Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
L uke was sitting on the sand at Shell Bay, watching the sunrise. The pink streaked sky did nothing to ease his mind, but he couldn’t spend another moment inside the four walls of Esme’s bedroom. Alone and angry and frightened.
The air was chilled and damp and he could taste salt on his lips. He had been crying earlier, but now he knew it was salt from the sea. He didn’t have an alternative plan, that was the plain truth. Nothing to offer. His mind had run endless circles, and there was no way out. Esme had explained the ramifications of letting the thing live. What would happen to Lewis, the island, the mainland. Maybe even the world as who knew how far the hungry thing would spread. It would never be satisfied. Never be full.
It would keep his brother alive for as long as it could, but he would only ever be a vehicle. Esme said that the longer the hungry spirit inhabited his body, the less of himself Lewis would remember. Eventually, there would be nothing of his brother left. He swallowed painfully past the lump in his throat.
There was something out at sea. A dark shape in the waves. Luke thought it would be a seal. He didn’t think it was Fiona, but it could be. Euan was capable of looking after Hamish, after all. But he imagined them all together. Euan on one side and Fiona on the other, Hamish safely tucked between them. That was what he would want to do if Hamish was his. After Hamish had been taken from them and endangered, they would want to stay close to him, not let him out of their sight. An image of lying in a double bed with Esme, their baby between them, made his head drop with a fresh wave of grief. He loved Esme. He understood what she was doing, and that she was doing the only thing possible. She was saving the world. He knew that. But he didn’t know if he would be able to look at her without seeing his dead brother’s face. He hoped he would be strong enough and that they could be together, with children of their own and all the happy days of their lives stretching out in front of them, but he did not know. It was the first time he had felt any uncertainty about his place by Esme’s side and it rocked him to his core.
The dark shape in the sea was getting bigger.
He blinked the tears from his eyes to clear his vision, sniffing hard and wiping his face with his hand. Another minute later and Luke could see that the shape was human. A person was emerging from the waves and he could see a head and now, shoulders. Another minute and it was clearly a man wading out from the cold North Sea. A tall man with impressive upright posture and neatly cut silver-white hair. A man wearing, impossibly, a tweed suit that appeared to be bone dry even as he was still up to his knees in swirling salt water. Tobias.
Esme had held the pillow firmly and pressed down. She had known she was doing it right as Lewis’s body had begun to jerk. She had been prepared for this, which was why she had climbed on top of him. It was the best way to ensure she could keep the pillow in place. She was leaning with all of her bodyweight and it was only just enough to stop him from dislodging her. His hands had come up and were pushing at her shoulders, fighting for his life. She felt sick.
She was counting, too, knowing that he would need to be at the point of falling into unconsciousness, and that would happen before he died. She wasn’t an expert. Nursing was rather more about keeping people alive than knowing how to suffocate them, but she knew that she needed him to be at the brink of death and that meant the moment he dropped down into a deeper state of unconsciousness. The theory was that the thing inside him would sense he was about to die and would jump into the nearest living host.
She realised she had lost control of her careful count. Her stuttering mind had lost focus for a split second and now she wasn’t sure what number she had been on. If she got it wrong, she might kill Lewis after all. That couldn’t happen. She was so close to fixing this, to getting everybody out alive. She kept the pillow pushed down and tried to feel if Lewis was still struggling. Had he blacked out? She was so close to success. Of doing her job and protecting the island and the people on it. She had to keep believing that she could do this, that the plan would work.
She just had to keep her fai—
The thought didn’t have a chance to complete. It was drowned out by a roaring sound that filled her mind. It was so loud and rough, it vibrated inside her skull and made her teeth thrum and ache.
When the sound faded, it left a background hum. A strange pitch that was unlike anything Esme had heard before. She tried to focus on it and work out whether it was coming from outside or inside her head. Maybe her ears were ringing from the big sound and it would clear soon.
She was still sitting on top of Lewis. He was a handsome man. His body felt warm and solid underneath her, and she squeezed her thighs experimentally. It felt good. So she did it again.
‘Esme?’
There was a voice that belonged to another person. Lucy. Youngest of The Three Sisters. Why was she thinking like that? As if she were answering a question? She knew who Lucy was. Why had she thought, for a moment, that she hadn’t?
And it came to Esme. There was something else in her head. It was the thing that was rubbing her body along Lewis’s and enjoying the sensation in its nerve-endings. Her nerve-endings. She stopped the movement with an effort and began to climb off Lewis.
‘I’m all right,’ she said, unable to focus on Lucy. Telling her muscles what to do was an effort. And the thing inside her didn’t want to move off the handsome man. There was something about him that promised more good feelings. Something to fill the time. Something to fill the…
‘I’m okay,’ Esme said. Her legs felt wobbly, but she finished climbing off Lewis and straightened up. The sea was shushing in and out on the shoreline. She was kneeling beside the outstretched man. Her hand was on Lewis’s chest, caressing the breadth of his pecs and shoulders. She pulled it away and pushed both hands into her pockets.
