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Madeleine was covered in mud.

It was nearly dry now, and it caked her shoes, the palms of her hands, and her jeans over her knees and bottom—everywhere she’d touched the wet earth when she’d knelt before Haera.

Now she was dirty all over, and there was nowhere to wash.

Whatever plumbing the neolithic Orcadians had managed was long gone.

She hadn’t realized where she was going until she got here: the standing stones of Jorsay, near the most ancient human settlement in Europe.

Six years ago, her students hadn’t been impressed by the tiny size of the stones and settlement compared to more impressive sites on the Mainland.

Madeleine had found it interesting, although she hadn’t felt any particular urge to revisit it since her return.

It wasn’t like Skara Brae or the Ring of Brodgar, which were well traveled and roped off.

The ruins on Jorsay still felt wild, as if you could fall into trouble in some other world.

That’d suit her. It couldn’t be worse than the trouble she’d found in this one.

Even in the darkness, with the only light coming from her phone, this place held less horror than what she’d just left behind.

Haera …

Her legs shook with exhaustion and her lungs ached.

Had she run all this way, or at least most of it?

She wasn’t a runner.

Her body, smarter than her brain, must really have wanted to get out of there.

With a whimper, Madeleine sat on the ground—what could a little more mud hurt?

—and leaned back against one of the standing stones.

Its rough surface tugged on her sweater’s wet wool.

She closed her eyes, for all that there was nothing to see in the dark.

Behind her eyelids, Haera’s face stared back at her.

It shifted back and forth between human and Each-uisge, but its eyes always glowed.

Not the amber that had been almost human, but yellow, the yellow eyes of the beast that had tried to walk her backward into the ocean one night.

I was going to kill you.

No. Madeleine shook her head, even as Haera’s voice echoed in her memory.

To regain honor with my herd, so I could become a Stormhorse .

A Stormhorse, like her father had been—Haera had told her that her father, Alban, had been part of the great force that uncovered Skara Brae.

She revered his memory.

Of course she’d want to follow in his footsteps.

Hoofprints. Whatever.

And of course she’d take extreme measures to get there.

Haera always did whatever was necessary to get what she wanted.

Including getting Madeleine in bed after turning her away from beliefs she’d held sacred her whole life.

All for the purpose of killing her.

Maybe that would have been less painful than this.

Again, there came the wrench of loss.

Over the last few weeks, she had learned what it was like not to be lonely.

It had taken so little time for Haera to creep into Madeleine’s heart like a worm boring into an apple.

Madeleine had spent decades keeping herself apart from the world, even her fellow nuns, even Becca.

Then she’d let someone in, and it had changed her, and she hadn’t been alone, and she’d thought maybe she could question everything she’d believed her whole life and it’d be okay, and…

She sobbed and wrapped her arms around her knees, squeezing them as if she could shrink into something too small for the world to notice.

Too small for it to hurt.

She’d given up her life and vocation for someone who’d intended to betray her in the worst possible way.

No, she reminded herself yet again.

You had to leave, the convent wasn’t right for you.

No matter what, you did the right thing .

At the moment, that didn’t make anything feel better.

It didn’t change what Haera had done, or what Haera was.

Not human, just a creature that wore a human face when it suited her.

Madeleine had feared to see that transformation all along, and now she knew why.

It exposed the awful truth, and while Madeleine had spent the last few years facing a lot of new truths, she wasn’t ready for this one.

The memory of Asgall’s words blew through her worse than any gale.

He hadn’t just said that Haera intended to eat Madeleine.

He’d said that Madeleine had had no choice but to return to Jorsay—that she and Haera were “bound” together, and Madeleine would never be able to leave.

She remembered that night she’d tried to change her plane ticket so she could leave Orkney sooner.

She hadn’t been able to.

Some inner voice had talked her out of it, promising freedom of all things—what a cruel joke.

Was it Haera’s voice?

Forcing her to stay through some enchantment?

She’d asked Haera that, on the day Haera had told her what she was.

Haera had denied it, but that could have been a lie like everything else.

If that was so, if they had a “bond,” then what would be left of Madeleine at the end?

Would she be like Jonathan, who’d stared at Asgall with a broken look on his face—still tied to him after years of pain and enmity?

Jonathan had said Haera and Madeleine had been given into each other’s keeping.

He’d been in a position to know, but he hadn’t told her the truth either.

Haera had just protested she’d never hurt Madeleine.

Her eyes had been wild, her hand extended in a plea.

I love you, she’d cried—screamed—with more desperation than Madeleine had ever heard in anyone’s voice.

I know you love me. She’d cried that too.

“It’s not love,” Madeleine choked, her eyes still closed.

“You don’t know how to love. Oh lord Jesus, forgive me. I went so far astray. Blessed Virgin, pray for me.” She hunched her shoulders.

“Help me, please—just some help, some guidance, please ?—”

A huge, crashing sound drowned the last word.

Madeleine’s eyes flew open.

That had sounded like a giant wave striking nearby—but the ruins were atop a great cliff face.

No wave could reach this far up, not even pushed by the hurricanes Madeleine had known in New Orleans.

It was too dark to see, but she smelled the water, as if a surge of seaweed and salt had landed a short distance away.

The clouds split open to reveal the bright curve of the half moon overhead.

Everyone talked about the unnerving quality of full moons, but Madeleine had always found half moons to be eerier—the even split between light and dark.

The half moon granted just enough light to show another great surge of water splashing over the edge of the cliff.

The water did not, however, fall to the ground.

Instead it rose higher, and higher still, and began to arch forward through the air in a graceful curve tipped with foam.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t natural, and she’d had enough of the supernatural to last her for eternity.

She had to get up, turn tail, and run again.

“Anywhere but here” seemed like a fine destination.

But there was no time to run.

