Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Ispend the day not coping in the specific way I’ve gotten good at not coping with things: coffee that keeps going cold, that fucking wolfsbane, and bog myrtle I still haven’t finished, the curtain over the sink open, then closed, and then open again because I can’t decide whether I want to be able to see the bay or not.
I’ve kept catching myself listening for him.
Setting two mugs out, then putting one back.
The aloneness hasn’t softened; it’s calcified into something I carry around the rooms with me.
So when I hear an engine working down the rutted track through the woods, my first feeling, god help me, is hope.
Some pathetic part of me leaps up thinking, he’s come back, before the rational part reminds me that though I’ve seen his Land Rover, I’ve never actually seen him drive it here.
And, if he were to return, I think he’d come from the water.
But as I peer out the front window, I see it is a car. A real one—grey, and official, and mud-splattered—easing down my drive and pulling up on the gravel beside my rental.
Sinclair.
I watch him as he gets out and looks at the cottage, the rowan by the step, the salt I haven’t swept off the front sill.
He looks the same as before, but there’s a weariness about him that’s gone past the professional kind into something that’s eating away at him.
A woman’s gone missing on his watch. He’s been driving the south shore knocking on doors.
This is getting personal for him, and I need to keep that in mind.
I open the door before he’s halfway to it.
“Detective.”
“Miss Galloway.” He stops where he is and nods in greeting. “Sorry to bother you again—and in person—but I was in the area and I’ve a few more questions, if you can spare the time. About the roads, mostly. Who comes and goes out this way.”
No one comes out this way, I think. One thing comes out this way, and it rarely uses the road.
“Of course,” I say, even though the last thing I want to do is talk to him, but I have to pretend that everything is A-Okay. “Do you want to come in? I can put the kettle on and…”
And that’s when I feel it.
The tilt. The weight in the air. The axis-shift under my skin that I’ve learned means he’s here, except he went out my back door yesterday in a fury of my own making and I told him never to come back.
The feeling I have now isn’t the presence of the man whose been in my kitchen.
It’s…older than that, colder. It’s the feeling I had the day I walked to his castle and saw a white shape through the trees; that feeling of being watched by something that’s watched this world for a long time.
I look past Sinclair’s shoulder, up the slope behind the cottage, toward the bracken, and the yellow-dotted gorse, and the dark line of the woods.
The horse is there.
It’s standing where the ground rises toward the trees, the pale grey-white of it stark against the turning copper of the bracken.
The long mane hangs wet and heavy down its neck even though it hasn’t rained for a few days.
The water has run down its shoulder and darkened the coat in streaks.
It’s bigger than a horse should be, the way it was bigger in the road, it’s always bigger than the last time.
The one eye I can see, turned down the slope toward us, is black.
Too black. The black of the loch at midnight, of the bottom no one’s mapped, the black of the cosmos where the elder beings roost.
But the horse isn’t looking at me, that much I can tell.
It’s looking at Sinclair.
“Detective.” My voice has dropped, panic starting to flood through me. “Detective, get in your car.”
He follows my look up the slope, and his tired face does something almost fond. “Ah,” he says. “Now there’s a fine beast. Yours?”
“No. Not mine. Get in the car. Please.”
“Don’t tell me it’s wild; a thing that strong and well-fed.
” He’s ignoring me and already turning toward it, and I can see it taking him, the pull of it, the glamour of it.
His weariness has dropped off him. There’s a softness coming over his face, an awe.
“I grew up with horses, ya know. My father kept Highland ponies, they were beautiful creatures. This one is far too big to be a pony, but it has to belong to someone.”
He takes a few steps towards it with a dazed expression on his face.
“It’s not…no, Detective, please.” I hurry over to him in my slippers and pull on his sleeve.
He glances down at me with the mild puzzled patience of a man humoring a frightened woman.
“It’s not safe. It’s not tame. It bites, it’s not…
look, you don’t know what it is. Please, just get in your car and go. ”
“Miss Galloway.” Gently. Like I’m the one who needs handling. “It’s just a bloody horse.”
He takes his arm back. Not unkindly.
And he walks toward it.
The horse shifts its weight, getting ready for something. Sinclair makes a low clicking sound with his tongue, and the horse’s ear flicks toward it, and he’s reading the ear-flick as a totally normal thing a horse does.
