The Immortal Highlander Read Free

enough sleep last night.” Or, “Wow, I shouldn’t have had that second (or third or fourth) beer with lunch.” If all else failed, they settled for a simple “I must have imagined it.”
    How she longed for such oblivion!
    She shook her head and tried to console herself with the thought that at least the fairy had been convinced and was gone. She was safe. For now.
    The way Gabby figured it, the Fae were responsible for ninety-nine percent of the problems in her life. She’d take responsibility for the other one percent, but
they
were the reason her life this summer had been one crisis after another.
They
were the reason she’d begun to dread leaving her house, never knowing where one might pop up, or how badly it might startle her. Or what kind of ass she’d make of herself, trying to regroup.
They
were the reason her boyfriend had broken up with her fifteen days, three hours, and—she glanced broodingly at her watch—forty-two minutes ago.
    Gabrielle O’Callaghan harbored a special and very personal hatred for the Fae.
    “I don’t see you. I don’t see you,” she muttered beneath her breath as two mouthwatering fairy males strolled past the hood of her car. She averted her gaze, caught herself, then angled the rearview mirror and pretended to be fussing with her lipstick.
    Never look away too sharply,
her grandmother, Moira O’Callaghan, had always cautioned.
You must act natural. You must learn to let your gaze slide over them without either hitching or pulling away too abruptly, or they’ll know you know. And they’ll take you. You must never betray that you can see them. Promise me, Gabby. I can’t lose you!
    Gram had seen them, too, these creatures other people couldn’t see. Most of the women on her mom’s side did, though sometimes the “gift” skipped generations. As it had with her mom, who’d moved to Los Angeles years ago (like the people in California were less weird than fairies), leaving then–seven-year-old Gabrielle behind with Gram “until she got settled.” Jilly O’Callaghan had never gotten settled.
    Why couldn’t it have skipped me?
Gabby brooded. A normal life was all she’d ever wanted.
    And proving damned difficult to have, even in boring Cincinnati. Gabby was beginning to think that living in the Tri-State—the geographical convergence of Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky—was a bit like living at the mystical convergence of Sunnydale’s Hellmouth.
    Except the Midwest didn’t get demons and vampires—oh, no—they got fairies: dangerously seductive, inhuman, arrogant creatures that would take her and do God-only-knew-what to her if they ever figured out that she could see them.
    Her family history was riddled with tales of ancestors who’d been captured by the dreaded Fae Hunters and never seen again. Some of the tales claimed they were swiftly and brutally killed by the savage Hunters, others that they were forced into slavery to the Fae.
    She had no idea what actually became of those foolish enough to be taken, but she knew one thing for certain: She had no intention of
ever
finding out.
     
    Later Gabby would realize that it was all the cup of coffee’s fault. Every awful thing that happened to her from that moment on could be traced directly back to that cup of coffee with the stunning simplicity of an airtight conditional argument: If not for
A
(said cup of coffee), then not
B
(blowing job interview), hence not
C
(having to go into work that night), and certainly not
D
(the horrible thing that happened to her there) . . . on to infinity.
    It really wasn’t fair that such a trivial, spur-of-the-moment, seemingly harmless decision such as taking an iced coffee to-go could change the entire course of a girl’s life.
    Not that she didn’t hold the fairy significantly culpable, but studying law had taught her to isolate the critical catalyst so one could argue culpability, and the simple facts were that if she hadn’t had the cup of coffee in her hand, she