his face, then brought a hand to her own face.
Daroch didn’t trust his voice, so he only nodded. Straightening, he looked around. “She’s really not here,” he noted with disappointment.
“Hasn’t been for days.” Worry glimmered in Kamdyn’s eyes. A familiar green turned aquamarine by her blue glow.
“She’s been with me,” he informed her.
The freckled nose wrinkled. “On purpose?”
A wry laugh wrung from his heavy chest. “No one’s more mystified by it than I. I made it abundantly clear her presence wasna wanted.”
Kamdyn smirked, wisdom beyond her years shone behind her pretty features. “Perhaps ‘tis why she sought you out. Everyone wants Kylah.” Her face fell. “Wanted, that is. Also, she may have been drawn to the pain and loneliness in your heart. For I think ‘tis what she needed to feel.”
Daroch found himself in front of the door, ready to flee from a harmless wee ghost. “What do ye know of my heart?” he thundered.
“Not a thing,” she admitted gently. “But we are Banshees. We’re drawn to sadness, anger, and loss. Thus is our nature.”
Daroch couldn’t think of a thing to say, so he turned from the young girl who saw too much and shut the door quietly behind him.
“Thank you, Druid, for what you did,” the wee Banshee called after him.
He didn’t turn to acknowledge her, but melted into the moonless highland night.
Chapter Nine
It took Kylah until the next evening to gather the courage to see him. She stood for untold hours staring at her grave, at her name so meticulously carved into a marker with strange and lovely runes surrounding it.
Daroch had found her remains. He’d laid her bones to rest. He’d visited her home and comforted her mother. He’d fascinated and excited Kamdyn, who’d vigorously regaled her with every detail of their short interaction.
“You must go to him, Kylah.” After a hearty and warm welcome home, Kamdyn had rushed her out the door so fast it left Kylah slightly dazed. “He needs you.”
Needed her? Her youngest sister obviously knew nothing about the man. But even so, the pull to see him again was almost magnetic in its inevitability.
Kylah lurked in the small crevice that opened into his cave, masking herself from his notice. He wore a vest-like leather tunic that bared his arms to the shoulders and fell to his feet. It split at the waist in many different places, allowing for movement and showing the stag skin trews he wore beneath as he purposefully strode from one place to another. His skin was free of silt and glowed in the firelight like honey poured over iron beneath the ancient markings. His long hair fell clean to the middle of his back in a thick, ebony braid.
Kylah gawked as he carefully poured what appeared to be liquid metal into a clear bowl of water and marked the change in water level.
“I can see ye, Banshee,” he informed her, though he’d never once looked in her direction.
“How?” she asked, incensed at being caught staring.
“Shamrock, remember?”
Drat. Kylah scowled. She’d forgotten.
Drifting toward him, she watched as he recorded his findings on a parchment with ink and quill. Kylah wished she’d learned to read, but they’d never had the time whilst running the washhouse. Katriona learned her figures to keep track of the money, but Kylah had never been bothered to.
“What are you doing?”
He still didn’t look up. “I’m measuring mercury.”
“You’re what?”
He moved back to the clear bowl. “Everything that exists on this planet is made up of tiny, invisible particles of material,” he explained. “An object with the same mass might still have more or less of those particular materials than another. By measuring how a submerged object displaces a volume of liquid equal to the volume of the object, one can calculate the density of this material.”
Kylah studied the clear bowl and frowned. “Then I no longer exist.
“Doona be ridiculous, of course ye do.”
“I don’t have this— material. I don’t displace anything. Not air. Not water. Not even you.” She reached out and passed a hand through his thick arm to make her point. “Therefore, I no longer exist. Not really.”
He looked up at her then and his eyes widened, snagged by a major change in her appearance.
“Blue.” She held her hands out for inspection, casting her soft new glow wider against the black stone of his cave. “Your doing, I think.”
The Druid remained silent, setting his parchment and quill down and picking up a large shell from an adjacent table.
“I want to show ye something.” He walked to