Then
“Dougie!” I hit the beach at full tilt, my breath coming in ragged gasps. Forgetting that he was ill, forgetting his injured ankle, I threw myself at him, collapsing, still half sobbing, into his arms.
“What? What is it? Heather, what’s wrong?”
“It’s…it’s…” But I didn’t know how to describe what had happened at the cove. Instead I just gripped him harder, locking my hands around his neck, burying my face in his shoulder. Though the beach was quiet, I could still hear their screams echoing in my head. The terror I’d felt refused to lessen, and I was shaking violently. My pulse thumped around my system, and even with my soaking-wet clothes, I was overheating.
Warm as I was, Dougie was hotter. His skin seemed to radiate heat, reminding me that he was sick. He was in no shape to be holding me up. Though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I pulled back, put the space of a footstep between us.
Now though, he could see my face. I worked hard to mold it back into its ordinary shape, but my chin was trembling and my eyes were screwed into slits as I tried to hold back the tears. I sniffed deeply, trying to get a grip on myself.
“You should sit down,” I quavered.
Dougie ignored my advice. Closing the distance I’d put between us, he gripped my arm.
“Heather, what happened? Did you go to the cove?”
Not really capable of talking, I made do with a couple of jerky nods.
“Did…you find anything?”
“I don’t know.” My voice came out oddly distorted, choked with emotion. “It was…” I broke off again, breathing hard. Just thinking about it was bringing the fear back, tight around my chest like a steel band. “There was something there.”
Dougie caught the strange emphasis in my words.
“What do you mean, something?” he asked, his face intense.
“I… I’m not sure.” I shrugged in apology. I was beginning to calm down, to regain my senses. What had happened seemed…impossible. I was no longer sure about what I’d seen, heard. Had I imagined it?
But then…
“Dougie, I found—” I presented him with my left hand.
Dougie’s eyes narrowed, then widened as he saw what I had. Slowly, he pried my fingers loose and pulled the brooch from my grasp.
“Where the hell did you get this?” he asked.
“It was on the beach. At the cove.”
“Washed up?” He looked dubious. “I guess it could happen.”
But I was shaking my head. “No, it was up above the tide line. It was buried beneath some pebbles.”
“That’s not possible,” he murmured.
I took a deep, steadying breath. “I know.”
Two blue eyes stared deep into mine. “Heather, what happened?”
I told him. Told him about the body that disappeared, the screams that came from nowhere. How I’d accidentally come across the brooch, fallen right on top of it. I didn’t look at him as I spoke, afraid I’d see the same thing in his face that Emma must have seen in mine: disbelief.
When I finished, there was a long moment of silence. I managed to wait all of ten seconds before I had to look.
Doubt was written across his face.
“You don’t believe me,” I accused.
“I don’t think you’d lie,” he hedged.
I scowled. That wasn’t the same thing. “You think I imagined it.”
He made a face that was easy to interpret: yes, but that’s not what you want to hear.
No, it wasn’t.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. His hand reached out to press against my forehead; a pointless gesture as his skin was so much hotter than mine. “Do you feel chilled? Overheated? Sick to your stomach?”
I pulled away from his touch.
“No,” I replied, somewhat frostily.
He chewed on his lip as he considered me. “I’m sorry, Heather, it just sounds a little—”
“Crazy,” I finished for him.
He grimaced at me, his eyes apologetic.
“But this…” He turned the brooch over in his hands. “This is weird. How did it get there?”
“I don’t know,” I said as I sat down, watching the way the light reflected on the coppery surface. “Don’t you think it’s kind of a funny coincidence?”
“What do you mean?”
“It being there, right there, at the cove. Maybe… Maybe it’s linked.”
“Linked?”
I paused, not sure I was ready to admit my theory. Even to me it sounded nuts.
“Think about where we got this,” I said, hoping he’d guess what I was thinking so I wouldn’t have to say it.
“The cairn?”
