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)
“I was trying not to,” he says quickly, the first fast thing I’ve heard out of him, and there’s an edge under it. “Iris. I was trying not to touch you. I moved you out of the way because if you’d stayed where you were…”
“You can’t control it.” I’m crying now, and I hate that I’m crying in front of him, scrubbing at my face with the heels of my scratched palms. “That’s what you’re telling me. You came up my hill as that thing, and you couldn’t control where it went, or what it did, or whether it ran me down, you just—trust it not to—and—”
“I could never really control it.” His voice is quiet again, and that’s so much worse than the edge. “Iris. Look at me. I’ve not been honest about that, and I’ll be honest about it now, because you’re owed it after what you watched. I don’t decide. Not that shape. When it comes up in me, I can steer it, a little, the way you’d steer a horse that’s already bolted, I can keep it from the worst, but I don’t decide. It decided to take the detective. I didn’t.”
I stare at him. The loch is black behind him. “Oh, so you’re absolved? Well, if you didn’t, then who did?”
“The horse.” He holds my eyes, unblinking. “The creature. The part of me that was never a man. It’s been kept down a long time, foxglove. There was a bargain, and the bargain kept it down just enough. I took what I could to keep it satisfied, but the bargain’s…you know what happened.”
He takes in a deep breath. “I am losing hold of it, Iris. I’ve told you as much. The monster is winning. I am afraid of what’s at the end of that, and I have not been afraid of anything in a very long time.”
The cold goes that through me has nothing to do with the breeze off the water.
Because I came here bracing for a monster who’s done a terrible thing on purpose, but instead I find that the man I…that the man is being eaten from the inside by the monster—and the monster is patient and winning—and somewhere at the end of that road is a version of him with no man left in it at all, loose on this loch.
“Come inside,” he says again, softer. “Please. Before you go to pieces out here in the cold. Let me…let me at least do that.”
Against my better judgment, I go inside the castle.
It doesn’t take long for the fire to build. He sits me in the chair near the hearth and puts a glass of good whisky in my hand, the peat of it sharp and warming. I drink it too fast, down in two swallows, fast enough to make me cough. The heat of it spreads down into me and steadies the shaking enough that I can think. There’s a fine line when it comes to thinking and whisky, and I have to be careful when I toe it.
Alasdair sits across from me, keeping his distance. He holds his own glass and sips it on occasion.
“The car,” I begin, when I feel like I can finally talk. “Someone knows Sinclair was out here. He told me he was driving the south shore, knocking on doors. He’ll have told people that. He’ll have…a detective has a system; they log where they’re going. They’re going to come looking for him, and the last place anyone knows he was headed is out this way.”
“I’ll deal with the car.”
I frown, sitting up straighter. “How?”
“The same way I deal with everything I need gone.” He says it matter-of-factly. “It goes in the loch tonight, out past the headland where the bottom’s never been found. It won’t come up. There’ll be nothing to put him on your land. Nothing to put him here.”
“That’s not…” I press the glass to my mouth and take it away. “That’s not the problem. Or it is, but it’s not the whole problem. Alasdair, I was probably on his list. He came to me twice. There’ll be a record that he meant to talk to me, or did talk to me. When they come, they’ll come to me. They’ll ask when I last saw him.”
“Aye. And that’s when you’ll lie.”
And there it is.
Just a fact. Like, yes, obviously I’m going to lie. I’m going to sit across from some tired officer and look them in the face and say, Sinclair? He never came, I never saw him, I’ve seen no one out here; it’s only me. And they’re going to write it down and believe me, because the truth is unsayable and unbelievable, and I’m just a grieving American with a dead aunt and a quiet life and nothing about me reads as a woman who’d drive a corpse’s car to a castle in the dark and ask a monster to hide the evidence.