Burned
Page 70

It has kept me from falling.
It has kept me from going mad.
Unexpectedly, it has also silenced the monster I was becoming.
I no longer loathe and fear what was happening to me, because so much worse has happened to me. Perspective is a funny thing. You think your back is to the wall, then something worse corners you, and the first threat looks puny in comparison.
There is only me now, a Keltar who’s been mutated with immense power and perhaps will always be, but each time I’ve died on this cliff and held my own, maintained my sanity, reminded myself of my heritage, who I was born to be, the madness of the Unseelie Prince faded a little more. Strengthened by my ordeal, staked to the side of this bloody godforsaken cliff, the prince overtaking me was overtaken.
I am not a man that was once a Highlander, who got swallowed alive by the depravity and homicidal mania of a death-by-sex Fae.
I am a Keltar druid who now happens to possess Unseelie power and a bloody enormous sex drive. Not sure that last part’s much of a change.
My head sags forward, blood gushes from my cracked lips. She’s at it again, needling away, yanking out my entrails and knitting feverishly on a gown that will never be complete.
The cruelty of it is intolerable. My entire body is on fire with pain.
Fires.
The Highlands.
Beltane.
I recall this particular night of my fourteenth year for three reasons.
It was the first night I was recognized as a Keltar druid. Heady stuff for a young lad.
It was also the night Uncle Dageus warned me, made me suspect my happy dream would end before I was ready.
Like Tara.
Like I won’t let it for Dani.
When Da and the others place the sacred chalice and staff on the slab, Uncle Dageus moves close and puts a hand on my shoulder, pulls me aside and gazes down. Golden eyes so like my own stare into mine.
Fire purifies and distills, he says. Fire transforms. You must remember that when the time comes it seems only to ravage and destroy.
So, too, does pain.
One day you will walk through flames, lad.
Of the Beltane fires? I ask curiously. This was not a tradition with which I was familiar, but many of our more complex druid rituals were cloaked in secrecy until certain ages.
Flames of another kind. Hellfire. You will believe you canna possibly endure the agony.
At ten and four, I shiver, startled by the solemnness and sorrow in his eyes. There’s gravity in his low voice that makes me more than uneasy; a young man that prides himself on his courage, I taste the sudden ash of fear.
I canna prevent it. The stones are closed to us now. I would spare you if I could.
Are you foretelling my future? I ask warily. Do I lose my virginity this year? I add quickly. I’d pose that question to none other of my uncles, but Dageus was different. The eyes of women follow him everywhere. I want to be like him one day, lady killer (but not a lady murderer) with the same slow, sexy smile that melts my (pretty darned hot, she’s only ten years older than me) aunt Chloe every time.
I’m ready. I want Tara to be the one.
He smiles sadly.
It’s whispered among my clan that Dageus has glimpsed moments in the years to come. That when he traveled through time—before the Seelie Queen took away our power to navigate the centuries in hours of need—he saw hours, even days, of our lives. He’s never spoken of it, but we’ve always suspected. He has a canny sense of premonition that’s proved invaluable on more than one occasion.
I doona ken the how and when it happens, so I doona ken how to prevent it, short of locking you away and that’s no’ a life. Time is tricky. It may or may not come to pass, but if it does it will test you beyond imagining. If that hour comes, you must hold on to one thing.
I shiver again. What?
Love. You can only be broken without it. So long as the smallest spark of love, pure, protective, and good, exists within you, that which is Keltar in you will survive. You will return.
Return.
I know a harsh truth.
So long as I stay in the magnificent Highlands of my mind I will never return.
You must face the fire. I doona ken how long you must endure. You must hold on, remain aware. You must be prepared when your opportunity arises, or it will fail. Uncle Dageus laughs softly. Every man’s time comes eventually. It will not, however, be yours. With luck, you’ll live forever.
I’d stare up at him, rejecting it, refusing to believe he had any powers of prophecy. Telling myself no one lives forever (not knowing I’d turn Unseelie Prince) and his rambling only made him half mad, likely from the constant chatter of the thirteen dead Draghar within him. Then I’d torn from his grip, raced off, and refused to speak to him for days.
Now I wish I’d asked him questions, now I wish I knew what he saw, what my opportunity is because I sure as hell don’t see one.
Love?
Can I even feel it anymore?
I’ve hated everyone and everything around me since the moment I began to change. I ran from those who cared about me. I concede it’s possible my hatred hastened the changes, fed the wrong things, starved the right ones. But love? To feel it here and now? I’m not sure it’s even possible.
Och, but of course it is.
It’s what I’ve been doing all along. Like my da and all my clan before us, the Highlands are our greatest love. I was shielding myself without understanding the nuts and bolts of it. I’m not a man that could wed a woman, follow her to another country and live there. I’m wedded to my motherland, to the very soil of Scotland.