Page 112 of Bonetide

“I can’t.” I sigh heavily.

“What do you mean you can’t? You’re in your car. Drive to Inverness. Get on a flight. Come home.”

“I can’t, Maddie.”

“Why not?”

“Because I…”

I don’t have an answer she would accept.

Because the creature is bound to this loch, and I am bound to him by something he made when I let him into my body. Because there is a binding that needs to happen, and I’m the only Galloway left to do it. Because Effie left me this, and I’m not going to be the one who refuses it.

Because I’ve spent my whole life believing there was something out there for me, some purpose, something that made me special, and this might just be it?

“Because it’s not that simple.”

“Babe. It is exactly that simple. You accepted this whole fucking harebrained inheritance plot to begin with. You accepted it so fast, with so much ease, you tricked everyone into thinking it was a good idea to just randomly up and move to Scotland because you made it seem oh so simple.”

“Maddie, please. I’m asking you to trust me for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks?” she cries out.

“I have to figure something out and I have to figure it out here. I’m asking you to trust me to do it. Please.”

The line goes quiet for a long beat.

“Are you safe? Like, are you actually safe right now? This is the man you think is a serial killer, is it not?”

I think about the salt holding. I think about him not coming last night. I think about the wards I have been keeping by accident and the wards I am keeping on purpose now.

“I’m safe today,” I say, which is the truest sentence I have managed in twenty-four hours.

“Today…”

“Yes.”

“Iris, that is not good enough.”

“It will have to be! I love you. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I tell her, getting ready to hang up before things get more disastrous.

“No, you won’t,” she complains with a dry laugh as I round the last bend and turn onto my drive.

The white horse is in the road.

I brake, hard.

“Holy fuck!” I shout.

“Iris? What’s happening?”

The car stops about thirty feet from it and the tires squeak slightly on the gravel.

The horse doesn’t move.

It’s in the middle of the road where my drive turns down toward the cottage. Its broadside to the car, the long white flank of it across the path, the head turned toward the driver’s side, the eye on me. It’s bigger than it was somehow, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination, my fear, or my position in the wee car. The mane is long and pale and wet, and the wet has run down the side of the neck along the shoulder, the coat a white that is almost grey, dark with the damp.

The eye is dark—too dark—the color of the loch at midnight. Its focus is on me, and even though this one belongs to a horse, even though it’s black, not blue, it’s the same knowing eye that has been on me for weeks at a distance, on the slope, by the rocks, through the back window.