Page 40 of A Study in Drowning

You didn’t fear the bird itself. You feared whatever terrible, unknowable thing its death portended.

After Ianto’s car had sped away and Effy had picked herself up off the road, she had swallowed one of her pink pills. The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.

Yet still, she had seen the ghost. And the Fairy King had appeared to her in the daylight, as he never had before. In the dark corner of her bedroom, his clawed hand curling around her closet door—but Effy had always believed the sunlight made her safe from him. In Angharad, the Fairy King had come for her at night, when her father and brothers were sleeping too soundly to notice.

There was something wrong here, in Hiraeth, in perhaps all of the Bottom Hundred. Old magic and wicked—or worse, ambivalent—gods. The Fairy King had more power here. The unreal world was close to breaking its fetters.

And Effy had walked right into the center of it, into this sinking house at the edge of the world. Her cheeks and brow were soaked in a cold film of sweat. Whatever reassurances the doctor had given her, they did not matter now. His pills were not enough to stop the waves from crashing over her.

When Effy was able to move her numb legs again, she ran down the stairs and hurled herself out the door, into the blackness of the night, heart pounding like church bells. She was not afraid of the ghost. But she was horribly, wretchedly afraid of whatever had killed the woman it had once been.

Nine

I can hear the mermaids singing

Beneath the rolling, wanton waves,

Their hair as lush as meadowsweet,

Their maidenheads as ripe for plunder

As the gold inside their sunken chests.

From “Great Captain and His Sea-Bride,” collected in The Poetical Works of Emrys Myrddin, 196–208 AD

Morning was the pale gray color of a trout’s belly, and the waves were lolling gently against the shoreline. Effy woke with a start slightly after dawn, the purple and green miasmas of her nightmares still swirling in the corners of her mind.

Her sleeping pills were meant to eliminate even her dreams, to plunge her into total, oblivious blackness, but they hadn’t worked last night, either. She’d spent hours in the throes of nightmares, tossing and turning so violently that the moss-colored duvet slipped off the bed and onto the floor.

She had dreamed of him, of course. The Fairy King and his bone crown. She could not remember a time when she had ever dreamed of anything else. Sometimes the nightmares were sliced through with images of Master Corbenic, but they flipped back and forth so rapidly that at some point, they appeared identical. It was all black hair and reaching hands and water rising to her throat.

Effy knew Preston would not be pleased with her being late. She hurriedly jammed her arms into her sweater sleeves and her feet into her boots. She hesitated at the door, fingers hovering above the iron knob. Now that she had seen the Fairy King in daylight, her old survival tactics could not be entirely trusted.

She slipped two of the pink pills into her mouth and swallowed them dry. Then Effy wrenched the door open and ran, skidding breathlessly up the path toward Hiraeth.

By the time she arrived, she was panting, her skin buzzing with adrenaline. She’d seen no flashes of damp hair in the gaps between trees. As she passed the front of the house, she looked in the driveway for Ianto’s car, but—blessedly—it was gone.

Two seabirds were pecking at something in the tire marks instead. A run-over animal, mangled and flat. Effy didn’t get close enough to tell what it was. She saw only the matted, bloody fur and her stomach turned over on itself. She clambered up the stairs into the house.

Preston was waiting for her in the study, a mug of coffee in his hands and a reproachful look on his face. “You’re late.”

Effy glanced out the window, which held a tender pink light. “It’s still dawn. Besides, that’s not fair. You slept here.”

“And I had time to get coffee and everything.” Preston looked down meaningfully at his mug. “If you’d been here at dawn, you could’ve gotten some, too.”

She drew a breath and resisted rolling her eyes, but the utter predictability of his reaction was oddly comforting. After all the strangeness, her nightmares, Ianto’s violently shifting moods, Preston’s reliable fussiness was almost like a balm.

Not that she would ever tell him that.

“You asked me not to fight you at every turn, but you promised to be fifteen percent less condescending,” she reminded him. “So you have to let me win sometimes.”

Preston’s lips thinned. “Fine,” he relented. “You can win this one, whatever that means to you.”

Pleased by his acquiescence, Effy considered what a suitable trophy would be. “It means you have to give me your coffee.”

He heaved an enormous, persecuted sigh, but passed her the mug. Purposefully keeping eye contact with Preston over the rim, Effy swallowed a small sip and gagged.

Of course Preston Héloury took his coffee black. She put down the mug, trying to hide her grimace.