Flein has an itch to travel, and he’s seen more of the world than just about any man alive. Then again, Flein is only half human. He is the offspring of one of the Norse gods who mated with a human, and staying on the move helps keep people from realizing that he doesn’t age and is in fact a thousand years old or more.
His wanderings take him to a small village in the Scottish Highlands, where a series of rapes and murders have been blamed on a mysterious creature that inhabits the loch. Flein meets the creature, a waterhorse that can shift to human form. Both the man and horse forms are beautiful, and deadly. The waterhorse considers the loch and glen its domain, and hunts what it chooses. But Flein doesn’t think the creature is responsible for the recent deaths.
Flein and the creature, which he calls Donnchadh, join forces to find out who is behind the deaths. As the two work together, Flein finds himself more and more attracted to Donchadh, who remains as skittish as a colt, although he seems to share the same feelings. The creature is very curious about the outside world, but is bound by an oath to stay in the loch.
“Dark Waters” is a pleasant little fantasy story. The mystery probably won’t challenge true buffs, but it most likely wasn’t meant to. It does help draw you into the story, which moves at a good pace. At its core this is a romance between two very unlikely lovers. Flein is rather well drawn as a character, and over the course of the story we get a good idea of his long history and what has made him the man he is.
The waterhorse is a bit less well drawn. Of course, a lot of that is intentional. Donnchadh is a force of nature, a spirit, not a human, with a very different view of the world. But there’s a small element here of the creature being mysterious because we’re told he’s mysterious. It doesn’t really come through in the writing, which is probably a limitation of the short length of the story as much as anything.
“Dark Waters” is available from Amazon
