CHAPTER 8
The sun reflected off the dark-gray hood as Blair McLean rubbed the milky polish in circles. He was in the courtyard, surrounded by a row of special cleaners and waxes to burnish his Bentley to a high sheen, when Sean came racing up the gravel path on his motorcycle.
Dust sprayed into the air as Sean tried to skid his way to a stop, barely three feet in front of Blair, but his rear wheel slipped, and he landed with a crash under his Moto Guzzi.
Strangely—and against all the experience he’d gained in the last 270 years—Sean found he wasn’t protected from injury. On the contrary. The gravel tore open his skin, leaving a three-inch gash. The power of the pain when he hit the ground took his breath away. His heavy bike squashed his foot, and he yelled out in surprise.
He crawled out from under his bike, gasping, his usual cocky composure completely shot. When he tried to walk, he was shocked to find that he could hardly put any weight on his ankle.
“Bas mallaichte! Bloody hell,” Sean said. “What on earth is going on?” He lifted his head and looked at his older brother.
Blair was grinning, his chest quivering from trying to suppress his laughter. “What is it? Don’t you like your motorcycle?”
“Are you nuts? I hurt myself, and you’re laughing?”
Blair stopped laughing. “Hurt yourself? How could that be?”
Sean would have really liked to punch his brother at this moment, but it hurt too much to move his shoulder. After so many years of feeling nothing at all, the pain was intensified and unexpected.
“No really… I hurt myself. I can hardly bear it. Ifrinn,” Sean gasped angrily.
Blair stared into his brother’s face, contorted by pain. Then it seemed he couldn’t help it; he started laughing again, so loudly he startled a family of red-throated divers right out of a tree. He couldn’t stop. He hadn’t laughed that hard in a very long time. He sank to the ground, leaned his broad back on his freshly polished tire rim, and rubbed the tears out of his eyes.
Sean’s crash had no doubt looked spectacular, but he’d always been a daredevil and he’d always gotten up without batting an eyelid—probably thousands of times. Blair had seen at least half of these wipeouts with his own eyes, and he’d never before laughed about them. Or anything else. No pain, no joy. That’s the way it had always been.
Sean was still rubbing his ankle and holding his bruised side.
“You have to admit, it’s kind of funny, isn’t it?” Blair asked.
“What?” Sean didn’t see anything funny.
“That you should finally feel something, now, only after a crash! Not when you bite your tongue or eat soup that’s too hot, but when you land under your bike while going forty miles an hour.”
Blair reached his arm around his brother’s shoulders to support him. Sean was laughing now, too, and together they swayed into the hall.
Nathaira Stuart looked up from her herbal dictionary in surprise when the two of them burst in. Blair dumped Sean onto a high-backed chair with a thud. Sean reached down and pulled a piece of gravel out of his knee, dropping it onto the floor in disgust. Nathaira put down the book crossly. She slowly shook her head at them and frowned.
“And what is going on here?” Her voice echoed through the silence of the great hall.
Blair and Sean looked at each other briefly before they both burst out laughing again.
“Stop snorting, you idiots!”
Nathaira tossed back her black hair, her green eyes sparking with annoyance. She looked confused. And she was not used to being confused. She took in the scene with marked disbelief, glancing from one face to the other. Her fiancé, Blair, was leaning on the back of the chair, trying to hold in his laughter and stand up straight. She had still not received an answer, so she stamped her foot angrily.
“Blair! Answer me! What is going on?”
He pointed at Sean and blurted, “He’s hurt himself. He was crying like a child!”
Nathaira spun around with a jerk to face Sean. “Hurt? What does that mean?”
She rushed to Sean’s side, looking at his leg with alarm and pulling away the fabric of his ripped pants.
“Blair, tell your fiancée to stop trying to get into my pants!” Sean, still laughing, twisted away from her.
She batted at him. “Shut up! This is serious! How could you be in pain?”
Blair put his hand on Nathaira’s hip. “Calm down. There’s bound to be a logical explanation.”
Sean nodded. He certainly didn’t want her to keep poking at his sore spots. Nathaira paced the floor, agitated, mumbling something incomprehensible. Then she rushed out of the hall.
Blair and Sean stared after her, surprised.
“’Tis funny, isn’t it?” Sean wondered aloud.
“I agree with you that it’s odd, but I don’t think it means anything special.”
“Why would you say that? Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Blair wasn’t one for thinking too hard with no real reason. “Doesn’t matter. Nothing bad happened.”
“Yes, but don’t you want to know why this is going on?” said Sean. “I certainly do. Because if this is the way the winds are now blowing, then I think I might have to start driving a little bit more carefully.”
Nathaira came back into the room with a stack of books piled high in her arms. She dropped them on the table and pushed them around until she found the one she must have been looking for. All the books had one very thing in common. They were old. Very old.
“A long time ago, I read something in one of these books, something that can help us. Where is it?”
Blair seemed to be losing interest. He probably wanted to finish detailing his car before the typical Scottish weather would spoil his efforts. “Mo luaidh,” he said to Nathaira, “why don’t you look at your books in peace and we’ll all talk this over later. We should probably tell Cathal and Payton, too.”
Sean agreed. “Exactly. Give it some time. It doesn’t look like Payton’s going to be back this evening, anyway, and Cathal isn’t due back for a week. Let’s just see what happens.”
Nathaira sighed. “All right, but if something like this happens again in the meantime, I want to hear about it immediately. And as soon as Cathal is back, we will call the clan together!”