The Immortal Highlander Read Free Page A

wouldn’t have dropped it, wouldn’t have splattered Ms. Temple, wouldn’t have made an ass of herself, and wouldn’t have lost all hope of landing her dream job.
    If not for the cup of coffee, the fairy would have had no reason to turn and look back at her, and she would have had no reason to panic. Life would have rolled smoothly on. With the promise of that coveted second interview, she would have gone out celebrating with her girlfriends that night.
    But because of that nefarious cup of coffee, she didn’t go out. She went home, took a long bubble bath, had a longer cry, then later that evening, when she was certain the office would be empty and she wouldn’t have to field humiliating questions from her fellow interns, she drove back downtown to catch up on work. She was behind by a whopping nineteen arbitration cases, which, now that she didn’t have a different job lined up, mattered.
    And because of that calamitous cup of coffee, she was in a bad mood and not paying attention as she parallel-parked in front of her office building, and she didn’t notice the dark, dangerous-looking fairy stepping from the shadows of the adjacent alley.
    If not for the stupid cup of coffee, she wouldn’t have even
been
there.
    And that was when things took a diabolical turn from bad to worse.

2
    Adam Black raked a hand through his long black hair and scowled as he stalked down the alley.
    Three eternal months he’d been human. Ninety-seven horrific days, to be exact. Two thousand three hundred twenty-eight interminable hours. One hundred thirty-nine thousand six hundred eighty thoroughly offensive minutes.
    He’d become obsessed with increments of time. It was an embarrassingly mortal affliction. Next thing he knew, he’d be wearing a watch.
    Never.
    He’d been certain Aoibheal would have come for him by now. Would have staked his very essence on it; not that he had much left to stake.
    But she hadn’t, and he was sick of waiting. Not only were humans allotted a ridiculously finite slice of time to exist, their bodies had requirements that consumed a great deal of that time. Sleep alone consumed a full quarter of it. Although he’d mastered those requirements over the past few months, he resented being slave to his physical form. Having to eat, wash, dress, sleep, piss, shave, brush his hair and teeth, for Christ’s sake! He wanted to be himself again. Not at the queen’s bloody convenience, but
now
.
    Hence he’d left London and journeyed to Cincinnati (the infernally long way—by plane) looking for the half-Fae son he’d sired over a millennium ago, Circenn Brodie, who’d married a twenty-first-century mortal and usually resided here with her.
    Usually.
    Upon arriving in Cincinnati, he’d found Circenn’s residence vacant, and had no idea where to look for him next. He’d taken up residence there himself, and had been killing time since—endeavoring grimly to ignore that, for the first time in his timeless existence, time was returning the favor—waiting for Circenn to return. A half-blooded Tuatha Dé, Circenn had magic Adam no longer possessed.
    Adam’s scowl deepened. What paltry power the queen had left him was virtually worthless. He’d quickly discovered that she’d thought through his punishment most thoroughly. The spell of the
féth fiada
was one of the most powerful and perception-altering that the Tuatha Dé possessed, employed to permit a Tuatha Dé full interaction with the human realm, while keeping him or her undetectable by humans. It cloaked its wearer in illusion that affected short-term memory and generated confusion in the minds of those in the immediate vicinity.
    If Adam toppled a newsstand, the vendor would blithely blame an unseen wind. If he took food from a diner’s plate, the person merely decided he/she must have finished. If he procured new clothing for himself at a shop, the owner would register an inventory error. If he snatched groceries from a passerby and flung the bag to