When I look at Giles his hands are shaking.
“I didn’t mean…” he says, trailing off. “It was just for protection. You said silver… It wasn’t meant for her. I loved her.”
And then he howls.
It’s a pure, animal cry of grief and loss.
It’s an alarm letting the òlanfhuil know we’re here.
I shove the knife in my pocket, finding my gun in the rags, and grab the lamp.
The last I see of Giles Stewart is him on his knees, gathering up the powder of my mother and bringing it to his chest, her ash slipping through his fingers as he tries to capture her, hold her. I leave him in the dark and I run.
In their own small dens the òlanfhuil are waking, outraged, furious clicking as they check with each other, and I am a beacon, the light bobbing in my hand as I try to remember the way to the tunnel, too scared to stop moving, my feet beating the earth as I run full pelt back the way I came.
When I reach my father I stumble, a bolt of pure grief stalling me. I don’t want to leave him buried down here. We were just about to fix things. Everything was going to be fine.
But one of the òlanfhuil appears in front of me, an old one, two sets of teeth eager for my flesh, and I fire, hitting it squarely in the chest.
I continue shooting as I run, unloading the next three bullets into swift white targets that try to reach me.
Then there’s a light ahead of me, somehow, and the sound of a voice shouting, muffled to my shell-shocked ears.
Murren Ross reaches out and swings me in front of him, flinging me headlong into the passage. As he runs behind me I turn and throw the lamp over his shoulder, into the entrance of the tunnel. The glass smashes, starting a small fire as the oil spills. Behind the flames the òlanfhuil scream.
We stumble along the passage, then drop to our knees to crawl, the glow of the fire behind us. There are bottles dotted along the passage, and Ren tells me to be careful. Then there’s the sweet, sweet light of the outside world ahead, a bright white shape calling us home. Hope swells in my heart – we’re going to make it.
I knock one of the bottles over and smell alcohol as its contents spill. I turn reflexively to watch it roll.
And see two of the òlanfhuil crawling behind us, reaching for Ren.
“Go!” I scream at him, pulling out the gun and flattening myself so he can pass me, rolling on to my back as the òlanfhuil claws for my ankle.
As its fingers wrap around it and begin to pull me back, I aim, close my eyes against the flash, and fire. Not at the òlanfhuil, but at the bottle beside it. The first bullet misses and I swear, squeezing the trigger and firing again.
I scream when a sharp, searing agony ravages my ankle, so hot it feels cold, as the bottle explodes. I smell the hairs on my leg burning, but I channel my pain into motion and roll, then crawl, to where Ren is reaching back for me.
I take his hand and he pulls me into the light.
I collapse on to the ground and stare at the sight before me. Maggie Wilson and Mhairi, Dizzy and Wee Campbell, Mack from the tavern, the Talbots from the inn, Iain-the-Smith, to my great surprise Mrs Stewart, looking thin and pale, along with Cora and the Reids, Mrs Ballantyne: almost the whole village, all standing in a production line, stuffing rags into bottles and passing them along to where Gavan is poised with a torch.
As soon as Ren and I are clear, he lights the first one and tosses it into the hole.
“His father—” I say to Ren.
“He knows. Cora told him Giles went down there.”
When I look at Gavan I see the sad resolution on his face as he lights the bottles and throws them down mercilessly, working as mechanically as the vats at his father’s mill.
The hole begins to glow, orange and red, and then Connor Anderson runs forward, a large jar in his hand. Gunpowder.
“Get back,” Gavan cries, taking the jar, and the crowd does.
Ren pulls me to my feet and a searing pain shoots along my calf. I limp away, Ren’s arm around my waist, joining where the villagers throng. Maggie Wilson comes over and puts her arm around my shoulders, and Ren releases me to her embrace. She smells of flour and lavender and good things.
Gavan tosses the jar into the hole and runs towards us, and then past, and like sheep we follow him, backing away from the holes, standing in a loch bed that just months before would have been deep underwater.
