Page 138 of Bonetide

“The same way I deal with everything I need gone.” He says it matter-of-factly. “It goes in the loch tonight, out past the headland where the bottom’s never been found. It won’t come up. There’ll be nothing to put him on your land. Nothing to put him here.”

“That’s not…” I press the glass to my mouth and take it away. “That’s not the problem. Or it is, but it’s not the whole problem. Alasdair, I was probably on his list. He came to me twice. There’ll be a record that he meant to talk to me, or did talk to me. When they come, they’ll come to me. They’ll ask when I last saw him.”

“Aye. And that’s when you’ll lie.”

And there it is.

Just a fact. Like, yes, obviously I’m going to lie. I’m going to sit across from some tired officer and look them in the face and say, Sinclair? He never came, I never saw him, I’ve seen no one out here; it’s only me. And they’re going to write it down and believe me, because the truth is unsayable and unbelievable, and I’m just a grieving American with a dead aunt and a quiet life and nothing about me reads as a woman who’d drive a corpse’s car to a castle in the dark and ask a monster to hide the evidence.

“They’d never believe me anyway,” I say, making peace with it already, so easily. My voice has gone flat and far away. “That’s the thing. Even if I wanted to tell them. There’s no version where I tell the truth and anyone believes it. So, I gotta lie. Because lying’s the only thing that sounds sane.” I look up at him, a sneer pulling across my lip. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you? Made people lie for you. Made them⁠—”

“No,” he denies. “Not made. I’ve had folks choose it, across the years, the way you’re choosing it. It’s not the same thing, and I’ll not let you pretend it is, even to hate me cleaner.” A pause. “Hate me for the rest. Not for that. You’re choosing that yourself, foxglove, the same as I chose what I am every time I’ve come up out of that water and not stopped.”

I don’t like it, so I don’t say anything. The whisky and the fire are warm, and across from me there’s a monster who just told me, frightened, for the first time that I’ve ever seen him frightened, that it’s losing the war for its own body.

And yet the pull is there, even now, even through all of it, the awful, magnetic pull toward him that I’m not sure I’ll ever be rid of.

He sees it, the bastard. He sets his glass down and leans forward, his hand coming up toward the side of my face the way it’s come up so many times before.

I let it get an inch from me, my eyes threatening to close, to give in.

Then by some stroke of luck or last-minute courage, I turn my face away.

“No,” I whisper, “not…I can’t. Not tonight. You need to deal with the car.”

His hand stops where it is, hovering for a moment before he takes it back. He doesn’t argue, doesn’t push, just folds it all away and stands. “Wait here where it’s warm. I’ll not be long. Then I’ll see you home.”

“No. You’ll deal with the car, and I’ll see myself home. I want to walk. I want—I need to be by myself. I need a single hour where there’s nothing, where it’s just me and the road.”

He looks at me a long moment, and I stare at him right back in challenge, and his jaw goes hard, like he wants to argue with me.

But he doesn’t.

He just nods. “Lock your door when you’re in.”

I watch him do it from the scrub above the sea-gate, because I find I can’t make myself leave until it’s done, until I know for sure there’s nothing left to be a witness to.

He gets in the car—the first time I’ve properly seen him in one, even though I know he’s driven mine—and drives it down off the flat and along the spit to where the land drops away to deep water past the headland, the headlights sweeping once across the black loch. He takes it to the edge, the car undulating over the rocks, and then the lights tip and go down. The loch takes the car the way the loch takes everything. There’s a brief commotion and then nothing, the automatic headlights glowing green until they dim and disappear beneath the surface as it sinks—one hell of an eerie sight.

He goes down with it until both car and driver are gone.

The surface then closes over, the moon rising and painting it metal.

I turn and start walking home. I walk every step cold and alone in the dark, second-guessing everything, including who I am as a person.

Who is Iris Galloway underneath it all?

I went out today a woman who was sleeping with a monster. That at least had the feel of something that could happen to a person, something done to you. Right? I mean, weird shit happens, monsters are real.

Now I’m walking home a woman who drove the evidence away with her own hands and has already, in the privacy of her own heart, agreed to lie to the police to protect the, the thing that did it.

Nobody did that to me. I did that! All on my own, too. Here’s a gold star for being morally complicit.

The cottage comes up out of the dark at last, small and stone, one lamp burning in the window because I left it on this morning when I was still someone else.

I let myself in and lock the door behind me, standing with my back against the door. I have absolutely no idea who the woman is who lives here now.

But I know what she’s going to do when the police come.