Page 27

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I couldn’t do it.

H?ra sat on the back steps of the house, staring at ?tlaquoy’s fields.

The sun was rising, but it was only a patch of light through the clouds.

Today would be gray.

Fitting. She felt gray inside too.

She felt as heavy as she had the first time she’d walked onto land, when the water had stopped carrying her.

I couldn’t do it.

It should have been perfect.

In human form, her head on fire, H?ra had gone into the village and sought out the hotel.

From a distance, on the street, she’d seen Madeleine—clearly drunk—heading toward the sea.

Toward their beach.

The Great Mare had arranged it, H?ra had been sure.

It was a sign that it was time for this to come to an end and for H?ra to embrace her destiny at last. What else could it be, when H?ra had finally found her resolve, only to see Madeleine heading for the beach of her own accord?

H?ra had transformed for the first time in years.

For a moment, as she’d stretched and grown and shifted her shape, she’d thought: I forgot .

She’d forgotten what it was like to wear the body she’d had for nearly a century.

Well—that would change, she’d decided, once she did what she’d come to do.

And she hadn’t been able to do it.

Madeleine had stood before her under the moon and stars, the wind making a mess of her hair.

Her mouth, the same mouth H?ra had kissed, hung open.

Her sea-green eyes bugged out.

She’d been shocked, and then terrified.

And beautiful.

And edible.

H?ra hadn’t been around Madeleine in her true form since the night they’d met.

She’d forgotten what that was like too.

Madeleine’s scent was delicious when H?ra wore a human shape.

It made her want strange, complicated things.

When H?ra was in Each-uisge form, it made her want something simpler: to devour.

To feast.

I couldn’t do it .

How was it possible?

To stand in front of what she wanted most in the world and be unable to take it?

Unclear. In the moment, all H?ra had known was that she couldn’t rend the same face she’d kissed only hours ago with more desire than the sea could hold.

She could have spoken.

Explained herself. But faced with Madeleine’s horror, the words wouldn’t come.

H?ra hadn’t been able to identify herself as the woman who’d vowed to protect Madeleine, kissed her, and was now about to eat her.

“I only wanted to set you free,” Madeleine had cried, her voice raw with fear H?ra had never wanted her to feel.

Set H?ra free? It was funny how human intentions often led to the opposite effect.

Madeleine had slammed a prison door in H?ra’s face and turned the key.

H?ra hadn’t been able to hurt a hair on Madeleine’s head, and she never would be.

So it was over. There would be no wings for her.

No sky. For her whole life, she’d wondered what it was like to be borne aloft by the wind.

She’d longed to know what clouds felt like.

Now she never would, and her chest ached so much she wanted to weep, to release the cold agony of lost hope.

She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t ever weep again.

She’d promised herself, and this would at least be one promise she could keep.

Now what? She’d always pushed Jonathan aside when he’d told her to think about the future.

She should have listened.

Last night’s plan—leaving the farm to return to the sea—was clearly a nonstarter.

She was back at the farm because she had nowhere else to go, until she couldn’t stay here anymore either.

No flying. No storms. H?ra was much more likely to meet her end at the hands of the whirlpool witch after all.

Or at the teeth of her own kin.

Her kin must’ve been on her mind lately.

Last night, she thought she’d seen one of them.

On the beach, just for a moment, H?ra had been sure she’d seen a horse’s head popping above the water.

But when she’d looked more closely, there had been nothing.

Only the dark waves.

She’d been paranoid.

Nevertheless, she’d urged Madeleine off the beach and back to her creaky hotel with its talkative proprietor.

Even if no rogue member of the herd had been lurking, Madeleine might have run into other dangers, drunk as she’d been.

If H?ra couldn’t kill her, nothing else was going to either.

At least there was one consolation.

H?ra had clearly made as big an impression on Madeleine six years ago as Madeleine had made on her.

You already ate me up, she’d said.

There’s only bones left.

H?ra snorted. Metaphors only got you so far.

