Borrowed Moonlight

by Helen Slavin

  “You’re not in the wrong.” Anna reached out a hand to Casey’s shoulder. “Hey, come on.” She kept her voice steady as she felt the memories lurch forward. If it was a Flickerbook, she should be able to turn the pages. She should be able.

  She hugged Casey as she cried it out, days’ worth of anxiety and guilt.

  “It’s okay.” Anna smoothed Casey’s pale hair. “It’s going to be okay.”

  With the breakfast done, Anna poached Casey some eggs.

  “Not eaten since,” Casey confessed. “Nothing proper.” She thought about it as Anna poured tea. “Had half a piece of toast yesterday. Thought I was going to hurl.”

  Her hands had stopped shaking, but her smile still had a wobble to it.

  “D’you want to go home? I can cope with the lunch rush. We’re not busy.”

  Casey shook her head.

  “Nope. Rather be busy, not sitting at home thinking about it.” She sipped her tea. “I should go to the police.”

  “I’ll come with you, if you like?”

  Anna hunted Lella down in the reception office.

  “You can’t go out,” Lella snapped.

  “It’s important.” Anna had not gone into details but had said they would both be back in plenty of time for lunch.

  “I don’t care. I’ve got the accountant coming in. We’re getting the books ready, so I won’t be able to man the phones or the bar.”

  Anna looked at Lella’s peevish expression.

  “I doubt there’ll be a rush between now and lunch,” she countered. Lella’s peevish expression faltered and revealed her underlying anxiety.

  “I doubt it, too.”

  As Anna and Casey left, Anna turned the sign on the door to CLOSED.

  As Casey gave her statement to PC Williamson, Anna stepped out and walked up to Church Lane.

  As usual, Mimosa’s window display was wild and creative. The thorns of the whitewash bramble crowded the window and door. Anna couldn’t see how it helped Aurora’s business. No one wanted whitewash bramble bouquets, did they?

  The thought did not trouble her as she spotted the ladder outside Mari’s new shop.

  “Hey.” She stepped inside. The interior was a stripped-back contrast to its former self. A pot of limewash was sitting on the sheeting covering the flagstone floor.

  “Hello? Mari?” There were voices from the rear of the shop. Anna stepped to the kitchen doorway.

  “Mari?”

  Outside in the small garden she could see Mari and Matt Woodhill looking up at the building. Mari waved to her.

  “Anna!”

  They were moving back inside. Matt nodded to Anna and made his farewells.

  “I’ll get the paper quote to you ASAP. Let me know what you think.” He ducked out of the shop.

  “Renovations,” Mari said. “It’s all go.”

  “The new signage looks good,” Anna said as they moved back onto the shop floor.

  “I’m full of optimism,” Mari said. “It won’t last.”

  Anna smiled to herself.

  “Plus, just as I’m setting up to take Betty’s into local handicrafts, bloody Roz Woodhill decides she’s opening her gallery in town.” Mari’s face assumed its familiar cheery grumpiness. She rolled her eyes. “Only bloody typical.”

  “In town?” Anna could not think where the new gallery was. “You sure?”

  “Yep.” Mari started to sort her brushes out, kicked a bit of sheeting back into place. “Over at the old Plainsong Chapel.”

  Since Roz and Anna were not particular friends, she had time, during her swift walk to the chapel, to think of an excuse for dropping by.

  “I noticed the renovations…” It was flimsy, but it got her through the door, bearing the sign OPENING SOON.

  Roz was subdued, and it pained Anna. She had lost her confident manner, and her face, while never the smiliest of countenances, was stark and serious.

  “You’ll have two galleries then. Expansion.” Anna’s breezy interest made a brash echo in the chapel’s interior.

  “Oh, no. Let the lease go on the one at Knightstone.” She looked smaller, thinner. “I’m concentrating on this place. New opportunity. Nearer to Castlebury and home.”

  “Shorter commute,” Anna said.

  “Exactly,” Roz smiled. “You’ll have to come over for the launch.” She reached onto the long trestle table behind her for some tickets.

