“The plan is to get to Agnes before she gets herself killed!”
Agnes had reached the bottom of the slope now. She was standing at the very edge of the water, perpendicular tome, her boots inches from the lapping waves, her hand outstretched toward the dark surface of the loch.
She was talking to something.
Calling it.
Movement near the island made my heart stutter, and I sucked in a breath, trying to push down the bands of panic that tightened around me.
I was close now.Fifty feet.
“Graham!” I turned to see Orla, her eyes blazing. “I see Isobel. She’s begging you not to go. You have to stop!”
“Sorry, doll, I cannae do that!” I kept my eyes on Agnes as I surged forward.
From here I could see the resolution in her eyes, the bone-deep certainty that she was doing the right thing, that stubborn lift of her stupid stubborn chin.
The water began to move in front of her.
The surface rippled, and not with natural waves.Oh fuck. The water seemed to bulge, swelling, as if something massive was rising from the depths.
“Agnes, get away from the water.Now,” I shouted.
“I can’t.” She didn’t turn around. Didn’t see what I was seeing. “If I don’t do this?—”
“I don’t care about the curse! I care about you!”
“And I care about you.” Her voice broke, and even from thirty feet away I could see the tears streaming down her face. “That’s why I have to do this. Don’t you understand? The curse will keep coming. It will never stop.”
Twenty feet.The water was rising higher now, taking shape. Something enormous uncoiled from the depths.
“There has to be another way?—”
I just needed to keep her talking.
“There isn’t. I found the truth. Isobel’s truth. And I have to fix this.” Agnes finally turned to look at me, and her expression shattered something inside of me. It was love and fear and desperate determination, all tangled together.
Ten feet.
I reached for her.
My fingers brushed her sleeve—just the fabric, just the barest touch—and for one single heartbeat I thought I had her. If I could just reach her, I could pull her back, drag her away from the water’s edge, and carry her back to the castle and lock her in a room until she came to her bloody senses.
And then the loch erupted.
The water rose in a wall behind Agnes, furious. The surface of the loch seemed to tear itself open, and a shape emerged from it. It was massive and serpentine, longer than The Tipsy Thistle and Bonnie Books put together, its body armored in overlapping plates that gleamed like wet slate in the moonlight.
The Beithir.
I had a moment to see it clearly. A crown of horns rose from its skull, and a mane of kelp and water streamed behind it. The eyes—bloody hell, those eyes—burned with rage.
It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
And it was looking directly at Agnes.
I lunged for her, my hand closing on empty air as the creature moved faster than something that size should be able to move. Its tail whipped out, wrapping around Agnes’s waist like a massive coil of scaled rope, and she was lifted off her feet as easily as I might lift a kitten.
“Graham!” Agnes shrieked, herhands flying up.
