Page 100 of The Last Kelpie

It felt like a magical vow, as if our love and words had just bound us forever. And I hoped they had.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Áedán and I settled into a life neither of us expected.

The cottage became ours. Áedán added more shelves in the main room for my books. A picture of my gran stood in a place of honor on the mantle. My laptop claimed permanent residence on the kitchen table, power cord snaking across floorboards that never rotted despite Áedán constantly trailing water across them. Oh, yes, and we had electricity! It had cost a pretty penny, but the Bonnie Loch Beast was a wealthy man now, and my pay wasn't too shabby either. We had a refrigerator, a water heater, and lights in every room.

I hung my jacket on the hook by the door, next to Áedán's. He made space in the wardrobe for my clothes, and my sweaters got tucked into the dresser amid his. Our toothbrushes sat in the same glass on the bathroom sink, and I had my own mug for coffee. Oh, and an electric coffee pot! Both of our lives had changed drastically. And both for the better.

Most mornings I woke to find Áedán already awake, standing at the window with a steaming mug of tea in hand, watching the loch. The water moved differently when he watched it. Calmer. Like it recognized its guardian.

I had video conferences with the Velasca twice a month, sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop angled so I could look up from the screen and see the view through the front window. Afterward, Julian and I would talk a little, his warm brown eyes assessing me with the psychological precision he'd perfected over eighty-seven years. Yes, he was eighty-seven. He had known my grandmother.

“You look well,” Julian said after our twelfth conference had finished.

“I am well.”

“Áedán?”

“Also well.” I glanced toward the dock where Áedán stood talking to a group of university students about water pollution. His voice carried through the open window, patient and authoritative. “He's teaching today.”

Julian smiled. “Good. We'll be assigning you a new myth soon. Is he still set on accompanying you?”

“Yes. I was wondering when you'd get around to that. It's been over six months. I feel like I'm being paid for nothing.”

“You worked hard for Áedán. You deserve the time off to settle into your new life.” He paused to grin at me. “The Velasca has changed because of you, Ethan. Every Velasca house is having unprecedented success with our new procedures. And you're inspiring others.”

I thought about the last meeting I'd attended via video call. Hassan had presented a proposal to help a fading stone spirit in Germany adapt to urban expansion. Mei Lin had organized a festival in Wales to celebrate a local water myth, inviting the community to share their own stories instead of preserving a single canonical version. Agnes had started a new section in the Archive: New Traditions.

“I'm glad,” I said.

“We all are.” Julian leaned back in his chair. Behind him, I could see the familiar walls of his office at the estate. “Though you're not the only one who's become an inspiration.”

I beamed at him, so damn proud of my eco-warrior. Áedán had become something the Velasca hadn't anticipated. My kelpie had forged a path for others to follow.

The social media accounts the Outreach Team created for him during the campaign to restore his myth were supposed to be temporary tools. They were a way to spread the true and also new story of kelpies as water guardians rather than monsters. But Áedán had taken them over completely, transforming them into a tool for much more than his survival.

He posted daily now. Photographs of the loch at dawn, videos explaining the importance of clean water, threads about the history of water guardianship across cultures. His follower count had grown to over sixty million. Sixty. Million. He wasn't just a trend. The Bonnie Loch Beast was here to stay.

“The Thames is dying,” he'd written last week, his words appearing on screens across the world. “Not because people don't care, but because they've forgotten how to listen. Water speaks. It tells you when it's sick. You just have to remember how to hear it. Or, with the Thames, how to smell it.”

That post had over 140 million views.

He'd started an organization. Guardians of the Water, he'd called it, and I'd watched him build it from our kitchen table with the same fierce determination he'd once used to protect his loch and the people who lived there. He held protests, filed legal challenges against corporations dumping waste into rivers, and spoke at conferences about environmental protection.

But he also fought in ways that human activists couldn't.

I'd woken one night to find him gone, the bed cold beside me. I'd found him standing waist-deep in the loch, his magic visible beneath his skin like ribbons of light, his hands moving in patterns I didn't understand. The water had responded, currents shifting, something ancient and powerful moving through the depths.

“What are you doing?” I'd asked from the dock.

“There's a river in India.” His voice had been distant, his attention focused somewhere else. “Someone's poisoning it. I'm cleaning the water.”

Magic that crossed oceans. Power that connected all water everywhere. He'd had it in him the entire time, but never knew what he could do with it. Not until he tried. Áedán was becoming the myth he'd been born to be. He was the guardian from the oldest tales, but that guardian had gone global. He was the damn Lorac of the water.

“He's remarkable,” Julian said, pulling me back to the present.

“Yes, he is.”