Page 40

From the refuge of Madeleine’s bed, Haera dimly heard Jonathan outside the cottage ordering Jim and Connor to start inspecting the worst of the damage.

Yes, he obviously knew about the broken cottage door, that wasn’t their first concern.

Haera had been hurt in the storm and was resting inside until Sue Kilbright could get here.

Naught anyone else could do.

Jonathan would just tend her until help came.

Madeleine? Oh. Yes. Madeleine was inside too, now he thought of it.

She’d help Haera, sure enough.

Jonathan would just go inside for a few more minutes and then be along to see the wreckage.

Get on now, look to the dogs, they were in the sheep pens.

Hope to Christ none were hurt, with the mad wind and that.

Never mind the gun.

His voice wove in and out of her hearing, which felt less sharp than usual.

Perhaps that was because her left arm hurt so much that she couldn’t pay proper attention.

Asgall had injured her front left leg, and now it translated into an ache that ran from Haera’s shoulder to her wrist. Broken?

Maybe.

Her heart, too.

Madeleine knew everything.

And she hated Haera for it.

The bedroom door opened and shut.

Haera blinked. When she stopped blinking, Jonathan stood over the bed, lantern in hand.

The light threw shadows into the crevasses of his face and the corners of the room.

His shirt and jacket still looked damp, and his trousers were dirty from where he’d knelt in the mud.

He looked exhausted and held the shotgun loosely in the other hand.

Haera looked at it and then raised her eyes to him in silent question.

She wouldn’t blame him.

“Don’t be daft.” Jonathan propped the gun up against the wall.

“You said you would.” She remembered the night Jonathan had looked at the dark computer monitor, his face blank and cold.

“You said if you thought I meant Madeleine any harm, you’d…” She trailed off.

Jonathan hadn’t said what, specifically, he’d do.

“And do you mean her harm?”

“ No.” She said it with a force that made her ribs hurt worse.

“Well then.” Jonathan looked away, and Haera remembered she was naked, as she’d been on the night they’d met.

“I’ll call Sue. Can’t use my mobile, some bloody Stormhorse must have buggered the tower.”

He took the lantern and left the room, leaving it in darkness again.

Haera looked at the wall.

Her bones hurt. Beyond the bedroom, Jonathan moved around.

After a moment, he called, “The landline’s out. Hold on a tick.”

Haera held on a tick, and then another tick, until he came back.

His face was pale as he set the lantern on the dresser.

“Someone cut the wires from the phone box. No, not cut. Tore.”

The implication was clear, but absurd.

“How would Asgall know to do that?”

“I told him about telephones all those years ago. He was fascinated by them, how you could talk to someone on the other side of the Earth. And he’s been skulking about the place for weeks. Must’ve figured it out.” Jonathan rubbed his hands over his face.

“Clever bastard. Never forgot a thing I said. Nobody ever listened to me like he did.”

Haera knew what Jonathan meant.

She thought of how she’d hung on Madeleine’s every word.

That had to be different, though.

She’d cared for Madeleine from the first moment.

Soon, that caring had become more, something Haera had never believed she could feel.

Asgall wasn’t capable of that.

He couldn’t be.

“Years ago,” she rasped, “on the night my family attacked me…before that, we were sitting out there at the kitchen table, and you asked if my kind could…”

“Wait,” Jonathan said sharply.

“Tell me what hurts worst.”

Where to begin?

Oh. He meant her body.

She said, “My left arm. Mainly my wrist, I think.”

Jonathan winced.

“Yeah, that’s a funny angle. Hold your arm up, and I’ll get some ice, it should still be frozen. Then…” He pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache.

“We’ll clean you up. Put you in some of her clothes. Get you back to the main house, and if he didn’t cut that fucking landline too, I can call…”

They looked at each other, realizing at the same moment that Asgall had definitely cut that fucking landline too.

Jonathan swore and stormed out of the bedroom.

When he returned, he held a plastic bag full of ice, along with a washcloth.

Haera gingerly held the ice to her wrist. The sharp cold, which normally wouldn’t trouble her, stung.

It should slow the swelling, at least.

Madeleine had ibuprofen in the bathroom, but human medicine never had much of an effect on Haera.

That wasn’t the only difference, though.

After she’d washed up on Jorsay, Jonathan had hustled her out of the doctor’s office as quickly as possible, but Sue Kilbright had noticed how fast she’d begun to heal.

While Haera held the ice bag, Jonathan wiped Asgall’s blood from her face.

Then he looked at the red-black smears on the cloth without saying anything.

“That night, you asked me if I was in love with Madeleine,” Haera said.

“You asked if it could happen so quickly to my kind.”

Jonathan closed his eyes.

His face screwed up as if he were about to weep.

“Did you...” He’d told Haera that, on their last day together, Asgall had taken on human form.

“Did you and he…”

“Don’t,” Jonathan choked.

“Fuck’s sake, don’t ask, or I’ll go as far as I need to for a drink.”

By now, she knew Jonathan better than to take that as a yes, as it might have been for another human.

He might mean yes, he and Asgall had lain together on that day.

