Page 148 of Bonetide

“Alasdair,” I say quietly, hating to intrude but needing to all the same.

The prayer stops. His shoulders go still and it’s that total stillness, the animal one.

“I’ve come to ask something of you,” I announce.

He doesn’t turn around. The fog ropes between us like snakes, as if sniffing me out. It’s colder than it should be, almost corporal in its form.

When he finally speaks, his voice is wrecked low. “You shouldn’t be here, Iris. You shouldn’t be anywhere near me. You saw what—” His breath drags. “You’re wearing what I am on your throat.”

“I know what I’m wearing.” I come into the chapel, slow, my footsteps loud on the old stone. “And I know what you are. Which is why I went to Mhairi…and you were right, you know, I went behind your back. I did and I’m sorry for the back part but not for the going part. Because she told me what Effie knew. She told me about the binding.”

His head lifts, just slightly. He still doesn’t turn.

“The hide,” I say. “Cut from the horse, with iron, with my own hand. Given, never taken. I know Effie asked you, Alasdair. Seventeen times across sixty years, she tried, and you denied her every time. I read it in her own hand. He will not give it to me.”

“Aye.” Barely a word at all. “I denied her.”

“Why?”

A long silence. The fog moves through the dead saints’ window.

“Because Effie was my keeper, and I loved her the way you might love the wall that holds the sea back,” he says finally. “She kept me, and I honored her, and she asked me to die for her…because that’s what it is, foxglove—whatever soft words the cunning women wrap it in—and I looked down all the years I had, all the years I’d ever have, and I couldn’t put them in an old woman’s hands. There was always more time. There was always another keeper coming. That’s the truth and it’s an ugly one. I let her go to her grave a failure because I was a coward with eternity in my pocket.”

I swallow hard, his truth feeling so raw and honest and real that it nearly makes me doubt my decision to come.

“And now?”

He turns toward me and he’s a wreck of a man.

I’ve never seen him like this, hollowed, his eyes red-rimmed and human, so human, and his gaze goes straight to my throat and he flinches as if those very bruises burn him.

“And now I’ve felt the thing inside me close my hand on the woman I love, and I couldn’t stop it, and next time I won’t surface in time, and there will be a next time, Iris. There is no version of the slipping that doesn’t end with you dead in my hands and me wearing your blood and not even grieving, because there’ll be no man left in me to grieve.” His voice breaks. “So, ask me, please. Ask me the thing I cannot ask of you.”

But I’m still stuck on what he just said, that he can’t close his hand on the woman he loves.

He loves.

He…loves me?

I take a breath, trying to hold myself steady because right now is the absolute wrong time to start going gooey at the knees because Alasdair just told me, in a roundabout way, that he loves me.

The words I rehearsed all day are suddenly nowhere, so I use the ones underneath them.

“Mhairi has a name for you.” I manage, ignoring the butterflies in my chest. “The old one, the one the old people used.” His face goes very still. “The Lord of Drowning. That’s the thing the binding ends. Not you…it. The lord goes down and the man stays up, and the man grows old, and the man dies, in fifty years or sixty, in a bed…” I give him a steady look. “With me, because I’ll be growing old and dying right alongside you. That’s what I’m asking. I’m asking you to let me cut the deathless part out of you and keep it in my pocket and walk you into the grave with me.” My voice cracks and I let it. “And I have no right. I know I have no right. I’m nobody, Alasdair, I’m a plant illustrator in a dying industry with a failed marriage and a body that already doesn’t work. I’ve known you half a summer and half an autumn out of all your hundreds. And I’m standing in your chapel asking you to trade eternity for…for this.” I gesture at myself, bruised throat, aching hips, all of it. “So, you can say no. You’ve said no before, as is your right. But I had to come and ask—because you can’t ask—and because if I didn’t ask, I’d be letting the thing win, and I⁠—”

“Iris.”

He gets to his feet in one smooth motion and crosses the floor, the fog parting between us, and stops in front of me, close, not touching, his hands at his sides like he doesn’t trust them yet, maybe won’t ever fully trust them again.

“Effie offered me a leash,” he murmurs. “You’re offering me a life. They were never the same asking.” His eyes search mine, glacial blue, all the way human. “I cannot say the words. You know I cannot. The thing in me holds my tongue on it and always will. So, hear what I can say.” He bends slowly and rests his forehead against mine, cold against my fever-warm skin. “I’ll stand for you. Tonight, before my courage goes. Bring your iron and your salt, mo ghràdh, and do what the Galloway women were always meant to do.”

We go down through the fog to the flat ground between the castle and the shore, where the old grass grows short over what might once have been a yard, or a church ground. He tells me where to stand, and how it has to go.

“You’ll turn your back,” he instructs. “What happens when I change is not a thing you need to see. You’ll turn your back, and you’ll keep it turned no matter what, and when it’s time, you’ll know.”

So I stand in the wet grass with my back to him and my eyes shut for good measure, the sgian-dubh in one fist and the salt jar in the other, and I listen to him walk away from me across the grass, and then I listen to the fog wisp around me.

There’s no sound of his transformation, which is odd and a little creepy. I braced for the sounds you’d hear in a low-budget werewolf movie and there are none. No tearing, no animal noise, nothing, only a long, drawn-out stillness in which the temperature drops around me by degrees, the deep smell of the loch washes over me, the hair stands up my arms and the back of my neck, and something behind me becomes large. I can feel the size of it on my skin. I can feel it breathing.