  “Oh, great. Bit of excitement in Woodcastle for a change.” She was cheery, but Roz’s face fell a little further as she turned away. There had been too much excitement at Halloween. Anna pursued the matter.

  “I’m glad I caught you. I was wondering, you know, if the Craft Club were meet…”

  Roz stiffened, and Anna regretted the blundering question.

  “Oh. No. Not.” Roz managed, shaking her head.

  “Oh, I just saw Mari, and so I thought…”

  “The others can meddle with that if they choose.” Roz’s smile was haunted. “I’m too busy.” She looked around at the artworks already out and others waiting to be unpacked. “Super busy.”

  “I can see.”

  There was nothing more to say.

  As Anna headed back to the police station, she thought over all that had happened after Apple Day. Roz, she could see, was physically fine, no lingering after-effects of the hideously broken ankle, but Anna didn’t know her well enough to ask what she might remember of the whole incident.

  The after-effect, the cessation of the Craft Club, bothered her. Roz had had a passion for her Craft Club interests. Being possessed by Mrs Fyfe had been a lesson in the Occult, one that she need not have learned.

  Anna felt guilty, as if it was not Mrs Fyfe but Anna Way who had robbed Roz Woodhill of her twig crown.

  41

  Footprints

  The problem of the quest for the Havoc attacker was a bee trapped against the window of Emz’s head.

  She was concerned with the fact that Caitlin had been found in Leap Woods, and that she and her sisters did not make patrols there as a matter of Gamekeeping course. In order to remedy this, she made her simple trip to the hide into a swift patrol. She looked for embers or any sign that might have been left.

  By the time she reached the rear edge of Cooper’s Pond, she was disconsolate. She did not have Charlie’s pathfinding skills and so the trail was cold. Her mood was shifting towards irritable when a thought occurred. She did not have the Map skills, but she had Reach. She wasn’t sure if this was something they could only do properly together, but it was worth a try. She stepped off the trodden path and, standing deeper within the trees, took a deep breath.

  It was like flicking a switch. At once the wood was altered. If she looked up, Havoc was beyond, the trees tinted at the canopy level with a faint smoke wisp that trailed out towards Mrs Massey’s old cottage. Smoke made her think of the embers she’d seen in the deer’s eyes, and, at once, she focused on Leap Woods and picked up the cold smoke filtered through the trees. It was thin and uncertain, but it was there. She followed.

  The deer dream chimed in her head. The smoke trail turned her this way and that, exactly as in the dream. Her heart was racing as she stepped down at the shore of Cooper’s Pond. Where had the deer splashed? Just over there. She moved to the spot and the dream began to replay itself. She ran on, gathering speed, rocking up at last, breathless and sweating, at exactly the clearing she had seen in the dream. The smoke thinned and drifted, hardly more than a breath.

  At her feet, the patch of ground where she had halted, last night, and faced her pursuer. She saw at once the real prints, the neat notches of a deer and the brief dance of fear it had printed into the mud.

  She looked around to the trees that had hidden the pursuer, had shielded that real face, the shadows of which deepened in her memory, trying to pull at the shape of the skull and jawline.

  She walked around to the hide, attempting to knit her thoughts together. The attacker came out of Havoc. His ember trail had shown up
as smoke in her Reach. The dream of the deer? It was real. She had the hoofprints to prove it. So what did that mean? The deer had shown her something? She dredged the dream back. The scar on its hindquarter. What was the significance of the scar? The threads wove and snapped as she opened the hide. She would take it all back to Anna and Charlie and they could pick it over together. She picked up a few bits of sweet wrapper and discarded worksheets and began closing up the shutters.

  She’d reached the last of them when the door opened behind her, a rectangle of mizzly November late-afternoon light. Emz turned.

  Logan Boyle stood on the threshold. Neither said a word, even as the mizzle became a more insistent rain, the drops catching in his hair, making a rattling sound on his waterproof jacket.

  “I—” he managed the sound, then drew in a breath. “I heard what happened.”

  Emz said nothing. Her heartbeat was clogging her mouth, grasping at the air in her lungs.

