Page 154 of Bonetide

Though at least in his case, he doesn’t have to become a slave to capitalism, which makes that list lighter. Not that I’ve had a lot of time to figure out what life looks like for us going forward, but he’s got a castle that, sure, could use some renovating but is still a fucking castle, and I’m sure somewhere in those hallowed halls he has things he could sell, or perhaps a large sum of money to lean back on. I mean, vampires always end up being rich because they’ve had centuries to save and invest, and maybe it’s the same with him.

At the very least, I have the cottage, which I will most definitely be inhabiting for a year now, so it will be mine and I still have my career (um, kinda, I’m really behind on a few deadlines now). All this to say, Alasdair can be a kept man. All he needs to do is continue to fuck me and look pretty and we’ll call the whole thing even.

I refill his tea, and for a while we just sit with the steam coming off our mugs, and the pale autumn light, and the dark bay through the window. I could live in this morning. I know part of me is looking to the future, but I’m also more than content to stay here in the moment and live in this morning indefinitely.

Which is when he sets his mug down and says, “There’s something I have to show you, foxglove.” And the grave look on his face tells me that maybe the morning and the moment are over. “It’s at the castle. And I’ll warn you now…you’ll want to hate me for it, and I’ll not blame you if you do.”

Okay, now the morning is definitely over.

We walk to the castle, because of course we do. The day’s already showing signs of the strange warmth it’ll open into, the sky rinsed clean after all that fog and rain, and the track around the head of the bay is the same three miles I walked two nights ago with a knife in one pocket and salt in the other, except everything about it is different now, because the fog is gone, and the dread has changed, and the man beside me keeps stopping to look at every damn thing.

He stops for the smell of the bracken warming in the sun, dragging it in through his nose like he’s never been allowed it before, and maybe he hasn’t, maybe the creature smelled everything through six feet of cold water its whole long life. He stops for a wren singing in the gorse. He crouches at a burn we’ve both crossed a dozen times and puts his bare hand in it just to feel the cold as a thing that bites instead of a thing that belongs to him, and he comes up grinning like a boy, shaking his fingers, saying, “It’s sharp. Iris. The water’s sharp now. I’d forgotten how it felt, to feel such things as a man.” I am so in love with this idiot it’s a wonder I can walk in a straight line.

But I’m also on edge, and the edge sharpens with every bend in the road that brings the castle closer.

You’ll want to hate me for it.

He won’t say more than that—I tried twice, got “you’ll see it whole or not at all,” which means that cryptic way of talking is definitely an Alasdair trait—and so my brain, which loathes not having answers, decides to fill it in. With everything. The possibilities scroll past like a slideshow from hell, each worse than the last.

Like, what if there’s a woman in the castle, a live one, kept, some lass from decades back he couldn’t bring himself to drown, gone strange in a tower room like Bertha in Mr. Rochestor’s attic, fed on tea and kippers for fifty years, and now that he’s mortal she’s my problem too.

Or there’s another one of him, a brother, a spawn, a younger thing he’s been keeping below the waterline like a man-eating seal, and the binding only leashed one of them.

Or the wives aren’t the only dead in his keeping…no, there are children. There were always children, little terrors with black eyes and teeth that run up my limbs and bite me and that’s the thing I’ll want to hate him for; that’s the thing no binding fixes. I’ve never wanted to be a mother, and by proxy, I’ll be a mother to literal tiny terrors.

By the time the trees start thinning I’ve imagined numerous terrible scenarios, including him keeping Sinclair’s reanimated corpse as a butler, and I have to physically shake my head to clear it, like an Etch A Sketch.

We’re maybe half a mile from the castle, where the track runs along the bottom edge of the woods, when he stops again, differently this time, his head coming up, and I follow his look into the trees.

The brown horse is standing among the birches.

The real one. The ordinary, and what I have always assumed is a non-shapeshifting, horse that he rode down to see me a lifetime of weeks ago.

Still, I can’t help but be a little wary, considering.

“It’s all right,” Alasdair says quietly. “She’s only a horse. She was only ever a horse.”

He clicks his tongue gently and she moseys on over to us, picking her way through the birches, unhurried, and walks right up to him and puts her big whiskered nose against his chest and breathes him in, one long deep investigation, and I watch him close his eyes.

“She always knew what I was,” he states, his hand moving up her neck and scratching at a spot hidden beneath the mane. “Horses do. She’d carry me anyway, though I never understood it. Kin recognizing kin, I thought.” The mare lips at his jacket, finds nothing, and sighs deep in lack-of-carrot disappointment. “I’m not kin anymore but I suppose she still thinks I’m true.”

The horse looks at him a long moment with one dark eye, a horse’s eye, soft and warm, nothing terrifying in it, and then she butts her head against his shoulder hard enough to stagger him, the way you’d shove an old friend. He breaks into a grin that’s half-joy, half sorrow, perhaps a bit of grief for what he was. As I told myself before, it would have been my childhood dream to be able to turn into a horse so I don’t blame him if he feels that loss.

“Aye,” he says thickly. “Aye, well. Good lass.”

She stays with us a few minutes, walking alongside like it’s nothing, nudging at our pockets, and then some private horse business calls her and she peels away up the slope and is gone into the trees. Alasdair watches the place she was for a moment before we walk on.

“Still friends, then. Even off the leash.”

“Seems so.” He pauses, giving me a wan smile. “I thought everything would leave with it. The water, the horse, the…the whole world I was kin to. And the water’s left, right enough. But she stayed.” He shakes his head slowly. “She was never mine because I was a monster. She was mine because I scratched the right spot.”

Then the trees give out and the castle is there, its grey bulk against the bright morning, no fog to soften it today, every broken tooth of it sharp in the sun. Whatever’s in it that I’m meant to hate him for is in there waiting for me, and Alasdair’s expression darkens. He leads me in through the courtyard and the stones of the great hall, now cold with a dead hearth, up the spiral staircase, and down the corridor. We go straight to a door I noticed the first time he ever walked me through the castle, one I assumed was just a guest bedroom.

He stops with his hand on the iron ring and doesn’t turn it.

“I built this room before your country existed,” he says, as if that sentence isn’t blowing my mind. “I’ve kept it longer than anything I’ve kept. And until this morning, I’d have told you it was the best of me. But I know better now. So look at all of it, and then let me explain, and if you want to walk home after and not see me for a time, the door down there will let you out.”

Oh, okay then.