Page 2 of Fierce Highland Longing

I sat back on my heels in the wet dark of the boathouse and tried to talk myself out of it in one long, slow sentence—body heat, insulation, my own palm warming the fur in the second it had taken me to touch it, anything a person tells herself when the world has gone weird under her hand and she is determined to walk out of it unchanged.

Still warm.

Still that slow rhythm under my fingers.

Put it away. Wrap it up. Walk to the inn. Sleep. Forget.

I pulled the oilcloth around it. Folded one corner. Folded the second.

I stopped.

I can’t leave it.

That was the thought I had, kneeling in the smell of rot and salt and old wool with the rain drumming the tin roof above me.I can’t, shouldn’t, leave it. As though the skin had a temperature it deserved to keep. As though the boathouse, that winter, was no place for a living thing to wait.

I couldn’t help tucking it tighter against me, as though it might be cold without my coat around it.

I lifted it off the plank. Pressed it under my jacket against my ribs. Buttoned the coat over the entire package.

I didn’t put the board over the iron cross.

I didn’t glance at the iron cross when I went.

The rain hit me sideways the second I cleared the door. The wind was going the wrong way for the walk home, and it took the breath out of my mouth and pushed it back to me full of salt.

I put my head down and started along the beach.

The bundle steadied against my ribs the way a hand steadies a spooked horse. I didn’t think about it. I cleared my head as I walked.

Halfway to the cliff path, I glanced over my shoulder for no reason I could name.

A lantern was moving along the tideline behind me.

Unhurried. Walking pace. The pace of somebody who already understood where he was going. Going, exactly, where I had been.

Uncertain of what I’d just done, I turned my face into the wind.

I kept my pace, kept walking, with the living thing against my ribs and the lantern at my shoulder and the iron cross unnailed in a boathouse full of nothing but rain.

Chapter Two

Nineteen Winters — Tavish

Myskinwokethreenights ago.

I was a hundred miles up the coast, standing on wet shingle in the dark, when something opened behind my ribs. Like a door coming unlatched in a house you thought was empty. I put my hand on my chest. The pull came from the south, low and steady, and it had one name.

Mine.

Nineteen winters since a man shut my sealskin in a box lined with iron and hid it somewhere along this shore. Iron does one thing to my kind. It blinds us. With the lid down I couldn’t sense my own hide from six feet away. I searched anyway. Every winter. A hundred miles of rock, north to south and south to north, until I stopped counting the years and started counting the beaches.

I stood there a long time waiting for the pull to stop, because things like that stop. It didn’t.

Somebody opened the box.

I started south inside the hour.

Three days on the coast road. I slept maybe four hours of it. A van slowed beside me the second night, out past Cruden, the window coming down on a face I didn’t know.