“Why?” I whispered. “What am I missing?”
The researcher in me hated that I had no answers to why my family had been plagued with these deaths. Certainly I’d looked into it in the years since my gran had died, but I’d kept running into dead ends.
And then life had gotten in the way. The Kelpies had surfaced, the Order had needed my help, and I’d pushed my own issues aside. What did my happiness matter when Kelpies were threatening Loren Brae?
I needed to go home. I was being stupid, and I could already hear Sophie yelling at me for coming here on my own in the darkness.
Thoughts of the Kelpies had my shoulders straightening, bracing as though they were barreling across the water toward me.
But I couldn’t seem to make my feet move.
Something seemed to hold me there and I gasped as the water began to change.
It started as a ripple—just a small disturbance near the center of the loch, barely visible in the darkness. But the ripples grew, spreading outward in concentric circles, and beneath them something began to glow.
A pale, flickering light, deep underwater, rising slowly toward the surface.
My heart slammed against my ribs. I should run. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to run.
Yet, bloody eejit that I was, I stayed.
The light broke the surface, and with it came something that made my breath stop entirely.
It was enormous. A serpent made of kelp and shiny scales, its body coiling and uncoiling as it slipped silently across the surface of the water. Its scales shimmered with an otherworldly luminescence, and its eyes—two great orbs of ancient, terrible intelligence—fixed directly on me.
The Beithir.
I’d seen it before, during the battle at the loch, but only from a distance. At the time, we’d been terrified, and rightly so.
Which was what I should be right now.
Instead, I stared at the beast, oddly fascinated by its horrific beauty.
And, to my surprise, it didn’t do anything. It just... watched me. Its massive head swayed slightly, water streaming from its scales, those ancient eyes boring into mine like it could see straight through to my soul.
A hook seemed to dig beneath my ribs, tugging at something buried deep inside me.
The Beithir opened its mouth, and I braced for a roar, for flames, for something terrible.
Instead, I felt words. Not heard—felt—pressing into my mind like stones dropped into still water.
Daughter of lies.
I couldn’t breathe. My thoughts scrambled in my brain.
“I don’t understand?” I asked, my voice thin and strange. “What lies? Please can you tell me?—”
The water remembers. The water waits.
The Beithir’s eyes rippled with light, and for one heart-stopping moment, I saw something—a flash of images, too fast to comprehend. A woman in old-fashioned clothes, standing before a great stone. A betrayal. Blood in the water.
Then it was gone.
The Beithir sank slowly back beneath the surface, its light fading, the water closing over it as if it had never been there at all. The loch went still and dark and ordinary, just a body of water reflecting the thin slice of moon.
I stood frozen on the shore, my heart pounding, my mind reeling.
Daughter of lies.