Now the literal truth had her sitting on the back steps while she contemplated her inevitable demise.

But she’d given herself one gift.

She’d known Madeleine might try, this morning, to tell herself it had all been a drunken hallucination.

Humans were fond of mental tricks like that.

Hard luck. A shred of blue fabric lay crumpled in H?ra’s palm.

She wouldn’t let Madeleine pretend everything was ordinary.

She couldn’t hurt Madeleine’s body, but her clothes were fair game.

Let there be proof that something had happened, something that mattered.

H?ra would remember too, for however long she was able, however long her life kept a shape she recognized.

Possibly not for long, then.

Madeleine’s day was not off to an optimal start.

Her alarm kicked it off with its insistent buzzing at seven-thirty.

It only got worse from there.

Someone had stuffed cotton in her mouth overnight and put weights on all her limbs.

They’d also shoved a hot poker into her brain.

Nothing else accounted for how much her head hurt.

Madeleine pried her eyes open.

The room spun for a moment.

Was she still drunk?

She’d knocked back enough whisky that she could believe it.

How could she have been so careless?

Never again. Madeleine wasn’t touching so much as a bottle of cough syrup from now on.

No more alcohol. Except, she supposed, Communion wine.

Her stomach revolved at the thought, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

Nothing came up, though.

Nothing except the sudden memory of last night.

Her eyes opened wide, which hurt too.

The beach. The rocks.

The night. The horse .

“Dream,” she croaked around a thick tongue.

“Just a dream.”

She sat up.

Her bottom ached. Lord in heaven, she hadn’t even taken off her shoes last night.

She still wore her jacket, which…

Which had a rip in the right shoulder.

A patch of fabric had been torn clean off.

Madeleine stared at it.

Teeth had torn it off.

Enormous, sharp teeth.

And her shoes were damp because she’d walked backward into the ocean.

Her rear end hurt because she’d fallen down on it on a stony beach with a huge horse looming over her.

Some time passed in which she couldn’t move, speak, or think.

Shock numbed her body.

Only one word kept circling through her thoughts like a hamster on a wheel.

Real. Real. Real.

She lowered her head into her shaking hands.

Okay. She could make this make sense, somehow.

Spiritual sense. Many Church scholars argued for the existence of ghosts and apparitions.

Beneficent souls could return from the dead to visit as part of God’s ordered universe…

Animals weren’t supposed to have souls…

And now that she was thinking about it, that horse had been corporeal.

Ghosts were supposed to be ghostly.

The horse had bumped her with its head.

Its hooves had made noise as it walked next to her on the sidewalk and then taken off at a gallop.

Madeleine looked at the hole in her jacket again.

Yes. It had been extremely corporeal.

A…demon? She’d never spent a lot of time thinking about those.

It seemed better to focus on God’s bounty.

She’d been put on earth to help others, not perform exorcisms. But what else could that wicked-looking, long-toothed, flame-eyed creature have been?

Something new, a voice whispered inside her.

Open your eyes. Wake up.

Madeleine had just woken up a few moments ago.

It had been a painful experience.

She wasn’t ready to do it again.

But she was starting to think she had no choice.

Her head throbbed. She hadn’t had a hangover since college, and they were probably worse in your forties than your twenties.

What was supposed to be the cure?

Hot coffee and lots of greasy food?

No thank you. Ibuprofen and water?

That sounded better.

Then, taking off her salt-crusted clothing, followed by a shower and a quiet morning to recover.

Quiet, not peaceful .

She had the feeling that peace wasn’t on her horizon anytime soon.

Not with the research she was about to do.

Over the next hour, Madeleine showered, changed, cringed away from Harry Duggan’s attempts at conversation over breakfast (“Iona said you got a bit tipsy last night and wanted to know you’d made it here!”), and fled back to her room.

Now she sat curled up in the armchair, researching on her phone.

During her last visit, she’d read up a little on Scottish folklore, including folklore specific to Orkney.