He might mean no, and the possibility now was too much for him to bear.

They sat together in silence.

Haera could think of nothing to say as Jonathan’s shoulders rose and fell unevenly while he kept his eyes shut.

His lips pressed together.

A tear crept from the corner of his eye and ran down his weathered cheek into his beard.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Sorry for everything he did.”

“Don’t say that either. The hell do you know about it?” Jonathan dashed a hand across his face and wiped the tear away.

He sniffled and coughed.

Fair question. Haera knew little, only that Asgall had hurt Jonathan for decades—Jonathan had said he’d ruined his life—and she couldn’t risk doing the same thing to Madeleine.

She couldn’t give Jonathan his life back, but she could spare the other person she loved from sharing his fate.

“You should have left me to him,” she said.

“Now he’ll return and put you in danger.”

“He was hurt too.” Jonathan cleared his throat and looked at the gun again.

“Next time, I’ll—I’ll be able to do it.” The promise seemed to lack conviction.

“And if he waits long enough, you’ll be well enough to help me. Let’s clean you up.”

“If the power’s out, the water is too.” The farm drew its water supply from a well with an electric pump.

“We can’t use the reserves just to wash me.”

“We need to clean this mud off your cuts. They’ll have the lights back on soon, you’ll see. We’ll sit you on the toilet and I’ll fetch enough water for you to wash.”

He let her lean on his shoulders to the bathroom, but she didn’t like how labored his breathing sounded.

She said, “You should rest.”

“With the farm in a shambles? Connor and Jim’ll already be wondering what’s taking me so long. Oi, is that water in the tub?”

It was.

Together, Haera and Jonathan looked at it in confusion.

“Madeleine must have filled it,” Haera said.

“Why?”

Jonathan made a sound of comprehension.

“To save water in case the power goes out. Which it did. Clever lass, except she ran off in the rain.”

Haera groaned as she stepped into the tub.

Cool water sloshed against her calves.

“I have to find her. I have to explain.”

“Not until you’ve got some strength back.” He set the lantern by the wall; shadows draped the corners of the room.

“You look done in.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Even as she said it, she swayed.

She remembered their first real conversation, out by the fence on the night Madeleine had come to dinner.

She’d been rude and had to say sorry afterward.

This seemed like occasion for greater regret.

“I need to apologize.”

“Only to her?”

The quiet reproof, the pain in his voice, would have felled her if she hadn’t already been sent sprawling.

Haera lowered herself into the tub, groaning with the strain in her muscles and the burn in her wrist. She almost slipped, and she dropped the ice bag so she could catch herself on the lip of the tub with her right hand.

It thumped wetly on the tile floor, and a few cubes shattered.

She sat in the water, hissing at the sting in her cuts.

Dried mud softened and flaked off her skin, while blood began to turn the water a cloudy red.

“I lied to you,” she said, with difficulty.

“For so long. Longer than he did. That makes me worse.”

Jonathan gave her a washcloth, lowered the toilet lid, and sat on it.

After a moment, he said, “What the hell did you mean to do, exactly?”

As she dragged the washcloth over her stinging cuts, Haera spoke her plan aloud to another for the first time.

She explained her yearning to grow wings, her desire to avoid the breeding cycle, her belief in her own destiny.

To be the first female Stormhorse.

To escape the sea and storm the skies.

And how devouring a worthy human was the only way to do it.

“And Madeleine, your Sister Madeleine, was worthy?” Jonathan asked.

“The most worthy.” Haera looked at her bare knees, poking above the water and flecked with goosebumps.

“I knew it from the moment I saw her. And when she returned—when I got to know her—I knew I was right.” She shuddered.

“Now I look back on it, and I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t think I ever could have hurt her, not even at the start. Or maybe I could’ve, if I hadn’t…”

“If you hadn’t what?”

“Spent so long trying to understand her,” Haera said.

“Coming to you and living here for years so when she finally came back…I saw her, and it was as if…” She pressed her right hand, her good one, over her heart.

It didn’t stop the ache.

Madeleine had looked at Haera as if she hated her.

Jonathan didn’t reply but stared into the distance.

Maybe he saw Asgall there.

She was almost done cleaning herself when he said abruptly, “I always wondered what you’d do when you didn’t age. But all along your idea was to eat Madeleine and then grow those wings?”

“I suppose.” Her wrist burned.

“So you could go back to your herd and not get killed, or have to breed and all the rest?”

Haera swallowed.

Her stomach felt as if it had another ice bag inside it.

“It made sense at the time.”

“Would it work?” Jonathan’s gaze was suddenly, unusually sharp.

“If you ate a worthy human, would they take you back? He just talked as if they would—a reward for killing the three of us.”

“I-I don’t know,” Haera stammered.

“Nobody’s ever tried. But I won’t hurt Madeleine.” She leaned forward; the water sloshed.

“I swear it on whatever you need me to swear. I must?—”

“Then eat me.”

Now was not the time for Jonathan’s jokes.

Haera had to find Madeleine before it was dark again, make sure she was safe, and apologize.

