The Highland Dragon's Lady by Isabel Cooper Page B

his valet—Loch Arach had yet to send him a suitable replacement, and he didn’t like traveling with strangers—had long since gone to bed, and Colin didn’t have the heart to wake him. He’d undressed himself before; he could do it again. He turned to leave his desk.
    A face peered in at him through the window.
    He only got a momentary glimpse before the figure saw him and vanished. He saw that the face was the color of raw dough and almost as formless. The mouth was a lipless gash, the eyes indentations, the nose nonexistent. It was a sketch of a human shape, done by a not-too-bright child.
    When the figure vanished, it vanished . One second it was there; the next, as Colin choked out a low Gaelic curse, it was gone. He dashed to the window, but the landscape that met his eyes was as still and empty as any other country night would have been.
    It was empty to human sight, anyhow. But he knew a trick or two.
    He spoke a quick stream of Latin, triggering one of the universe’s hidden rules, and the world around him changed. Now the bedroom was full of gray mist, turning faintly rose around the bed and blue by the desk. Outside, faint shades of green and brown rippled through the gray—and by the window, traces of putrid green lingered. The color was fading quickly, but now it was still sharp.
    Reggie wasn’t the only one who could climb out windows.
    Colin spent a moment to make sure that the green residue was just residue, leftover aura from whatever the figure had been, and not hostile in itself. He spent another second checking for other traps. Seeing none, he wrenched open the window and sprang out onto the balcony.
    From his new perspective, the green traces trailed away into midair. Nothing had climbed up to the balcony. The tree from which Reggie had entered bore no tracks, and neither did either of the walls beside the balcony. Colin leaned over the iron railing, looked out across the lawns of Whitehill, and saw no figures, human or eldritch. There were only the trees, the hedges, and a few swooping owls and bats silhouetted against the sky.
    He could almost have thought that he’d imagined the shape outside his window—but he’d never been particularly given to hallucinations, and the traces of its rotting aura did hang in the air, even now.
    With the night air cool against his face and the balcony cold beneath his feet, he tapped his fingers on the rail and thought of possibilities. He’d been sincere in telling Reggie that he didn’t have much experience with ghosts, and he didn’t think that the creature stalking Whitehill was anything else—he’d have been able to sense much more about a demon. Colin had lived long enough to know when he was over his head, and even to admit it sometimes, particularly to himself.
    A few basic principles should still apply.
    To wit: the creature had been at his window. He couldn’t see where it had gone or how. Thus, either it could transport itself instantly elsewhere or it had moved up—though one might as well say down or sideways or blue , since human directions didn’t really apply in these circumstances—to a different level of existence. Neither course would have left traces that Colin could perceive, even with magic.
    Not in human form.
    Responding to his thoughts, his fingers stretched out, reaching to their full length and then longer than any man’s would have been. Silver claws and blue scales glimmered in the moonlight, and Colin heard iron bending beneath his grip.
    No. Not yet. Think first. He pulled his human shape back around him like a man adjusting a coat and looked down at his hands in what he wouldn’t allow to be alarm. Such lapses in self-control were rare, at least for him.
    It was the prospect of a hunt that provoked him, maybe, such as he hadn’t truly had in decades: a hunt beneath the open sky with an enemy who deserved no mercy. He had never thrown himself into such matters as his father had, or as Judith and Stephen did, but the