I needed to get back before Josh arrived. I had to. I couldn’t fathom what would happen to him if he got there and I was missing.
Please be safe, I thought. Be safe. Be safe. Be safe.
Even though I was running faster than I’d ever done before, with more efficiency and intent than I was likely to feel again in my life, I already knew it was too late by the time I approached the cottage ten minutes later. Josh’s car was in the driveway, and all the curtains were closed despite the fact the sun was slanting through the windows.
I heaved the moment I stopped moving, hands on my knees as my lungs cried out for air and my calves twisted in the throes of painful cramps from running so quickly. But I pushed through it all and reached out a shaking hand to open the door. It was locked. I listened carefully for shouting. Fighting. Anything. But there was nothing; only silence.
Just run, I thought, blind with fear. Run away and you can pretend you don’t know anything.
But I couldn’t do that. On the other side of this door was a scene – whatever that scene might be – that I had to face up to. In reality it was one I had long since believed would happen, down in the darkest recesses of my mind. Only so many coincidences could stack up before they became correlation, after all, and I was a scientist. Looking for correlations was my literal job.
I pulled out my key and shoved it into the lock before I gave myself enough time to over-think the decision. The click as it unlocked seemed far too loud to be real, and raised all the hairs on my arms and spine until I shivered. With hands so tired of shaking they had eventually come full-circle to be steady with dead calm, I pushed open the door.
My immediate reaction was to take a step back and wrinkle my nose in disgust. The stench that filled my nostrils was overpowering. A smell so primal, metallic and innate that, though I had limited experiences with the scent in the past, I knew at once what it was.
Blood.
“L-Lir?” I called out, wavering and insubstantial. I stumbled down the hallway towards the tiny living room where he’d been lounging when I’d left for my jog. My vision was hazy at the edges, like when you play a video game and you reach dangerously low health. Given the situation I was in the comparison seemed more than appropriate.
Lir didn’t answer my call, though I heard a shifting of limbs through the open door frame before I reached it that told me he’d heard me. My stomach lurched; the smell of blood grew ever more sickening as the distance between me and the living room decreased with every step I took.
Don’t go in. Just run. Run, run, run away.
But Josh was in there. I could feel it in my very core. I couldn’t run away and leave him alone with…whatever Lir was.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and turned into the living room.
Lir was kneeling over a horribly familiar body cut wide open from neck to navel, every inch of his skin slick with dark, crimson blood. In his hands was a heart. To my eyes it looked like it was still beating.
Josh’s eyes stared at the doorway, dull and lifeless and so at odds with the panicked expression on his face that I could do nothing but return his stare. I wanted him to wake up. To be able to wake up. He isn’t dead, I thought, even as I looked at the gaping hole where his heart used to be. I fought back the urge to vomit. To cry. To scream.
To run.
Lir dropped Josh’s heart back into his chest. “Grace,” he said.
I backed away towards the front door.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Grace, don’t go!” Lir cried out after me. I took a slow step back into the hallway, then another, then another, all the while never taking my eyes off Lir as he staggered upright and came after me. His bare feet trailed blood through the living room carpet like some kind of horrific ghost story come to life.
“Don’t!” I cried, holding a hand out in front of me when Lir reached the doorway for all the good it would do. “Don’t come over here. Don’t – don’t – just let me leave.”
He didn’t reach out to grab me. He didn’t demand I follow him back through to the living room and face Josh’s mangled corpse, either. What Lir did do was smile at me through a face spattered in blood and gore.
“I had to do this,” he said, as if that explained everything and made it okay. “He was my rival. I had to sacrifice him for me – for us. The gods like those kinds of tributes much better. The ones that personally affect us. Don't you see, Grace?” Lir let out a laugh, as if he couldn’t believe how blind he’d been up to now. He pointed back through the doorway towards the massacre he was responsible for. “I should have thought of this so much sooner. Thanks to this the gods will forgive me and I can go home.”
I lost my capacity to speak about anything other than the facts that lay in front of me. “You killed him.”
“And? I had to.”
“No you didn’t!”
“Animals aren’t enough, Grace,” Lir argued, eager for me to understand. “I worked that out a while ago. But strangers…they don’t seem to work, either. I could have saved so much trouble had I just gone for someone who directly affected my life from the beginning.”
All I could do was stare at him. I couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of Lir’s mouth. They didn’t belong – didn’t sound right – in his lovely, lilting voice.
“What else have you done?” I asked, so quietly even I barely heard the question. So I cleared my throat and asked it again. “Who else have you sacrificed to your gods?”
“I think you know. I think you’ve known for longer than you care to admit.” The smile slipped from Lir’s face, leaving only an impassive expression that dared me to contradict him. But I couldn’t: he was right.
I knew exactly who he’d hurt.
“You attacked David,” I said, very slowly. “You even told me you were the last one to see him that night.”
“Yes,” was all Lir said in response. “And?”
“And…Terry. Oh my – oh my god,” I uttered, as the memories I’d repressed up to this point hit me like a brick violently smashed into my face. “He told me someone was watching my parents’ house. I could barely understand him. But he was warning me about you.”
