Redeemed (Heroes of the Highlands) - By Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,4
did her looks have to do with anything?
“Why not?” she asked the darkness.
“Why would I?”
She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms. “I’ve been told that I’m quite pleasant to look at.” And that was being modest. “In fact, I’m… well, I’m quite beautiful.” Lud, she’d never said it out loud before. “Why would that offend you so?”
His amplified snort grated on nerves she thought long dead. “Beauty is nothing to be proud of. It’s no great feat or accomplishment, only a happenstance of birth. It doesna make ye intelligent, interesting, nor desirable company. Now again, I say be gone.” The stones augmented his command and likewise fractured his voice into many, which all told her to leave more than once.
“Nay.” There was a refreshing truth in his words, Kylah begrudgingly admitted to herself. No matter how indecorous the manner in which they were stated. But she wasn’t going to do what he told her to. If there was one advantage to being dead, it was free reign to lurk where you liked.
Through the omnipresent darkness, Kylah knew exactly where the Druid stood, and exactly what she was doing here.
“It was you,” she murmured, advancing into the darkness. “I thought this god forsaken place drew me here. But, nay, the anguish and loss doesn’t belong to these stones… It’s yours.”
The Druid was suddenly in front of her. His unsettling face shoved close to hers, his mud-streaked features pulled into the most terrifying snarl she’d ever seen.
“Get. Out!”
Chapter Three
If Kylah had still been alive, she would have fled. She would have obeyed. As it was, she still found herself retreating a few paces until she floated over the grotto.
The Druid stalked her to the water’s edge, his hulking body swathed in the shadows beyond the reach of her dim light. In a swift movement, his staff of petrified birch cracked against the earth, causing that percussive vibration to ripple through her again.
It was the closest sensation to being touched Kylah had felt in almost a year.
She closed her eyes and let out a breath. “Do that again,” she murmured.
He didn’t.
Seized by the need to see more of him, she drifted closer. Her glow crawled up tattered, ancient grey robes lashed to an enormous body by weathered, knotted vines. Shells of swansea, whelk and eigg clung to where he’d fastened them into his hair from the temple, where warriors would have donned war braids.
Kylah met a scowl so intense she had to suppress an absurd and surprising smile. Never in her life had she been the cause of such an expression.
Why would it amuse her so?
The angles of his face remained inscrutible, hidden behind a layer of silt from the Allt Dubh. The rest of his hair caked to his head and fell down his back, contained by the same dried mud. Kylah searched her memory for what she knew lay beneath the mask. She didn’t have to go far. The image lurked at the surface of her mind’s eye more often than she cared to admit. Compelling, savage features carved by a primordial artist and defaced by some undisclosed blasphemy. Dark blue tattoos of a forgotten, ancient design covered the entire left side of his face, but were concealed beneath the silt.
The only clarity belonged to his eyes, which glittered at her with unmistakable hostility. It rolled off his impossibly wide shoulders with all the force of a physical shove.
“I’m sorry if my scream disturbed you, I thought I was alone,” she explained. “I promise to stay at a more pleasing register.”
He ignored her peace offering. “I know I’m not the soul ye’re after, Banshee, so there’s no reason for ye to linger here unless ye’re just entertained by disturbing my peace.”
Kylah found herself distracted by his white, even teeth bared in a disgusted sneer. She was, in all honesty, vastly entertained. But couldn’t exactly say why.
“How do you know you’re not the one I’m after?”
“I’m not bleeding, am I?” He rolled his eyes before giving her his back and slinking into the darkness. “Yer intended victim’s head would have burst during that wasted keen.”
“The keen wasn’t wasted,” she shrugged. “It helped me.”
“I doona care,” the blackness coolly informed her. “Now go away.”
Kylah drifted forward, hoping to find him again with her glow. “You still don’t know you’re not the one I’m after. What if you are An Dioladh and therefore immune? Like a Faerie creature or blessed by the Gods? You’re a Druid, aren’t you?”
“Druids are not Faeries.” He spat