Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels) (38 page)

The Wolf watched him. Block or no block, Seth could feel his cold black eyes between his shoulder blades. And then he felt the point of cold steel slide out of his flesh.

‘Very well, Murlainn,’ said the Wolf silkily. ‘We’ll do this together. Let’s take a little road trip.’

‘Are you still sulking about the horse?’

In front of me Rory snorted a laugh. ‘Nah. That was clever. Also sneaky.’

I smirked to myself and snuggled closer against him. That was mostly for warmth, of course. We were high up now, high enough to have left the thickest of the trees behind, and wind funnelled
through the pass straight into our faces. Above us icy patches of snow still lay in the gullies, waiting out the summer, and I could feel exactly why it hadn’t melted. For all the singing
birds, for all the golden light, it felt like spring had never arrived up here.

Our route was hardly what you’d call direct. We’d given houses and farms a wide bodyswerve, we’d followed half-dried-up riverbeds and belts of larches and pines where we could.
As for the clotted patches of yellow whin, some of them were so dense and gnarled even the horse wouldn’t try to get through. When I got off the beast once, growling with frustration and
insisting I could find a path, I was forced to retreat almost in tears, my arms pincushioned with spikes and brambles.

I certainly wanted this journey to be as short as possible. ‘Couldn’t I try to contact your dad?’

‘No, I told you. Don’t let your block down. He’ll track us if you do.’

I reckoned he wasn’t talking about Seth. ‘So all we can do is go to that house?’

‘Tornashee. Yeah. My father’s
bound
to go there.’

‘Doesn’t everybody else know that too, then?’

He didn’t answer. I should really stop asking awkward questions, since they never made me feel any better.

‘So anyway, why would I sulk about the horse? I’ve got my own.’ Rory was back on the more comfortable subject of his kelpie obsession. ‘I’ll be back to get that
filly one day. Properly this time.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Sorry about that. Again.’

‘You didn’t know. Anyway, taking the kelpie mare was a good idea, I think.’

‘It wasn’t my idea, it was Eili’s.’

‘Oh. Well, I’m still going to try it.’

I liked it when he talked positive. I liked it when his every word didn’t seem to assume we were going to die horribly and quite soon. Unfortunately, those moments never lasted long.

‘Sh.’ He halted the horse. It stood there with its ears pricked forward and its lip curled back from its teeth.

‘Oh God,’ I muttered.

He reached back and pinched my thigh quite hard. ‘
Sh.
’

Now I could hear it too: the throaty rumble of a diesel engine. Hard to tell which direction it was coming from; the air was so thin and clear up here, and there were plenty of scree slopes and
granite escarpments to make sounds bounce and echo. ‘Bugger,’ I said.

‘Would you shut
up
?’

‘No.’ I pointed to a narrow defile where a trickle of water was funnelled into something resembling an actual river. ‘Down there. Hide.’

At least he didn’t argue with that. The horse could be amazingly quiet when it felt like it, and it sidled into the feeble cover, placing its hooves delicately on moss patches and soft
tussocks of mountain grass. Still pressed close to Rory, I could feel his heart hammering. Or maybe that was mine.

In mid-stream, the horse stood dead still. All I could hear was the wind, and the whisper of water round the creature’s fetlocks, and smooth stones rattling like phlegm in the gullet of
the burn.

Then it was on us out of nowhere, the roar of its engines sudden and loud. Rory sucked in a breath and the horse spun on its hindquarters and I might have let out a smallish squeal.

God, the way the mountain could distort sounds and make them vanish. The quad bike was right there, and the man riding it was squinting at us with a sharp callous interest.

‘You want to hide from a Watcher,’ he said, pushing hair out of his silver-pricked eyes, ‘you don’t do it in water.’

‘Well, you don’t smell like Lammyr to me,’ said Suil, plugging a kettle into the wall, ‘so I suppose you’ll want a cup of tea instead of a quick
death.’

A very good-looking osprey, that was what he reminded me of. The irises of his eyes were amber-yellow and his nose was aquiline and his tawny hair was flicked back above his ears, but it
wasn’t so much any of that as his hungry predatory look, as if he was dying to dive for a nice bit of fish.

Sure enough, as he swung open the fridge, illuminating his doubtful face, he said, ‘Smoked trout? On toast? It’s all I’ve got in.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Oh please. Thank God Almighty you haven’t got any rabbit.’

Suil made a dry noise that might have been a laugh and shoved two slices of bread into the toaster. I liked his cottage, small and slightly messy but definitely this side of civilisation. I
especially liked the loud hum of the generator out the back. Home comforts.

The only thing that unsettled me was the faint odour of decay and death. I glanced nervously over my shoulder again at the curtained box-bed along the back wall.

‘My lover,’ he’d said when we arrived, and the curiosity was killing me.

‘How long has she been...’
sick,
I was going to say, but he shook his head.

‘Like this? A month or so.’

‘What’s her n–’

‘Teallach,’ he said. ‘It was Teallach.’

He rose and pulled back the curtain, sat down on the edge of the bed. Gently he stroked her hair out of her eyes. It was half-blonde half-grey, a messy filthy wild shock of it, and I can’t
explain it but she looked ninety and nineteen all at once.

I got up and sat beside him on the edge of the bed. The woman stared at me and then she stared at Suil. Her expression didn’t change. She didn’t recognise either of us. I took her
hand; it was withered skin over bone but it wasn’t twisted like an old person’s hand. Same with her face: it was a young person’s face, except that the skin was yellow and
shrivelled tight across her skull and her eyes had sunk into the sockets. Her teeth were loose and she smelt of death.

