The food arrives, the smell of it making her mouth water. She and Clover sit at the small round table by the window. She pours Clover a glass of water.
“Cheers,” Clover says, lifting her glass with a smile.
The scene is heartwarming, and Luna finds herself lifting her own glass to toast Clover. “Cheers,” she says, clinking Clover’s glass with her own. It might be miserable outside, and she may not have found what she came for, but Clover is happier. As though she’s getting used to Luna.
“What’s that?” Luna says, right as Clover holds a forkful of pie to her mouth. Something doesn’t look right. She lunges forward and takes the fork from her hand.
A sharp turn of the fork toward the light reveals it—a shard of glass sticking up out of the pie.
Quickly, Luna pulls apart the pie and finds more glass. Smaller pieces. Less easy to detect. A minute longer and Clover might have swallowed one.
“Why is there glass in my pie?” Clover asks.
“I don’t know,” Luna says, a chill running clean up her spine.
But she does know. She remembers the way the ticket officer ran his fingernail under her name on the ticket, then did the same to Luna’s. The way he looked at them both.
Someone knows they’re here.
LIV, 1998
I
I kept my word to Finn—I rang the island GP and booked the earliest appointment I could. Finn wanted me to drive back to England and go straight to the hospital, but I wasn’t ready for that. I could not, would not leap that fast, but I could manage to speak to a GP locally. The GP only came to the island three days a week, and the earliest slot was the day after. That was good enough for me.
It was Halloween, or Samhain, as the Scottish called it. The girls had spent the day making costumes at school, transforming black bin bags, twigs, and pipe cleaners into witch costumes replete with brooms and cauldrons. They carved out turnips, or “neeps,” for lanterns. They’d also learned a special Samhain poem by heart to perform to the neighbors.
Finn brought Cassie over and we painted the girls’ faces green before taking them in the car to the village.
“When are you leaving?” Cassie asked as I painted her face. She was sitting in the kitchen, swinging her legs and holding hands with Luna, who was next in line to have her face painted.
“We’re leaving in about thirty minutes,” Finn said.
“No, I mean—when is Luna going back to England?”
“Oh.” I bit my lip and flicked my eyes at Luna. Both girls were looking very sad.
“Can you stay forever?” Cassie said.
“Please, Mum?” Luna said. Clearly they’d been discussing this, planning to petition me as a unit. “We like it here. And I’ve been doing my homework every night.”
Finn folded his arms and raised his eyebrows in a you-should-say-yes gesture.
“This is a big conversation,” I said gently. “We’ll discuss it later.”
Cassie and Luna threw their arms around each other and I worried—where were we going to, after the commission ended? Where would we live?
In Strallaig, the streets were aglow with neep lanterns and firepits. Some of the locals had dressed up in white sheets, dragging tin cans behind and making ghoulish noises at groups of children, and the windows of all the houses and even the shops glowed with candles. The window of Isla’s café had clearly been decorated by Rowan, with a line of gemstones along the interior windowsill and an elaborate pentagram drawn in glow-in-the-dark paint on the glass of the window. Around it, in a circle, she’d drawn skulls and bats, and the words of a poem in white paint.