‘Did it work?’ Lucy was bending over so that she could look into Esme’s face. Her eyes were on her. Burning into her own. Searching.
Esme wanted to say ‘yes’ but the new thing that was in her head seemed to know what that would mean. She supposed it could access her thoughts and memories or, perhaps, it just had an instinct for danger. Self-preservation had to be important, otherwise it would never have been alive for so long. Now that it was inside her, Esme could tell it was old. Old beyond counting. And very alone. A whistling sound joined the background hum. It was wind in a mighty cavern, miles of rock pressing from all sides and the faintest trickle of water. Water that had found its way through the tiniest crack and would eventually widen that crack into a fissure. Something wide enough to follow.
Esme blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Did it work? Esme? Look at me. Open your eyes.’
Esme didn’t want to open her eyes. She felt sad. And alone. And very, very hungry.
Luke couldn’t quite take in the scene. Tobias had marched to Harbour Bay, seeming not to hear any of Luke’s words as he had tried to speak to him. They passed a couple of visitors on the edge of the sand, walking slowly and steadily in that zoned-out way Luke had come to recognise.
Tobias and Luke powered past them to the far corner of the bay. The tide was out and there was an expanse of sand before it became muddy. There were some rocks, a fire, and two figures. As they got closer, he realised there were three figures. His brother was stretched out on a picnic blanket, the cheerful checked material incongruous in a scene that included Lucy with her hands around Esme’s throat.
‘Stop!’ Luke yelled.
‘It’s in her,’ Lucy said, not looking at them. ‘This is the only way.’
‘You will stop,’ Tobias said, his voice carrying easily over the distance.
Lucy’s hands stopped moving instantly. Her eyes widened in surprise.
‘I will take it from here,’ Tobias said, sounding more like his usual self. He crossed the remaining distance and placed his hands over Lucy’s. She let go of Esme and stepped away, her expression impossible to read. Her red lips were curled back from her teeth and Luke didn’t think he had ever seen her look less human.
Tobias began to drag Esme to the edge of the water. She was half-walking, half-stumbling beside him, scrabbling for purchase on the soft sand.
Luke wanted to step in, stop the mayor from restraining her, but the mayor wasn’t quite the old gent he remembered. He was wearing his usual tweed and he looked the same, but there was something different… something that Luke couldn’t even name.
As they reached the sea, Esme began to pull away from Tobias in earnest. She made a low keening noise that made every hair on Luke’s body rise. Her eyes opened and found his. ‘Help me.’
And that’s when his body overtook his mind. He put himself in Tobias’s path, cold seawater splashing up to his calves. ‘What are you doing? Let her go.’
Luke was used to Tobias’s presence as a tweed-clad comfort. A sprightly and sharp elderly gent who gave Luke grandfatherly vibes. Not that he had ever had a grandfather, but Tobias was the kind of thing he had been led to expect from television.
Now, however, Tobias was terrifying. His skin was still wrinkled, but his whole face was glowing with a subtle light. It was like the man was being filtered by a kindly app. The light seemed to be smoothing out his skin and brightening his eyes until he was no longer a well-kept man in his twilight years, but a young man, no more than thirty.
As if that wasn’t disconcerting enough, Tobias appeared to be far taller than he had been a moment earlier. And there was a strange humming sound that was getting steadily louder. Luke didn’t know if the sound was coming from Tobias himself, but he knew it wasn’t a sound that he had heard before. The hum was both high pitched and low at the same time and he realised it had to be many sounds all at once, combining to make one weird, deeply vibrating hum. His skin was prickling, his hair raising with tiny electric sensations running across his skin, and his lips starting to feel numb.
‘You will not stand in my way.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Luke didn’t know whether apologising was going to do the trick, but he figured it was a decent place to start.He stepped aside. ‘Please don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt Esme.’
Tobias seemed to shrink, to become more human again. ‘Trust me.’
Esme was still pulling hard on his arm, leaning back with all her weight to try to yank herself free. It didn’t seem to have any effect. It was as if she was trying to topple a tree.
Tobias began walking again, his face turned to the sea. Soon, he was up to his knees in the freezing foam. Now that she was deeper into the water, Esme seemed to calm down. She was no longer leaning back, putting her weight into trying to break Tobias’s grip on her hand, but she was shaking and wailing. An awful sound that cut Luke to his soul.
Only then did he realise that Lucy had wrapped her thin arms around his waist and was anchoring him to the sand. ‘Let them go,’ she whispered in his ear.
The water was up to Esme’s waist, now.
‘Esme,’ Tobias said sharply, his voice carried back to the shore by the wind. ‘I know you know that this must happen.’ And, with that, he pushed her underneath the waves.