Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“Go on,” I whisper. My face is wet, and I don’t know when that started. “Go home one more time.”
The horse walks into the loch.
It goes the way it has always gone, unhurried, the water rising up its legs, its chest, with no splash and no sound, the surface folding around it, rather than breaking. The white of it grows dim in the black water, and then it’s swimming, then it’s a slash of cream, and then the loch closes over the place where it was and the fog drifts across the water and the bay is empty.
The horse never comes out again.
I stand on the shore a long time, my hand pressed flat over the warm weight in my coat, and I watch the still water, and I let myself understand what I just watched: that was the last of it. The thing that has come up out of this loch for centuries, the terror of this coast, the lord of all its drownings. I just watched it go under for the final time, and no one will ever see it again unless I decide it.
Somewhere out in the fog, the man is in the water. Or the man is becoming possible. I don’t know how it works from here, Mhairi’s instructions ended at the cut and the keeping. So I do the only thing left, which is turn around and start the long walk home and trust that what comes up out of the loch tomorrow, or tonight, or whenever the water is done with him, will be Alasdair.
Mortal.
Mine.
And aging from this hour forward, because of what I did to him with my own hand.
The fog stays thick on the walk back and the fibro comes up with every step now that the ritual’s let go of me, my hips grinding, my hands throbbing around nothing. I walk through it and I cry on and off, quietly, in the undramatic way you cry when you’re alone, and maybe partly pretending you’re an actress in some foreign film festival entry.
Because here’s what I keep circling back to: who am I, that he did that?
I asked and he stood. A creature older than the village let me cut the eternity out of him, and for what…for me? I’ve known him for just shy of two months. We’ve never even said the word love. He might have said so earlier in the keep, but he didn’t really tell me, it was just a fact to him, an aside.
Love. I think it and flinch, because what if this isn’t that? What if this is glamour, or loneliness, or two broken beings mistaking their fitting for fate? What if in ten years he wakes up in an aging body next to an aching woman and understands what he traded, and hates me for asking? What if I deserve none of it? Not the binding, not the man, not the line of cunning blood that lit up in me tonight like it had been waiting?
I don’t have answers.
But the hide stays warm against my chest the whole way home, warm as a heart—his heart—the deathless piece of him keeping me company through the cold, and the cottage finally comes up out of the white.
I go inside, and I bolt the door out of habit, and I put the piece of him in that box Effie left me, buried under the floorboards of her secret storage room.
Then I go downstairs and look out at the darkness of the bay.
“Come back to me,” I say to the fog. “Come back a little older.”
Chapter
Thirty-Two
He doesn’t come back that night.
I don’t sleep so much as float near the top of it, surfacing at every sound the cottage makes, and the cottage makes a lot of them: the wind finding the eaves, the stove settling, the rowan scratching the wall like a request to come inside. Each time, I’m up on one elbow with my heart going before I’m even awake, and each time it’s nothing. Each time I lie back down, and put my hand over the place on the quilt where the warmth of the hide would be if I hadn’t buried it under the floorboards with Effie’s things, where it belongs, where I already miss it in some strange (and a little fucked up) way.
And he doesn’t come back the next morning, either.
I do all the motions of an ordinary day: shower, get dressed, have breakfast, attempt to read a book, attempt to sketch and paint, but more often than not I stand at the back window watching the fog burn slowly off the bay, and the water that emerges from under it is just water. Flat, grey-blue, ordinary. No pale shape on the rocks of the far spit. No dark head in the shallows. I don’t want to see a damn thing, but I’m afraid if I don’t watch it, like a watched pot that never boils, then that’s when the loch will come alive with monsters again.