Mr. McPherson, the fisherman, had appeared with two buckets of water. He’d poured them over the shark.
“If we do this until the tide comes in, we might save him,” he’d said.
Luna had taken one of the buckets and run to the tide, scooping it up and tossing it over the shark. It was a phenomenal and strange sight. That enormous shark, long as a bus and helpless as a kitten.
She remembers scooping the water and dumping it over the shark until her arms ached. Finally, Mr. McPherson had said, “That’s enough, lass. Say your farewell.” They’d stood in silence for a moment, looking down at the huge body of the shark, his gray skin so rough that Luna had friction burns from where she’d accidently rubbed her arms against him while pouring water over him. He was more rock than fish, all thirty feet of him lying stretched out on the sand. She’d asked Mr. McPherson if they could lasso him somehow and get a boat to tug him back out to sea.
“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.