Bonetide

Chapter 30

Chapter

Thirty

The rain starts before I’m even out of the village, a fine mist at first, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as hangs in the air and waits for you to walk into it.

By the time I’m on the road that hugs the loch home, it’s turned to something with weight, drumming the roof of the car, smearing the headland into grey.

I drive half-paying attention to the road, half drowning in my thoughts about what I have to do and how the fuck I’m going to convince Alasdair to do it, so that I don’t see the blue lights until they’re right behind me.

My stomach drops straight through the floor of the car.

This is it. They found the car, they found Sinclair, they followed me from Mhairi’s, they know.

Every catastrophe arrives in my brain at once, and my hands go slick on the wheel as I pull onto the verge with the rain coming down in earnest. I watch in the mirror as a figure gets out, hunches into the weather, and comes up alongside me.

I put the window down and the cold, misting rain comes straight in, beading on my sleeve, on the dash.

It’s Constable MacRae. The one who first came out to see me after I made a complaint about someone chasing me down in the woods. My god, that feels like a lifetime ago.

“Evening.” He dips to my level, rain running off him. “Miss Galloway, if I remember? From the Galloway cottage out the headland.”

“That’s me.” My voice comes out almost normal. I’ve gotten frighteningly good at almost normal. “Nice to see you again.”

“Aye. Didn’t mean to put the heart across you with the lights.

” He says it almost apologetically. “It’s just your nearside taillight’s out.

Back left. You’ll not have known, but it’s a wee bit dangerous on these roads in the dark, especially in this.

” He tips his head at the rain. “Will only get worse as we head into a proper autumn.”

The relief is total, a rapid loosening behind my ribs that leaves me lightheaded. A taillight. It’s just a fucking a taillight.

“God, no, I had no idea. Thank you. I’ll get it fixed ASAP.”

“You do that.” He glances past me into the car, the back seat, the way they do, and I’m suddenly aware of everything that could be in a car. In fact, I have the library books in the backseat since they’re already overdue; I just keep getting distracted. Story of my life.

Luckily, he doesn’t seem too interested in the mythology books. “This a hire car?”

“It is, yeah.”

“You’ll want to ring them about the light, or get the registration shifted to your own name if you’re stopping for good and they make you an offer.

You’ve been here a wee while now.” A long pause, a squint of his eyes.

“Folk tend to buy a runabout, once they know they’re staying. Cheaper than the hire in the long run.”

“I’ve been meaning to sort out something more permanent.”

“Aye.” He straightens, then bends back down, and his expression turns troublesome.

“You’ve not seen DI Sinclair about, have you?

Out your way? He’s not checked in to work for some time, and it’s not like him to do so.

I know he said he was going to ask after some people, and I know your name was on that list.”

The rain seems to be heavier all of a sudden, the sound of the drumming on the roof becoming a cacophony.

“No,” I reply smoothly while my heart has turned into a machine gun. “Not since he stopped by to ask about the missing woman. Few days back.”

“Ah, well, you take care on that road, Miss Galloway,” he says, though there’s hesitation in his voice. “Get the light seen to.”

He raps the roof of the car twice with his knuckles and goes back to his own vehicle, and I pull off the side of the road with my hands shaking so hard I can barely hold the wheel.

I watch him in the mirror the whole way down the track until the bend takes him, and even then, I’m not sure he’s stopped watching me.

By the time I get the car parked at the cottage, the rain’s gone torrential, hammering the bracken flat, sheeting off the slope. I run for the door with my coat over my head and burst in soaked anyway.

The moment I step inside, however, I know Alasdair is here. I feel it.

I take off my coat and hang it up, then go into the kitchen where he’s been standing at the window, staring out at the bay.

“Where were you?” he asks flatly. No hello or anything like that, though I suppose he’s never been much for pleasantries.

“The shop,” I tell him, putting my purse on the counter. “The village. I needed to get out of the house, get some supplies.”

He turns toward me, his eyes blue and piercing.

“You’ve got no groceries.”

Ah, yes. Fuck.

“You went to the village and came back with nothing in your hands,” he says, his voice quiet and careful, which in turn tells me to be careful.

“You don’t go to the shop and come back empty, foxglove.

You at least always have a tin of biscuits with you.

So, I’ll ask you again—and I’d have you not lie to me—because you know I wouldn’t do the same to you. Where were you?”

The cottage is very quiet under the drumming rain.

“Fine,” I respond with a sigh. “Fine. I did go to the shop. But I went to talk to Mhairi. I went to ask her what I could do. About you. About all of it. About the killing, and the slipping, and the women in the loch, and the fact that I’m one bad night away from being one of them…

I went to find out what to do about you, Alasdair.

There. That’s the truth. You wanted it, there it is. ”

The confession hangs heavy in the air between us, but at least it’s no longer weighing in my chest anymore.

Alasdair swallows hard and I watch his expression slowly change. It’s not anger, not really. It’s something worse, something cold and calculated, temperature of the room dropping by degrees. “Behind my back.” His tone is pure ice.

“It’s not like that,” I protest.

“You went to a cunning woman behind my back to find a way to deal with me.” He takes a step, teeth bared at me. They’re not pointy, but it’s generally unsettling nonetheless. “Like I’m a thing to be managed. A problem at your table.”

“That’s not—” I start, but where’s the lie? He’s right. I try to give him a placating smile. “You’re scaring me right now; do you know that? This is exactly the—”

“I’m scaring you?” He laughs, but it’s cold, and bitter, and devoid of all humor.

“After everything—after I came up out of that loch faster than I’ve moved in a hundred years because I couldn’t bear the thought of pulling you up dead—now you’re scared?