He nodded. A drop of Josh’s blood fell from his chin and down onto the carpet. I watched the grey fibres soak it up instead of having to look at Lir’s face. “He didn’t believe me when I said I knew you,” he said. “Even when I tried to reach your door to tell you I was there, he pulled out his phone to call the police. So I tried to silence him and things went too far. Somewhere along the line I figured he’d make a good sacrifice. He obviously cared about you – wanted to protect you. But then you showed up and I had to stop!”
“Oh, so it’s my fault I prevented you from murdering someone?!” I cried. Part of me knew I shouldn’t upset Lir. He was unhinged. A literal murderer. I should have felt unsafe but, for some reason, I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. Not physically, anyway. So I continued being brutally honest: “When you were late coming back from Islay do you know how afraid I was that the man who’d been killed was you, Lir? But you murdered him, didn’t you? And you murdered Cian! Every attack the news has been following – doubtless so many more they don’t know about – it was all you, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but –”
“There’s no but, Lir! How in the world do you justify all of – all of this?”
I moved through to the living room despite my better judgement, forcing myself to face up to the disembowelled body of Josh MacDonald. Age thirty. A paediatrician. Older sister to Louisa MacDonald, age twenty-five, who was my best friend. He’d always wanted to be a doctor, even when he was little. Children and elderly folk alike adored him. Josh knew this made him more attractive to women and so utilised it to his advantage, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love his work or genuinely care for his patients. He was a flawed human being with a frustrating sense of entitlement but was, nonetheless, a good man.
He didn’t deserve to die.
; He never deserved to die.
Lir had killed him. And for what?
“Why…” I began, pointing at Josh with a finger that shook so much I looked like I was having a seizure. “You said – you said a personal connection. Why Josh? Why David? Why my fucking neighbour?”
“Your neighbour was in the way,” Lir explained simply, though his veneer of calm seemed to be cracking as if my questions were making him address things he didn’t want to talk about. “Like your cat. I didn’t want to touch him. But since I had to…I was as well making the most of it.”
God, I was going to be sick. Every word out of Lir’s mouth pushed the bile further and further up my throat until every swallow was actively pushing it back down. Somehow, impossibly, it was looking at Josh – at his entrails pouring out of his stomach across the floor, at his hands now forever curled into fists to try and defend himself, at the resignation in his eyes as he realised he was going to die – that calmed the nausea.
I knelt down beside him, not caring about the blood that covered my skin in the process. It was cold. Disgustingly cold. But Josh deserved someone to be by his side so he wasn’t alone with the monster who had killed him. I reached out a hand to close his eyes…and faltered. The logical part of my brain knew I shouldn’t touch him. My DNA couldn’t go anywhere near him, otherwise the police –
The police.
I forced my eyes from Josh to Lir, who was watching me with obvious upset on his face. Clearly he didn’t like seeing me displaying even an ounce of sympathy for the man he’d killed. I hated seeing him jealous like that because a twisted part of me wanted to soothe him and tell him not to worry. The fact my love for Lir hadn’t magically disappeared after witnessing what he’d done was the worst feeling in the world.
I knew I had to call the police. He needed to be locked up. Someone far more qualified than myself needed to help him through his psychosis.
So why couldn’t I pull out my phone and call them?
“Did you go to Islay fully intending to kill someone?” I asked Lir, buying myself some time to fight with my conscience whilst getting answers to the questions I’d wanted to ask him for weeks now. Months. “All the attacks before that never ended in you taking a life.”
Lir seemed relieved by the question which unsettled me to no end. “The man on Islay...that was an accident,” he said, cocking his head to the side as he considered his answer. “Well – kind of,” he corrected. “After your neighbour I thought I had it in me to sacrifice a human being but it turned out I was wrong. I was so sick that night, Grace. I couldn’t stop throwing up. Thinking about the way his body bloated – the colour of his face, the way his whole body went rigid like it was made of wood – I couldn't take it. There was no way I could have come back to Glasgow that night and pretended everything was okay. So I waited until the next day to return.”
“I thought you were the victim,” I whispered. “I thought you’d been taken from me forever.”
At this Lir came bounding over and knelt beside me, taking my hands in his and holding them to his chest. I was too scared to pull away even though his grey eyes shone with a fevered madness I couldn’t possibly understand.
“Well I was, in a way,” he said. “The victim, I mean. I'm not doing this because I'm evil, Grace. You must know that, right? I'm doing this because the gods wish it to be so. I just need to find the right sacrifice.”
“And how do you know that to be true?”
“They'd have let me go home if I'd done it right, wouldn't they?”
“If the sacrifice is supposed to be a personal one then why didn’t m-murdering Cian work?” I stuttered, forcing myself – as I had done the night before – to make Lir face up to rational questions and answer them properly.
A flash of disgust crossed his face at the mention of his childhood friend. “He killed my fish. Then he kept hitting on you even when I was right there. I thought my hatred for him would be enough but clearly it wasn’t. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t a good person, so the gods didn’t want him. Maybe if I’d been able to follow through on killing David –”
“You planned to kill David?!” I cried, wrenching my hands from Lir’s grip. “He did nothing to you! He –”
“He liked you too much. Of course he had to go.”
