He was dead. Keava didn't need to check; it was obvious. You didn't get a ceramic plant pot through the side of your head and live through it. Brady Mason was dead.
And she'd killed him.
The inside of her head rang with shock like the dying resonance of a brass bell. She took a breath. Smells crashed into her. Blood, loose soil, crushed plants, and ugh, urine — his bladder muscles must have let go.
She let the scent-heavy air back out, slowly, shakily, and wiped at something hot on her chin. Her hand came away red — when had her lip started bleeding? A cool breeze tickled her right breast. She looked down and found her shirt torn open, her bra askew.
She straightened it hastily, tried to close the rent. Her trousers were open. She zipped up the fly and tried to refasten them, but the button was gone. She clutched them shut and cast around for it.
The floor of the greenhouse was scattered with dirt, smashed ceramic pots, and battered plants. The whole three-tiered metal shelf had toppled off its rollers when Brady had crashed into it, toppled and fallen on him, heavy pots crashing down. Lily, the owner of the nursery, had warned all her employees to on no account ever climb on the rolling shelves. She'd said they might not be stable. She'd been right.
Keava couldn't see her button. Not that it would do her much good now. And she didn't fancy staying to look. Much of Brady's body was covered by dirt, debris, and the shelf lying across it, but she could see enough of his smashed skull and once handsome face to make her feel a little queasy.
He had been terrible company while he was alive. Now he was dead, and the only improvement was now she could turn her back to him. Turn it and walk unmolested out of the greenhouse, out into the cool fall evening, under a dull orange sky.
She licked blood off her lip and probed it with her tongue. The hole was already closing. Good. Was she hurt anywhere else? Oh, her arms… Bright red fingermarks encircled her forearms and wrists. Would they bruise? Keava didn't bruise easily, and she could usually make them go away if she massaged them, maybe applied an ice pack. She should do that — she didn't want Ros to see…
Ros.
For the first time, horror hit Keava, slammed into her chest and rushed up her throat. She had killed someone. What would Ros think? What would Ros say?
Ros was a doctor. Kind, sensible, empathetic. A healer. She had been Keava's best friend since they were five, her voice of reason, her moral compass. She kept Keava from doing the things that the deep, dark part of her wanted to do — the wild things, the dangerous things.
That part of her had just come roaring out. And instead of doing anything proportionate, instead of simply stopping him, it had picked a man up and smashed his skull.
Keava knew she was dangerous. She'd known for a long, long time. But this was worse.
She'd killed a man. Someone she knew, a co-worker. The thought should have horrified her more than it did. Shouldn't she be guilt-stricken? Devastated? Filled with desperate remorse?
A fire burned at the pit of her stomach, but it wasn't remorse. She pulled the cover off the flames to see what they were. In the rush of air, they leapt high.
Anger. So much anger, hurt, outrage. How dare he. How dare he touch her body without permission. How dare he ignore her protests, brush off her wishes as no more weighty or important than the lost, downy feathers of a squawking gull. How dare he call her rude, get angry at her for not submitting herself to his wishes and desires when he swung them at her like a sledgehammer.
Brady had always been self-centred. Every conversation you had with him would fall into the gravitational pull of his hungry ego and end up orbiting endlessly. You had to learn to extricate yourself before you fell below the conversational event horizon and were trapped in an endless cycle of his prowess at rugby…
No one would ever extricate themselves from conversation with Brady Mason ever again. His clever, agile limbs were cooling, what was left of his brain had fallen silent. His lips would never speak of anything again. Would never tell any other girl that she owed him, that he was doing her a favour, that she would thank him for it afterwards.
Savage satisfaction surged through Keava's veins. She hadn't meant to kill him, but why should she be sorry? It was self-defence. You couldn't go around assaulting people, trying to stick your cock where it wasn't wanted, and expect not to face fierce retaliation. That her retaliation had happened to be lethal was hardly her fault.
But… The satisfaction wobbled under her feet. How could she ever explain this?
