Bonetide

Prologue

She comes in the late afternoon, in a dark jacket too thin for the weather, dragging a suitcase that catches every uneven stone on the path.

She’s not alone, she has the solicitor with her—a portly man who smiles too much.

It’s a smile that most give around these parts, nervous and wary, as if they believe all the sordid tales that abound in this region but don’t want others to know.

I’m used to those looks and those smiles.

They no longer bother me, if they ever did.

I’ve been waiting such a long time.

Neither of them can see me. I’m across the water—half in shadow—and she’s still looking at the cottage as if she can’t believe her eyes, perhaps thinking it’s bigger or smaller, more well-kept or less well-kept than she thought.

Her hair is darker and longer than her great-aunt’s was, her face shaped like a doll, but there is something of the old woman in the line of her jaw.

A stubbornness. A way of standing as if she is alone in the world and has decided that is fine.

I knew Eufemia Galloway for a long time. I know that jaw.

The new one, the one the people in town called Iris when I was last eavesdropping, sets her suitcase on the step and looks behind her at the solicitor.

He had been standing there staring at the loch with a look on his face one can only describe as frozen, his mind perhaps torturing him with stories of the drowned wives.

Then he snaps to it and hands Iris a key which she accepts with some reverence.

It makes me glad to see that she already respects the cottage.

She fits the old key into the lock. She has to lean her weight into it. The door has always been stiff. Then she is inside, and I lose her to the windows for a while, only her shape moving room to room as she opens curtains and cupboards, learning the bones of the place that is now hers.

She comes back out at dusk—the solicitor long gone—and stands at the edge of the water with her arms wrapped around herself.

Now I let her see me.

Not all of me, though—not at first. Just enough that I’m a mere shape across the bay where there was nothing before.

A stillness in the dark that her eye catches and holds.

I watch her register me. I watch her go very, very still in the way a rabbit does when they know they’re being watched; that primal instinct that knows before the mind does.

Like the rabbit, she does not run unless she has to. I won’t give her a reason yet.

I want her in a way that will terrify her.

I want my mouth on the soft place beneath her ear where the pulse runs close to the skin.

I want to know what sounds she makes when she is afraid, and what sounds she makes when she is not.

I want her on her knees in the salt grass with her hands fisted in my shirt, telling me to stay.

I want—and this is the older want, the patient one, the one I have nursed through every long winter on this loch—to take her apart slowly, in the way only she will let me.

There is time for all of it.

There is so much time now that she is here.

Because no matter what happens, she won’t leave this place.

The wind shifts, bringing salt and bone and something that is not yet rot. She lifts her face into it, breathing deep. Becoming one with this land. Becoming…open.

But I won’t go to her tonight.

Tonight I only want her to feel me from afar. To carry the feeling inside with her when she goes inside and locks the door behind her. To lie awake in her aunt’s bed wondering if she dreamed me.

But she will not have dreamed me.

For I have come for her.