She’d run in the opposite direction of Asgall, and Asgall was hurt, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t encounter some other danger.

“Very funny,” she growled.

She dropped the washcloth into the water with a plop.

“Will you help me up? Madeleine’s out there somewhere in…”

Jonathan grabbed her right bicep and squeezed it, hard.

He’d never done that before.

“I’m serious. Look at me.”

Haera looked.

She hadn’t seen such a wild expression on his face since the night they’d met on the beach, when he’d been drunk and screaming for Asgall to come ashore and face him.

“It’d save your life, would it? You’d go home and be all right?”

“What?”

“He must’ve thought I was worthy once. Am I still? He looked at me tonight the same way he did years ago, just before he tried to…” Jonathan shivered.

He was red in the face.

“I’m not much now, but…”

“ Eat you?” After tonight’s other events, she’d thought she could hold no more horror, but this offer…

“Are you mad?”

“What about this isn’t!” He let go of her arm so he could throw both hands in the air.

“And what the hell else am I meant to do?”

Had tonight broken him?

Had seeing Asgall done his brain in for good?

“There are plenty of alternatives to being eaten!”

“Really? For me?” Jonathan leaned forward, eyes flashing.

“Like what? Dribbling on myself in a care home until I’m buried and prayed over by people who don’t know me?”

“Jonathan, what…”

“It’s my bloody destiny. ”

Haera gaped at him.

A purple vein pulsed at his temple, beneath his reddened skin.

“I’ve always known it,” he said.

“Ever since they pulled me up on that boat while I bled from my leg. Spent decades as a sot, dreaming of him, and then I met you that night, and I thought—here it is, it’s time?—”

“You thought…?”

“But it didn’t happen like that. You were different from him.”

Haera hunched her shoulders.

“I’m not, I…”

“ You were different, and I thought, Maybe it’s all done with, maybe it won’t come to pass after all. And you know what that did?” His eyes were wide and wet.

“It broke my fucking heart.”

Her ears rang.

She was faint. Maybe she was losing more blood than she thought.

“You…want to be eaten?”

“I want to do something, and for him to… How many deaths mean anything? Not just pissing off one day and hoping your mates raise a glass. I haven’t got mates. I’ve only got you and…”

Somehow, Haera knew Jonathan wasn’t going to say and the farm or and Jim and Connor or and Madeleine or and the bloody sheep or anything else that might have made sense.

She knew who he meant.

“Meanwhile, you’ve got her,” Jonathan said hoarsely.

Madeleine. Who had fled across the green fields to the depths knew where.

“She hates me. She should. I don’t have her.”

“It doesn’t matter if she hates you,” Jonathan said raggedly.

“You’ve got her anyway. But you could leave her be, you could give her life back. Take me with you, do what you’ve got to do, and go back to the sea. Get your damned wings.”

The bathwater was too cold now, and her wrist ached worse.

She put her right hand over her face.

“Stop. No more of that nonsense. I can’t think. I have to find her.”

“But…”

“I said no! Forget it. That’s final.” Haera stood up and nearly lost her footing.

Jonathan caught her slippery arms and almost fell down himself.

“Oh hell.” He sounded very tired.

“You’ve got to lie down before you do aught else. She’ll come back.”

It was a titanic effort to lift one foot out of the tub onto the mat, never mind the second one.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know.” He left her sitting on the toilet and returned with plasters, ointment, and bandages.

“Your bleeding’s already slowing down.”

“I heal faster than you.” The blood of her kind congealed quickly; a survival mechanism to keep predators from scenting it in the water.

“Good job nobody else saw. We’ve been lucky, lass.” Jonathan patted the wound on her back dry with a towel while she held back a hiss of pain.

“We didn’t do too badly, did we? All told?”

Gently, he wrapped her wrist and dressed her other wounds as best he could.

When he was done, Haera knew she was unable to chase after Madeleine or anybody else.

She could only make her way to the bed.

Jonathan was right: her blood no longer soaked freshly into the bandages and plasters, but she was more exhausted than she’d been since the last time Asgall had attacked her along with her mother.

What would Beathag say about all this?

Beathag wouldn’t say anything.

She’d just deliver the killing blow.

Jonathan pulled back the duvet, the top of which was muddy and bloody from when she’d lain on it a few minutes ago.

The sheets beneath were clean.

She was still naked.

Her clothes and boots lay somewhere outside in the mud, shredded to bits from when she’d transformed.

Her eyelids sagged as she lay down.

No. She mustn’t sleep.

She had to put her body into a state of metabolic rest; she would not sleep .

She just had to rest a little, only a little while, so she’d be strong enough to find…

“Madeleine,” she groaned.

Jonathan covered her with the duvet.

“Hush now. I’ll tell one of the lads to look for her. She ran east.”

It seemed vitally important that Jonathan understand something.

Haera’s eyelids sagged even as she said, “I love her.”

“Yes. You said.” Jonathan sat down on the edge of the bed.

Then he put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

How? she wanted to ask him, but it was too late.

Her eyes closed. She was going to sleep.

The last thing she knew was the warm weight of Jonathan’s hand.