Would people believe that Brady had just … knocked into the shelf in the struggle? Could that plausibly have brought it down? What if they asked questions — what if they didn't believe that slender, willowy Keava had thrown off six-foot-two-inches of muscly rugby player?
…And what if her satisfaction showed? What if people could tell she wasn't sorry? What if … what if Ros could tell? What if her mother and father could tell?
She thought she might throw up.
But … if she said nothing… No one but Brady had known she was staying late to finish the replanting. There were no cameras, no security, no witnesses… No one would know she'd been here.
Someone would come in the next morning and find him, and they'd all assume that he had been as impervious to good sense and advice as usual and climbed on the shelves. Terrible accident. No one need know she was involved. And wouldn't it be less painful for the family than his being killed trying to rape a coworker?
…No, she decided, better all round if no one knew she was here. Kinder. Ros always encouraged her to be kind. And there was nothing to say Keava had been here, but—
She remembered the button.
The ground tilted beneath her feet, and her native language slipped between her lips. "O mo chreach 's a thàinig."
She turned back to the greenhouse door. It stood open, and suddenly, irrationally, it felt like a trap waiting to spring. She had escaped, she was out, she could run now. If she went back … it was a whole second chance to be caught. To leave evidence, step on something, give herself away. But if she didn't, and someone found her button in Brady's dead hand…
A third option rose in her mind. It broke her cardinal rule, a rule she survived by, but if ever there was a time…
With a furtive glance to make double, triple sure she was unobserved, she stepped back to the door. Avoiding looking in, she extended a hand through it and whispered,
"Thig thugam, a phutain bhig chruinn phràisich,
"Thig air ais do làmh na mnà [a chaill thu / dha 'm buin thu."
A tingling rush ran through her fingers. In the greenhouse, something rustled.
Through the air zoomed something the size of a large housefly. Keava snatched it, for one awful moment afraid it was a housefly and she would catch nothing but smashed bug.
Her fingers closed on cool metal. She breathed a sigh of relief.
And then she heard voices behind her.
An electric charge crackled through her. She whipped around. The voices were down the street, not yet in sight but closing. She had seconds.
As silently as possible, she closed the greenhouse door, darted over to her bicycle, and grabbed its handlebars. Then she drew in a long, deep breath and pretended as hard as she could that she wasn't there.
She was invisible … she was a ghost … the little car lot was empty but for Brady's hatchback — no bicycles, no people, no reason to look.
Keava looked at her hand. The long, pale fingers seemed just a little bit blurred, a touch out of focus.
She wasn't sure exactly what it was, but when she did it, people didn't see her. She wasn't truly invisible, not really — cameras would still record her — but to the human eye, it was like she faded into the background. As long as she did nothing to draw attention to herself, no one noticed.
No one, that is, except the sort of person who saw ghosts, or omens. Taibhsearan they were called in her native Gaelic — people with the Second Sight, like her friend Lorna. Lorna saw through Keava's tricks.
You could never be entirely safe. There was always something. And with the ways Keava's luck was running today…
As quietly as she could, she slipped herself and her bike around the back of the greenhouse as two women, out on their evening walk, went past the front. It was a narrow squeeze between the greenhouse and the hedge behind, never meant for a bicycle. She got caught up twice but made it through and, nervous as a rabbit, poked her nose out the other side.
What she could see of the street was clear. The voices were receding the other way, deep in debate about some ridiculous political scandal. Chances were they wouldn't look back. And if they did … she was pretending she wasn't there.
Heart in her mouth, Keava MacSween ventured out from the site of her first kill, the first life she had ever taken, and, pumping the pedals as hard as she could, fled for home.
Was it sanctuary? Safety? Or just where the police would come to find her when the body was found?
She was gasping by the time she got there. She hadn't heard any sirens yet. She kept telling herself that it made sense, that there was no reason for the body to be discovered before tomorrow morning. But she couldn't shake the feeling that the owner Lily would find some reason to go in, or someone would see Brady's car, sitting outside like a big "SOMETHING'S WRONG" sign, and go in to look for him…
Keava's neighbour Evelyn was out in her garden, pruning some dead leaves off her roses. Keava ducked her head into her shoulders and pretended extra hard that she wasn't there.
