My Vampire Husband Wants to Bite Me Every Night novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Daylight
Morag holds the gate with a shotgun while Ailsa tells Hamish, in front of his men, the blood he coughs into his handkerchief; he swears to return at dusk with the constable.
Morag was already at the gate with the shotgun when I got there.
I had pulled on the man's tweed jacket from the hook by the door, and it hung to my knees.
Outside the wall sat seven horses in the grey morning light.
Hamish Gow was on the front one, black coat buttoned, beard stiff with rain.
Angus sat beside him with his right hand wrapped in a bloody rag.
Behind them a thin man in spectacles held a leather bag on his knee.
A boy of about sixteen beside him held a coil of rope.
"There she is," said Hamish.
"Ailsa. Come here to me, child."
"I'm not your child."
"You're my ward, and you're not well."
He turned in the saddle to the thin man.
"This is the doctor from Inverness."
"He has a signed paper for a hysterical girl who ran raving from her guardian's house in the night."
"I'm not hysterical," I said.
"I'm cold, and I'm standing in a puddle."
Hamish's eyes did not move off me.
"The lass cut her own hair," he said, loud enough for every horse to hear.
"She stabbed my son."
"She sits in the house of a man the whole glen knows is not right, and she is not fit to speak for herself."
"Doctor, if you please."
The doctor looked at his bag.
The boy with the rope slid off his horse.
"Take one more step," said Morag, "and I'll put the first barrel through that rope and the second through you."
The boy stopped.
Hamish sighed.
"Morag Cameron, you've kept that house for fifty years, and I've let you. The Duke's lawyers will have something to say about who sleeps there."
"The Duke's lawyers have never once come up this road," said Morag.
"Neither have you, Hamish, not in daylight."
He turned his face away from her.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The second was the handkerchief.
He took it from his sleeve and pressed it quick to his mouth as he coughed, and tucked it back before anyone could look.
I did not mean to do it.
I walked through the gate and across the wet cobbles to his stirrup, and I put my hand on his boot.
It was enough.
The sight came up my arm like cold water.
I saw the doctor in Inverness shaking his head.
I saw a basin, and a lot of red in it.
I saw Hamish alone in the counting room at night.
He was reading a very old book with a brown leather cover, his finger moving over a line.
I saw the door of the ruined chapel at Dunmorrow standing open.
I lifted my hand away.
"You cough blood," I said.
It was very quiet in the yard.
"You have had a doctor in Inverness, and he gave you till next Martinmas."
"The handkerchief in your sleeve has a stain on it the size of my palm, from last night."
"You haven't told Angus."
Angus turned and stared at his father.
"Father?"
"She's raving," said Hamish.
"You see, Doctor."
"You wrote down what I said about every family in this glen for eleven years," I said, to the men and not to him.
"I never once saw you wrong. Ask him if I'm wrong now."
The doctor was looking at Hamish's sleeve.
A man in the second row shifted his horse.
Another one looked at his own hands.
I saw it go through them.
Hamish saw it too.
He went the colour of wet ash, and then his face closed.
"Angus," he said, very softly.
"Take her."
Angus swung down.
His good hand was reaching for my collar when the shotgun went off over his head.
The boom hit the tower wall and came back twice.
The boy with the rope sat down hard in the mud.
"The next one's lower," said Morag, snapping the breech.
"Home with you, all of you."
Hamish's horse had reared, and he hauled it round.
He sat there a moment looking down at me, and his eyes were not a madman's eyes.
They were calm and calculating, the eyes of a man adding a column of numbers.
"I'll be back at dusk, Ailsa," he said.
"With the constable, and a proper warrant, and the minister if you like."
"You'll come out of that house in front of the whole glen, or I'll have it pulled down stone by stone."
He turned the horse, and then he looked back one last time.
Not at me.
At the tower, and at the shuttered slits of its windows, and at the rising pale sun.
"Ask your fine host why no man in this glen has laid eyes on him by daylight in forty years," he said.
"Ask him what he's afraid the sun will show."
They rode away.
Angus went last, his bandaged hand held to his chest.
He looked back at me over his shoulder, and his face was not red anymore.
It was white and shaking, and it had a promise in it.
Morag shut the gate and dropped the bar.
I stood on the cobbles and found my knees would not hold me.
Morag caught my elbow.
"You did that well, lass," she said.
"Now come in, and sit, and put your head down. You've a nosebleed again, and I'll not have Himself finding it on the floor."
"What happens at dusk?" I said.
"Himself wakes."
"And then?"
"And then you choose, lass," said Morag, "what to do with a man who has waited a hundred years for a storm."
I looked at her.
"Fifty of those years I've stood at that window with him," she said.
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