“Lir,” I mouthed, my throat closing over so much that I could hardly make a sound. “I was going to turn him down. He’d never have pursued me after that. He’s a good –”
“You’re my siren, Grace,” Lir cut in, sliding closer to me across the bloody carpet until his knee was locked firmly between mine. He pushed errant strands of hair from my face, smearing sticky wetness across my skin as he did so. “My siren, not theirs. They didn’t deserve you. Couldn’t have you. Not Cian or David and especially not him.” He pointed towards Josh without looking at him.
For a moment neither of us spoke, our eyes on each other speaking volumes in place of our voices. I could tell Lir was trying to work out what I planned to do next. I wondered, if I decided to call the police, if he would do anything to stop me – to save his own skin.
“I would never hurt you,” Lir said, as if reading my mind. “Not even if you…but please. Don’t leave me. Don’t let them put me in a box I’ll never get out of. I just want to go home. I just want – out. I love you, Grace. I love you more than anyone or anything else on this earth.”
And I could see he believed it was true. It was in his eyes and the way his entire being softened as he stroked my cheek.
That just made things worse.
Lir was a monster. A twisted, childlike, tragic monster, but a monster nonetheless. I had to leave him. I had to turn him in. I had to avenge Josh and David. Cian. My neighbour. That nameless man on Islay. My cat. Every soul Lir had ever hurt.
I had to.
“I won’t leave you,” I said, reaching a hand out to cup Lir’s face, bringing his lips to mine for perhaps the most fragile kiss I’d ever experienced. But within moments it turned desperate, hard and sharp, Lir’s predatory canines piercing my tongue until all I could taste was blood. I didn’t pull away even though the taste made me want to vomit. “I won’t,” I repeated between stolen breaths. “I won’t. I won’t. I won–”
Lir broke the kiss to envelop me in a bone-breaking embrace, forehead resting on my shoulder as he leaned all his weight against me. “I knew you wouldn’t,” he whispered. “I always knew you’d stay. We’re meant to be.”
Until two days ago I’d eagerly believed that to be true. But if it still was true despite everything, and Lir was a monster…
What did that make me?
Chapter Thirty
When I walked to the bathroom I was too numb to notice where I was going. But clearly some part of my brain knew I needed to be clean. I was covered in blood – Josh’s blood – and I needed it gone. Lir didn’t even protest when I broke away from his arms without a word of explanation as to where I was going. Perhaps he understood my desire to be clean just as much as I did.
I could hardly bear to look at the shower as I turned it on and stripped off my clothes. I’d been so excited that it was big enough for two only yesterday, my head filled with lustful thoughts of me and Lir getting entirely lost in each other as steam and sweat became indistinguishable on our skin.
But all I had on my skin now was blood. When I caught my reflection in the mirror and saw the red streaks across my cheeks and forehead, stark and unsettling against my painfully pale complexion, I stifled a sob. It was on stumbling feet that I finally managed to slide open the glass door and step inside the promising, comforting heat the shower provided.
I hardly dared to exhale as the rush of scorching water poured over me, running down my face and chest and legs until I was soaked through. Crimson circled the drain for a while. Red, red, red. Then, slowly, pink, paler and paler with every swirl of water until eventually it was clear once more. But it wasn’t enough. No matter how much I scrubbed and brushed and lathered myself I couldn’t wash away t
he feeling that I’d never be clean again.
Lir had gotten under my skin. He’d fed me sweet nothings and promises of being soulmates, all the while ripping through my life until there was nothing left but the two of us. What will he do to my parents? I thought almost dully. I didn't think I had anything left inside me to react appropriately to the disturbing situation I was in. Lir clearly loved his aunt and uncle; perhaps family was off-limits. But then what about Louisa?
That was when I fell to my knees, hand to my mouth to mask the sobs wracking through me, agonising and bone-breaking. Evidently I wasn’t as numb as I thought I was. I tried to imagine telling her about what happened to her brother all because of my boyfriend.
Because of me.
What was it that Louisa had seen in Lir to be so immediately suspicious of him? What had Josh? How had they worked out something was off about him before me?
At this I shook my head so vigorously I was in danger of hurting my neck. For they hadn’t worked it out before me. I’d known right from the very beginning that there was something odd about Lir. Something different. Something...other. It’s what had drawn me to him in the first place.
I kept scrubbing my skin, even when my arms grew irritable and red not from the heat of the water but from friction. All I’d wanted was someone on my level. Someone who understood me. Someone I could sit in a corner with and discuss the world outside, without having to put myself at the mercy of said world. Someone to hide beneath the covers with me on dark, windy days and not move for hours.
Someone to live my life with.
I guess that’s ultimately exactly what I got.
When Lir came into the bathroom and stripped off his clothes I didn’t immediately notice. It was only when he slid open the shower door, letting out my precious heat for a moment as he stepped inside and eased me back to my feet, that my brain finally acknowledged his presence.
The Boy from the Sea Page 20