Better Evelyn couldn't attest to when Keava had come home. And just at the moment, Keava wasn't sure she could survive being drawn into a conversation about whether the fat tabby cat down the way was killing Evelyn's songbirds.
Evelyn stood to stretch her back as Keava coasted by, and Keava tensed … but Evelyn's eyes slid right over her without notice. Evelyn returned to her work, and Keava swerved up the drive to her half of a little duplex townhouse.
She unlocked her own front door, brought the bike in, and then on impulse locked the door again behind her. She never did that. She stared at the key for a moment. She had grown up in Skye, in the sort of community that never locked doors, and she had barely adjusted to locking them when she was absent. But now…
She turned away in a sort of daze, heading for the kitchen with a vague notion of making tea. Instead, she found herself sitting at the table with her phone in her hands, flicking through numbers.
Her thumb hovered over Ros. But no. Keava couldn't tell her. She couldn't tell Ros. She couldn't tell her parents. …What about Lorna?
Keava's relationship with her old tutor was different. Lorna didn't like to talk about her past, but she gave the impression of having seen just about everything and been impressed by none of it. Nothing shocked her. Nothing upset her.
Without ever entirely making up her mind to do it, Keava's thumb hit Lorna's name. The phone began to ring.
Lorna picked up on the fourth ring. "Keava? What's happening?" She was already on alert. It wasn't like Keava to just call and not text first.
Keava opened her mouth and found she had no words ready. Her mind wasn't in the right place for words. She felt like, since the struggle, she had been some primal, wild creature with no aim other than to survive and escape. Now, suddenly, she needed to be human again.
She dug into the depths of her mind and tried to unearth language. "I … I've…" She took a deep breath. Best start from the beginning. "One of my coworkers, he … he got me alone, and…" The correct terminology crashed in on Keava, that it was 'attempted rape,' and it now applied to her. "…He tried to rape me, and … and I killed him. I didn't mean to," she added quickly, since she wouldn't have blamed Lorna for assuming she had. "I just … wanted him away from me, and…"
In all honesty, she wasn't entirely sure. Brady had just been picked up and thrown across the room, as if by telekinesis. Keava had moved things with her mind before, but never of that size. This was different. This was frightening.
Lorna, however, jumped at once for the most vital point. "Did anyone see you?" The question was short, sharp, urgent.
"No one. It was after closing. No one else was there, and there are no cameras."
"Good," was all Lorna said to that. And then she proceeded to pull the full story out of her former pupil, alert every moment for anything that might attract attention, attract suspicion. Keava recounted everything she could think of, hoping Lorna wouldn't see anything she had missed, and was relieved when she didn't. And all throughout, Lorna was calm, practical, unruffled. As if it didn't surprise her that Keava had done such a thing.
Lorna knew more about Keava's true nature than anyone. It was she Keava's parents had turned to when they realised the little foundling they'd adopted could do strange things. Lorna could do more than a few strange things herself, and though her strangeness was not the same as Keava's strangeness, she had been vital in helping Keava learn to control it.
Lorna showed no surprise that Keava's reaction to the assault had been lethal. Lorna knew what Keava was better than anyone.
"You don't seem surprised," Keava made herself say at last, because she had to know.
"…Well, no," said Lorna. "No one takes well to being attacked; that's natural. But the sìthichean have always taken it especially poorly." [And then, in a tone as if to be comforting, "You only followed your nature."]
Her nature. Her nature was to fling out lethal force and then feel nothing but vicious satisfaction. She could still feel it in her stomach even now, hot, angry, unrepentant.
What kind of person reacted to killing like that?
The question chased itself round and round Keava's head as she assured Lorna that she would sit tight and keep mum, that she would call Lorna immediately if there were the slightest sign of things going wrong, of suspicion falling upon her.
