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Chapter Three
“Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.”
—Demetrius, Act 4,A Midsummer Night’s Dream
He kept to the shadows in the waning light. Both because the darkness was his disguise as well as where he belonged.
When he used to be free, he spent most of his time deep beneath the seas, where the only light was emanated by creatures of magic.
Creatures like him.
Once in a blue moon, he broke through the waves, dancing with dolphins as they leapt with carefree joy, or racing with sailfish as they hunted sardines. How he missed the calm silence and soothing flow of the ocean.
These rancid, boisterous, crowded city streets were an anathema to him. But even so, he preferred this to his cage.
That was another sort of darkness altogether.
It still amazed him that his prey was the quintessentially ordinary Lady Brigid. Though the title was merely honorary, given her attachment to the Rathbournes.
Her real name was Brigid Titania Mackintosh, with strong Celtic bloodlines. It could be traced back to the very first Druids that presided over these isles, while her distant relatives possessed only tenuous claim to Scottish nobility.
If not for the grand castle and grounds they inherited upon the passing of the last direct male descendent of that particular branch of the family tree, they never would have made their home in the faraway Highlands. Their previous estate was situated in the borderlands, where they seemed neither to belong to the Scottish wilderness nor English civilization.
Throughout Brigid’s life, his keeper had watched her, showing him glimpses through the girl’s waking and sleeping dreams.
Supposedly, this entirely unremarkable female was actually a changeling that the faeries had hid with humans upon her birth. To protect her from his Master, he deduced, for she was destined to usurp the Dark rule and bring Light to the fae realms once more.
Through trickery and temptation, his Master had tried to lure the child, and then the woman, into their destructive clutches.
But Brigid never wavered from her path. She always seemed to sense when something wasn’t right. She could always smell a lie.
She detested lies, perhaps because of this built-in self-protective mechanism.
As his Master’s powers were limited to the other world, their control of the human realm weak at best, Brigid remained out of reach. Until the Master realized that while they saw snatches of Brigid’s life, she caught glimpses of their world as well.
She became fascinated with all aspects of the faerie realm, and spent more of her time dreaming than not. For it was in her dreams that she was freed from the constraints of her conscious mind. Free to explore and learn a whole other universe.
But curiosity for this other dimension wasn’t enough to tempt her, his Master soon surmised. The one thing, theonlything, that kept her coming back, kept her tethered to the Master’s sphere of influence—washim.
He never knew why.
And now, finally, the Master decided to release him into the human world to bring back the prey they’d hunted all this time.
She had to come willingly, they said. She had to offer him her loving, beating heart.
The former he could probably accomplish, though he had little experience interacting with humans. Or indeed, any sort of non-aquatic being.
Even before his imprisonment, he had little desire or opportunity to encounter land-dwellers. Once in a while, he saved humans from shipwrecks, more to eject them from a place they didn’t belong than out of any kindness.
In his favor, he possessed a natural ability to mimic, like a chameleon. He could adopt human airs if he observed them closely enough. He could modulate his tongue and tone to form their speech patterns and blend in. And though he could only shapeshift into one human form, his true form, thanks to the Master’s spell, he could still adapt his outer trappings to suit different human occasions.
The latter of the Master’s task, however, was another matter. What did he know of loving hearts?
His task would have been much easier if it was simply a beating heart he had to carve out and put on a platter to offer his Master in exchange for his freedom. And, more importantly, the freedom of all of his imprisoned friends.
He did not want to do harm to an innocent, such as Brigid clearly was. But it seemed a small sacrifice for release from millennia-worth of torment and captivity.
It had been so long, he barely recalled his own name.