For the longest time nothing happens.
Then the ground shakes.
It lasts for only a few seconds, and on the outside there’s little to see. Just the tiniest of landslides, a few rocks and stones falling. It’s anticlimactic.
At least until a profound, savage rumbling emanates from inside the mountain, and a dust cloud pours out of the entrance to the caves. We have to move back yet again as it rolls towards us, shielding our eyes and faces, heads bent into our clothes. When it finally clears, leaving us all coated in a thin layer of mud, a coughing Gavan steps forward. Dizzy and Wee Campbell flank him, while the rest of us hold our breath, both literally and figuratively, trying to peer through the settling grime to the caves.
When Gavan turns back and gives a single nod, the villagers cheer.
I have to see for myself, though.
I untangle myself from Maggie’s hold and move forward, each step like I’m treading on knives. Gavan waits for me as Dizzy and Wee Campbell pass me, both clapping me on the shoulders, before turning to each other and embracing. Dizzy Campbell lifts Mhairi into the air and whirls her around like she’s a slip of a girl; Cora Reid is at the centre of a scrum of her brothers, all of whom are crying openly. All around me people reach for each other, smiling and cheering. Ormscaula is united in a way it hasn’t been for so long, all of us together, working and hoping together. A real village.
But I can’t take my eyes off the sealed entrance to the caves. I step closer, heart thudding in my chest, terrified a charred, thin hand is going to plunge out of the rock and grab me, dragging me back under.
“It’s possible they’ll be able to dig their way out,” Gavan says, joining me. “It depends whether the whole passage caved in or not. We might have only bought a few days’ respite. But that’s long enough to make bullets and fortify the village, come up with some other way to trap them. We can keep an eye on things here.”
“Gavan, your da…”
“I knew if he went in he wouldn’t come back out. What about your father?” I shake my head. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Me too.”
He looks up at the livid sky above us, swollen with clouds. “What happens now?” he asks. “If they are gone? What do we do next?”
“I don’t know. Carry on, I suppose.”
“You’re the Naomhfhuil.”
“And you’re the master of the mill. The master of Ormscaula.”
Gavan’s jaw tightens. “Enough of that. We need to rebuild. People will need jobs. But there will be no more production at the mill until the loch is full again, and we will never again let it go dry.”
As if in answer to him, the heavens open.
And the people of Ormscaula begin to dance in the rain.
I’m in no shape to dance, every bone and muscle and inch of me aching, aflame or bitterly cold, so I begin the long walk back to my cottage, grateful for the rain on my skin. After a few yards I realize someone is beside me, and I know without turning that it’s Ren. We walk in silence for a while, both of us limping heavily.
“You’re very quiet,” Ren says.
“Tired,” I reply.
We don’t speak again until we get back to my cottage.
I’d forgotten about the door being boarded up, and I have to crawl inside, my leg throbbing when I kneel on it. Ren follows me.
He stands in my hall, looking uncharacteristically awkward. “Shall I go?” he asks.
I shake my head. I don’t want to be alone.
“No. Stay. Just let me just wash up.”
He frowns, but shrugs, heading into the kitc
hen. “I’ll make a brew.”
I limp into my bedroom, seeking fresh clothes. Then I stop, rummaging in my running-away bag, still sitting on my unmade bed, for one of my fancy city dresses. Not the one Giles wanted me to wear, the other one. I take it through to the washroom, where I use water from the butt to clean my hair, and my face, and my body.
When it comes to the wounds on my legs I’m gentle, sitting down on a stool and carefully wiping the blood away from the burned skin and the cuts.
And the neat set of twin puncture wounds just above my left ankle.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I knew I’d been bitten. I knew the piercing I felt in my ankle wasn’t shards of glass from the bottles. It was like icicles being pushed into my body. Two sets of teeth. One to feast, and one to change.
My mother wasn’t lying when she said it hurt.
