Excerpt: Kelpie

1.

The sea was angry tonight, of all nights, but Niall had a scent and nothing would stop him. He cut through the heaving currents like quicksilver. Heavy salt water battered his flanks, his pumping shoulders, his curved neck, and it surged through his wide velvet nostrils as he sucked in lung-fulls in labored breaths. His glossy hooves pounded the water. His powerful tail swept mightily up and down, scales shimmering. He was close to the surface, where the smell was strongest, and it maddened him, making his breath come in salty grunts and gasps and making his neck arch in a high, urgent curve, a stallion sensing heat. His tail flipped above the surface and slapped down, hard, with the clap that had given rise centuries ago to the legend that he created the thunder.

He knew he was getting closer.

***

The seawater lapped gently but insistently at Charlotte's ankles. That was as far in as she would go. She stood with her arms crossed and her feet planted in the wet sand, loose jeans rolled up her short, slender calves, looking for all the world like someone having a silent argument with the water. And maybe she was.

The night and the moonlight softened the waves until they looked almost placid, but she could feel their rhythmic strength through the darkness, and she wasn't fooled. She knew better than to trust the sea. On either side of the bay where she stood, the jagged cliffs so typical of the Moray Coast formed massive ridges and arches that echoed with the brutal hammering of the surf that had carved them over the ages. Charlotte listened to the echoes, and shuddered. Even back home in the States, even with different oceans, the sight and smell of the water had always worked a strange magic on her. Here in Scotland, it was a hundred times worse.

She gave herself a shake and took a few steps backwards, out of the water. That's quite enough of that, she thought. I've got work to do. She turned her back on the sea, arms still crossed, and made her way up to the cottage nestled just past the point where the sand ended and the grass began. The wind whipped her long red hair around her face. Ginger, they called it here, and they said it like it was an insult. I hate this country, she thought, as she unlatched the door to the house.

The warm interior of the little cottage smelled like nutmeg, just like the woman who had owned it for over twenty years. Charlotte's grandmother had left behind a sweet clutter of her life's flotsam, from boxes of letters to dusty model horses to the very scent in the air. With her emotions still raw from the small funeral, Charlotte felt a gentle twinge every time she stepped through the door. It was hard to look at this loving mess and see things that needed to be boxed and dispersed or disposed of. But with her mother gone as well, there was no one else to do it. And as uncomfortable as she felt this close to the sea, as strange as she found this country, Charlotte intended to take her time. This was her own, private ritual, and her only chance to say goodbye. Besides, there was no one back home who would miss her. No one anywhere who would now, for that matter.

She poured herself a cup of tea and settled in cross-legged to pack up the model horses, dusting each one, trying to remember if her grandmother had had a name for it, and then carefully wrapping it up and placing it in the box marked “charity”. The feel of them, the chipped ears, the perfectly sculpted little noses, made her feel like she was twelve again, her head full of stamps and snorts and whinnies. Her mother had never let her take riding lessons, though; she said they were immoral. She said horses were made for better than that. Charlotte's mother had been strange like that.

A sound in the distance startled Charlotte out of her reverie. She held her breath and listened harder, afraid she was the victim of an overactive imagination. But the wind died down for a moment, and she heard it again: the faint sound of hoof beats on sand. The sound of a horse at full gallop.