By the time Keava rang off, she felt slightly ill. She sat at her kitchen table, staring at the blank screen of her sleeping phone.
Her mind winged away back to her childhood, to her brief experience in primary school before her parents had managed to get her enrolled in a homeschooling programme. They had claimed it was due to the remoteness of their location and the precociousness of their child. But the truth was that little Rachel MacKinnon had unfairly accused Keava of stealing her ball, and in the midst of Keava's furious denials, the ceiling had caught fire.
No one had been hurt. The whole school had been evacuated, shut down for weeks due to smoke and water damage — and also having all its aged wiring replaced, since that was the assumed cause — but no injuries. It could have been much worse. And then Keava's parents had got her out of there before [it could get much worse.]
And now, finally, the axe had fallen. Keava had proven their worst fears correct: that she was a viper with a lethal bite.
Was this how she would react to every attack? Would she have to live the rest of her life [— who knew how long, she was forty-seven and not aging yet —] guarding against fits of murderous temper?
She laid her forehead on the table. Perhaps she should become a hermit, avoid entirely dealing with people she didn't like, people who might set her off. She needed to leave here anyway; she had been in this house for eight years now, and people were starting to comment admiringly on how well she retained her youth. Much longer, and she would begin attracting interest.
'What's your secret?' they'd ask, never guessing, never dreaming. They'd joke about a picture in the attic, ask about skin creams and diet, innocently unaware of the danger. With not a notion that they were speaking to a creature who was untouched by the creeping fingers of age because she wasn't human at all.
Keava shivered and clenched her hands on the human skin of her arms. She knew it was to some degree a façade, that something else lurked beneath it, a sharper, wilder true form. Lorna had given her a glimpse of it once, reflected in a mirror, but Keava had shied away. Her human disguise was deep and old and had cloaked her from danger since infancy. She didn't dare look behind it, let loose what lived beneath. What if it became even harder to manage?
It seeped out enough as it was. And look what happened when it did.
A little voice reminded Keava that she had been defending herself — that if she hadn't let it out, things would have been much worse. She wouldn't have been able to fight off her attacker, wrest back control. And that was true — it was why she couldn't make herself regret it. But…
The hot, angry thing in the pit of her stomach, she was sure, could have done much worse to Brady given the opportunity. It could have inflicted pain, torment, like he'd tried to inflict on her, and left him to suffer it. Even now, it whispered to her that it would have been more fitting. And if the opportunity had lain open before her … Keava wasn't sure she could have held back the darkness.
She checked the time. Gone midnight. No one had come banging at her door yet. In spite of all her assurances to Lorna, she had still half-expected it — some mischance leading to the discovery of the body, someone jumping to the conclusion that Keava must have been the one to see him last.
But if it hadn't happened yet, it likely wouldn't tonight. She should go to bed. Except that lying alone in the dark sounded dreadful just now, and the possibility of dreams sounded even worse.
So instead she finally made that cup of tea, chamomile in the hope that it would settle her and she'd sleep after. She drank it slowly, trying to occupy her mind with things that weren't death and destruction. Once the sense of a monster lurking under her skin receded, then she would go to bed.
…She made herself another cup of tea. And then another. And spent she didn't know how much time staring at the wall, trying to think of nothing, drifting through a strange fog of surreality, wondering how any of this could have happened, whether it was truly real or just a terrible dream.
It seemed plausible in the dim twilight of pre-dawn. Keava clung to it, imagining she would wake up soon, or perhaps had already from one of those strange, powerful dreams that lingered like reality in your waking mind, only fading back into murky, illogical dreamland when the full light of the sun was cast upon them. Perhaps the sun would scrub this nightmare away, take Keava back to a world where her most urgent worries were readying the greenhouses for fall and whether she'd remembered to water the orchids.
Away to the east through Keava's kitchen window, the pale autumn sun broke the horizon. Its light warmed her face. The memories of crushing, painful grip on her arms and the smell of blood in her nose did not fade.
She remembered the bruises, tugged up a sleeve. They were there, darkening now, ugly, physical proof.
