Page 100 of Bonetide

I flip to the last entries.

I am eighty-three, and he looks the same as he did when I was twenty-two. When I die, the bargain breaks. The next Galloway will have to do what I could not, or refuse him entirely. I will be the one who left her this. I will have to die with that.

The last entry is undated.

Iris will have to do what I could not. I am sorry to leave her this. I see no other way.

I close the notebook and stare numbly at the paintings.

Effie tried for sixty years to do something, some binding, and she failed at it.

Effie created a bargain with Alasdair.

Effie left me the cottage knowing all of this. She was unable to tell me outright—perhaps because I wouldn’t believe it until I lived here long enough—until I eventually came to know Alasdair.

I sit there for a long time.

When I get up, I am decidedly undecided. I know only there is one more person I have to talk to before the day is done; before my brain absolutely melts into goo.

I duck back through the doorway. I lock the secret room behind me, refuse to look at the jawbone that I know is still on the bed, then go downstairs. I get my keys from the kitchen counter where Alasdair left them.

I drive to the village.

Mhairi is at the till when I step inside her shop, the air inside warm and a little stale, smelling of tea, and butter, and lavender. It all seems so quaint, so normal and ordinary, and, for a moment, I think I’m being silly by coming here. That there’s no way I’m about to tell this shopkeeper I barely know that my neighbor seems to be immortal.

Even Mhairi seems so unassuming, keeping busy by sorting a stack of envelopes. She pauses her shuffling and looks up at me when I walk in.

She stares a beat longer than she needs to and squints, raising her chin. She doesn’t say anything, but I think, somehow, she already knows. She sets the envelopes down, then turns and puts the kettle on.

“Mhairi?” My voice is clear as I approach.

“Aye, hen. Cup of tea?”

“I’m good,” I tell her, raising my palm.

“You’ll be even better when you have tea. Sit down.”

There’s a single wooden chair by the cold radiator at the back of the shop, beside the rack of postcards the odd tourist or hill-walker buys—who apparently don’t care that they’re all yellowing at the edges. I sit down while Mhairi makes the tea. I know the stores back at home—least not the places I’ve lived in—would never offer tea to their customers as if they were old friends, but here it feels like a custom; part of the landscape. Besides, even though I really should just get some bread and a few things, I do have a fuckton of questions for her, and she’s more likely to answer them if I just do as she says and have tea.

She brings me a mug and a plate with a tablet of shortbread on it then pulls a stool over from behind the counter and sits across from me. She looks at me with her clear, hazel eyes for a long second before she speaks.

“Let’s cut the idle chitchat, shall we?”

I nearly choke on my biscuit. Straight to the point, this one. I hope that comes in abundance today.

“You’ve been over there,” she states.

I don’t have to ask her to clarify where “there” is.

“You’ve gotten to…know him,” she adds with a glint in her eye. I don’t want her to clarify what that means either.

“I have,” I say slowly. “Fairly well.”

“And now you’re wondering who exactly you’re dealing with” She grimaces. “Or what.”

I stare at her, because we’re about to embark on a conversation I never thought I would have with anyone. A conversation about the fucking impossible. The supernatural. And Mhairi here is acting like this is just a regular workday for her.

“What do you know?” she asks between a sip of her tea.