Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
It rains all night and into the next day until the sound becomes background noise, and the cottage has taken on a new feeling of damp that a roaring fire does nothing to dissipate.
I don’t go to Alasdair. I don’t text Maddie.
I don’t do anything but tend the fire and drink cup after cup of coffee that I barely taste.
A ring of faint purple bruises circle my throat, and I sleep badly and wake aching.
I spend the day preparing, in the way you prepare for something there’s absolutely no way to prepare for.
I read over the notes I made at Mhairi’s, the steps and words in order, and wish to hell there was some book on the shelf called So, You’ve Decided to Bind an Immortal, which would probably be right beside So, You Woke Up Next to a Monster, Now What?
But alas, no such luck. I do find Effie’s old sgian-dubh in the trunk, the little black-handled knife, and I test the edge of it against my thumb to find it sharp enough to draw blood.
Iron, Mhairi had said. With your own hand, with iron.
And I think about him out there in the loch, or in the castle, wondering what he’s thinking. Wondering if the monster will win. Wondering if, when I do this, there will be a struggle, or if it’s me who might die in the end.
But I try not to think about that part too much, and if I do, well that’s what whisky is for.
By evening that following day, the rain has mercifully stopped, but what comes after it is worse: fog.
It rolls up the bay just before dusk, thick, and white, and absolutely still, swallowing the far spit, the castle, the water itself, until the world outside my windows ends fifty feet from the glass.
This is the kind of fog that scary stories are built around.
I dress in warm layers and put the sgian-dubh in one coat pocket and the small jar of salt in the other, repeating the words in my head.
I look at my car keys hanging by the door and leave them there, because the taillight’s still out and the last thing I need is MacRae coming down the headland road to find me driving to the monster’s castle at night. So, I walk. It’s been a while, anyway.
It’s three miles around the head of the bay, and my body lets me know about every one of them.
The fibro’s been quiet for weeks. Or not quiet, exactly, just shouted down, drowned out by adrenaline and dread and a monster in my bed, all of which turn out to be excellent painkillers right up until they aren’t.
Tonight, with the damp in the air, and the cold coming off the water, the weight of the last two days sitting in my tissues, it comes back up with a deep ache in my hips first, then my hands, then that tightness in my skin where clothes start to hurt.
Of course. Of course, my body picks tonight—the night I have to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done—to remind me that it’s failing at being a body.
I walk through it the way I’ve learned to walk through it, slow and steady, and some bleak corner of me notes the irony: I’m on my way to ask an immortal to take on this?
Decades of fucking this? A body that aches in fog and cold.
That’s the gift I’m bringing him. What a trade-off.
The fog holds the world so still that my own footsteps sound like an unnatural intrusion.
There’s no wind. No birds. The loch, somewhere to my right, makes no sound at all, and the ferns stand beaded and motionless.
The further I get from the cottage, the stronger the feeling grows that I’m being watched.
Not the prickle of one set of eyes but something wider, the whole drowned dark of the water paying attention.
I decide to keep my eyes on the road. I don’t look at the trees and I don’t look at the loch.
Halfway around the bay, where the track passes the little lochan in the woods, I see her.
A woman in white, standing at the edge of the water, in among the birches. Pale dress, dark where it’s wet at the hem, a stillness to her that nothing living has. My heart goes off like a flushed bird and I stop dead in the track with the fog moving slow between us, and I stare, and then…
Then the figure begins to resolve, or perhaps dissolve. It’s a birch. Just a stunted birch, white-barked, leaning at the water’s edge with a rag of old mist caught in its branches.
Just a birch…right?
I stand there another moment anyway, because the fog shifts and for half a second the proportions are wrong again, the trunk too soft, the lean too deliberate, and I think about the wives and how they called me in once already, and how they’re losing him tonight too, in their own way.
I walk faster. I don’t look back at the lochan. If the birch is still standing there in the morning, it was a birch.
The castle comes up out of the fog all at once, not approaching but appearing, the black bulk of Caisteal Eachainn suddenly above me with its broken crown lost in the white.
There’s no light in it, no smoke from the chimneys.