‘Is she dying?’ I whispered.

‘She didn’t want to go to the Selkyr,’ he said, kissing her forehead. ‘Fair enough. Her choice.’

I didn’t say anything because I had no idea what he was on about, and anyway I thought I might cry. The dying woman gave an incoherent cry of petulant anger.

‘I think I will, though,’ he murmured, distantly. ‘When it’s my turn. I think I’ll take the Selkyr.’

Rory had come over to stand and look down at her. There was a superstitious look of fright on his face. ‘She was all right till a month ago?’

‘It’s taking so much longer than I thought,’ said Suil. ‘I think it’s taking far longer than she thought, too.’ Almost absently, he massaged her bony fingers
and kissed each knuckle. She watched him do it, uncomprehending.

He stood, abruptly. ‘Toast’s ready.’

‘Hannah.’ The whisper was insistent, and I knew fuzzily that it had been said more than once. ‘You awake?’

I pulled the lumpy pillow off my head and sighed loudly. ‘I am now. What?’

The night wasn’t black at all. I doubted it ever had been. Sometimes I thought there would never be a proper night again, the kind you could hide in. Through the thin curtains the light
was pearl grey; it could have been dusk or dawn. I had no idea what time it was. I felt as if I’d been asleep for all of three minutes.

Rory, having yanked me out of sleep, had suddenly gone silent. To make sure of that, I held my breath, but there wasn’t so much as a grunt from him now. I got the sense he was having
trouble speaking. I wondered if my block had slipped while I was asleep, because something hung in the air like the dissolving tatters of a dream: blaeberry scrub and oily black smoke and blood: an
awful lot of blood. I blinked it all away.

‘I don’t know what consangwhatever is,’ hissed Rory at last, ‘and I don’t care. I’m cold and I just wondered if…’

I sat up on my mattress and looked thoughtfully at him. ‘It’s a hot night.’

‘Well, I’m cold.’

My fingers curled tightly into the musty bedclothes. I shouldn’t get up. I knew that Suil wasn’t here; I knew he was watching the still deep pool below the escarpment, a sword on his
back, like he said he did every night. But his lover was here in the room next door, whether or not she had a mind left.

It was remembering the dying woman that made me sit up and swing my legs off the bed. I thought about that long decay, and the look in Suil’s yellow eyes when he stroked her hair and
spooned mashed trout into her slack mouth, and the sound of the spoon rattling on loose teeth.

I stood up quickly. Rory’s bed was against the opposite wall; I sat down beside him and took his hand.

‘Did you have a bad dream?’

‘Yes.’ His voice was muffled by the pillow.

The bed was saggy and narrow but I managed to wriggle under the sheets between him and the wall. The bad springs tipped me towards him, so I put my arms round his body. His back was to me and I
could see the angular jut of his shoulder blades and the line of his spine. His arms found mine and clutched them more tightly round him.

I pressed my cheek to his shoulder. I was not going to let on that I could feel the dampness of the pillow beneath his face.

‘I wouldn’t even know if he was dead,’ he said. His throat sounded as if it was full of ground glass.

‘I think you would,’ I said into his neck. ‘I think you would anyway. And he isn’t. Anyway.’

His fingertip stroked the back of my hand. An owl called, somewhere out in the night, and I heard the kelpie stir outside the window, stamping and snorting. Rory’s body was so tense I
thought every muscle in it might snap under the strain. I mustn’t clutch him too tightly, I thought. I mustn’t.

He rolled round to face me and said, ‘Thanks.’

I stroked his cheekbone, feeling my innards clench. ‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘He’ll be okay.’

‘Of course.’

He’s my cousin. He’s my cousin.

My fingers drifted into Rory’s hair all by themselves, combing it back from his ear. ‘No, it really will. It’ll be fine.’

‘Okay. Thanks,’ he said again, and kissed me.

And who was I to shove him away at such a moment? His mouth lingered on mine, and it was like a puzzle fitting together. After a bit I stopped being surprised, and kissed him back. He tasted
familiar. My arm round his waist, his hand on my neck, his leg hooked over mine: it was all exactly the right fit, like we’d been sculpted as one by some very talented artist.

Outside, beside a dark pool, a man sat hunched in the half-light and watched for monsters; and beyond the wall at my back a woman lay dreaming of a life she’d forgotten. Death seeped in
everywhere, through the cracks in the loose window frames, down the sooty chimney, in the breath of breeze that stirred the cheap curtains. It touched the nape of my neck and crept across my skin
on spider-feet.

We’d neither of us lived very long, Rory and me. The night was brief and it wasn’t any kind of a hiding-place, but it was all we were getting, and we took it.

‘Clunk click,’ said the Wolf as he plugged in Seth’s seatbelt.

‘Gosh, that dates you,’ said Seth. ‘But thanks for your concern.’

‘Well.’ The Wolf patted his knee. ‘I wouldn’t want you hurting yourself. That’s my job.’

Seth gave him a twisted smile.

The Wolf ejected the disc and threw it onto the back seat, then flicked through the ones he’d stolen from the house. ‘The Stranglers! Murlainn, you old punk.’

‘Are you more of a boy-band man?’

‘Hold that.’ The Wolf gave him a dark look and thrust a disc at his mouth while he examined the next in the stack. Seth held The Stranglers carefully between his teeth till the Wolf
took it back, stuffed the others into the rack, and slotted it into the player.

‘If you scratch my favourite CDs I’ll kill you,’ said Seth.

The Wolf sighed. ‘Look, Murlainn, I know it’s only a figure of speech, but that is not an option for you any more. Okay?’ He gunned the car out through the raven gateposts.