I remembered my father’s box of treasure that I had mocked as a boy, buried in the hill. I did not dare trust that I would find it, but I did, and even then I did not trust that the objects therein might earn me more than a week’s food: my great-grandmother’s rings and a bag of old coins. But an antiques dealer found them extremely valuable, and overnight I went from owning just the shirt on my back to becoming the wealthiest man on the island.
I bought a house, and the Longing. I bought land. And I bought a boat. Somehow traveling the ocean soothed me. It felt as though I was getting somewhere, that I was traveling back to her. I ventured to Iceland, where her ancestors had hailed from, and where her mother’s knowledge of spells had originated.
I wrote, in the back of this book, all that I remembered. Amy’s runes came back to me, little by little, in dreams, and sometimes at unexpected moments.
I had vowed to her: I would never rest until we were together.
And I would do anything, absolutely anything, to make it so.
LIV, 1998
“There we are,” Patrick said.
I was falling in and out of consciousness, but the lightness of his tone—chatty, convivial—dragged me back into the present. He was speaking to me as though we were on a coffee date or he’d just mended a hole in my T-shirt instead of slicing up my back. I felt spit filling up my mouth, trapped by the strap he’d tied across it. Images of my father filleting a fish flashed in my mind; the jab of the knife, the spine ripped out, then the heart. The metallic smell of blood reached my nostrils. My blood.
My lower back was still cold, numb, but the thought of what he had just done to me in this filthy, disgusting place, rife with insects and bat droppings . . .
My vision started to blacken again, the world around me collapsing to an atom.
Luna will find me here. She’ll be completely alone.
Or Patrick will do to her what he’s just done to me.
I came to as he started to head up the staircase. On the floor beneath me I could make out a pair of discarded vinyl gloves smeared with blood. Something clicked in his hands as he moved up the stairs.
My ribs.
He had my ribs.
As soon as I heard him reach the lantern room, I lifted my head as high as I could and looked around. Patrick had a phone. Where was it? I had to call someone. Finn. The police.
But just then, a new smell reached me, the dense, earthy scent of an open flame, teasing out my primal instincts, a new alarm bell shrieking in my head. He was shouting in the lantern room, and the taste of smoke on my tongue was unmistakable.
The spell only works with the runes, bones, and fire.
I saw the hole in the floor, the one that had been covered by the grille. The wood had been shifted to one side, the grille removed. Slowly, painfully, I raised myself to my knees. My lower back was still numb, my left arm, too, but despite how close I was to fainting, the rest of me had feeling. Adrenaline powered through me.
Luna was still in the bothy. I had to get to her.
But as I moved across the floor I fell down, falling painfully to the ground below.
I heard a terrible crunch as my ankle snapped. A sharp pain shot through the bones of my foot, hot and gut-wrenching. Tears came quickly to my eyes, and I clamped a hand to my mouth to stifle a scream.
I straightened and glanced around. The hole that I’d fallen down widened outward into a huge cave, with streams of light at the far end indicating the exit.
And I wasn’t alone.
The little boy I’d spotted, the little boy with straggly pale hair, was standing behind a long pillar of rock. I crawled toward him.
“Are you a ghost?” I managed to whisper. Maybe I was dead. Maybe this was the afterlife.