  “Mark said,” Logan still faltered at the threshold, “I thought… I wanted to…”

  “They were being bastards. Like normal.” Emz’s voice was husky with emotion. Logan took a step forward.

  “I wanted—” his voice cracked. He took a breath. “To say thank you.”

  Emz was glad of the bench in front of her and the press of it against her shaking legs.

  “Mark said what you did.” Logan circled the point. “So, I—”

  Emz felt the rain blowing in on the back of her neck from the open lookout.

  “Thank you.” He put his hands in his pockets, but the crackle of his waterproofs did not disguise the crack in his voice.

  “You can’t thank me for the truth,” Emz said.

  “I’m trying,” Logan shrugged. He did not make a move to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “How it all went down. Before.”

  Emz nodded.

  “I know,” she confessed.

  “You’re not the same,” Logan said, “as them.” He nodded in the general direction of Woodcastle.

  “No.” Emz hoped the hide was dark enough to hide the fact that she was shaking. Logan took one step forward. Emz moved, her primal brain operating the controls, but she staggered back, caught. The pocket of the black waxed raincoat snagged on the edge of the bench.

  When she looked up, Logan was gone.

  42

  Priorities

  When she arrived home, the sound of raised voices pushed thoughts of Logan out of Emz’s head, the argument rising out of Cob Cottage like bitter smoke.

  “Because Cry Wolf needs three of us.” Anna’s voice, usually so calm, even in anger, held an odd tone. Emz heard it clearly as she strode up the shore to the porch. It was bird-like, a call like a crow. “You can’t keep doing this, Charlie.”

  “Keep doing this? Keep doing? It’s tonight. It’s just this once.”

  “To add to the other tonight-just-this-onces.” Anna’s swift attack. “We’re all in this. We are together.” Her tone was as hard as the stone at the waterline.

  “Anna, this is one night.” Charlie responded with frustration. Neither sister acknowledged Emz as she walked in. “I have a reason.”

  “And I have a reason for asking you to stay.” Anna was insistent. Charlie railed against her.

  “Tonight I need to do this one thing that is not about Havoc.” Charlie’s hand was slicing at the air between them. “One night.”

  “We have a job to do.”

  “Then do it.” Charlie was unmoved. “You’ll manage.”

  “Managing isn’t good enough.” Anna’s voice held an eerie calm. “Not if we’re going to help Caitlin, Casey, Bridget, and Judith.”

  “Who?” Emz heard the list of names.

  Charlie stared, Anna matching her harsh gaze as she spoke.

  “Other victims. I found out today Casey was attacked, to add to the rumour around town about Bridget Quinn being jumped at the Highwayman. That’s why finding this man is our priority.”

  “Not. Tonight.” Charlie’s hand was a guillotine blade coming down on the table so that the cup nearest to her over-balanced, rolled perilously to the edge. “Tonight, I have promised Aron, and that is all there is. If you had had something important to do with Calum, then you would have chosen the same.”

  “Charlie.” Emz glared, sensing Anna shutting down beside her.

  “Tonight is that important. It’s not my fault she won’t listen.” Charlie would not retract, held her eldest sister’s gaze. “I have to.”

  There was a cavernous silence ended by a nod from Anna.

  Charlie, released, was out of the door in seconds. No one spoke, the sound of Charlie’s car growling up the track to Old Castle Road, growing fainter and fainter. Anna made a move to go to her room.

  “There’s nothing stopping us,” Emz said. “Let’s go.” She handed Anna her jacket from the back of the chair.

  The two sisters did not speak as they patrolled Havoc Wood. Emz trudged under the weight of her day, Anna the opposite, lightfooted and swift with emotion.

  Havoc creaked and rustled around them as they made their way along their usual tracks, heading down to the edge of ThinThrough, the terrain hard underfoot with the last frost, the trees bare, looking, it appeared to Emz, starker than usual.