Scared because I have some feelings about what you’re doing now, sneaking behind my back?

” He’s closer now, the chill coming off him, and his eyes have gone too bright, too fixed, his pupils like tiny pin pricks.

“I just mean, I know you’re angry about all of it, but I was just trying to help.”

“Help? So now you go to Mhairi to find the leash. Was that the plan, then?”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“Then what was it like, Iris?”

We’re almost touching now, both of us breathing hard, the rain roaring on the roof, and the air between us has that charge it always has, the terrible magnet of it, fury and want indistinguishable, and I don’t know which of us moves first.

His mouth crashes down on mine and I’m against the wall before I’ve drawn breath, his body pinning me there cold and hard, the kiss all teeth, furious.

My hands find his hair, and his hands are already at the button of my jeans, shoving them down past my hips.

His deft, cold fingers find me, and I’m wet for him because of course I am, because I’m broken in exactly the way that wants this, and he makes a low sound against my mouth when he feels it.

“Even now,” he breathes. “Even scared of me. You’re wet as sin.”

His other hand comes up to my throat.

He’s done it before. The grip there, the press of his thumb at my pulse, the dark thrill of it. It’s the rough thing I’ve learned to crave, and I tip my head back and let him have it, and his fingers close, and the pressure builds, and it’s good, the edge I like.

Until it goes past the edge.

Harder. Then harder.

Last night, when he held me under the water, I felt equipped to handle it, but now I feel unsteady, like I don’t know where we stand, now I feel like he’s not quite here the way I want him to be. Because he’s angry and hurt, and he’s not listening the way I’m used to him listening and…

My air thins. I make a choked sound and open my eyes hoping to see those glacial blues, the color that means he’s with me, that this is the game and—

His eyes are black.

That bottomless dark abyss is here, and there is nobody behind them.

That’s the thing my whole body understands in one cold plunge, that this isn’t the monster in the deep with his arm around me keeping me safe in his element, this is the monster surfaced up through the man, in my kitchen, on dry land, his hand crushing my throat, the man gone out of his eyes.

And the pressure doesn’t stop. It builds. My hands scrabble at his wrist but his wrist is cement. The edges of the kitchen start to soften and go grainy and far, and from somewhere in that lightless face a voice comes, that inhuman, gravely ancient voice.

“You think you can just be rid of me?”

I understand, even with the grey coming up at the edges of everything as I feel myself slipping away, that Alasdair is gone.

He’s not the one talking. The thing that’s talking is the thing the binding kills, and it heard what to do about you through the wall of him and knows exactly what that means.

This monster is not going to stand in my kitchen and wait to be put down.

I can’t get air to speak. I can’t fight him; his wrist won’t move.

So I do the only thing left, which is stop fighting.

I go still under his hand, my fingers going soft on his wrist, and I let the tears come because they’re coming anyway.

I try to say his name even though all it does is move my lips.

Alasdair.

It feels like a last-minute prayer.

Then something detonates behind the black, some violent surfacing, and the blue comes flooding back into his eyes from the center like a blooming cornflower and his hand springs off my throat like he’s been burned.

I drop against the wall, sucking in a great whooping breath and coughing, my hand at my own neck, and he stumbles back from me with his face coming apart in real time.

He looks at his own hand, then looks at me, at my throat, at the marks I’m sure he’s left. The horror on his face is both heartbreaking and a relief because it’s human. It’s the man, fully back, fully here, understanding precisely what the thing wearing him just did with his own fingers.

“Iris—” he rasps, his voice cracking.

I can’t answer. I’m still dragging air, one hand on the wall, watching him.

“I didn’t—” He stops. He can’t even finish it, because I didn’t is a lie. He did, even though it wasn’t him. But he still did.

He backs toward the door. He’s shaking now, and I’ve never seen him shake before, not like this.

“Don’t,” he commands, and it’s only half to me. “Stay there. Don’t come near me. I can’t—”

He turns and wrenches the back door open, running out into the roaring rain, out across the slope toward the bay, his figure swallowed by the downpour before he’s halfway to the loch, to the thing that’s winning.

Because, in this moment, it’s the only place left that he can put himself where I’m not.

The door bangs in the wind. The rain comes sideways through it, soaking the floor.

I slide down the wall and sit on the cold floor, my hips overwrought and tired, my neck burning, and I breathe, just breathe, in and out, while the kitchen goes grey and cold with the open door and the storm.

When I can finally think again, what scares me most is that the thing inside him wasn’t wrong.

You think you can just be rid of me?

I went to Mhairi to find out how to take a blade to him and keep the piece that makes him deathless.

The cunning folk like her call it a binding and I’d been calling it saving, but the monster doesn’t hear it in those diplomatic words.

The monster hears the truth under them, which is that the binding ends it.

The each-uisge dies. I keep Alasdair. Alasdair keeps me.

But the thing that came up through him just now and crushed my windpipe with a man’s hand, well that fucking thing will be gone, and I fear it’s not going to go without a fight.

I think of Mhairi in the back of her shop weeks ago, telling me how it would go. Some night the man will sit at your table, and you’ll look up and not be sure for a second whether it’s even a man anymore.

She was wrong about that.

It wasn’t at the table. It was against the wall, with his hand down my jeans and his mouth on mine.

I sit on the floor a long time, the rain blowing in, my throat aching with every breath. Across the bay, somewhere in the black water is the man I think I’m falling in love with, and the thing that wants me dead, and they live in the same body. I’m the one who has to decide what happens next.

I get up and shut the door against the storm. I throw the bolt that’s never kept anything out.

And I have no idea, none at all, what I’m going to do.

Just that I know I have to do it.