Page 57 of The Snow Witch

Was it Jake with Violet?

Or was it Emory with Meg?

The lines between reality and this apparent past life blurred a little more.

And he looked so sad, even in his sleep, that her heart was breaking for him.

‘I’m sorry,’ Violet said. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

Then the man murmured through his dreams, his voice breaking with emotion: ‘Just be with me. Be with me. Or let me be with you.’

‘Oh God, I can’t do that,’ whispered Violet. ‘I think that you’ve been gone for centuries. And I’m not… her. Am I?’ She paused and looked down at him. She wasn’t very sure about that at all if she was honest. She felt as if she was definitely living two lives right at that moment in time. Then the image faded and she watched until the man disappeared.

She became aware of the dagger in her hand again, and looked down at it. There was an odd sense of recognition, and not just because she’d seen it – or one very like it – at the Well. It was almost as if she’d handled it before, that it had been given to her before.

Violet shivered, then wrapped the dagger carefully in a handkerchief, then put it in her pocket. Then she replaced the flagstone and stamped it down into the floor firmly.

It was time to leave Meg’s cottage.

* * *

Ollie was also in Newbrough. However, he was nowhere near the cottage. Instead, he was prowling up and down the Stanegate, his mind and his thoughts overlaid with something else – someone else.

As he stalked along the street, the modern world seemed to be falling away from him, the stone buildings flickering and changing as he passed them. There were small cottages, open spaces. People milling around, the sounds and smells of a marketplace. And snow. Thick snow everywhere and chimneys belching out smoke…

Villagers were looking at him or dropping their heads as he stormed past, his sole purpose to find her.

To find Meg Noble.

He would go to the witch’s cottage, and make her pay⁠—

No. He had to make his brother pay. It was her weapon that did it. But his brother had wielded it…

Ollie blinked and found himself outside the pub again, next to his car. It was only along the road and up the lane. He could go to the cottage easily.

Find it! The voice growled in his head. Look for it. Don’t let her return it.

Ollie climbed into the car and started it up.

Then he drove to the cottage.

38

THEN

Corbridge was bitterly cold. The snow was lying in the streets, piled up against the walls of the buildings, cartwheel tracks, hoof marks and footprints turning it into an icy, filthy slush.

Thankfully, the inches-deep covering in the side streets helped disguise the sound of Emory’s horse walking along but, just in case, he dismounted a few streets away from The Head Inn, walking in the slush to hide his tracks so his footsteps merged with a hundred others.

But Emory wasn’t going to one of the cosy houses in the town, or dropping down the hill to walk along the river; his intentions were far more dangerous. As well as the dagger, he had brought a pistol with him. He had yet to decide which weapon he would despatch Nicholson with.

Hatred had propelled him, there through the darkness and the blizzards, and he didn’t care that the cold and the damp were seeping through his clothes, chilling him to the bone. He was damn well sober now as well, more’s the pity. But his mind was cracking and breaking, the hatred building until it was like a living thing, urging him forwards, her voice in his head constantly.

He walked to the back of the inn and slipped inside, pressing himself against the walls in the dank corridors to make his way into the main part of the building. If he crept in this way, he could sit in a corner, and nobody would take any notice of him or see him coming through the front door. If he sat with his coat collar up, his kerchief covering most of his face and his hat pulled down, and his dark hair hanging loose around his face rather than tied back, he was as anonymous as he could be.

And he could watch and wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. A tall, gaunt, arrogant man came in and banged his stick on the floor to get the attention of the woman pouring flagons of ale – Tess, the innkeeper’s wife. ‘I demand service!’ the man bellowed. ‘I have an important journey to make tomorrow, and I must awake early and refreshed.’