Trish backed away from the flashing orb and wiped her hands on the seat of her pants. Raising her hand to her chest, her mouth opened and closed without making any sounds.
Latharn had seen this reaction before. As long as Trish didn’t bolt, he’d have time to explain. He kept his voice to a soothing echo, accented with the pulsating lights. “I have known my Nessa since before she took her current physical form. I’ve waited for over six hundred years for her soul to choose a body and decide to join us on this plane of existence. I’ve been walking her dream plane since the summer her parents broke her spirit.”
Latharn paced the globe and allowed his energy to swirl about the room. His voice strengthened and the light pulsed as he explained the mystery to Trish as best he could.
“Nessa doesn’t realize I truly exist for the curse has prevented me from ever speaking to her while I walk in her dreams. She thinks I’m but a creation of her imagination, brought on by years of loneliness and pain.”
Trish finally found her voice. “Then we’ll just tell her. We’ll tell her what she needs to say and then you two can live happily ever after.”
With a sorrowful shake of her head, Fiona linked her arm through Brodie’s as they both gathered around the table.
“Trish, we canna tell her about Latharn and neither can you. The dark witch was quite shrewd when she cast her spell. Nessa must whisper her love to Latharn and call him forth without any prompting from anyone else. If anyone reveals the details of the curse to Nessa, the globe will shatter and send Latharn’s soul into the eternal abyss.”
A frustrated scowl crossed Trish’s face as she paced around the room. “You’ve got to be kidding me. How in the world are we going to get her to whisper him out of that thing without telling her how to do it? I can’t even get her to follow explicit instructions on how to power down her laptop when I give them to her word for word!”
With a deep sigh, Brodie kissed the top of Fiona’s head and pulled her close. “We can only hope the goddess will finally smile upon our family as she did when our clan followed the Old Ways.”
Circling the table, Trish studied the globe as though plotting how to kill it. “Wouldn’t she be more likely to whisper to this thing, if we kept it constantly in her presence?”
Scooping up the witch’s ball, Brodie held it protected against his chest. “A MacKay must always be the caretaker of the crystal orb. It must always reside in a clan member’s home.”
“Why?” Trish huffed, scowling at Brodie as though she were about to snatch the orb out of his grasp.
“The curse,” Fiona retorted. “The black witch was no’ the fool. She knew no one could tell the intended woman how to break the curse but she also wanted to ensure the globe would never accidently become the woman’s possession…the less likely for it to hear her muse.”
“Set me down, Brodie. I tire of being tossed about,” Latharn roared from the depths of his tomb. Brodie immediately settled Latharn back to the center of the table, his face flaming at Latharn’s scolding.
“Well, dammit!” Trish paced around the table centered in the modest sitting room. With a look of determination, she spread her hands on either side of the globe and peered into the pulsating ball. Latharn spread his hands on the frigid walls of his prison and eyed her back. “Well then, that leaves us no other choice. Either the two of you must move in with us, or we have to move in with you. Either way, Nessa will be around that thing enough to start talking to it and will accidentally say what the curse needs to hear.”
“Would ye kindly stop referring to me as that thing?” Latharn calmed the lights emitting from the sphere, lowering them to a serene flicker about the room. Trish’s reasoning pleased him. Her unwillingness to let the puzzle go meant he had another ally outside of his prison walls.
Trish shrugged a shoulder with a sheepish grin. “Sorry. No offense. But it’s hard for me to relate to something that looks like a yard ornament from my grandmother’s garden.”
At Trish’s retort, Latharn’s laughter rumbled like thunder rippling through the room. He intensified the aura to a blinding cloud as his energy centralized in the air just above the sparkling globe. For the first time in several hundred years, he projected the image of his face within the aura. He allowed them to see his amused eyes echoing his flashing smile.
“Thank ye, Trish, for being the first one to give me a hearty laugh in well over five hundred years.”
“Wow.” Breathless, Trish stared at Latharn’s visage, suspended in the air above the globe. “I wish I could whisper you out of that thing. No wonder she trapped you in there.”
ChapterFourteen
“Trish, are you sure they’ve decreased our housing stipend? I just saw a letter stating they were increasing our grant money since the documentation of the fifteenth-century claymore.”
Nessa sat at the desk with her chin propped in her hand, trying not to fall out of her seat. Her eyes were so gritty they felt like they’d dropped in a child’s sandbox and been shoved back in her head. Exhaustion pounded at the back of her skull and ached through all her muscles.
Trish nodded, reaching across the desk to slide all the mail out of Nessa’s reach. “I got the call this morning. We’re going to have to move out of the inn. The sooner we’re out the better.”
Nessa rubbed her face. Trish’s words didn’t make any sense but maybe it was because she was so tired. “I guess we’ll just have to stay here at the site full time then. We can sleep on the cots in the back. We’ve been sleeping here off and on anyway. We’ll just have to make it permanent.”
“There’s another option we might consider.” Trish nervously shuffled papers from one desk to the other. “The other day when I was having tea with the MacKays, they asked me if I knew of any of our students who might be looking to rent a room.”
Nessa pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her stinging eyes. They burned like two orbs of glowing hot embers. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since she couldn’t remember when. The one night she’d taken the sleeping pills, she’d spent it trying to flee from the Highlander in her dreams.
Her feet had been like two blocks of solid concrete plowing through a swamp. She’d managed to keep just out of his reach, but she’d been terrified she’d fall into his hands. His weapon was gone, but fury flashed in his eyes, a storm threatening to unleash at any moment.
For some odd reason, she’d gotten the distinct impression that she’d angered him by trying to escape his visits with a drug-induced sleep. Somehow, he’d overpowered the drugs and pulled her from the dark, fuzzy depths. She’d struggled against him. She’d pounded on his chest until she’d finally wrenched free of his grasp. She’d struggled and pushed her weighted feet into an endless run. She’d awakened gasping when she’d barely escaped him.
Since that nightmare, she’d forced herself to spend the night’s upright in a chair. She’d struggle through the hours, dozing just enough to function the following day. She didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to keep this up; all she knew was she dare not fall asleep. Who knew what might happen the next time he showed up in her dreams?