She’d read about trows, and then forgotten all about them until H?ra mentioned them again.

She’d read about selkies, seals that could take human form.

Orkney used to have fairies too, before the arrival of Christian priests had driven them away.

That one had been a little on-the-nose.

Then there were the kelpies.

Madeleine gulped as she combed through another website on Scottish lore, remembering what she’d read years ago.

A kelpie was a water demon in the shape of a horse.

It assumed an attractive human guise to lure people to their deaths.

Kelpies inhabited freshwater lochs and rivers.

They dwelled inland.

Their goal seemed to be getting humans into water, drowning them, and eating them.

Why? Nobody knew. General malevolence, apparently.

The website said kelpies had black hides.

Some legends said they had snakes in their manes.

Her heart flipped in her chest when she saw there was a version specific to Orkney, a shape-shifter called a “tangie.” But that one was also supposed to be a merman sometimes, and lived by the lochs as well.

Madeleine’s horse had met her by the ocean, not inland by a river or loch.

Its hide hadn’t been black, and she hadn’t seen any snakes.

And it definitely hadn’t assumed human or merman form.

It hadn’t tried to lure her, either.

It had just walked her inexorably backward toward the sea.

Good grief, what was she doing?

Trying to convince herself that whatever beast she’d met last night was normal , not one of these terrifying creatures?

Legends started somewhere.

Maybe this was how the legend of the kelpie had begun.

Madeleine dropped the phone in her lap, bent over, and hid her face in her hands with a groan.

How did this square with anything?

She’d thought the massive horse was a vengeful ghost. The coincidence of it standing there on the same beach from six years ago seemed too great to ignore.

If it was a kelpie, why had it been trapped under a dock in the ocean instead of lurking in a loch?

And why would it seem to hold a grudge against Madeleine for setting it free?

Clearly, if it was a kelpie, it couldn’t have drowned, so it had nothing to accuse her of on that score.

But she’d encountered something supernatural, that was for sure.

A dark road lay ahead of her.

If she walked it, she’d start thinking things like: You gave up your entire life, your community and calling, because a demon tricked you.

This was all for nothing.

Worse than nothing.

She wouldn’t walk it, then.

Even if her time on Jorsay had wrecked her life, it had made her confront what needed confronting.

She hadn’t belonged with the Daughters of Grace, and she’d known that for longer than she’d wanted to admit.

Certainly before she’d visited Jorsay the first time.

She just couldn’t face it until something extraordinary happened.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways” was a saying for a reason.

Who was to say Madeleine wasn’t getting a divine lesson in unexpected form?

The horse had listened to her and spared her life.

That wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t supposed to learn something from it and change herself for the better.

Whatever “better” looked like.

In her memory flashed H?ra’s face with its bright eyes and mysterious smile.

Of course.

Maybe there was a reason for that too.

H?ra had told her about a trow living under a mound in ?tlaquoy’s pastures.

She hadn’t talked about it like it was nonsense.

She knew the local folklore.

And she was odd enough herself not to think Madeleine was crazy.

Bizarrely, if Madeleine could talk to anyone about this, it would be the beautiful woman who haunted her dreams and dragged out feelings she’d repressed for decades.

You said you came here looking for answers, H?ra had told her yesterday.

I’m one of them, even if we don’t know the question.

Can’t you see that?

Madeleine was starting to see that, yes.

For better or worse.

Moreover, it seemed she wasn’t the only confused party here.

H?ra had said, “ We don’t know the question.”

What a strange—and telling—way to put it.

In the moment, Madeleine hadn’t exactly been focusing on pronouns.

Now, H?ra’s words reverberated in her memory with astonishing clarity.

She drummed her fingernails against the front of her teeth in an unsteady, clicking rhythm.

She’d told H?ra that she’d need time to think about what had happened between them.

It had been less than twenty-four hours, and it already seemed like that time was up.

They needed to speak, and soon.

This wasn’t going to be easy. What else was new?