Dark Waters by Chris Quinton

Author:Chris Quinton [Quinton, Chris]
Language: nld
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: erotic MM, Romance MM
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

For nearly a week Flein and Donnchadh walked with Father Murdo and Rory MacAllister, talking to the families of the dead women, following their paths. The early evenings were spent in Murdo’s cell, with Flein squinting in the candlelight and writing copious notes from their reports and drawings. In the single dimly lit room, the each-uisge’s eyes were sometimes greenly opalescent, reflecting the small flames. If Rory noticed, he made no comment.

Nights were spent on pallets in the hall of the Keep, along with others of the MacAllister household. Donnchadh was patently uncomfortable in the crowded, never-silent chamber and slept little but it made no complaint. All of its focus seemed to be on trapping the killer. Even its questions on distant places seemed to have dried up, to Flein’s disappointment. Not that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice—more that he liked the rapt attention in those fathomless eyes.

Proximity, without the opportunity to act on the growing hunger he felt for Donnchadh, gave Flein the chance to learn more about the creature’s personality and quick mind in its responses to the others around it. In particular, the young women.

Donnchadh had kept its chin shaved clean and the women, whether they were wed or not, clearly found its looks very much to their liking. It had problems fending off their advances and Flein got the impression that it wasn’t trying as hard as it might.

The creature did have a sense of humor, he discovered, and a rather dry wit that appealed almost as much as its dangerous grace and underlying sensuality. It was an autocrat, with its own concept of honor and obligation and it took a proprietorial interest in the people and their day-to-day lives. Nor was Flein the only one to notice this. The young laird, they called it behind its back and to its face, and it laughed with them, enjoying the joke.

55

Chris Quinton

The first time Flein heard that laughter, he’d been stopped in his tracks by the sheer joyousness of it. Something had tightened in his chest then loosened to flood him with a bittersweet emotion compounded of desire and tenderness and something he’d refused to acknowledge both then and now. It had shaken him to his core and he could no longer tell himself that what he was feeling for the Sidhe was nothing more than simple lust. His hunger for it now had a poignant edge that was more than unsettling. What the each-uisge felt, if anything, he could not guess.

But surely the creature’s fascination with the people, both as a clan and—perhaps more importantly—as individuals, was to the good. Cait, for instance, or Rory were two it seemed to particularly like. Perhaps in the future it would think twice before making a meal of a mortal. But then again, perhaps not. Although on the surface the each-uisge was becoming more human with each passing day as it learned more of the MacAllisters and their way of life, Flein knew better than to believe the change was more than skin-deep.

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