Page 137 of Bonetide

Alasdair stands at the foot of the wall where the old sea-gate is, where the castle meets the shore, and he’s a man again; naked and soaking wet. The water sheets off him in the last of the light, running down his hair and his shoulders, pooling dark around his bare feet on the stone, like he’s only just come up out of the loch and put a man’s body back on over whatever he actually is—or however the fuck that actually works.

He’s not braced for my arrival. For once I’ve caught him off guard—he doesn’t expect the detective’s car, doesn’t expect me to be driving it, and there’s a half-second where his face is unguarded and I see something on it I’ve never seen before, something close to total dismay.

The fact that he has this emotion at all gives me a bit of courage, like there really is someone in there, someone human, that’s worth saving.

I get out of the car on shaky legs.

We look at each other across the bracken and road, the dead man’s car ticking as it cools between us.

“We have a problem,” I say.

“Aye.” He grunts, hair in his eyes.

“And put on some pants,” I tell him, my voice cracking and absurd. “I can’t talk to you about this with you standing there like that.”

“Aye, foxglove,” he replies, and something in how gently he says it nearly undoes me on the spot. He turns and goes through the courtyard into the dark of the castle, and I stand alone by the car with my arms wrapped around myself, the cold coming up off the water, and, somehow, I don’t fall apart.

He comes back in trousers and a dark shirt he hasn’t bothered to button all the way, his feet still bare and hair still wet, stopping a few feet from me. He doesn’t try to touch me, which means he’s read something off me that’s telling him not to.

Wise man. Must be the abject horror on my face.

“Come inside,” he offers, “you’ve had a shock. I can get a fire going.”

“I don’t want to come inside.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Of course I’m shaking.” And there it goes, the practical animal losing its grip all at once, the whole afternoon coming up my throat. “Of course I’m, fuck, Alasdair, I watched you kill him! I watched it all happen! I stood outside my home and I watched you. You broke him. You didn’t even…you didn’t kill him clean, you broke him to pieces and you dragged him over the rocks while he was still alive. I heard him, I heard the sounds he made, and then they…in the water, they—” My voice climbs and breaks. “And it came at me. Before. On the hill. It came down the hill straight at me, you came at me, you put your, that thing put its head down and it ran at me and I thought I was going to…”

“I was trying not to,” he says quickly, the first fast thing I’ve heard out of him, and there’s an edge under it. “Iris. I was trying not to touch you. I moved you out of the way because if you’d stayed where you were…”

“You can’t control it.” I’m crying now, and I hate that I’m crying in front of him, scrubbing at my face with the heels of my scratched palms. “That’s what you’re telling me. You came up my hill as that thing, and you couldn’t control where it went, or what it did, or whether it ran me down, you just—trust it not to—and⁠—”

“I could never really control it.” His voice is quiet again, and that’s so much worse than the edge. “Iris. Look at me. I’ve not been honest about that, and I’ll be honest about it now, because you’re owed it after what you watched. I don’t decide. Not that shape. When it comes up in me, I can steer it, a little, the way you’d steer a horse that’s already bolted, I can keep it from the worst, but I don’t decide. It decided to take the detective. I didn’t.”

I stare at him. The loch is black behind him. “Oh, so you’re absolved? Well, if you didn’t, then who did?”

“The horse.” He holds my eyes, unblinking. “The creature. The part of me that was never a man. It’s been kept down a long time, foxglove. There was a bargain, and the bargain kept it down just enough. I took what I could to keep it satisfied, but the bargain’s…you know what happened.”

He takes in a deep breath. “I am losing hold of it, Iris. I’ve told you as much. The monster is winning. I am afraid of what’s at the end of that, and I have not been afraid of anything in a very long time.”

The cold goes that through me has nothing to do with the breeze off the water.

Because I came here bracing for a monster who’s done a terrible thing on purpose, but instead I find that the man I…that the man is being eaten from the inside by the monster—and the monster is patient and winning—and somewhere at the end of that road is a version of him with no man left in it at all, loose on this loch.

“Come inside,” he says again, softer. “Please. Before you go to pieces out here in the cold. Let me…let me at least do that.”

Against my better judgment, I go inside the castle.

It doesn’t take long for the fire to build. He sits me in the chair near the hearth and puts a glass of good whisky in my hand, the peat of it sharp and warming. I drink it too fast, down in two swallows, fast enough to make me cough. The heat of it spreads down into me and steadies the shaking enough that I can think. There’s a fine line when it comes to thinking and whisky, and I have to be careful when I toe it.

Alasdair sits across from me, keeping his distance. He holds his own glass and sips it on occasion.

“The car,” I begin, when I feel like I can finally talk. “Someone knows Sinclair was out here. He told me he was driving the south shore, knocking on doors. He’ll have told people that. He’ll have…a detective has a system; they log where they’re going. They’re going to come looking for him, and the last place anyone knows he was headed is out this way.”

“I’ll deal with the car.”

I frown, sitting up straighter. “How?”