same.
    Pain wrapped about his heart. So much sadness. So much he would prefer not to remember. The old betrayals had never healed.
    And now they were coming back to his abbey, back to the dangers that had stalked them centuries before.
    The knowledge fell like the weight of the house itself, crushing down upon Adrian’s shoulders. He could not fail them again.
    Gradually, he grew aware of a shape at his hand. Blinking, he looked down to keen eyes and sleek gray fur. “So you see it all again, too. How they met. How their laughter rang over the green lawns, then stilled to far more than laughter. I should have known they would find joy in each other. He wooed her with his music and with his smile he broached her heart. Damnation, I should have guessed what would happen before it was too late…”
    The cat brushed hard against his tense fingers. The movement brought Adrian back to the chill night and the faint thread of sound drifting from the north.
    “Yes, we shall watch. Together as always, Gideon. Perhaps, with God’s help this time, we shall not detect the madman’s coils too late…”
    Together they stood, two shapes that might have been stone or yet no more than the fabric of shadows, while the haunting strain of the pipes rose around them, no more real than any other part of the abbey’s magic.
    And all the while something hard and dangerous waited in the