Page 156 of Bonetide

“Aye.”

The lamp shakes a little in my grasp. The cold down here is total—the breathing of the well goes on and on—and all around me are the bones of the women he’d killed. Yes, it was the monster who did the eating, but Alasdair did the luring.

And he also laid them out like this with so much care that it’s almost heartbreaking. Horror and grief are side by side in this place.

“Let’s get them out of here,” I say, when I can. “All of them. Today.”

“And take them where?” he inquires.

“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But I’m sure you will, when you think about it.”

We work for the better part of an hour, mostly in silence. He brings the canvas bags down from the hall, and we lift the women two-handed, one at a time. They weigh almost nothing since they aren’t complete skeletons but random bones he managed to scavenge, and yet it’s the weight of the moment that feels the heaviest.

The last thing Alasdair does, when the chamber is empty and the bags stand waiting by the stair, is take the lamp around the circle of name-stones one final time, reading them. His lips move as he repeats them to himself.

Then we climb up out of the rock toward the daylight, carrying the dead between us, and the well goes on breathing in the dark behind us, holding nothing anymore but water.

“If you we take the bones away from here, can they move on?”

“Aye,” he confirms with a nod, “just can’t be in this loch. We can bury them somewhere, but I would worry they might be dug up since I’m not about to bury them here. But we can take them past the headland, where the loch gives onto open sea. Beyond the reach of the bay, beyond my keeping. The sea takes what the loch can’t hold.”

“Then it sounds like we need a boat.”

He frowns. “We?”

“Well, of course I’m going to help you.”

“It’s not a small thing I’m asking. You’ll be handling⁠—”

“Bones?” I gesture to them. “Listen, these ladies mean well, but let’s not forget they tried to drown me not long ago. I want them out of the loch as much as you do. They need to move on, and we do too.”

He rubs his lips together. “Well, it may not surprise you, but I don’t have a boat. I’ve never needed one.”

“Yeah, well luckily that’s something I happened to inherit.”

Chapter

Thirty-Four

The outboard motor that belongs to the skiff on the beach is in my mudroom under a tarp, where it’s been since the shed became my studio. I don’t know a lot about motors aside from when my father and brother and I would go lake fishing when I was young, but I know this one is ancient enough, a four horsepower of stubborn 1980s engineering. We bring it to the little skiff that we’ve dragged into the water and Alasdair clamps it to the stern. It starts on the third pull, loud and roiling, which brings out a wide grin from both of us.

The day, as it has turned out, is now unbelievably beautiful as we head out along the water. It’s sunny and warm and the sky is swept clean of clouds, that saturated blue that early autumn brings. The loch is a deep green for once instead of its forty shades of grey, and we motor out down the long arm of the bay with canvas bags resting in the bow like sleeping passengers.

I sit facing backward watching the cottage shrink and the castle slide by on its spit, and the further out we get, the more the waves slosh and the wider the world gets, the loch opening its mouth to the sea, the headlands peeling back until the horizon arrives all at once. I can see the great blue shoulders of the Isle of Skye off to the southwest, and beyond, faint as breath on glass, a low pale smudge that Alasdair says is the Outer Hebrides, and beyond that nothing but Atlantic until Canada.

“We should go somewhere,” I say, surprising myself. “When this is done. I’ve been in Scotland long enough, and I feel I’ve barely seen anything.”

“Where would you go?” he wonders, piloting around a piece of floating driftwood.

“Everywhere. Skye. I heard that place is lovely, these fairy rocks and pools and all that…” I trail off and squint into the sun at him. “Wait, don’t tell me fairies are real.”

He grins, his face looking stupidly handsome. “The fae are more real than the people are here. You should know this by now.”

Right. I suppose he is kind of fae himself.

Or was.

“Where else?”