She felt sick and began to massage them. She needed them to go away. They were evidence, and not just for her. If anyone saw…
At least the thing inside her could be useful for something. She called it up and felt her skin tingle and prickle as she rubbed it, as it healed. Soon there would be no sign.
The sun slowly climbed higher. Keava turned her face away from its light.
A shrill noise shattered the morning stillness. Keava's heart tried to explode. She upset her teacup — nearly empty, luckily — before realising that it was her phone.
She checked the screen. Lily. Her heart splashed down into her stomach and threatened to send bile rushing up her throat.
Now the true test began. She must, above all, seem normal.
Keava took a moment to think herself into an ordinary day, on which an early-morning call from her employer was both unexpected and very strange. Surely a sign of something wrong.
On the fifth ring, Keava answered. "Hallo?" Tension made her voice rasp badly. She winced, then decided it was good — it made her sound half-asleep.
"Oh, I'm so sorry, did I wake you?" gasped Lily. "I didn't even think — of course, it's quite early…" She sounded anxious, tense. Of course she did. Keava carefully didn't think about why.
"Lily, what on earth is the matter?" she asked, squinting and resting her head in her hand as if playing half-asleep to someone who could see her. After an entirely sleepless night, it came surprisingly easily.
"Oh, Keava dear," Lily said in a near-moan. "I just called to tell you not to come into work today. Something dreadful has happened."
With a sick feeling curling in her stomach, Keava woke herself up and pounded her brain for the most likely conclusions to jump to. Why hadn't she spent the night preparing for this? She was an idiot.
"What, did someone break in? A fire?"
"No, no, worse than that. Oh, oh…"
Keava's heart twisted. Lily sounded near tears. "The police told me not to tell anyone until the family has been informed, but … you've a right to know."
She was quiet a long moment, and Keava debated desperately whether to say something. She could now reasonably guess someone was dead, couldn't she? Or at least grievously injured? "The police?" she settled on, letting show her genuine alarm at the idea of them.
"Aye." Lily's voice was distressed, exhausted. "I had to call them. It's Brady. When I came in this morning … I found him dead in the greenhouse."
Keava felt herself teetering at the edge of a precipice. This was it. "What?" she said hoarsely, unable to think of anything else.
"Oh it was awful, so horrible," moaned Lily. "I can still see him every time I close my eyes. And the smell. I didn't realise it would smell like that, not … fresh…" She trailed off awkwardly, clearly not wanting to talk or even think about rotting dead people.
Keava felt her first stab of real guilt. Not for Brady, but for leaving his shattered corpse where Lily would be the one to find it. "What happened?" she asked urgently.
"Oh, the young fool," Lily groaned in a voice thick with tears. "I told him. I told him never to climb on the rolling shelves. I told him they might be tippy. But if ever there was an arrogant twit impervious to good advice…"
Keava's knees went watery with relief. She slumped in her chair. "The … the shelf fell on him?" She modulated her tone as best she could — hoarse, tense, trying for a little horror.
"Aye," said Lily on a heavy, pained sigh. "The shelf and some big, heavy pots too. Poor bugger never stood a chance. Poor, stupid boy…"
It said something that, even in this moment of tragedy, when many would begin to idealise the deceased, Lily still could not bring herself to speak of Brady Mason in glowing terms. Lily had once told Keava that she kept him on because he was pretty to look at and excellent at moving heavy pots, plants, and bags of soil, but if he kept blowing off her instructions and work-safety rules, she was going to lose it and put fertiliser down his shorts.
Brady's coworkers had all thought him a bit of an arrogant, self-centred dolt. They had just never thought it made him dangerous.
"I told him," Lily was saying again, "never to move heavy things on his own, but young men will think themselves invincible. Why he was there by himself, though… You must have been the last to see him, Keava, when you left for the day?"
