Page 43

The beach was deserted.

There were no fishing boats here, no houses or structures, no reason for anyone to rush here in the wake of a storm.

Only one man would.

Atop the seawall, Haera looked wildly down across the beach, seeking what she didn’t want to find.

It was too dark even for her.

She had to get closer.

Her leg aching, she picked her way down the stone steps to the shore.

She couldn’t see anything but rocks that faded into sand that disappeared into dark water.

The storm had cast flotsam on the shore, along with human debris like a broken old dinghy.

“Jonathan?” she called.

No reply.

Oh, how foolish of her, of course he wouldn’t be able to hear her over the wind and water.

She needed to be louder.

She screamed, “Jonathan!”

His name disappeared into the wind.

No sign of him.

Had he gone into the water?

He wouldn’t be so reckless, would he?

He wouldn’t leave her?

Hurry to save a life.

Haera had hurried. She must hurry more.

If he was in the ocean, she’d find him.

It couldn’t be too late.

Gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg, Haera cantered toward the water.

At the water’s edge, moonlight gleamed off a long, thin, metal surface.

It was the barrel of Jonathan’s shotgun, which lay alone on the sand.

No. Oh no.

She stopped in her tracks, panting, to sniff the gun.

The barrel was cold, and she smelled no lead or discharge.

If Jonathan had brought the gun for self-defense, he hadn’t been able to use it.

Had he dropped it so he could go into the water?

Or had Asgall snatched him, dragged him down?

She had to?—

In her peripheral vision, something caught her eye.

To the left, a dark lump lay on the sand.

She turned, slowly, because it could not be what it was.

It could not be a human body.

It couldn’t be?—

Two human bodies?

Her legs shook like a newborn foal’s as she made her way over.

Like the gun, the bodies lay at the edge of the water, which lapped at them.

They didn’t move as she approached.

They didn’t breathe.

One of them was Jonathan.

She knew his scent, although it was dulled by salt water.

His trousers were wet up to the waist.

The other was a naked man, covered in wounds.

His hands were curled into Jonathan’s jacket as if he’d been trying to drag him somewhere.

The man’s face was half turned into the sand, his eyes closed, but she saw the family resemblance.

A long nose, a full mouth.

A lean, pale body with rangy muscles.

Asgall’s human form.

She stared dumbly at him.

That didn’t make sense.

None of this made sense.

Never mind it, then.

Forget Asgall! He could go to the deepest depths and beyond.

She needed her friend.

Her best friend. Her real family.

Jonathan couldn’t be dead.

Not truly. She had to wake him up.

Haera nudged Jonathan’s body with her nose, rolling him over.

“Jonathan?”

He didn’t move.

His eyes, wide and glassy, looked up at the night sky.

His face was gray, his lips blue.

But there were no cuts or bruises.

His clothes weren’t ripped.

Asgall hadn’t wounded him.

“Wake up,” she whimpered.

“Jonathan, I’m here. Wake up.”

His chest was still.

No breath lifted or lowered it.

This couldn’t be right.

There must be something here to explain what had happened.

Something, anything.

Haera rammed Asgall’s body with her head, hard enough to kill him again, to expose more of him.

His hands were too stiff to let go of Jonathan’s clothes, but she saw the cuts and bites she’d given him—not as well healed as her own injuries.

There was also the wound in his chest from when Jonathan had shot him.

Dark blood leaked sluggishly from it.

The picture came together, horribly.

Jonathan had pursued Asgall to the beach, on foot, clearly out of his mind.

He had strained his heart, which doctors had been warning him about for years, thanks to all the drinking and the salty food he loved.

He’d pushed himself to his limits, and then he had found Asgall.

And Asgall? He’d taken human form.

No doubt to confuse Jonathan, perhaps try to lure him into the waves.

Maybe it had worked.

They were at the edge of the water and Asgall had grabbed Jonathan’s clothes.

There must have been a struggle, and it had stopped Jonathan’s heart, and Asgall had been dragging his body back into the sea when his own wounds had overcome him.

Now he too was dead.

They were both dead.

Jonathan was dead.

Jonathan, who had taken her in, who had taught her humanity, who played a bloody awful fiddle, had died.

He had died. Jonathan had died, and he was no more, and he would never call her “lass” again.

He would never smile when she said good morning.

He would never do anything ever again.

He was gone, and she was here.

She hadn’t been fast enough to save his life.

Air clogged thick and suffocating in her chest. She had wanted to save his life because she loved him.

She loved the dead man lying on the beach, but she’d never told him.

She had never said, Jonathan, I love you, thank you for everything.

Now the words clawed her throat with burning talons because they were trying to get out, to follow him, but there was nowhere for them to go.

A howl ripped out of her instead.

Her denial shrieked its way into the wind, which carried it away.