I go in through the courtyard with my heart beating loud and my hands aching and no idea at all what I’m going to find—the man, the monster, the wreckage of both?
It’s hard to say since it feels empty inside, the great hall is empty and cold, the hearth dead, and I stand in the dim of it and listen.
And…I think I hear him. Above me. A voice, low, rising and falling through the stone.
I climb the spiral stair to the next floor, past the corridor that leads to the tower he’s never shown me, and I follow that low cadence to the chapel.
It’s a ruin of a room, the roof half down at the far end, the tall window over the altar still holding most of its stained glass, saints’ colors gone to lead-grey in the dark.
Tonight the fog is coming in through the broken panes in slow ropes, moving along the floor, pooling in the corners, and kneeling in the middle of it, in front of the bare stone altar, is Alasdair.
He’s on his knees and his head is bowed, his hands folded in front of him, and he’s speaking, low and steady. I assume it’s the language he learned as a boy—the one no one speaks anymore, the one that has no one left to hear it—and the fog moves around him like it’s listening because maybe it is.
He’s praying.
This centuries-old monster is on his knees in a ruined chapel, praying, and while I have no idea who he prays to, I know desperation when I hear it. I stand in the doorway and my throat closes, and I almost turn around. This wasn’t meant to be seen.
But I didn’t walk all this way through the fog on a flaring body to turn around.
“Alasdair,” I say quietly, hating to intrude but needing to all the same.
The prayer stops. His shoulders go still and it’s that total stillness, the animal one.
“I’ve come to ask something of you,” I announce.
He doesn’t turn around. The fog ropes between us like snakes, as if sniffing me out. It’s colder than it should be, almost corporal in its form.
When he finally speaks, his voice is wrecked low. “You shouldn’t be here, Iris. You shouldn’t be anywhere near me. You saw what—” His breath drags. “You’re wearing what I am on your throat.”
“I know what I’m wearing.” I come into the chapel, slow, my footsteps loud on the old stone.
“And I know what you are. Which is why I went to Mhairi…and you were right, you know, I went behind your back. I did and I’m sorry for the back part but not for the going part.
Because she told me what Effie knew. She told me about the binding. ”
His head lifts, just slightly. He still doesn’t turn.
“The hide,” I say. “Cut from the horse, with iron, with my own hand. Given, never taken. I know Effie asked you, Alasdair. Seventeen times across sixty years, she tried, and you denied her every time. I read it in her own hand. He will not give it to me.”
“Aye.” Barely a word at all. “I denied her.”
“Why?”
A long silence. The fog moves through the dead saints’ window.
“Because Effie was my keeper, and I loved her the way you might love the wall that holds the sea back,” he says finally.
“She kept me, and I honored her, and she asked me to die for her…because that’s what it is, foxglove—whatever soft words the cunning women wrap it in—and I looked down all the years I had, all the years I’d ever have, and I couldn’t put them in an old woman’s hands.
There was always more time. There was always another keeper coming.
That’s the truth and it’s an ugly one. I let her go to her grave a failure because I was a coward with eternity in my pocket. ”
I swallow hard, his truth feeling so raw and honest and real that it nearly makes me doubt my decision to come.
“And now?”
He turns toward me and he’s a wreck of a man.
I’ve never seen him like this, hollowed, his eyes red-rimmed and human, so human, and his gaze goes straight to my throat and he flinches as if those very bruises burn him.
“And now I’ve felt the thing inside me close my hand on the woman I love, and I couldn’t stop it, and next time I won’t surface in time, and there will be a next time, Iris.
There is no version of the slipping that doesn’t end with you dead in my hands and me wearing your blood and not even grieving, because there’ll be no man left in me to grieve.
” His voice breaks. “So, ask me, please. Ask me the thing I cannot ask of you.”
But I’m still stuck on what he just said, that he can’t close his hand on the woman he loves.
He loves.
He…loves me?
I take a breath, trying to hold myself steady because right now is the absolute wrong time to start going gooey at the knees because Alasdair just told me, in a roundabout way, that he loves me.
The words I rehearsed all day are suddenly nowhere, so I use the ones underneath them.