I wanted, very much, to be wrong. I pushed it away the whole walk home, even though I could feel the coldness spreading through me. It’s at my knees now; they feel stiff and frozen.
I don’t know what happens when it gets to my heart. I guess my human heart stops and the monster’s one starts.
I dab at the wounds and pull the smart new dress over my head, braiding my hair into a thick plait down my back. Then I reach into the pocket of my filthy borrowed skirt and pull out my mother’s gun, and the final silver bullet. I load it in the barrel, clicking through the empty chambers until it’s in place.
It’s not that I want to die – I want the opposite. I want to leave this place and try my luck elsewhere. I want to kiss Murren Ross until neither of us can breathe. I want to do more with him than just kiss. I want to see the sea and eat chocolate. I want to grow up. I want to be a girl with a pen and paper who can write her own world. A better one than the one I’ve known.
This isn’t fair.
I leave the bathroom and walk through to the kitchen, every single step agony. But I paste a smile on when I see Ren at the table, two steaming mugs of tea before him.
“We can do better than that, Murren Ross,” I say. “This is a celebration, after all.”
“So I see.” He nods at my dress, his eyes bright and fevered-looking.
“Am I pretty?” I ask. Death makes me bold, it seems.
Ren’s mouth falls open, and I laugh.
I fetch my father’s good whisky and two glasses, filling them to the brim, pushing one in front of him and lifting my own.
The first sip is fire in my throat, and I take another, wondering if it’ll burn the cold out of me.
He isn’t fooled for a second.
“What’s going on?” he asks, leaning forward, ignoring his drink.
I place my mother’s gun on the table between us.
“If I don’t have the guts, you’ll have to do it,” I say.
He shoves away from the table so fast that he almost topples the chair.
I keep talking. “Ideally, I’d like it to be the sun. One last sunrise and then turn to dust. But I’m worried – what if some kind of instinct kicks in, if I try to run or hurt you…” I trail off. “When it was my mam, it happened fast. Within hours. The same with James, must have been. I don’t… I don’t know how much of me will be left.”
Nothing good, I think.
“What are you saying?”
“Oh, Ren. You know what I’m saying.”
I lift the hem of my dress and show him the wound.
He stares at it, the neat, round marks, two inches apart. They look like nothing.
“I can’t shoot you,” Ren says.
I believe him. “Then I’ll have to do it.” I reach for the gun.
He grabs it, holding it like it’s a snake.
“Ren, there’s no coming back from it. I won’t heal. There isn’t a cure.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. You either turn, or die. Aileen and Hattie died. James and my mam turned.”
“So turn. I’ll take care of you, or something. I’ll get you what you need. Make sure you can’t hurt anyone. It doesn’t have to be an end.”
“Ren—”
“No, Alva. No.” He shakes his head, staring at the gun.
I’m gentle when I speak. “Ren, listen, it’s going to end badly for me, one way or the other. But I can make sure it doesn’t end badly for anyone else. I need you to help me with that. If you can’t, then I know what I have to do.”
He barks a terrible laugh. “So, that’s it? Either you shoot yourself now, or I shoot you later?”
I nod. Because that is it. That is the very awful truth of it.
Ren turns his back on me, and I watch his shoulders shake.
My heart is breaking.
I take my glass and walk to the front door, bending low and crawling back outside, through the hole we made. I sit under the porch, watching the rain. The sky is iron; it’s not going to let up for a while. It smells lovely. Clean.
Ren comes to sit beside me. His eyes are red, whisky in his hand.
He puts an arm around me, pulling me to him.
“Here’s how I thought it would go,” he begins, in a soft, ravaged voice.
He tells me that he planned to follow me away, when I left. He explains how we’d have got jobs in Inverness. I don’t say I was never going there; this is his dream now. I burrow into his chest and listen to the sound of his heart beating as he tells me how he’d have wooed me. How after many misunderstandings and a few false starts, we would’ve got our act together and fallen in love. He tells me he’s pretty much there already, just waiting for me to catch up.