Nobody could hear her, nobody would know the horror of this moment.

She was all alone. She stomped her leg, her injured one.

She stomped it again and again, until her whole body was white hot with pain, and howled some more.

It wasn’t enough. It didn’t hurt enough.

It didn’t bring him back.

Try again? Try just one more time?

She bent to Jonathan and nudged him once more.

She wailed, “Please,” and then, “ Please,” again, and he didn’t listen.

Nobody listened. Not Jonathan, and not the Great Mare, who might have been able to save him.

But she didn’t. The Great Mare did not wake him up again.

Madeleine was wrong about prayer.

It was useless.

Madeleine.

Madeleine had left too.

She’d left, because she hated Haera.

She hated Haera. Jonathan was dead.

All Haera loved in the world was gone, and it was all her own fault.

Her lies had driven Madeleine away, and she hadn’t been fast enough to save Jonathan from her own brother.

And in the sea, the rest of Haera’s kin would tear her to pieces.

Her own mother would be the first to do it.

There was nothing left for her anywhere.

Haera’s lungs ached from her cries, and her whole body trembled.

Her head weighed more than it had before.

It was too heavy to hold up.

She could only stare down at Jonathan’s and Asgall’s bodies, empty shells now.

The Last Current had torn away everything that mattered.

There was no love, or comfort, or peace.

There was only despair.

The witch had known all along how this would end: that Haera’s ambitions could only poison everything she touched.

What began with a lie could never end happily.

Maybe that had happened to the witch herself.

Maybe that was why she was trapped forever with the people she’d murdered.

Haera might find out quite soon.

She had a bargain to fulfill.

That was all she had.

There was nothing left for her here.

She’d go to the ocean and swim for the whirlpool—the witch had said she’d bring Haera to her, somehow.

She would or wouldn’t, if the Each-uisge happened to see Haera first. What did it matter?

What did anything matter now?

She bent to Jonathan once more and sniffed his cold forehead, inhaling his beloved scent one final time.

It was mingled with Asgall’s smell.

Polluted. If Haera had the strength, she’d rend her brother’s human body into pieces for daring to intrude on Jonathan this way.

She had no strength.

Her leg ached—it must be nearly broken.

She’d use the last of her energy just to make it to the ocean, much as she had years ago when she’d washed up on shore.

She’d been shattered then too.

There was no Jonathan to put her back together this time.

Head bowed low, Haera limped toward the ocean.

On her back, she carried her despair like a rider: a cold, thin thing that dug its heels into her hide.

It urged her on without mercy or grace.

Good. She deserved neither.

She deserved only the whirlpool.

Only the witch.

Madeleine found Connor by the beam of his flashlight.

He crouched by the fence near the sheep pen.

The winds had torn out a couple of posts.

Behind him, the half moon shed just enough light to reveal the corpses of two lambs.

She glanced around as she approached.

The pen’s metal roof was intact, but one of the doors had been blown off the hinge and hung loosely to the side.

Straw lay all over the ground.

Her legs were unsteady and sore from her frenzied run to the stones.

She’d walked back as quickly as she could, clutching her side against a painful stitch.

The Great Mare?—

—the impossible Great Mare?—

—hadn’t exactly made her life easier , but she’d certainly opened Madeleine’s eyes to a few urgent things.

She had to find Haera.

They could figure the rest out later.

Beathag…my teeth…

“Connor,” she called.

The beam of his flashlight blinded her.

“Madeleine! What the hell happened?”

His voice was sharp with concern.

She’d come to like him and Jim—they were kind and never showed the slightest curiosity about her relationship with Haera.

Around them, it was hard to feel ashamed, and easy to feel that everything was normal.

That she was.

She held her hand in front of her face to block Connor’s beam and turned off her phone’s own flashlight.

The battery was nearly drained by now.

“Uh, well…”

“You’re covered in fucking mud!” Usually Connor and Jim avoided profanity around her.

“You look as if you were blown about in that gale, were you outside? Jonathan said you were looking after Haera in the cottage?—”

Madeleine looked over his shoulder, where the cottage lay, although she couldn’t see it in the darkness.

Haera must be there. “Um—yes. I need to…”

“But Jim went to look, and nobody was in there. We can’t find Jon or Haera anywhere. Jim said the bed was covered in dirt and blood!”

He looked Madeleine up and down, clearly taking in the dirt that was on her too.

Oh no. Did he think she —?

Madeleine grabbed her throat.

“I’m looking for them too. Something happened.”

“No shite it did. Neither of them’s picking up on the walkie-talkie. The phones don’t work either. Jim’s gone to the village to fetch Isla and see if anyone there can call around.” His eyes narrowed.

“Doubt all of them had their boxes cut.”

Please don’t let that be an accusation.

