Page 134 of Bonetide

Ispend the day not coping in the specific way I’ve gotten good at not coping with things: coffee that keeps going cold, that fucking wolfsbane, and bog myrtle I still haven’t finished, the curtain over the sink open, then closed, and then open again because I can’t decide whether I want to be able to see the bay or not. I’ve kept catching myself listening for him. Setting two mugs out, then putting one back. The aloneness hasn’t softened; it’s calcified into something I carry around the rooms with me.

So when I hear an engine working down the rutted track through the woods, my first feeling, god help me, is hope. Some pathetic part of me leaps up thinking, he’s come back, before the rational part reminds me that though I’ve seen his Land Rover, I’ve never actually seen him drive it here. And, if he were to return, I think he’d come from the water.

But as I peer out the front window, I see it is a car. A real one—grey, and official, and mud-splattered—easing down my drive and pulling up on the gravel beside my rental.

Sinclair.

I watch him as he gets out and looks at the cottage, the rowan by the step, the salt I haven’t swept off the front sill. He looks the same as before, but there’s a weariness about him that’s gone past the professional kind into something that’s eating away at him. A woman’s gone missing on his watch. He’s been driving the south shore knocking on doors. This is getting personal for him, and I need to keep that in mind.

I open the door before he’s halfway to it.

“Detective.”

“Miss Galloway.” He stops where he is and nods in greeting. “Sorry to bother you again—and in person—but I was in the area and I’ve a few more questions, if you can spare the time. About the roads, mostly. Who comes and goes out this way.”

No one comes out this way, I think. One thing comes out this way, and it rarely uses the road.

“Of course,” I say, even though the last thing I want to do is talk to him, but I have to pretend that everything is A-Okay. “Do you want to come in? I can put the kettle on and…”

And that’s when I feel it.

The tilt. The weight in the air. The axis-shift under my skin that I’ve learned means he’s here, except he went out my back door yesterday in a fury of my own making and I told him never to come back. The feeling I have now isn’t the presence of the man whose been in my kitchen. It’s…older than that, colder. It’s the feeling I had the day I walked to his castle and saw a white shape through the trees; that feeling of being watched by something that’s watched this world for a long time.

I look past Sinclair’s shoulder, up the slope behind the cottage, toward the bracken, and the yellow-dotted gorse, and the dark line of the woods.

The horse is there.

It’s standing where the ground rises toward the trees, the pale grey-white of it stark against the turning copper of the bracken. The long mane hangs wet and heavy down its neck even though it hasn’t rained for a few days. The water has run down its shoulder and darkened the coat in streaks. It’s bigger than a horse should be, the way it was bigger in the road, it’s always bigger than the last time. The one eye I can see, turned down the slope toward us, is black. Too black. The black of the loch at midnight, of the bottom no one’s mapped, the black of the cosmos where the elder beings roost.

But the horse isn’t looking at me, that much I can tell.

It’s looking at Sinclair.

“Detective.” My voice has dropped, panic starting to flood through me. “Detective, get in your car.”

He follows my look up the slope, and his tired face does something almost fond. “Ah,” he says. “Now there’s a fine beast. Yours?”

“No. Not mine. Get in the car. Please.”

“Don’t tell me it’s wild; a thing that strong and well-fed.” He’s ignoring me and already turning toward it, and I can see it taking him, the pull of it, the glamour of it. His weariness has dropped off him. There’s a softness coming over his face, an awe. “I grew up with horses, ya know. My father kept Highland ponies, they were beautiful creatures. This one is far too big to be a pony, but it has to belong to someone.”

He takes a few steps towards it with a dazed expression on his face.

“It’s not…no, Detective, please.” I hurry over to him in my slippers and pull on his sleeve. He glances down at me with the mild puzzled patience of a man humoring a frightened woman. “It’s not safe. It’s not tame. It bites, it’s not…look, you don’t know what it is. Please, just get in your car and go.”

“Miss Galloway.” Gently. Like I’m the one who needs handling. “It’s just a bloody horse.”

He takes his arm back. Not unkindly.

And he walks toward it.

The horse shifts its weight, getting ready for something. Sinclair makes a low clicking sound with his tongue, and the horse’s ear flicks toward it, and he’s reading the ear-flick as a totally normal thing a horse does.

I get in front of him.

I don’t decide to, I’m between him and the slope before I’ve thought about it, my arms out, walking backward in my slippers up the rise toward the horse with my body shielding the detective, which is insane and the most useless thing a person could do, and I’m saying, go on, get, shoo, to a centuries-old thing wearing a horse like a coat.

And then it fucking charges.