Reluctant (Heroes of the Highlands) (The MacKays #3) (2 page)

“And has been a thorn in Scotland’s arse ever since,” Connor groused.

The Banshee Queen held up her hand. “So to mitigate more bloodshed, you request that I send a Banshee to kill this man, Soren?” Her white robes glistened with her movement, sending a shower of tiny frost flakes to the floor. Her crystal eyes took in each of the men. “What do you offer in return for this life?”

Roderick stepped forward. “We figured you’d be interested in reclaiming the Fae relic he has plundered, though if you require aught else, we should be able to provide it.”

The queen seemed to take longer than necessary to consider, though the frost about her aura began to swirl in excited flurries. The men started shifting with impatience, but none of them dared to speak. Kamdyn knew that Tah Liah measured everything very carefully with the unhurried manner of an immortal. So she settled in for the wait, wondering who would be chosen to kill the villain.

“I am very much interested in regaining this relic,” the queen stated in a voice that conveyed little to no interest at all. “I will send my own handmaiden to procure it, and rid you of this Lord of Shadows.”

“It’s
Laird
of Shadows,” Daroch corrected the Banshee Queen in a voice full of derision. He held little fear or respect for the Fae and was therefore unable to help himself.

Kamdyn felt like a fish pulled from the sea. Her eyes bulged and her mouth opened and closed without drawing any air or making any sound. She couldn’t remember once ever taking a life. She had always been the sort to take a spider out of doors to save it from her sister’s boot. She’d cried for days when they’d had to eat one of their hens during a particularly long winter. In fact, she’d refused to eat meat for months in protest of the senseless slaughter. As a Banshee, it was understood that she’d been supposed to kill an evil MacKay Laird, but she’d always been secretly thankful she didn’t end up having to. Now the queen was sending
her
to take care of this Viking Berserker warlord? This
Laird of Shadows?
What was she
thinking
?

“Ye’re sending
this
wee thing to kill the Laird of Shadows?” Connor echoed her thoughts. The Berserkers simultaneously burst into laughter. “I doona think we’ve properly expressed to ye how dangerous this man is.”

Kamdyn scowled at their laughter. She caught Rory cracking a smile and speared her brother-in-law with a withering look.

He pulled his lips into a straight line, but the corner of his mouth trembled furiously.

“I assure you, my handmaiden’s touch is as effective as any Banshee’s.” The queen did not seem amused, but neither did she seem incensed.

“Yes, I am
quite
fatal,” Kamdyn insisted, hoping they didn’t call her bluff, but resenting their laughter and lack of respect. “And… and… I’m certain that I could even be
lethal
, if I wanted to.”

A new wave of masculine chortles crippled the warriors, and Rory lost the battle to his dimpled grin. Even grim Daroch snorted in amusement.

“I’ll—I’ll do it.” Kamdyn regretted the words the moment they escaped her, yet still she plunged deeper into the reckless vow. “I’ll kill this marauder and recover the relic. Then we’ll see who is laughing.”

The two MacKay men sobered and cast uneasy glances at each other.

“We mean no disrespect, wee Banshee.” Connor covered his mouth as though to contain his mirth. “It’s just ye’re such a slip of a girl. Ye look as though ye’d blow away in a strong wind, let alone stand against a Berserker.”

“I’ll be forty next year,” she imperiously informed him. “Though I became a Banshee at eighteen, and am therefore stuck in that form.”

The Berserkers peered at her a bit differently then.

“That’s no’ exactly the case,” Daroch chimed in with the information she hoped he’d keep to himself. She should have known the hope was foolish. “She’s spent some of that time in Faerie, which means she hasna exactly
lived
all of the years we have, as time passes more slowly there.”

“Aye.” Rory took the argument a step further, regarding her with brotherly gentleness. “I doona believe she has the heart to do what must be done.”

Tah Liah looked back at Kamdyn, spearing her with an arctic, crystalline gaze. “It is my opinion that it is time she learns to use her Banshee magic. She has accepted the terms of this pact, has she not?”

Kamdyn gulped and nodded. Tah Liah had always been good to her. Treated her with patience and fairness, if not affection. Still, she dare not refuse her queen’s will. Agreements and contracts were a very sacred thing to this particular Banshee Queen.

