Page 120 of Dark Victory

She was so dizzy and sick that she clung to the floor. For a long moment she could not move or think. She could only lie there, too exhausted to do anything else. The battle had come close to destroying her. She fought the need to pass out, to retch. She needed help, she needed Macleod.

Determined, Tabby started to crawl from the room, across the landing to the stairs. She did not know how she would make it out of Melvaig’s tower if she couldn’t even walk. She looked down the stairwell and despair welled. The journey down it might as well have been a thousand miles.

Where are you, Macleod? What has happened to you?

She had almost expected an answer. There was none.

She half crawled and half slid down the stairs. On the landing below she paused, panting and out of breath. Maybe she would close her eyes and rest….

Tabitha?

About to pass out, her eyes flew open. She was certain she’d just heard Macleod close by. But she was alone on the dark landing. She crawled to the doorway and used a door to claw herself to her feet. Then she simply stood there, clinging to it.

“Tabitha!”

Tabby jerked at the sound of Macleod’s voice—and it was real. She turned and saw him striding toward her, several strapping young Highlanders with him. Their eyes met; his gaze blazed. Tabby exulted. But even as she did, she saw his blisters and burns.

He was the same man who had just tried to fight Criosaidh with her. It was Macleod, but he was the Master who lived in the sixteenth century—the Master who had tried to reach across time to her at the Met.

He was the man she loved, just older. She loved him desperately and she needed him just then terribly. And he needed her—she saw it on his face and felt it coming from him in huge, hard waves.

But before she could cry out, she felt the world tilt and begin to spin. He ran forward and caught her as she fell.

And looking into his eyes, she inhaled. He was even more powerful now. But he was blessed. He walked in their light….

“Ye’ll be fine now,” he said, kneeling with her in his arms, his eyes fierce and searching. “I’ll always find ye an’ I’ll never lose ye, even without the pendant.”

His burns had been treated, she saw, and they were already healing. There was a scar on his jaw that she’d never seen before. He looked as if he was in his late thirties—not as if he was twenty-five. But mostly, his eyes had changed. They were the eyes of someone centuries old, someone who had seen and fought everything, someone terribly wise and empowered by the gods. “You took your vows,” she whispered, clasping his jaw.

His smile came and went. Moisture shone in his eyes. “Ah, Tabitha, I took those vows centuries ago.”

“Are you all right?” She stroked his hard jaw. It was the same.

“A few burns canna hurt me, Tabitha, not as long as ye live.”

She touched her throat, which was bare.

“Ye lost it in the fire,” he said softly.

“I’m in the sixteenth century—you’re from the sixteenth century,” she whispered. “But I belong at Blayde in 1298.”

“Aye.” His mouth shifted. “I ken…ye’re so sweet an’ so young!”

Tabby reached for his shoulders and he held her tightly, against his broad, powerful chest. His embrace was the same—powerful, consuming, impossibly safe and right. “After the fire, you found me at the Met.”

He hesitated. “I thought ye died fer one terrible moment, after ye went up in the flames, and I leaped into time to find ye. I thought to find ye when we started this, so long ago, at the school where ye were teachin’ the children.”

“So there is a beginning?”

“Sometimes we’re not allowed to remember everythin’, Tabitha. I ken we both fought this way together in the fire here before. But I canna really recall it well. ’Tis shadowy, in my mind. I ken I feared I lost ye, that ye died. But ye dinna die.”

“I didn’t die—I won. Elasaid’s amulet is powerful.”

“Aye, ye triumphed. Ye wouldna have done so if it wasn’t what the gods chose fer us.”

Their gazes locked. Tabby hesitated. He had come to New York because of her spell, but their beginning had been that afternoon when she’d seen him at the Met—because of this battle at An Tùir-Tara.

“Tabitha, I came to ye at the exhibit, but ye came to me when I was a lost boy.”