I get in front of him.
I don’t decide to, I’m between him and the slope before I’ve thought about it, my arms out, walking backward in my slippers up the rise toward the horse with my body shielding the detective, which is insane and the most useless thing a person could do, and I’m saying, go on, get, shoo, to a centuries-old thing wearing a horse like a coat.
And then it fucking charges.
The horse drops its head and comes down the slope at me, the size of it fills the whole sky.
the hooves loud on the turning ground, and I have just enough time to understand that I am going to die, that I have put myself in front of a monster that is going to run me into the dirt, and I manage to throw myself sideways, into the gorse.
It doesn’t hit me.
It checks, pulls up short three feet from where I was, the great white body wheeling while it lets out a loud whinny, and I understand, even as I’m sprawled in the gorse with the breath knocked out of me, that it was never going to hit me.
It simply moved me out of the way, the way you’d move a dog out of a doorway with your foot.
It wanted me out from in front of the thing it came for.
Now I am out of the way, and Sinclair has stumbled back toward his car at the shock of it. The horse stands between us, breathing wet clouds from his nostrils, and I’m pretty sure it’s already forgotten I exist.
And Sinclair—Sinclair, who grew up with Highland ponies, who just watched a half-wild animal nearly trample his witness—goes to the boot of his car, pops the trunk, and takes out a coil of blue nylon rope.
“No,” I whimper from the gorse, “no, no, no, don’t—”
“It’s spooked, that’s all,” he says in a soothing, competent voice, looping the rope in his hands.
“A loose animal like this’ll do somebody harm if it’s left.
I’ll get a line on it and we’ll ring round, find who’s missing a horse.
” He’s moving toward it slow now, the rope held low and easy, his voice murmuring there now, there, easy, easy. The horse stands and lets him come.
Of course it lets him come.
I get up out of the gorse. My palms are bleeding from the fall, my slippers half on, and I’m screaming now. “It’s not a horse! Detective, it is not a horse, it’ll kill you, please, please get away from it—”
He doesn’t even look at me.
The glamour has him all the way now. He reaches the horse. He lays his free hand flat on the slope of its shoulder, the way you gentle a horse before the rope, that broad confident pat, there now—
…and his hand doesn’t come off.
I see the exact moment it goes wrong, and his face changes. He tries to lift his palm to bring the rope up over the neck, but his hand stays where it is—fixed to the wet shoulder like it’s been set in concrete. Incredulous, he starts, “What the f—”
The horse rears.
It goes up, up, Sinclair’s stuck arm wrenching up with it so his whole body is hauled off the ground. For one frozen second he hangs there, his trapped hand against the rising bulk of it, and then the hooves come down.
The first one catches him low, between the legs, and the sound he makes is one that will stay in the marrow of my bones until I die.
The second comes down on his shoulder and I hear it break, a wet wooden crack, the joint going the wrong way.
He screams. He’s still alive, and he’s screaming, and his hand is still stuck.
The third hoof comes down somewhere in the soft middle of him, and the scream changes pitch into something that isn’t human anymore.
He’s not dead. That’s the fucking horror of it all: it hasn’t killed him. It’s broken him, methodically, hoof by hoof, and left enough of him alive to know what’s happening.
Then it runs.
It drops to all fours and bolts down the slope toward the bay, dragging Sinclair with it, his hand still fixed to its shoulder, his ruined body bouncing and tumbling over the rocks, and the stone, and the gorse.
I hear him going over the ground, parts of him meeting the rocks with sickening thumps and splats.
I run after them and I don’t know why—there is nothing I can do—my legs moving on their own.
“Alasdair!” I scream his real name at the man that’s somewhere inside there, at the white horse racing toward the water. “Alasdair, stop, stop, please—Alasdair!”
My voice goes out over the bay and comes back to me off the far spit, off the castle stone, Alasdair, Alasdair, thinned, and doubled, and useless.
The horse doesn’t stop, hitting the shallows at a gallop, throwing up sheets of silver.
It doesn’t slow at the water’s edge the way a real thing would; it goes in like a homing missile.
The detective goes in with it, dragged under in a thrashing grey jacket, and blue rope; the last of his voice cut off in a gurgle as the loch closes over his head.