“The burial cairn,” I reminded him.
“But it was just left there,” he argued. “It can’t have been there long; it’s not even old.”
“It looked old when you pulled it out,” I argued.
“Yeah, but that must have just been dirt. Look at it now. Metal doesn’t stay all shiny like this, not for that length of time. Not left outside.”
I knew he was right, but I still couldn’t let it go.
“But everything that’s happened… It’s all been since we found it.”
“You think…” His lips twitched as he sat and, even with everything that was going on, I knew he was laughing at me. “You think the brooch is causing all of this?”
“Don’t you think it’s a little strange that we steal this, then just after it—and I mean, like, just hours after it—everything starts going wrong?”
“It’s just a coincidence, Heather,” he said quietly. “Nothing more.”
“I don’t think so,” I said obstinately. I felt stupid, my cheeks flooding with red, but I plowed resolutely on. “Right after we find it, Martin goes AWOL, the Volvo dies, and you sprain your ankle. Then you chuck it away, and Darren goes missing at the beach where it washes up, Emma goes crazy, and I—” I broke off, ground my teeth together.
I was getting angry, annoyed that Dougie wouldn’t even consider my words. He hadn’t been this derisive when Emma had told her insane story. Why wouldn’t he even consider mine?
“Heather—”
I didn’t let him finish, sure he was going to try to persuade me I was talking nonsense.
“Dougie, what if we’ve…woken something?”
“Heather, there’s nothing here.” Dougie leaned forward in his chair, forcing me to meet his gaze. “It’s just us. Maybe—”
“I didn’t imagine it,” I said. “It could be…what you were saying. About the druids.”
“That was a story, Heather!” Dougie exclaimed. Then he took a deep breath, obviously reining in his emotions. “Look. I believe you think you saw what you say you did,” he said, and I glowered at his careful wording. “But maybe you’re not able to separate what’s real and what’s not right now. I mean, when I was dizzy before, I didn’t even know where I was for a minute.”
“I’m not getting sick,” I repeated stubbornly.
“You might be, and you just don’t know it yet,” he insisted. “I was fine right up until I wasn’t. Heather”—he reached one hand up to rub his forehead, which was shiny with sweat—“you’re talking about the supernatural here. Spirits and entities and stuff. I mean, just last night you said Emma was losing it. Now you, what, agree with her?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. I wasn’t quite ready to align myself with Emma. I certainly hadn’t seen anything like she’d described. But I was maybe willing to think about it with a more open mind. But she just…she just seemed so unstable right now. It was difficult to believe anything she said.
“I’m not crazy.”
I hadn’t heard Emma coming out of the tent, but when I whipped my head around at the sound of her voice, she was standing just a few feet behind us.
“Emma, you’re awake,” Dougie commented, his voice falsely cheerful, and I knew he was wondering the same thing I was: how long had Emma been standing there listening?
“I’m not crazy,” she repeated, moving forward, footsteps silent in the sand. “That thing I saw… It was real, and it was there.” We watched in silence as she rounded the firepit and lowered herself slowly into one of the remaining chairs. She was wearing the clothes I’d helped her dress in earlier, but now they were creased, her sweater hanging messily from one shoulder. Her hair was tousled, not in the casual, I-just-got-out-of-bed style that I knew she spent hours creating, but as if she didn’t know what she looked like and didn’t care. The makeup she’d put on at least a day before was now halfway down her face.
She looked older than I’d ever seen her. It was in her eyes: as if she’d witnessed true horror. They were frightened and sad and resigned all in one, and I didn’t like looking at them. I couldn’t seem to tear my gaze away though.
“Tell me again what you saw,” I demanded.
Now that she was calmer, I hoped I’d get something a little more concrete than the hysterical fragments Dougie and I had had to piece together the night before.
But Emma didn’t answer. She was looking at me oddly, head cocked to the side, eyes slightly tightened. “What happened?” she asked me.
“What?”
