Fergus pointed back to the doorway. “He couldn’t come today, so I said I’d pop in. Don’t worry; you’re not doomed to my company every visiting hour.” He made that same sneering, wolfish grin, though it seemed different now. More self-deprecating than predatory.
He rolled the magazine in his hands.
“Y’know, funny you should say that. About having a house dropped on you. Because that’s how we found you.”
My eyes widened. If I wasn’t awake before, I was now.
“What?”
“Nothing but rubble left,” he said. “Rowan had me drive us round to check in on you after… your conversation.”
Ah, so Fergus also knew what I’d done then. That was fine. I was done hiding it anyway.
“I can’t believe he did that by the way,” Fergus continued. “I said to him, ‘You don’t take a girl up into the woods to tell her you went to prison, you psychopath.’ He said he thought the quiet would help.” Fergus shook his head, but there was a hint of that wolfish grin. “I swear to God, he’s got to be the dumbest wise person I know. Anyway, we came round to check on you and half the cottage had come down.”
I sat up, ignoring my protesting bones and muscles.
“Which half?”
“The 1a one, so your neighbour’s place. Though we weren’t sure which half was yours at first, ’cause there’s bloody nothing in 1b. Except that sheepskin rug you got funny about.” He peered at me like I was a strange new animal he’d found on an alien world. “How are you living like that? No table, no chairs. Not even a telly. You’ve got to get that sorted out.”
“How’d you know what the inside of my house looks like?”
“Because Rambo Ro went running inside to check. I wanted to wait for emergency services to arrive, just in case the other half came down, too. But in he goes, so of course I have to go in as well. Luckily you left the front door open, which, again, you’ve got to get sorted out.”
He shook his head and grabbed something from my side table.
My phone.
“I’ll add it to the list.”
“Hey!” I protested.
“Shut up. You’ll thank me later.” He finished typing something, then put my phone back down on the table. Then put the charger cable into it. “Anyway, we found you down in the basement, covered in masonry dust and more blood than I thought a person could make so… congratulations, I guess.”
I looked down at my bandaged limbs.
“For making that much blood or surviving losing that much blood?”
“Either. Both.” He shrugged. “Rowan told the emergency services you’d talked about having a neighbour, so they went looking for her in the clusterfuck of building violations you call next door. I don’t know who you’d seen, but they said the place looked like it had been deserted for years. They checked the blood on you, too, just in case you’d murdered someone.”
I looked up.
“But it’s all yours, so we’re calling you Blood Bath from now on.”
I thought of what had happened in her side of the house. The last I remembered I was in 1a. There was sunlight and then there was dust everywhere. I must have been blown through the door back into my side of the house.
Along my arms, I saw the line of pinpricks from the needle. The red thread was gone.
Fergus noticed me looking.
“Doctors don’t have clue what those are,” he said. “They were hoping you could enlighten them.”
I shook my head in faux confusion.
“Nails from the floorboards maybe?”
The lie would probably cost me a tetanus shot, but the truth was probably better left alone.