“Aye, my lady.”

“Then it is settled. Tonight you will end the Laird of Shadows.”

Chapter Three

Kamdyn found the Shadow Laird’s camp in the Naver forest near Strathnaver. The cloudy night was dark, and their fires glowed in the isolated country like tiny beacons among a maze of stark and gnarled trees. It had to be magic that no one had found them yet, because a force of two hundred or so men was nigh impossible to hide.

She lurked among them, spying on their night time rituals. They laughed, ate like savages, fought amongst themselves, and sang songs that made her ears burn. However, the band of marauders wasn’t exactly what she expected. They were clean. Their tents were fine. There seemed to be a subtle organization in their debauched anarchy. A creed maybe? A code by which they lived. Kamdyn struggled to understand it. Who would choose to live like this? There were no women. No color to make their tents cozy or spices to make their meals pleasant. Just pilfered goods and bloodied weapons.

The men spoke about
him
in hushed voices laced with equal parts fear and awe. No matter how loud and raucous they became, when they passed the large tent set away from the camp, tucked into the very corner of the trees, they fell silent, giving it a wide berth and uneasy glances.

There she would find the Laird of Shadows.

And there she would end him.

Kamdyn paused at the entry to the tent, which faced the trees rather than the camp. Becoming corporeal, she adjusted the thin straps of her diaphanous blue robes and hesitated.

Though it was early October, large, soft flakes of snow began to drift slowly to the highland trees and grasses. Not a storm, more a warning that winter approached. At the appearance of the lazy, feathered swirls, a feeling of lost desolation reached out to her. It drifted about the camp, not unlike the snowflakes, leaving none untouched.

Kamdyn watched the pillagers with new eyes. She’d expected evil. She’d expected the kind of violent, selfish brutality that Angus and his men displayed when they’d burned her and her sisters alive.

But she felt none of that from the surrounding men. She felt… Need. Raw, pure, unfulfilled desires. Some so intense and soul-searing, they choked her. The need for love. For acceptance. For food, for blood, revenge, sex, dominance. Some of the men who laughed the loudest were the most empty.

And the emptiness seemed to concentrate at one particular point.

His
tent. It was like a chasm. Indeed, they called him the Laird of Shadows, but there had to be light in order to create shadow, didn’t there? And in his tent, she could feel none. To her Banshee senses, whatever that tent sheltered was like a gaping wound, nay, like scorched and salted earth. Desolate. Insatiable.

Clenching her fists in preparation, she needlessly filled her lungs with chilly air, and nodded to herself. His name was Soren, and he needed to die. Wasn’t that what the Nordic Berserker had said? He’d done terrible things. Killed innocent people. Destroyed livelihoods and homes, and would continue to do so unless she put a stop to it.

Right, then.
She squared her shoulders. Time for the Laird of Shadows to face the Reaper—er—Banshee. She thrust aside the flap of the tent and plunged inside.

The hiss of a dagger flying end over end warned her the moment before it imbedded to the hilt just below her rib cage.

Kamdyn let out a shocked cry at the sharp pain. It was more a sound of outrage than anything. Her hands went to where the dirk penetrated her skin.

The Berskerker had a double-sided axe in his hand before he leapt from the pallet of furs on the floor.

He was incredibly massive. He was also incredibly
naked.

A lone candle flickered at the far edge of the tent on a table strewn with the leavings of a devoured supper. Its flame flared brighter and reflected in the ice-blue eyes that mirrored astonishment back at her.

For a speechless moment, their gazes clashed and held. But Kamdyn couldn’t stop her eyes from darting glances at all the foreign parts of him displayed by the dancing candlelight.

Laird of Shadows, indeed. For there were shadows created by the deep grooves and swells of sculpted brawn stretching taut over his thick frame. And there were shadows lurking in his deep-set eyes as they latched onto the hilt of his blade still protruding from her middle.

“You are—a girl,” he accused her in a deep, rumbling Nordic accent.

Apparently, brilliance wasn’t on the list of dangerous aspects of the Laird of Shadows.

