Page 5 of Fierce Highland Guardian

“You’ll want to be off this headland by dark.” He set another stone, unhurried. “Some things under these cliffs are better left buried.”

“Funny thing about my whole job.”

“Then hear the plain of it.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “You’ll pack up your instruments and drive your little car south, and by the week’s end you’ll have talked yourself out of every strange thing this coast showed you. Everyone does. It’s a kindness. Take it.”

“And if I don’t?”

His hand went still on the wall. His eyes had dropped to my collar, to the thistle, and the stone he’d been setting hung forgotten in his grip, his massive frame gone motionless the way water goes right before it turns to ice.

Every year of practice told me to shrink. Go small, go quiet, be gone before it cost me. I’d done it for a decade. The old switch reached for the light.

I left the light on.

“I saw you last night.” My voice came out plain, no joke stitched to the end of it to make it survivable. “You came out ofthe sea. You weren’t a man.” I paused, and gave him the rest, because the rest was the part I’d never once said to anyone. “And I didn’t photograph you. I could have proved the biggest thing that ever happened to me, and I didn’t, because some idiot four-year-old I used to be would never have forgiven me. So don’t tell me to doubt it. I’ve had one true thing in ten years, and it was you.”

He looked at me with eyes that didn’t dare blink. For all he was, for all I had no language for, I could see the animal in him now: not the myth, not the monster, but the ache of something that had been alone so long it forgot how to want anything but quiet. I’d named him, and, in naming him, made him vulnerable. It was a small, impossible intimacy, the kind that happens just once, if ever.

And I watched the lie die in his face.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Liability - Craig

Theliemelted,andno mask I owned would cover the hole it left.

Three hundred years I’d worn puzzlement for anyone who saw too much. It wouldn’t come now. So I stopped reaching for it and reached for the other thing instead.

“You should be afraid of me.” Low. True. “Everyone with sense on this coast is.”

“Probably.” She didn’t move. “And yet, here we are.”

Gods, she was quick.

“Go home.”

“People keep telling me that.” She tipped her head. “The sea. A man with a trowel. My ex-husband, most of two years.” She shrugged. It came a beat late, and the lateness was the ex-husband. “I’ve stopped taking the advice.”

The joke had a splinter in it. I filed the splinter away and hated noticing it.

“You don’t want what’s under these cliffs.”

“See, that’s the thing.” And she stepped in—toward me, toward the thing she’d watched rise out of black water, which nocreature with a pulse should do. “You keep talking like I’m a tourist you can spook. But I’ve been sitting with it all day, and you don’t fit. You don’t fitanything.” She counted on her fingers, brisk, a woman laying out a case defending a thesis. “You’re not the wyrm from the Norse strand-hoards—wrong hoard behavior, you’re mending a wall, not sleeping on gold. You’re not a kelpie, wrong element, you cameoutof the water, not into it. Every drowned-serpent myth on this coast is a warning to keep people off the cliffs, and here you are personally keeping me off the cliffs, which means either you’re the source of all of them or you’ve been doing this so long you’ve become your own folklore.” Her chin came up. “You’re not warning me off a place. You’re guarding one. And you’re doing it alone, and you’re tired.”

I read her the way I read weather.

It should have frightened me worse. It did the reverse, and the reverse was the danger.

A creature with sense puts stone between itself and the thing that sees it clear. I set another into the wall and stayed. Staying was the danger, and my hands kept working the granite anyway.

I tried the old scripts, because they had never once failed me.You saw a sick woman’s dream in a lightning storm.I had the words halfway up my throat, the flat certain tone that had emptied taverns and sent bishops home to doubt their own eyes. But she was standing there having just told me she’d thrown away the only proof she’d ever get of me, for no better reason than that a child she used to be would have wanted her to—and the script curdled on my tongue. You cannot make a woman doubt her eyes when she has already chosen what she'd witnessed over her own safety. There was nothing in her left to turn.

I could see it in the tight cording of her jaw, the flat and fearless flare of her gaze. Whatever the reason, in her, there was no space for the kind of fear that made people sensible—she hadgone past it, molted through it, and shed every layer that would have been a warning.

The wind shifted and brought me iron and old ink off the lower rock, faint and foul. My spine went cold. The stone went wrong in my grip, sitting proud of the course, crooked, a thing I hadn’t done in a hundred years, and I left it that way and didn’t mend it.

“Your hands stopped,” she said. Quiet. Not quite a question.

I inhaled sharply. The tang was new and ancient at once, a metallic taint in the wind that cut through the usual salt and sea to the quick of memory and warning. It ran beneath the everyday odors of the headland, subtle as an undercurrent until the air shifted and made it urgent—a thin, cutting line in the nose that was iron, yes, but something else too, something close to a buried engine.