Page 146 of Bonetide

“Even now,” he breathes. “Even scared of me. You’re wet as sin.”

His other hand comes up to my throat.

He’s done it before. The grip there, the press of his thumb at my pulse, the dark thrill of it. It’s the rough thing I’ve learned to crave, and I tip my head back and let him have it, and his fingers close, and the pressure builds, and it’s good, the edge I like.

Until it goes past the edge.

Harder. Then harder.

Last night, when he held me under the water, I felt equipped to handle it, but now I feel unsteady, like I don’t know where we stand, now I feel like he’s not quite here the way I want him to be. Because he’s angry and hurt, and he’s not listening the way I’m used to him listening and…

My air thins. I make a choked sound and open my eyes hoping to see those glacial blues, the color that means he’s with me, that this is the game and⁠—

His eyes are black.

That bottomless dark abyss is here, and there is nobody behind them. That’s the thing my whole body understands in one cold plunge, that this isn’t the monster in the deep with his arm around me keeping me safe in his element, this is the monster surfaced up through the man, in my kitchen, on dry land, his hand crushing my throat, the man gone out of his eyes.

And the pressure doesn’t stop. It builds. My hands scrabble at his wrist but his wrist is cement. The edges of the kitchen start to soften and go grainy and far, and from somewhere in that lightless face a voice comes, that inhuman, gravely ancient voice.

“You think you can just be rid of me?”

I understand, even with the grey coming up at the edges of everything as I feel myself slipping away, that Alasdair is gone. He’s not the one talking. The thing that’s talking is the thing the binding kills, and it heard what to do about you through the wall of him and knows exactly what that means. This monster is not going to stand in my kitchen and wait to be put down.

I can’t get air to speak. I can’t fight him; his wrist won’t move. So I do the only thing left, which is stop fighting. I go still under his hand, my fingers going soft on his wrist, and I let the tears come because they’re coming anyway. I try to say his name even though all it does is move my lips.

Alasdair.

It feels like a last-minute prayer.

Then something detonates behind the black, some violent surfacing, and the blue comes flooding back into his eyes from the center like a blooming cornflower and his hand springs off my throat like he’s been burned. I drop against the wall, sucking in a great whooping breath and coughing, my hand at my own neck, and he stumbles back from me with his face coming apart in real time.

He looks at his own hand, then looks at me, at my throat, at the marks I’m sure he’s left. The horror on his face is both heartbreaking and a relief because it’s human. It’s the man, fully back, fully here, understanding precisely what the thing wearing him just did with his own fingers.

“Iris—” he rasps, his voice cracking.

I can’t answer. I’m still dragging air, one hand on the wall, watching him.

“I didn’t—” He stops. He can’t even finish it, because I didn’t is a lie. He did, even though it wasn’t him. But he still did.

He backs toward the door. He’s shaking now, and I’ve never seen him shake before, not like this.

“Don’t,” he commands, and it’s only half to me. “Stay there. Don’t come near me. I can’t⁠—”

He turns and wrenches the back door open, running out into the roaring rain, out across the slope toward the bay, his figure swallowed by the downpour before he’s halfway to the loch, to the thing that’s winning. Because, in this moment, it’s the only place left that he can put himself where I’m not.

The door bangs in the wind. The rain comes sideways through it, soaking the floor.

I slide down the wall and sit on the cold floor, my hips overwrought and tired, my neck burning, and I breathe, just breathe, in and out, while the kitchen goes grey and cold with the open door and the storm.

When I can finally think again, what scares me most is that the thing inside him wasn’t wrong.

You think you can just be rid of me?

I went to Mhairi to find out how to take a blade to him and keep the piece that makes him deathless. The cunning folk like her call it a binding and I’d been calling it saving, but the monster doesn’t hear it in those diplomatic words. The monster hears the truth under them, which is that the binding ends it. The each-uisge dies. I keep Alasdair. Alasdair keeps me. But the thing that came up through him just now and crushed my windpipe with a man’s hand, well that fucking thing will be gone, and I fear it’s not going to go without a fight.

I think of Mhairi in the back of her shop weeks ago, telling me how it would go. Some night the man will sit at your table, and you’ll look up and not be sure for a second whether it’s even a man anymore.

She was wrong about that.