  At Quinn’s Gate, Anna came to a stop, her breath coming in short, harsh bursts that did little to disguise the roiling emotions. Her eyes were too bright in the autumnal night, the beam of Emz’s lantern catching at her jawline making her face seem wild and raw. Except, as Emz looked, her Strength pulled focus. She had not looked at Anna’s real face in a long time. It was not simply a courtesy to those she loved and lived with, it was, Emz was beginning to realise, how her Strength worked. At this moment, her Strength revealed Anna’s face, unbidden. It was older, thinner than Emz remembered. Her eyes were a danger to look into but carried in their depths a torch of light. Her jawline was more angular, no softness in the way it curved into her neck like a thin blade. It was not an ugly face. It carried its scars. It warned you.

  “We’ve come the wrong way.” Anna’s temper had died and been replaced by frustration with herself. “We… I should have taken us up the ridge.”

  Emz looked at their surroundings, another raggedy edge of Leap and Havoc striped with thin elder trees.

  “Where are we? The back end of Stride?” Anna asked. Emz nodded and a thought struck her.

  “We never stopped here, did we?” she said.

  “Stopped? What d’you mean?” Anna was puzzled. “When?”

  “We’ve walked this way hundreds of times with Grandma, but this is one of those places that we never stopped. We never had a picnic or a breather here.” She looked around at the stony ground, the thin trees crowding in on them. “Do you see anything?” she asked her sister, as she herself surveyed their surroundings.

  “Like what?”

  “Can you put being pissed off with Charlie on hold for a minute and concentrate?” Emz snapped. There was a moment of standoff. “There are two of us. We’re not useless.” Emz was restless, something pulled at her. At first, she thought it was the emotion of the day rattling around her, but, as she berated Anna, she understood that the wood was reaching out. “Feel for it.” As she spoke, the wood rustled with the cold night breeze and prickled at her. She switched her attention away from Anna and their argument and let her Strength connect with the wood.

  The effect was instant. The beam of her lantern sparked against the air; veins in the few remaining leaves stood out as the amber and copper and bronze of the dropping foliage illuminated the wood.

  She could see the wispy, smoked trail of the Havoc attacker, a handprint on an oak, a bootprint here and here and here, showing the rat run he had made through Havoc. It was not the route that Charlie might have seen. It was the remains, the archaeology of him. As Emz walked forward picking up the traces, she understood.

  “He’s here. He’s in Havoc, and he’s been here a long time.” The Strength hummed in he
r mind like an old tune. She turned to Anna.

  Anna was looking in the opposite direction.

  “We need Charlie,” she insisted. “We can’t do this.”

  “We can.” Emz could see the trail heading into the direction Anna was facing. There was an indication, a glow of embers, that hinted it had been recently used. “What’s that way?” she pointed. Anna considered for a moment.

  “Takes us to The Brush and…” Anna’s mind had caught up with the track. She turned to Emz with a quick glance.

  The stave they had set by the gate at Mrs Massey’s cottage was still in place. Emz could see it gave off a pale light, like sunlight through a leaf. She and Anna were breathless from their hurried trek, but now they felt they had picked up the scent.

  “We’ve kept him out of here.” Anna’s face lightened. “I can feel it.” She looked to Emz for confirmation and found it. She could see the traces of where he had been, a frustrated circumnavigation of the cottage. Emz turned as Anna shut her eyes, and she felt the Reach push out.

  “Anything?” she asked, as the thrum of it died away. Anna turned.

  “This way.”

  It was an assault course, instinct and insight pulling up this track, along that trail, up this path, but not once finding the culprit.

  “Oh!” Anna exclaimed, throwing a stone in frustration. It bounced off a fallen trunk with a hard, broken sound. “This is useless.”

  Emz, too, after nearly two hours of wandering, had lost heart.

  “He’s hiding.” She felt a sharp prickle jab at her fingertips, like an allergic reaction. “In the dream…” she was dredging the images up, “in the dream he could hide himself, camouflaged,” she admitted.

  “Good. Stay hidden!” Anna shouted at the trees. “There’s no place for you here.” As the words left her, a fierce squally wind blew up, whirling a cloud of leaves, branches rattling above them like beseeching hands, twigs breaking off, the movement spinning out from where they stood.