‘I’m sorry,’ she said, feeling hopeless. ‘I’m so sorry, Rav. I would like something with you, I just…I just…can’t, right now.’
‘Whatever.’ He turned and started walking away. ‘I’ll see you around, Faye. Let me know when you’re ready to talk like an adult.’
The storm clouds were growing nearer; the air was changing. Now, it had an electric smell like burnt ozone. Fear contracted Faye’s body; she didn’t want to lose Rav. Her heart ached, and suddenly she was sick of all her secrets. She knew she had to open up to Rav. To tell him everything.
She ran the few steps between them and made him turn around to face her.
‘Please. I will explain. Everything. Just listen.’ She reached up to his face and touched his cheek. His eyes met hers again, and she dropped her hand.
‘Faye, I don’t know…’ he muttered, and a distant thunder rumbled in the distance. ‘I don’t want to get involved if you’re going to mess me around. I like you too much.’
She nodded. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. You deserve to know everything.’
‘Why does it have to be difficult? I like you and you like me. I think you do, anyway,’ he murmured, stepping close to her. He pulled her to him and stroked her cheek.
‘You know I do,’ she confessed, her tone urgent. ‘But I’ve got something to tell you. It’s going to sound really strange. But I have to, I think.’
He pressed his finger softly to her lips. ‘Tell me later. All I care about is that you like me.’
‘I have to tell you, Rav. It’s important. Please?’ she insisted, fighting the desire to kiss him, to lose herself in him. It would be terribly dangerous, a kiss; the faeries had watched them make love on the beach before. This close to the faerie road, any number of Finn’s spies might be watching, or even Finn himself.
‘All right.’ His lips brushed hers, and Faye felt the heat between them build.
He kissed her. It was a sweet yet rough kiss; his mouth was warm, and her own deep yearning for him responded.
She closed her eyes and surrendered to it, unable to do anything else, despite the danger. His hands pressed into the small of her back; his touch was at once intimate and gentlemanly, and she breathed in his warm, woody smell, remembering how he touched her, how cherished he had always made her feel, how powerful.
The thunder had moved quickly, and the kiss brought on the rain, or so it seemed. The black sky rumbled ominously, and lightning split it like slivers of moonlight. Rav pulled away from the kiss; they both stared up at the storm for a brief moment, startled at its speed, and Faye felt a wave of unease clutch her heart.
‘God. Come on, we’ll get drenched,’ he shouted over the thunder and guided her down the path towards the beach, but the rain came down hard and there was no escaping it.
Faye’s gaze flickered to the faerie road alongside Rav’s house. There was something odd happening. As she followed him, ducking her head under her arm in a vain attempt to keep off the rain, some of the black clouds had lowered to the path itself, disconnected from the sky, like a stray, angry storm cloud, separated from the rest.
The seawater rose in tall waves and crashed onto the beach, and when Faye looked into the waves, she saw the shapes of horses surging forward, relentless, their glassy black manes driving through the white sea spray. Her breath caught in her mouth.No.
She saw the power in their legs, which was the weight that drove the waves forward and rolled underneath them. She knew what the horses were, and why they had come.
Rav started running ahead. He turned back to wave something at her, but she couldn’t make it out. He shoutedsomething, but the wind took it away. He pointed to his house. She took it to mean he was going to open up so she could run straight in. She screamed at him, ‘No,run, run,’ but he was too far away to hear her over the wind and the crashing waves.
Unlike her, Rav couldn’t see the fae or the faerie road. He was completely ignorant of the strangeness ahead of him. And the cloudy blackness was so close to the house that Faye started running after him, a shout growing in her throat, ‘No, no, no!’
Faye watched, aghast, as the black water horses – kelpies – rode out of the sea towards Rav with a white fire in their eyes.
They galloped towards where Rav was standing with his back to the sea, fumbling for his door keys. Their serpent tails powered them along, swishing side to side in the wet sand.
‘Rav!’ she shouted. ‘Rav!No!’
He hadn’t seen them; perhaps he couldn’t.
Faye wanted to scream at him to run, run away as fast as he could from the kelpies, but she knew he would never be able to outrun them.
Rav turned around just as a kelpie reared up towards him; its webbed black hoof struck Rav at the side of the head, and he crumpled to the ground. The water horse gripped Rav’s arm with its long teeth and swung him onto its back in one lithe, wet motion. Black tethers of some kind lashed him to the horse’s back. Sprinting towards him, Faye watched as he struggled but failed to get free.
Faye screamed at the kelpies to free Rav, but they showed no evidence of having heard her. She felt the betrayal slap her in the face; she had ridden a kelpie, she had taken its leathery scale as a token of her communion with it, under the sea. And yet, that meant nothing now. Her hand went to her neck, to the kelpie charm that Moddie had given her, but it was only there in the astral plane, in dreams and in the faerie realm. It couldn’t be touched in the human world.
‘Rav!’ Faye yelled again, panting with the effort of trying to catch up to the kelpie.
The kelpie galloped away, along the faerie road and over the headland. The rain pelted her mercilessly.