Keava's insides shimmied. "Aye, must have." Half a moment's debate of how much to say, then: "I stayed a bit late to finish the [repotting]." And thank goodness she had finished it, Keava realised now. Her story would look suspicious if she'd left the job undone. If Brady had attacked a bit earlier, or if she had been a little slower…
She shivered at how easily her lies could have been undone before they'd even started. "He was going to put all the plants away, but he shouldn't have had to climb any shelves…"
Her voice trailed away as she realised that, in this scenario she was painting, perhaps the responsible thing would have been to stay with the coworker. "I should have stayed, shouldn't I? I should have stayed and made sure, but he was being such a twit, and I just wanted to get away from him…"
That part was all true. That was exactly how she'd felt just before things had got physical.
"Oh no one will blame you, Keava dear," said Lily at once. "I should have stayed, and if I hadn't needed to get to the bank before it closed, I would have. But even so, he was told most specifically and more than once not to do what he did, and he did it anyway. It's not your fault, dear."
Well that made Keava feel about ten times worse, even though it was bloody true that Brady had been told most specifically not to do what he did — a man could not live in this modern world without having the necessity of CONSENT impressed upon him — and yet he had done it anyway.
Keava had a moment of intense resentment for Lily's need to go to the bank. If that hadn't happened, if Lily had only been there…
…It likely would have just happened some other day, when some other opportunity had presented itself. Brady had outright said that he'd been hoping for the chance to catch Keava alone. And if it had happened another day, maybe another place…
Perhaps they would have been interrupted before things reached the crisis point, perhaps she could have got him sacked and never had to see him again (leaving him, a little voice said, to go after some other woman, one who couldn't defend herself…). Or perhaps all that would have changed was a witness, someone who saw her kill Brady … or maybe he might have survived her retaliation and had the knowledge of her secret to hold over her.
Could have been better. Could have been much worse.
Lily let out a breath that crackled over the phone. "If only, if only — if only I hadn't needed to go to the bank that day, if only he'd listened, if only the shelves had been more stable… But that's how disasters happen, isn't it? A list of if-only's, and fate could have steered the matter to safety at any point, but she'd steered Brady safe through his own foolishness a dozen times before — perhaps she got tired of it."
Keava swallowed. Fate? She didn't know if she believed in any such beast, but it was certainly true that Brady had enjoyed taking risks. Even dangerous risks. And if you kept playing Russian Roulette, sooner or later you would get the chamber with the bullet.
But Keava didn't like being the bullet.
"Aye," she murmured, wishing she could rewind time to yesterday and run off home to her parents.
"Well, I've still got Jeanie to call," Lily said wearily, referring to one of the other two employees, "and I should tell Andy not to come in tomorrow either — I expect we'll be closed a while… Oh goodness, I wonder how long? Perhaps a week, is that enough time to process? Oh dear, I suppose I'd better look it up…"
This impelled Keava to speak. "You take the time you need, Lily, it's you who found him. The rest of us can run the nursery without you for a bit if we need to — eh, once it's … cleaned and all, anyway." Could Keava work on the site of recent brutal death, where blood had soaked the floor? She thought she could, but … only one way to find out.
"Oh, thank you, sweetheart." Lily sounded a little choked. "We should stay closed a while out of respect, at the very least — a week, a few days … oh I'll figure it out later. It feels sick to worry about mere practicalities when there's a man dead on the floor…" Her voice wobbled.
Keava was suddenly uncomfortably aware that she was older than Lily by more than five years, though she looked young enough to be her daughter. "Death always brings no end of practicalities, and someone needs to deal with them," Keava pointed out. "But if there are any I can take off your hands, let me know."
"Oh, you're such a dear," Lily said warmly. "Don't worry about me; I'll be all right. Take the day off, and I'll let you know if I need you."
They said their goodbyes, and Lily rang off. Keava sat there in her kitchen, staring at her phone. 'You're such a dear,' Lily had said to the woman who had killed her employee and left him lying in his blood in her greenhouse. 'Such a dear.'
Keava was quite sure that, whatever she was, it wasn't a dear.
Testing, testing! I can like, can I comment?
And I can reply to it.
Yes, okay, that works!