Dark Highlander Page 0,3

reflected in the glistening glass and David Boreanaz stalked broodingly, playing Angel, the tortured vampire with a soul. Dageus watched long enough to ascertain it was a repeat, then let his gaze drift back to the night.

The vampire always found at least partial resolution, and Dageus had begun to fear that for him, there would be none. Ever.

Besides, his problem was a little more complicated than Angel's. Angel's problem was a soul. Dageus's problem was a legion of them.

Raking a hand through his hair, he studied the city below. Manhattan: A mere twenty-two square miles. Inhabited by nearly two million people. Then there was the metropolis itself, with seven million people crammed into three hundred square miles.

It was a city of grotesque proportions to a sixteenth-century Highlander, the sheer immensity inconceivable. When he'd first arrived in New York City, he'd walked around the Empire State Building for hours. One hundred and two floors, ten million bricks, the interior thirty-seven million cubic feet, one thousand two hundred and fifty feet tall, it was struck by lightning an average of five hundred times per year.

What manner of man built such monstrosities? he'd wondered. Sheer insanity was what it was, the Highlander had marveled.

And a fine place to call home.

New York City had beckoned the darkness within him. He'd made his lair in the pulsing heart of it.

A man without clan, outcast, nomad, he'd doffed the sixteenth-century man like so much worn plaid and applied his formidable Druid intellect to assimilating the twenty-first century: the new language, the customs, the incredible technology. Though there were still many things he didn't understand--certain words and expressions utterly stumped him, and more often than not he thought in Gaelic, Latin, or Greek and had to hastily translate--he'd adapted at a remarkable rate.

A man who possessed the esoteric knowledge to open a gate through time, he'd expected five centuries to make the world a vastly different place. His understanding of Druid lore, sacred geometry, cosmology, and natural laws of what the twenty-first century called physics had made the wonders of the new world easier for him to fathom.

Not that he didn't frequently gawk. He did. Flying on a plane had fashed him greatly. The clever engineering and fabulous construction of Manhattan's bridges had kept him occupied for days.

The people, the masses of teeming people, bewildered him. He suspected they always would. There was a part of the sixteenth-century Highlander he'd never be able to change. That part would forever miss wide-open expanses of starry sky, leagues and leagues of rolling hills, endless fields of heather, and blithesome and bonny Scots lasses.

He'd ventured to America because he'd hoped that journeying far from his beloved Scotland, from places of power such as the standing stones, might lessen the hold of the ancient evil inside him.

And it had affected them, though it had only slowed his descent into darkness, not stopped it. Day by day he continued to change... felt colder, less connected, less fettered by human emotion. More detached god, less man.

Except when he tooped--och, then he was alive. Then he felt. Then he was not adrift in a bottomless, dark, and violent sea with naught but a puny bit of driftwood to cling to. Making love to a woman staved off the darkness, replenished his essential humanity. Ever a man of immense appetites, he was now insatiable.

I'm no' entirely dark yet, he growled defiantly to the demons coiled within him. The ones who bided their time in silent certainty, their dark tide eroding him as steadily and surely as the ocean reshaped a rocky shore. He understood their tactics: True evil didn't aggressively assault, it lay coyly hushed and still... and seduced.

And it was there each day, dear evidence of their gains, in the little things he did without realizing he was doing them till after they were done. Seemingly harmless things like lighting the fire in his hearth with a wave of his hand and a whispered trine, or the opening of a door or blind with a soft murmur. The impatient summoning of one of their conveyances--a taxi--with a glance.

Wee things, mayhap, but he knew such things were far from harmless. Knew that each time he used magic, he turned a shade darker, lost another piece of himself.

Each day was a battle to accomplish three things: use only what magic was absolutely necessary, despite the ever-growing temptation, toop hard and fast and frequently, and continue collecting and searching the tomes wherein might lie the answer to