The Lighthouse Witches(79)

“The rope would only hurt him,” he said. “Yon beast weighs about five ton. We’re best letting nature take its course. He should have left these waters weeks ago with the rest of the sharks. Maybe he knew his time was up and he wanted to die here.”

Luna was devastated. After the disappearances of her sisters, it seemed a cruelty to watch such a gentle giant die right in front of her.

Mr. McPherson had urged her to keep away from Basil’s body. Once he was dead, toxins would come off his skin that might make people very sick. The coast guard would remove him safely, once he started to decompose.

Luna looks up. Her headache is gone, the cold air a balm for the heat of it. Or perhaps it’s the distance she’s put between her and Clover.

She’s at the bottom of the field in front of Cassie’s croft, where the waves can be heard crashing against the rocks below. It’s the sky that has her attention. It’s so vast, shimmering with stars. She looks up at them and wonders if it’s true that we’re all made of stardust. The baby kicks again, and she smiles. Her memories are coming back thick and fast. This is what she’s always wanted, she thinks. Every birthday, she’d blow out her candles with a wish to remember tucked closely behind the wish for her sisters to return. And now that she’s here in Lòn Haven, it’s happening. The unspooling of the past.

But there’s one more thing she came here to do.

She turns and heads quietly into Cassie’s kitchen, where she finds the knife block. She selects the one with a long, slim blade, perfect for slitting a throat. She’ll slip it inside her bag for tomorrow’s trip to the woods.

Behind her, Cassie hides in the shadows. She sees Luna’s face in the thin light of the moon at the window, studying the knife, and catches her breath.


III

The snows lifted from Lòn Haven and the sun shone down, and while the people recovered and reeled from the visitation of a wildling to the island and the near-extinction of our community, Amy revisited her mother’s runes and book of spells.

She woke me one night, sopping wet and shivering with cold.

“I worked it out,” she said. “I think I know how to fix it.”

I helped her out of her wet clothes and lit the fire while she wrapped herself in a blanket.

“I went inside Witches Hide,” she said, shivering. This time, however, instead of climbing back up the tunnel at the entrance, she said she went out the other end that led to the sea. She had expected to step into low tide, but when she went through, she plunged into deep water, the depths almost claiming her.

When she emerged, she swam to shore and sat shivering on the bay. There was a girl with long black hair collecting seaweed, who wrapped her arisaid across her shoulders for warmth. The girl said her name was Marion Darroch. Her father was Christopher Darroch.

The only Christopher Darroch I knew was a child of two years old. A little chubby creature who walked everywhere behind his mother, holding on to her skirts.

“Ask me how long I’ve been gone,” she said.

I looked out the window. “You’ve been gone this night.”

She smiled and shook her head, and there it was again, just for a moment—the wild glint in her eye. “I’ve been gone over two months.”

She had hit her head, I thought, or been driven mad by fear. People would cross the road when they saw her, after what had happened to Angus’ son Blair. The curse that she’d uttered five years before was dredged up as a likely cause for the wildling.

I rubbed her hair with a towel, and she gasped in pain, pulling at something on her shoulder.

“What is it?” I said.

Slowly, I moved the blanket from the spot that was evidently causing her pain, squinting until I saw the cause—a burn that had caused the skin to rise up in a livid red circle.

“How did this happen?” I asked.

I saw something inside the wound and looked closer—someone had used a sharp blade to carve four small numbers into her skin, all in a row.

1

7

0

7



I knew what it meant, and what it would mean if anyone else were to see.

And I knew how I was meant to act, now that I had seen the mark.

I was to kill her.

I was to burn Amy alive.





LIV, 1998



I

“Isla!” I yelled, hammering on the door of her house.

“You’ve found them?” she said, mistaking my distress for joy.

I was hysterical. She told me to come inside and I stumbled forward, sinking to the floor. Luna was with me and I wanted to be composed for her sake, but as soon as I saw Isla, it felt as though everything I had been holding in spilled out in a tremendous rush.

“Rowan,” Isla called. “Can you take Luna here and show her what you’ve been baking?”

I saw Rowan appear. She took Luna by the hand and led her away. Patiently, Isla sat on the floor with me and laid a hand on my arm. “Easy now,” she said. “Whatever has happened?”

I told her about the night before. How I had awoken to find a child had come into the house. And no, it wasn’t Clover, and it wasn’t Saffy—it was a child who looked exactly like Luna.

She sat in complete silence as I told her, my words rambling and half-crazed. I was at the end of my rope, the end of my wits. And I was perfectly ready to accept that perhaps I was mad, and this was all a dream.