Dark Victory. Brenda Joyce
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lips, no longer dizzy but still a bit weak. What had just happened? She’d just felt a huge and threatening black force. And it had wanted her?
Her gaze moved to the glowing white stone in the palm’s center. It winked at her and she was stunned to feel its holy power. “It has white light. The amulet is for good, not evil. It has powerful magic.”
“It has to, to survive a fire. Gold melts,” Kit said flatly.
Tabby trembled. “I think I had a vision.” And what about her reaction to the fourteen-year-old boy who had survived Blayde’s destruction in the thirteenth century?
Tabby tensed. She felt as if she could almost see that boy. When she’d read those words, she’d felt his grief and guilt.
Sam’s dark blue eyes widened. “You don’t have the Sight, either!”
“It felt like déjà vu.” She wet her dry lips again. “There was a witch—or a female demon. I know her.” She corrected herself. “I knew her. And the survivor of the first fire, I might know him, too.”
“What first fire?” Sam demanded.
Tabby realized she needed to sit down. “The clans started warring after 1201—it says so right on the plaque, Sam.” She glanced around for a bench. There was one across the hall, but she didn’t want to leave the display.
A brief silence fell, in which they all considered what had just happened. Kit said, “I get good vibes from the pendant. Maybe I can dig up something at HCU on it, and on these two clans.”
“My gut is telling me that we should see what we can find out about An Tùir-Tara.” Sam stared closely at Tabby. “Ring any more bells?”
Tabby stared at her sister. Whatever had happened at An Tùir-Tara had been frightening and horrible. What was Sam thinking? She looked far too grim—as if she knew more than she’d let on.
“Want me to dig into the destruction of Blayde, too?” Sam asked quietly.
Tabby became chilled—and even more sick. The boy’s grief felt as if it was a part of her. Had she been there?
She thought about reincarnation. The Book of Roses had one mention of past lives, in a Wisdom that had clearly been read over and over again. Tabby didn’t disbelieve in past lives, but she didn’t believe, exactly, either. “Are you thinking I was there? Either at Blayde, or at An Tùir-Tara in 1550?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said matter-of-factly. She was oddly poker-faced. What was going on with her?
“Maybe Mom was there, or Grandma Sara, or another ancestor,” Sam said. “Maybe it was you, in a different life, although I’m not really into reincarnation. Or maybe you are coming into the power to sense evil—to feel across time the way Brie did.” Sam shrugged. “It can’t hurt to check it out. You’re obviously involved with this amulet, in one way or another.”
Tabby was silent now. The Book of Roses was very clear about Fate and the fact that there was no such thing as coincidence.
“I hate to jinx ourselves, but I’ve been waiting for something bad to happen all day. I just thought it would be really bad—you know, like vampires from a Buffy episode stepping out of the TV and coming to life in our living rooms,” Kit said, eyes wide.
Tabby couldn’t smile.
“We need vampires like we need a hole in the head. Don’t give the demons any ideas,” Sam said, amused. Then she and Kit exchanged conspiratorial looks.
Kit was more of a Hunter than a Slayer, and not half as impatient as Sam. She didn’t mind spending days poring through HCU’s amazing database, while Sam couldn’t sit still for very long—or stay off the street for very long. “What are you two planning?” Tabby asked with some trepidation.
Sam put her arm around her. “You’re still really pale. I think we should take you home and start checking this out. Tomorrow would be a better time to visit here, anyway.”
Tabby knew Sam was worried about her. She stared past her sister at the pendant. The little white stone was glowing now. “I’m fine.”
“What does that mean? We can’t leave you here, not when you almost fainted,” Sam said. “You seemed to go back in time while standing right here with us. I don’t like it, not one bit.”
Sam was never this protective of her. They were a team of equals, backing each other up in crisis after crisis. They fought demons together almost nightly. Tabby straightened and took a deep breath, deciding not to worry about her sister’s odd behavior now. She needed to think about that boy and that demon-witch. “I’m staying. I have to stay.” When Sam’s eyes widened, she said firmly, as if to one of her first-graders, “I am fine. I’m not going to break like fine china. I am going to get some water and then I am going to sit down by this amulet and think—and feel.”
Sam finally said, “I am not liking this very much.”
Tabby stared closely. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Sam’s expression became bland. “We don’t keep secrets, Tab.”
Kit said, “She should stay here, Sam. We were meant to be here today. This is the first time she’s ever felt evil—and by God, she felt it across time. This is a medieval Celtic exhibit. Melvaig is in the Highlands.”
Kit thought the exhibit related to the Highlanders who were fighting this war with them—but from medieval times, Tabby thought, surprised. She didn’t buy that. This was about a suffering boy and a woman with lots of black power. And it was about that amulet.
But why did everything feel so familiar?
Sam was grim. “That was spoken like a Rose,” she said to Kit.
“Hanging around you two, I feel like a Rose sometimes,” she quipped, her eyes sparkling.
“You know I can hold my own when it counts,” Tabby said, which was true.
“Okay,” Sam said, shrugging. “You’re a big girl and this is obviously in the Big Game Plan. Don’t know what got into me.”
Tabby walked back with them as far as the closest water fountain. She preferred Giuliani Water to the bottled stuff, anyway. When Sam and Kit were gone and she’d had a drink, she hurried back to the exhibit.
The closer she got to the glass case with the amulet, the stranger she began to feel. Dizzy, expectant, nervous, afraid…and angered.
She paused before the bright gold palm, light-headed and tense, uneasy. She’d been waiting for the sky to fall and it was falling now—this was it, she thought anxiously. The white moonstone blinked merrily at her. She remained aware of the boy and the woman with black power, of all the emotions that were somehow associated with the amulet, or An Tùir-Tara, or Blayde and the warring clans. Just as she had the odd notion that the amulet was protecting her from getting too close to emotions that might be dangerous for her—or a life that might be dangerous for her—so much grief consumed Tabby that she cried out.
It sent her right down to her knees.
It was the kind of grief she’d never felt in her life. It resonated with so much male warrior power and so much rage. On her hands and knees, Tabby somehow looked up.
A Highlander towered over her. He was a huge and muscular man, dark of complexion and hair, his face a mask of fury. His face was blistered, burned and bleeding. She recoiled in fear. He was holding a long sword, his knuckles blistered and bloody, too, and a red-and-black plaid was pinned to one shoulder. Otherwise he was clad in a short-sleeved tunic that hit mid-thigh, and it was charred and sooty. She inhaled—his arms and thighs were also burned and bloody!
His enraged and anguished blue eyes locked with hers.
In his grief, the Highlander looked ready to commit murder.
Uncertain if he was real or not, she somehow got up and reached