“Something happened to you. What was it? Was it the cove? Did you go back there? Did you see something?”
“I’m…not sure.”
“Tell me,” she ordered.
I recounted my story again. Emma’s eyes widened in surprise and fear, then settled into a mixture of satisfaction and resignation. “I told you,” she said when I finished. Then, with more feeling, “I told you!”
“I didn’t see a…thing,” I insisted, uncomfortable corroborating her story when it still seemed so unbelievable.
“But you think there’s something going on. I heard what you said before,” she added as I opened my mouth to argue.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled pathetically, aware of Dougie’s eyes watching me closely. I took a breath. “I think we should just get the hell out of here.”
Nobody argued with that.
Though it was tempting to hide out in our tent during our final hours on the beach, none of us wanted to leave the fire. It wasn’t just for the heat, though I was so cold it had settled right into my bones and Dougie was shaking uncontrollably, fever tricking his body into thinking everything was cold, even my arms around his shoulder, desperately trying to warm him.
We huddled by the fire. The world around us was cloaked in ominous shades of gray. Slowly, that darkened into unfriendly, threatening black.
We didn’t talk much. After appearing almost normal earlier, Emma had retreated back inside her head and was quietly humming to herself as she gazed into the flames. Dougie looked like it was all he could do to stay awake, although he’d resisted my attempts to get him to go and lie down. I didn’t push the matter. His presence, even weak and dizzy and barely conscious, was a comfort. As for me, I spent my time scrutinizing every inch of the brooch. Tilting it at an angle, I used the flickering glare from the flames to throw the engravings into sharp relief. Twisting it this way and that, I tried to make sense of the squiggles and shapes. I wasn’t sure why, but I remained convinced that the little circlet, small but big enough to almost fill my palm, was somehow if not responsible, then at least connected to everything that was going on.
They were so strange though, those markings. Unrecognizable, but not random. Undaunted, I continued to try to decipher them, spinning the brooch around, peering at it from different perspectives, attempting to force the loops and irregular angles to become something that made sense.
“You know,” I said slowly, squinting down at it, “if you look at this the right way, that part kind of looks like a man.”
“What?” Dougie turned to me, his eyes half-shut, jaw juddering. He sniffed, pulling his second sweater tighter around his shoulders, but looked down at where I was pointing.
“The brooch,” I said, ignoring when he sighed. “This part here.” I held it out for his inspection. Rather than straining to see across the short space between us, he pulled it from my grasp.
I watched him rotate it this way and that.
“Maybe,” he said. “You mean this part in the middle of the flames?”
“Flames?” I blinked. “What flames?”
“Yeah, these parts.” He pointed to jagged scratches that I hadn’t been able to decipher. “They’re flames, right?”
I wasn’t sure—they didn’t look very flame-like to me—but I remembered how easily Dougie had interpreted the cairn when I had seen nothing more than a jumble of stones.
“Sure,” I mumbled.
“And these look like gifts.”
Gifts? I snatched it back from him. I hadn’t seen any “gifts.”
“Where?”
“Here.” He stretched over and ran his finger around the lower half of the brooch, opposite the man apparently surrounded by fire. “See? That’s a pot or something, and that’s maybe a spear or an ax… It’s hard to tell. Definitely votive offerings, though.”
“Votive offerings?” I echoed, trying not to sound like I’d never heard the phrase before in my life.
“Yeah, you know, sacrificial offerings to a god or whatever.”
“Right.” How the hell did he know all this stuff? “So then…this might be a god?” I pointed to the man I thought I’d found.
Dougie made a face. “Doubt it, not with all the flames. Not unless it’s the Devil. Or a demon, perhaps.”
“Something evil…” My thoughts were racing. I looked back down at the scratched figure of a man, the jagged shapes Dougie said were flames. “Or could they be”—I squinted, connecting lines in my head—“wings?”
“Yeah.” Dougie lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Flames, wings.” He paused, thought about it. “Might even be waves.”