Would he believe Madeleine if she insisted she didn’t know how to disable a phone box?

“Where have you looked?”

“Everywhere. It took us a bit to realize they were gone—we were busy checking everything. There’s dead animals, some structural damage. Not like usual.”

“Um, okay, but we have to find?—”

“Something’s gone wrong,” he said.

He looked her right in the eyes, his gaze even sharper than before.

But something was missing from it.

Surprise.

Connor didn’t look in the least surprised or confused by this turn of events.

“It’s her, isn’t it? Something’s gone wrong with her . And you know whatever it is.” He took a deep breath.

“You know whatever she is.”

Madeleine lost her breath.

No denial found its way to her lips.

She could only gape at him.

That seemed to be confirmation enough.

He ground his jaw and inhaled deeply through his nose.

Madeleine began, “Connor?—”

“Do you lot think we’re stupid?”

The words burst out of him in a roar, and Madeleine gasped.

Connor held up his free hand, palm facing forward, to silence her.

“Come on! She washes up on shore, starkers and beaten half to death, and Jonathan gives this cock-and-bull story about her being his long-lost daughter? This isn’t Coronation Street .”

“Um—well?—”

“We all knew something was off straightaway. Sue Kilbright told Iona Darrow how fast the lass healed up before Jon hustled her away. And then Eileen McKay talks about how he came to her asking for a bloody birth certificate because Haera was born ‘off the grid,’ and she let him have one because she didn’t see the harm and she was glad he was doing better now. Christ!”

The Great Mare hadn’t exactly given Madeleine a script for this.

“I don’t?—”

“Oh, and she’s strong as Superman. Harry Duggan told everyone how she scooped you up when you fell. More than that too. You think Jim and I worked here for years and never once noticed how fuck-off hay bales got moved, but nobody’d been using the machines?”

Haera had been so careful not to be seen.

Apparently she’d never worried about the evidence afterward.

To be fair, neither had Madeleine.

She’d thought that if Haera had gotten away with it for five years, it must be working.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Haera wasn’t getting away with it.

“And storms came and we got away with nary a scratch. Until now.” Connor ran an agitated hand over his hair.

“I knew something had changed as soon as I got here and saw the damage. Now she and Jonathan are nowhere to be found.”

Silence fell.

Madeleine searched for an excuse or explanation she could give.

There was none.

“And you never said anything?” she eventually asked.

“You just kept working here?” That might be just as strange as Haera’s true nature.

If you thought something supernatural was afoot, wouldn’t you want to avoid it?

Madeleine’s own case to the contrary.

“Me and Jim like her,” Connor said, to her astonishment.

“She works hard. Keeps herself to herself. Everyone says she turned Jon around, and he’s got a heart as big as the sky. They’re good folk. The farm’s a good place.”

The last part, Madeleine understood.

She’d loved ?tlaquoy from the moment she’d set foot on it.

It just felt good. Was that the trow’s now-lost magic, or something to do with the love Haera and Jonathan had put into the land?

“You don’t ask questions of their sort,” Connor added.

“Whatever she is.”

Madeleine had asked plenty of questions, and none of the answers had made her life easier.

“That was…probably a good idea.”

Connor sighed gustily.

“And now you’re all mixed up in it. The hell happened at the cottage? Mud’s churned up at the back door. There’s hoof prints all over, and not from a cow or sheep.”

Asgall and Haera, circling each other between vicious attacks.

Madeleine couldn’t hide a shudder, and Connor’s eyes narrowed again.

“Jim had a look round,” he said.

“Said one set of prints left from the back, and then another started from the front door. They both looked to be going east before the grass covered ’em.”

Both prints .

Asgall had left from behind the cottage.

Haera must have followed later, but why in her Each-uisge form, especially when she was injured?

Connor had said she healed quickly, but even so, why would she take such a risk?

What would make her so desperate?

Jonathan was missing too.

The beach lay to the east.

Madeleine wrapped her arms around herself.

Her clothes and hair were still damp, and the night wind was cold.

There was no time to go back to the cottage and grab her jacket, the one with the torn shoulder, the one she hadn’t stitched up because it proved all of this was real.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Connor asked.

“Do you know where they are?”

Madeleine’s mouth was dry.

“I think so. But I have to hurry.” She glanced at the silhouette of Jonathan’s Vauxhall.

“I need the car.” She certainly wasn’t jogging to the beach.

Jonathan kept the car keys by the office door, and she’d had practice driving on the left side by now.

“You should stay here,” she added.

Connor scoffed. “No fear. I’m worried about them, but I’m not a fool.”

“I am,” Madeleine snapped as she hurried toward the house.

The last few months had given ample proof of that.

How ironic: she was finally what Christ said everyone should be. A fool for love.