Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
There is no version of it that ends with anyone believing me, and every version of it ends with me in a room being asked whether I’ve been sleeping enough and if I’m on any medication. They are not Mhairi and the village folk who accept truth like they do the weather. Whoever comes looking for Sinclair will come from the city and have city sense, and city sense knows that if a woman alone on a sea loch says a horse ate a policeman, the next stop is the padded cell.
So I’m not going to call anyone. I work that out standing in the cold, staring at the car, and I stop being a person something happened to, and start being a person who is doing something.
I just don’t know what the fuck that is yet.
What I do know is, from countless TV crime shows, is the car can’t be here.
The car can’t be here, in my driveway, my fingerprints on the door I’ve pulled open. I get in the car and turn the key. The seat’s pushed back for a tall man, so I drag it forward, my hands going through the motions now, acting before I have a chance to give the command. Some practical animal has taken the wheel; it is going to deal with the car first and let me fall apart later, on its own schedule, when there’s time.
That’s what compartmentalization is all about, kids.
But even my subconscious has decided I won’t take the car toward the village. Toward the village is the road out to the world, to people. I take it the other way, around the head of the bay on the narrow road that hugs the shore, toward the dark mass of the far spit and the castle on it, because the only thing better at making things disappear than the loch itself is the thing that lives in it.
And right now, because those eldritch gods have a wicked sense of humor, the thing that lives in it is the only ally I’ve got.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Idrive a dead man’s car to the monster’s house.
The road is bad, and the light is going, and I take the bends too fast, the loch black on my right now, the headland rising.
I don’t dare look at the water.
By the time the castle comes up out of the dusk, Caisteal Eachainn, all broken-teeth-standing stone, the part of it that’s still roofed black against a sky going to indigo. My hands have started shaking so badly on the wheel that I have to stop. I bring the car onto the flat scrub below the curtain wall, kill the engine, and the silence comes in.
He’s there.
Alasdair stands at the foot of the wall where the old sea-gate is, where the castle meets the shore, and he’s a man again; naked and soaking wet. The water sheets off him in the last of the light, running down his hair and his shoulders, pooling dark around his bare feet on the stone, like he’s only just come up out of the loch and put a man’s body back on over whatever he actually is—or however the fuck that actually works.
He’s not braced for my arrival. For once I’ve caught him off guard—he doesn’t expect the detective’s car, doesn’t expect me to be driving it, and there’s a half-second where his face is unguarded and I see something on it I’ve never seen before, something close to total dismay.
The fact that he has this emotion at all gives me a bit of courage, like there really is someone in there, someone human, that’s worth saving.
I get out of the car on shaky legs.
We look at each other across the bracken and road, the dead man’s car ticking as it cools between us.
“We have a problem,” I say.
“Aye.” He grunts, hair in his eyes.
“And put on some pants,” I tell him, my voice cracking and absurd. “I can’t talk to you about this with you standing there like that.”
“Aye, foxglove,” he replies, and something in how gently he says it nearly undoes me on the spot. He turns and goes through the courtyard into the dark of the castle, and I stand alone by the car with my arms wrapped around myself, the cold coming up off the water, and, somehow, I don’t fall apart.
He comes back in trousers and a dark shirt he hasn’t bothered to button all the way, his feet still bare and hair still wet, stopping a few feet from me. He doesn’t try to touch me, which means he’s read something off me that’s telling him not to.
Wise man. Must be the abject horror on my face.
“Come inside,” he offers, “you’ve had a shock. I can get a fire going.”
“I don’t want to come inside.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Of course I’m shaking.” And there it goes, the practical animal losing its grip all at once, the whole afternoon coming up my throat. “Of course I’m, fuck, Alasdair, I watched you kill him! I watched it all happen! I stood outside my home and I watched you. You broke him. You didn’t even…you didn’t kill him clean, you broke him to pieces and you dragged him over the rocks while he was still alive. I heard him, I heard the sounds he made, and then they…in the water, they—” My voice climbs and breaks. “And it came at me. Before. On the hill. It came down the hill straight at me, you came at me, you put your, that thing put its head down and it ran at me and I thought I was going to…”