“For a bright girl you’re very slow on the uptake sometimes,” he says, and I laugh. “But I would have waited,” he says softly. “I would wait.”
Ren tells me how he would have kissed me, how he’d have taken me to wed, how he would have trembled in my arms. He spins us out over decades, so many successes, a few failures to make the joys sweeter. How we would have grown and lived and loved. He tells me about our children, and their children. Over the course of the afternoon and evening he weaves a lifetime for us and I let him, using his words to push away the coldness that rises through my belly, creeping up my chest with every hour that passes.
As if he feels it too, he pulls me closer.
“Pretend I went,” I say. “To Maggie, to Gavan and the others. Don’t let them know what really happened.”
He kisses my hair, over and over, then my face, my cheeks and my eyelids, lifting my palms to his mouth and kissing them too, before folding me against him once more. “I won’t.”
His heartbeat is becoming unbearable to me. I wriggle out of his arms and pull myself up, pretending I need to stretch.
It’s the darkest part of the night now. No moon, hidden behind the relentless rain clouds. If this carries on, the loch will be full again before anyone knows it.
From inside the house the clock chimes five.
For the last hour of my life I sit beside him, no longer touching. He’s too warm; I’m too aware of the heat of him, the living of him. We don’t talk, because there’s nothing else to say; he’s told the story of us and I want that to be the truth.
Above us the sky begins to lighten, and my skin starts to feel too tight.
Ren presses his lips to my temple and mouths four words against my skin, old words, words that don’t belong in the mouth of a Sassenach boy.
I reach across him, into his pocket, and pull out the gun, laying it gently on his lap. Just in case.
My heart drums a million miles an hour inside my ribs, cramming a lifetime of beats into the next few moments.
I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Biggest of the thanks are for Claire Wilson, my brilliant agent. You are the roots of the tree of me, keeping me tethered. We grow together. And Miriam Tobin at RCW, thanks for all the backstage stuff I know you do but never see.
Thanks to Team Scholastic: my lovely editor, Gen Herr, and editorial superstars Jenny Glencross, Pete M
atthews, and Jess White. Magical Hannah Love, clever Harriet Dunlea, and patient Kate Graham, in marketing, and all of the people behind the scenes whose names I don’t know but who work hard to get my words out there. Special thanks to Jamie Gregory, for the most beautiful cover I could have imagined (again!).
Thanks to Catherine Johnson and Anna McKerrow for being ears and wine and hearts and hopes. A finer coven I couldn’t ask for. And to Vic James, who told me this was the book that would make me. I hope you’re right.
If you’ve ever read my acknowledgements before then you’ll already know these names; they’re the same old stalwart supporters, lifesavers, future alibis and advisors, and I hope they never stop being the people I’m most grateful for. I owe them so much more than just thanks; I’m privileged and honoured that after so many years they’re still my best ones. So, as always, thanks to my inner circle: Emilie Lyons, Franzi Schmidt, Katja Rammer, Lizzy Evans, Hannah Dare, Neil Bird, Asma Zbidi, Sophie and Liam Reynolds, Laura Hughes, and Rainbow Rowell; you’re all the greatest and I love you.
And as always thanks to the Lyonses, Papa and Mutti Schmidt, and the Salisburys (the good ones).
And finally, to you, if you read this, and if you’ve read me before, or you plan to read me in future. Mòran taing gu dearbh.
Melinda Salisbury lives by the sea, somewhere in the south of England. As a child she genuinely thought Roald Dahl’s Matilda was her biography, in part helped by her grandfather often mistakenly calling her Matilda, and the local library having a pretty cavalier attitude to the books she borrowed. Sadly she never manifested telekinetic powers. She likes to travel, and have adventures. She also likes medieval castles, non-medieval aquariums, Richard III, and all things Scandinavian.
She can be found on Twitter at @MESalisbury, though be warned, she tweets often.
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