The Kelpie's Curse (book #1 in the Kelpie's Entrapment trilogy)

Day 3 pt. 3

***

Renestrae was at a loss. Five hours! Five hours she'd been poring over the mythology books at Fearchar's library and she couldn't find one single reference to the Kelpie. Actually, she couldn't find reference to any water spirit. This wouldn't have been a problem back home but this was Scotland. They had the Loch Ness Monster for crying out loud! How could this one town be devoid of water spirits?

To make matters worse she was still mad at Evelyn for her outburst this morning. She needed to grow up, did she? Why? Because she didn't feel the need to be so obsessed with normalcy that she forgot to live? That she forgot her passions? No, if the choice was between letting some man that didn't deserve her trust stomp her heart into the ground time after time, or having her head in the clouds then she'd pick the clouds, thank you very much. She didn't even let her try to explain. Didn't she realize that many people drowning in the "beck" not during the "flood" seemed a bit odd?

Of course not, she was too busy thinking that both she and Kaloria were on their way to the funny farm.

"Hmm! She probably thinks I believe Tinkerbell did it or something," she muttered under her breath, as she scanned the current page she was on for something, anything, having to do with water.

"Och, lass, dinnae tell me ye actually believe in tha' sorry excuse fer a pixie."

Instantly her head snapped up because she recognized that voice. How could she not? It was silky and smooth, much like water when it was calm, and she had yet to decide if the man it belonged to was just creepy or eccentric, maybe even a little of both.

"Oh, of course not, Mr. MacArtair. Man-eating water demons are much more believable than jealous pixies."

Instantly, she noticed, his black eyes turned hard as he sat down across from her. "Tha' sounds suspiciously like a jab, Miss Frank, and I thought I told ye tae call me Dageus."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "I'll call you Dageus if you call me Renestrae. My apologies about the jab but I'm feeling a bit..."

"... off kilter?" he supplied.

Her brow furrowed in confusion, but only for a moment. What a strange, almost old world, way to put it. Maybe it was just a Scottish thing. "Sure, something like that."

"I heard ye had quite th' run-in yesterday."

Instantly the sight of Alec's body flashed before her eyes. The almost white sightless eyes, the blowflies rushing up into the air only to settle back around the hole in his chest where his heart should have been, and the smell! By the gods, the smell had been awful. She now understood why people described something as smelling like death because there was no other way to describe it. It had reeked of death, and rotting meat and decay and ... and ...

"I'd rather not talk about it, if it's all the same to you," she snapped, but she didn't mean to. Not really, but he was right about one thing. She was definitely off kilter.

"Understandable, lass. I suppose ye're doing a bit of reading tae calm yerself."

She almost quirked an eyebrow at that. Strange how it didn't sound remotely like a question. When she turned the page, it was a bit harder than she had meant to.

"That was the plan but even that is turning out to be frustrating," she almost growled. This was just getting plain ridiculous.

"How so?"

Instantly her brown eyes snapped back up to meet his black ones. Had she not been so angry she might have noted that his long black hair was dripping wet again. "We're in Scotland, are we not?"