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)
He said if you’re not there, I go home. I wasn’t there night after night, so…he went home.
And maybe he’d meant home for good.
Which could be for the best. I mean, there’s a—possibly senior citizen—serial killer on the loose, which my great-aunt may have been complicit in, plus talk of drowned wives and who fucking knows what else. I should be happy and relieved that my sexy, potentially murderous neighbor isn’t coming to visit me anymore.
But I’m not.
And then one morning, I wake up and I am just done.
I’m done with the box that won’t open. I’m done with the letters I’ve read four times. I’m done with sitting in a cottage waiting for a man who’s already told me he’s not going to come. I am, mostly, done with myself. Done with being in this cottage and letting things happen to me.
I need to make things happen for myself.
I’m going over to that motherfucking castle and knocking on his god damn door.
I’m aware this is a bad idea. I’m aware that the rational thing—the thing Maddie would say, the thing the woman I was a year ago would do—is to call Sinclair, hand him the letters, and let him do his job. I’m aware that I’m choosing a man over a detective, a stranger over a uniform, the version of this story with monsters in it, over the version that seems more straightforward.
I’m choosing it anyway. I don’t even need to talk myself into it. My brain, my soul, every witchy part of me that has been passed through the Galloway bloodline, wants to believe in creatures and ghosts and that something fantastical might be at play here. I have no fucking idea what that could be, and maybe in the end this really is a case of cold-blooded murder from a psychopath, but either way I’m going to figure this all out or die trying.
Okay. Hopefully not the “die trying” part.
I barely get a cup of coffee down before I’m on the move. I put on my wellies and the wax jacket. I put my hair up. I think about bringing the box and seeing if Alasdair can help me with it, but something tells me, very strongly, that the box should remain in the cottage and definitely out of his grasp.
The sky is growing lighter through the trees by the time I’m at the end of my driveway. By the time I’m on the main road, the wind has picked up. Halfway down his access road, the rain comes.
It comes down the way rain here does when it’s been making up its mind all morning—all at once and with relish—the kind of downpour that gets past the wax of any jacket in under a minute. I push my hood up and keep walking because there is no shelter between here and the castle and going back would be worse.
Though at the moment, I can’t imagine anything worse than this.
I’m soaked to the bone, and it is fucking miserable.
I keep slogging through, and a couple of soaked minutes later, I come to a sudden stop.
The white horse is in the same clearing as before.
He’s standing there calmly, his pewter mane gone dark and ropy with the wet, his eyes black and unblinking. I stop on the track and wipe away the rain from my eyes.
I should keep walking. I know I should keep walking. He bites. I know.
But I take a slow step toward him. Then another. He doesn’t move. He lets me come. I get within five feet, close enough to see the breath blooming at his nostrils, close enough to see the wet on his lashes, close enough that the part of me that read The Black Stallion is purring like a child who’s been told yes. Yes, I’m the special one, I’ll tame you.
I put my hand out.
My hand isn’t even fully extended before the horse’s head comes up sharply—not at me, not even toward me, just up, like he’s been spooked by something in the forest—and he’s gone, a clean, fast turn, and he’s thundering through the trees, the white of him visible for a beat between the trunks and then nothing. The clearing is empty. The rain falls into the space where he was.
I stand there with my hand still half-extended, feeling slighted and a little embarrassed. The part of me that thought he’d let me touch him was loud, but I have a feeling that horse spooking just saved me from a grave mistake.
I lower my hand, shove it in my damp pocket, and walk on.
The castle in the rain is a different castle. The downpour makes it streaked and shining, the stone gone dark, water sheeting from the broken parts of the parapet, running down the curtain wall in fast bright lines. It’s only now that I notice another building behind some brush and a rocky outcrop—maybe that’s the stable where he keeps the bay horse?—and a ruin of sorts with a car parked beside it.