The Book Eaters(102)
—The Brothers Grimm, “Rapunzel”
It’d been so incredibly long since something had gone right.
Devon hummed happily all the way from Eastleigh to Southampton, was still humming when she caught a straightforward train to Brighton with Cai in tow. She endured a call from Ramsey at noon railing about “obvious victims” left in hotel bathrooms and police who sought a woman of her description. She promised to do better and shrugged it off. They were already on the move, what was the fuss?
“I don’t like traveling.” Cai had scarcely looked up from Mario, preferring to hide himself in the safety of the game, but he’d put the console down long enough to frown out the window. “Where are we going now?”
“To the seaside.” Salem would have wanted to go to the seaside, she thought disconnectedly. Shells and sand. “You’ll like it. Even better than where we were before.”
He pulled a four-year-old’s pout and said in an old man’s voice, “Can I have a lager? I miss having a lager with me lunch.”
“Um. No.”
Less than an hour later, Brighton rolled into sight with its mix of souvenir shops and authentically archaic buildings. The tail end of February was not a popular time to visit, and the streets were eased of their burdensome tourists.
She paid an exorbitant amount of money for a hotel room, this time by the sea. And then, because neither she nor Cai had ever seen a beach before, let alone the ocean, they walked down to have a look. It was en route to the pier anyway.
Beaches in books were soft, friendly, sandy places, warm and deliciously tropical; Devon’s fiction-fed imagination had prepared her with such imagery.
Brighton defied that utterly. Instead of sand, the shore was comprised of pebbles and rocks that bit Devon’s feet, just small enough to get stuck between her toes while still large enough to dig deep. The sky was a smear of rotten gray, the ocean a cold soup of bitter salt that left a silty residue on her skin.
“Amazing,” Devon murmured, and Cai nodded emphatically in agreement.
It was the most beautiful place they’d ever seen. Raw. Real. Authentic. Hard-edged, and unpretentious. In another life, she might have stayed here forever, lingering on that boundary between sea and earth. The kind of place you could get lost, and find yourself. If ever they made it anywhere safe, Devon hoped it would have a rocky beach to wander on.
Despite the unfriendly weather and lack of tourists, the boardwalk was populated with small carnival rides, each plagued by a handful of human children in coats and shoes. She and Cai wore only jeans and short-sleeved T-shirts, and Devon realized they stood out in a bad way. They’d need coats as the weather got colder, if they wished to fit in.
“Can we go on the rides tomorrow?” Cai said, awed and oblivious to her self-consciousness. Almost no trace of the old man when he was excited, a thing she found curious and hopeful.
“Aye, why not.”
They walked along the waterline for a while, ambling slowly toward the Palace Pier. A handful of swimmers braved the sinking light and single-digit temperatures. Devon scanned every face that passed; none were her Easterbrook prince. Shouts and laughter from elsewhere on the seaside peppered her peripheral hearing. Groups coalesced and dispersed.
The tide washed low, leaving strips of pebbles for them to clamber on beneath the pier in wet shoes and spray-lashed jeans. Devon paused beneath the beams, inhaling the tangled scents of salt and wood-rot. Lapping water threw wet echoes around the pier’s cavernous underside.
Somewhere in the city, a cathedral clock struck a late hour. No sign of Jarrow.
“I’m bored now,” Cai said. “Can we go sleep? Or watch the telly.” He had stopped asking to go home in recent weeks, having finally understood that Easterbrook Manor was lost to them forever.
“Yes,” she said, “we’ll go back to the hotel.”
Devon pivoted, crunching up the rocky sand. If Jarrow did not show then she would simply manage on her own. Hadn’t she always, in the end?
A glimpse of movement caught her eye, too fast and fleeting for a human, and she paused. Devon saw perfectly well in the dark, but here beneath the Palace Pier where the wooden beams rose like a branching forest, it was difficult to get a good line of sight.
“Why are we stopping?” Cai wheedled, tugging at her hand. His childish lisp was particularly strong just then. “Corrie’ll be on the telly soon. I like catching a bit of Corrie.”
No, the old man liked Corrie. “You’ve never seen a single episode,” she retorted, then regretted the careless words immediately when his eyes filled with tears. Not his fault; none of it was his fault. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. We’ll head back so you can catch Corrie, aye?”
She wasn’t even sure what this show was, just some kind of soap opera thing. But so what, she thought. It mattered to him. And it cost her nothing to indulge his interests, regardless of their source.
“Okay.” He sniffed and wiped his nose on her sleeve, mollified for the moment.
They picked their way up the pathless gravel beach. This time, when that same flicker of movement tracked in the corner of her vision, she didn’t stop or look sideways. Definitely not human.
In a handful of minutes she was off the shorefront, across the road, and bundling Cai up a set of stairs to their expensive-in-cost, but cheap-in-furnishings room. She turned on the television, helped him find his silly program while he sprawled on the bed.