Redeemed (Heroes of the Highlands) (The MacKays #2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

entire body with just the strength of his arms, but once he swung his foot up and found purchase, he was able to rest for a moment and adjust his burden.
    Shaking his arms, Daroch sent her a cranky look before latching on to the rock again. “Well, out with it. How is it that I am wrong?” With a grunt, he tackled the increasingly precarious cliff with renewed vigor.
    “You’re not merely a man,” Kylah gently accused. “You said in the cave, that I was a creature of magic and you were a being of power. But that isn’t true, is it? You just used magic to save yourself. I felt it.”
    A strong gust of wind tossed his dark, wet hair and the Druid clung to the rock, waiting for it to pass. “Aye, and it may have been the death of me.” The tattoos made the grim set of his face seem sinister. He looked over at her then, as she floated beside him. His calculating eyes searched every inch of her, snagging on places she’d not expected. Her feet. Her legs. Her breasts. The exposed column of her throat. When his gaze finally met hers, it held a naked mixture of desolation and heat. “Maybe I should have just let ye drown me.”
    While he hoisted himself closer to the top, Kylah tried to control the unnecessary breathlessness that squeezed her chest.
    A small tingle ran up her spine that had nothing to do with the mostly naked Druid.
    Kylah looked up. Daroch was only a few hand-holds from the bluff.
    And something malicious waited for them at the top.

Chapter Six
    “Wait.” Frigid goose bumps erupted on Daroch’s shoulder as he grasped the grassy ledge, signaling that the Banshee had reached for his skin. “Someone’s up there.” Her warning killed the sensation reaching toward his loin-cloth.
    “Who?” he asked. And why didn’t he have his fucking shamrock amulet? The years had made him reckless.
    “I don’t know.” She sounded worried. “But he looks like death incarnate.”
    “So it’s true. The Druid slave still lives after all these centuries.” The wind whipped the mocking words over the cliff.
    Daroch grited his teeth as hatred impaled him with all the force of Dagda’s spear. They would send him.
    “Ly Erg.” Daroch kept his voice cold to hide the inferno raging through him. He used it to surge to the ground and roll to his feet. “Ye still kneel at the foot of her throne and jump to do her bidding, while I answer to no one. I ask ye this. Which of us is still a slave?”
    “Centuries?” Kylah breathed.
    “Stay out of this Banshee. Your Queen commands it.” The militant Fae pointed a permanently blood-stained finger at Kylah and she shrank back.
    “W-why?”
    Daroch couldn’t smother an ironic smirk at her favorite question. Apparently, the Banshee Queen’s executioner found it as irritating as he did.
    Ly Erg’s imperious voice had the distinct unhurried pacing of an immortal and the cruel anticipation of someone who loved to kill. “Because it’s none of your concern. Now be gone.”
    Daroch grunted. “Good bloody luck with that command,” he muttered. He divested himself of his satchel of fish and bladder of air. He may not live long enough to eat.
    Calculating odds, his mind flew through a series of observations as he tested his muscles. His body was moderately fatigued from swimming, fishing, and climbing, running at about seventy percent maximum strength and, due to the extra adrenaline dump from almost dying, sixty five percent of maximum agility without extra stores of energy.
    “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” The desperate note in the Banshee’s voice thrummed something soft in the center of Daroch’s chest that he thrust aside with cold estimations.
    “I’ve already hurt him.” Ly Erg bragged, drawing the curved, long-handled sword from a scabbard decorated with intricate Fae Symbols. “I’m here to finish him.”
    Ly Erg’s Fae strength amounted to roughly four hundred percent of Daroch’s own maximum. But since the hubristic nancy bastard insisted