Page 114 of Bonetide

That’s when I realize that while I have my phone, I didn’t bring in the fucking books.

I go to the window by the front door to see if the coast is clear.

It’s not.

The horse is still there, far away at the start of the drive.

Then it turns, ever so slowly. It walks off the road, into the bracken, and the bracken closes behind it. The last thing I see is the wet, pale flank moving through the gorse, heading up the slope toward the woods behind the cottage, heading toward the castle.

And then it’s totally gone.

I realize I’m holding my breath and let it all out, bracing myself. I make a mad dash back out to the car, fumbling like a lunatic as I go, dropping the books a bunch of times as I bring them out of the car and to the cottage, locking everything all over again.

Once I’m certain everything is secure once more, I unload the library books onto the kitchen table before making myself a fresh pot of coffee. Then I sit down with the books open in front of me and start reading again.

I have a long day to get through and I’m going to need to read every single page before I can figure out what the fuck I’m going to do.

I can only hope I’ll find the answers.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

The clock on the bedside table reads 3:17 in red.

The creepy hour, I think distantly, my head full of slow sand, the kind of waking that comes up out of deep sleep in stages, eyes open on their own, brain trailing a few heartbeats behind.

The cottage is cold. That’s the first thing I catch up to. The wood stove I banked before bed shouldn’t be dead yet; the radiator by the wall is on low, and the room isn’t freezing per se, but there’s a current moving through it, the moving kind of cold, the kind with a source.

The second thing is the smell. The bedroom smells of the bay.

I don’t move. I keep my eyes on the ceiling and my breathing level while I work out that the cold is coming in from over to my right, the wall with the wardrobe and the window.

I turn my head slowly toward the corner.

The wardrobe’s there. Ornately-carved, dark, vaguely person-shaped in the dim, the thing my eye has snagged on all these nights and corrected before I freaked myself out. Just the wardrobe, my brain offers, trying to be helpful though it’s tired. Not a person. It’s never a person.

Then my eye keeps going, to the window.

It’s open. Open wide, actually, the curtain pulled inward on the cold, breathing in the darkness outside.

I never opened it.

I closed it before bed, I know I closed it because it was cold out and also I salted the sill heavy hours ago with my own hands.

But now…that salt is broken.

The clean white line I laid is scattered back across the sill in a smear, like a hand went through it. The cold’s coming straight off the loch, through my open window, and I’m working out how the fuck and what the fuck, when the shadow of the wardrobe shifts out of the corner of my eye.

It fucking moves.

Just slightly.

But the wardrobe can’t shift.

The wardrobe’s stood in that corner, not moving for decades, I’m sure. It isn’t the wardrobe that moved, but the dark beside it, the dark in front of it, the vaguely person-shaped dark I’ve dismissed as just a wardrobe…except tonight, when I stare at the shape, it doesn’t resolve into carved oak.

It resolves the other way.