She only managed to brace her feet and tense her thighs before the water coalesced before her, spinning like a tornado.

Her face caught salty, misty spray from its edges.

As Madeleine wiped the spray from her stinging eyes, the spinning water expanded into a dreadfully familiar shape.

Another horse. One made not of flesh or blood but of the sea.

It stood higher than the cliff, a surging giant.

Its head alone seemed as large as her entire body.

As it floated in the air, water defined its form, rippling and reflecting the moonlight.

Seacap foam curled around its front hooves.

And also around the fins of its massive, fish-shaped tail.

Madeleine, frozen on the ground, gaped up at it.

Maybe she’d fallen asleep at the foot of the stones and was having a terrible dream.

Or a beautiful one. The creature was both.

Its eyes were pits of darkness, like the bottom of an abyss.

And it was looking straight back at her.

“ I am the Great Mare ,” said the leviathan.

“ And you are very small .”

In sleep, Haera dreamed.

In dreams, the witch found her again.

Haera stood before the witch as she was: naked and bruised in her human form.

Asgall’s blood was on her face again.

Around them spun the whirlpool’s waters, but now the witch was alone.

No corpses of her victims. She and Haera faced one another on the sand.

“The bargain,” the witch said.

Haera bowed her head, just as she had before Asgall, when she’d realized all was lost. “Yes, Ancient One.”

“Bring me your despair.”

“I will. As soon as I’m well enough to come to you.”

The witch’s eyes, pits of black, flashed with displeasure.

“Your whirlpool is too far away.” Even in a dream, her body ached.

“I cannot swim that distance while I’m hurt. And I cannot take a boat.” Everyone would be inspecting the damage to the fishing vessels.

Even if Haera knew how to pilot a boat, which she didn’t, she’d never be able to steal one.

The witch took one step forward, and then another.

She frowned, as if in concentration; perhaps she wasn’t used to walking.

But she came forward, and Haera found herself helpless to move away.

The witch cupped Haera’s face.

Her hands were so cold that even Haera flinched at her touch.

Her skin was coarse as sand.

She leaned forward and licked Asgall’s blood from Haera’s cheeks.

Her tongue slid, slimy and kelp-like, over Haera’s flesh.

When it passed over her bloody lips, the witch sighed, “Hungry.”

Haera’s stomach flipped over.

The witch’s breath was icy against her mouth.

This wasn’t like Madeleine’s kisses, which Haera would never taste again.

“You’re going to eat me?” she asked shakily.

That’d be fitting, all things considered.

“I like your brother’s blood,” the witch said.

“Bitter salt. He belongs to the sea.”

Haera knew, somehow, that the witch was not really tasting Asgall’s blood but a dream’s echo of it—perhaps Haera’s own memory of its taste.

How strange, that you could know things in dreams.

“Walk to the shore,” the witch told her.

Her thumbs stroked Haera’s cheeks.

“Walk into the water. I will bring you here.”

“What? How? Aren’t you trapped in your whirlpool?”

“I will bring you here,” the witch repeated.

“Hurry. Hurry to save a life.”

That didn’t make sense.

“Save a life? What do you—” She turned colder than any current could ever be.

“Madeleine. She’s in danger. On the shore?” Madeleine hadn’t been heading in the direction of the shore, but she might have changed her mind.

“Your woman is safe. Someone else is not.” The witch stopped stroking Haera’s cheeks and pressed her thumbs in, hard.

The edges of her nails were sharp enough to cut.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry. Hurry to me. And to despair.”

Haera opened her eyes.

It was fully dark now.

This time, she didn’t look around for the witch; she was still in Madeleine’s bed.

It was only a dream.

Not real. Not…

Her cheeks hurt where the witch had pressed her thumbs in.

Haera touched one cheek with a shaking hand.

She felt no cuts from those sharp nails, but the dread had her body in its grip nevertheless, and she thought: Real .

The witch had said: Hurry to save a life .

How long had she been asleep?

How healed was she? There was only one way to find out.

She sat up and groaned.

Everything was sore, but she no longer bled.

She flexed her left wrist. Painful, fragile, but not broken.

It would have to do.

She struggled to her feet.

Hurry to save a life.

Not Madeleine’s. The witch had said Madeleine was safe.

There seemed no reason for her to lie about that—it could neither amuse nor benefit her.

There was only one other person Haera would care enough about to make her way to the shore.

But Jonathan wouldn’t have gone there.

Would he? Why…?

Head spinning, she looked at the wall where his shotgun had rested.

It was gone.

It’s my bloody destiny, he’d said, the sea’s wildness in his eyes.

“No, you dolt,” she whispered, and stumbled to the front door even as horror drenched her limbs.

She was stark naked.

It didn’t matter. There was no reason to put on Madeleine’s clothes only to tear them up again.

She couldn’t make it to the shore fast enough in her human shape.

Her Each-uisge body was swifter than the Gator, swifter even than a car when she was in top form.

This was far from top form, but it’d have to do.

It was dark now, for the electricity hadn’t come back, and nobody would see her so long as she avoided torches.

Connor and Jim would be working round the farm to clean up whatever damage there was, and maybe Madeleine was there too.

Maybe she’d come back by now.

They’d be distracted.

And if Haera was seen, she was seen.

This was more important.

She poked her head through the front door to make sure.

Nobody in sight. In the distance, around the sheep pens, two torches waved about.

A dog barked, so at least one had survived.

Setting her jaw, Haera closed her eyes and transformed one more time.

As her body expanded, so too did the discomfort.

Her left front leg wasn’t broken, but it would be beyond foolish to move at a full gallop.

Hurry to save a life .

She had done more foolish things than this.

With a low neigh of pain, Haera ran as fast as her bruised body could carry her to the shore where everything had begun, and where everything seemed likely to end.