His brutal face was condemning as he again lifted his eyes to hers. His axe lowered and then clattered to the earth as he dropped it. “I thought you were—I do not keep girls in the camp.”

“I am a
woman
.” She absurdly felt compelled to correct him while trying not to rudely stare at his nudity. Her eyes rested on the torque that encircled the swell of his bicep. “Well, I’m a Faerie. A Banshee. But I
was
a woman. Once. Not that I’m not now. A female, that is. Not a… woman.” Kamdyn scowled and squeezed her eyes shut. This was rapidly deteriorating. They hadn’t amply prepared her for this. Hadn’t told her that the villain would have the sculpted features of Eros and the body of a barbarian god.

“And
you
!” she scolded, latching on to indignation with desperate fingers. “This is why I’ve been sent here, you know. This unacceptable behavior.” Gripping the dirk’s bejeweled hilt, she let out a gasp as she pulled it from her body, already feeling the flesh begin to knit back together. “Really, who throws daggers at a guest before ascertaining whether they are friend or foe?”

“Do. Not. Do…
That
.” The dark command held a bewildering pleading note.

“Do what?” she queried, holding the dirk up for inspection. It was long and wicked and since she was so small, it almost stabbed clean through her.

The Berserker’s eyes flickered, and shadows of a different sort began to swirl in their depths.

“Bleed.” The word was growled from lips peeled back from sharpened teeth. Kamdyn froze in fascination as the black of his pupils deepened and spread until his entire eye was a void, empty of emotion and full of every shade of darkness.

She’d been warned that blood would bring on Berserkergang. That it turned him into a ruthless beast of indiscriminate rage that would kill anyone in his path.

His body arched and he snarled as muscles built and compounded upon each other. He seemed to grow taller, wider, even monstrous. Either that or the tent was shrinking, which Kamdyn very much doubted. The part of him that defined his sex twitched and grew, becoming full and large.

Kamdyn’s mouth went dry. Then flooded with moisture.

He’d become some kind of beast. He turned those abysmal eyes on her again and an expression crossed his face that astounded and bewildered her all at once.

On a dog, she would have called it joy. But on the Berserker’s feral features, it had to be called something else. He was too savage to smile. To brutal to possess something like hope. Too ruthless to love. She was certain of it.

But to possess, to dominate, to destroy, of these things he was more than capable. Every dark intent she could imagine was blasted toward her by the muddled emotions drowning in the soupy remnants of his tainted soul.

As he stalked her, Kamdyn decided she was almost glad he’d become this monster. It would be less like killing a human. It would be easier to look into the soulless voids that should be his eyes and watch the life ebb from them, taken by her Banshee magic. His murderous intent would soothe the shame at wasting all that masculine beauty.

He leapt for her.

She reached out toward him, bracing for the impact, ready to send her deadly currents through his body.

But didn’t. The closer he came, the better she could see just how wrong she’d been. The swirling darkness of the beast’s eyes weren’t empty at all, just deeper. And what she saw in their depths was a timid, undiscovered tenderness that took her breath away. And a fear of… something. Rejection? That couldn’t be right. Her Banshee senses had to be shorting out.

When he seized her, she’d expected him to try to rip her apart with his strong bare hands.

What she hadn’t expected was for him to kiss her.

Chapter Four

He didn’t just kiss her. He captured her lips with his mouth. Captured her hair with his hand, and crushed her body to his nakedness.

Kamdyn stood frozen. His flesh was so warm beneath her hands, like silk stretched over sun-heated stone. His dangerously hot mouth threatened to melt her where she stood. In fact, her skin felt as though she’d been set ablaze for the second time in her life, but the sensation carried waves of disquieting pleasure scattering through the flames.

He was so strong. Too strong. Strong enough to rend her limbs from her body without using more than two fingers. She could feel it in the unerringly solid band of his arm imprisoning her against him. In the handfuls of hard, meaty muscle on his chest. In the press of his alarmingly thick thighs against her. In the fact that her feet no longer touched the ground, but dangled above it as he devoured her.

He forced his tongue past her lips without seeking entrance. He claimed her mouth as his, thrusting and retreating in a strong, moist action that sent dizzying thrills through her veins.