Page 139 of Bonetide

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

It takes Alasdair three days to come back, and I spend all three telling myself I won’t go down to the water when he does.

I’m oh so good at lying now. I’ve had the practice.

The first two days are the worst kind of quiet—me jumping at every noise, waiting to hear a car outside, a knock at the door, a person in uniform showing up and asking if I’ve seen Sinclair.

But nothing comes. The bay sits suspiciously still under a low sky and gives no sign it swallowed both a man and his car whole. The wind has died down—enough that it won’t even ripple the surface—filling the air with silence, like the loch is holding its breath as much as I am.

During those days, I draw nothing, eat little, sleep in bits and pieces.

On the third evening, just as the light goes to that bruised violet it goes now that it’s properly autumn and getting darker earlier, I feel him.

But it’s not him. That’s the weird part. For three days I’ve been braced for the tilt in the air that means Alasdair, the cold weight of his attention, and this isn’t that. It’s something that makes my hair stand on end, but it isn’t him.

One moment I’m at the window with a mug of chamomile tea, and the next I find I’ve set it down without deciding to, and I’m at the back door, and then I’m out on the rocks in the purple-brown light with the cold coming up off the bay, and…I don’t even know how I got here.

The loch is glass-flat and waiting. Across the water the castle crouches black on its spit. And down in the shallows at the foot of my rocks the surface does something it shouldn’t, a slow turning, a darkness rippling under it without a wind to move it, and I feel the pull of it in my chest like a fishing hook set behind my sternum and drawn, gently, seaward.

Come in, the water says. Not in words. In the language under words, the one my body answers before my mind can get a say, conjuring up images of the woman who beckoned me weeks ago.

Come in, come in, the water’s fine, come and be one of us, come and be held.

“No,” I say out loud to the empty shore, though my hands are already at the hem of my sweater.

I take it off. It’s like I’m watching myself do it. I’m fully here, fully awake, fully screaming somewhere behind my own eyes, and none of it reaches my hands, which do things without my command. They pull the sweater over my head and drop it on the rock. They unhook my bra. They push my joggers down over my hips, and I step out of them, naked in the September cold, my skin gone to gooseflesh, and the rational part of me is shrieking stop, stop, you watched this water eat a man, stop, and my feet carry me down the rock to the waterline like I’m a marionette and someone else has the strings.

“Please,” I whisper. I don’t know who I’m asking. “Please, I don’t want to, I don’t want to⁠—”

The first step in is so cold it should break the spell, but it doesn’t. The second takes me to my knees. The pull behind my sternum goes tighter, more insistent, almost tender, and the dark under the surface gathers toward me. I wade out past where I can stand because my legs won’t stop, and the channel drops away beneath me into the black, and then there’s nothing under my feet at all and I feel myself drop.

And then the hands come up.

Cold and soft and many, closing around my ankles, my calves, and they don’t hold me up. They pull me down. The surface closes over my head before I can get a proper breath, and the cold goes total and black. I’m dragged down into the dark by a dozen gentle, waterlogged hands, and I can’t fight them—I can’t even make my arms work—the compulsion’s still on me like a weight. I think, with a clarity that’s almost peaceful, Oh. This is how it happens. This is how they all went.

Then the peace tears, and the animal in me wakes up, and I start to fight.

I claw for the surface. I get my face into the air for half a second, one ragged half-breath, loch water in it, and I scream and then they pull me under again, deeper. The light goes, my chest already burning.

I don’t see him come. I hear it, underwater, muffled and enormous, a splash, a body hitting the loch hard from a height, and then the water around me churns with something moving through it fast.

A hand closes around my wrist.

It’s strong and hard and certain, and I’d know it anywhere. It hauls me up while the drowned hands clutch and drag the other way and for one endless moment, I’m the rope between them—the dead below pulling me down and Alasdair above pulling me up—then he says something into the water. I feel it more than hear it, reverberating through the water, reminiscent of whale song but not melodic, not sorrowful, but angry and commanding.

The soft hands of the drowned wives flinch, and falter, and let go.

He brings me up into the air, breaking the surface.

I come up retching, hauling in breath that’s half water. He holds me against him, treading the black channel with one arm crushed around my back, and his face—god, his fucking face. The careful stillness is gone, blown clean off him. Instead, he’s afraid. The monster that’s watched this coast for centuries is wide-eyed and afraid, and it’s for me.

“I have you,” he says, voice strained and ragged. “I have you, foxglove, I have you, I have you…”

“They pulled me in,” I sob into his throat, suddenly able to speak, to cry. “I couldn’t—I didn’t want to go, I couldn’t stop my own feet, they called me and I couldn’t⁠—”

“I know.” He moves us toward the shallows, and he doesn’t let go of me for a second, his hand spread wide and firm against my heaving back. “I know. I felt it the moment they reached for you. I have never swum so fast in all my years, Christ, Iris, I thought…” He breaks off. His arm tightens until I can’t breathe for a different reason. “I thought I’d come up with nothing in my arms.”