The Eclipsed Life of Luna Mischa novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: Three Hundred Bottles

"The title isn't mine to give," I said.

"You could get it for me. The elders do whatever you say. That whole pack does."

"They turned their chairs round because you used a clerk's baby scan. Not because I told them to."

"I was nineteen when he started on me about that pack." Her voice cracked. "Nineteen. Every Sunday dinner. The lake, the treasury, the Luna who ruined us. You don't know what it's like, being his."

"No. I don't."

"So help me."

I looked out of the chapel hall window at the cove. Somebody's kitchen light was still on halfway up the hill.

"Here's what I'll do," I said. "On the fourteenth, at noon, he's standing on this quay to take it. Come and stand there too. Say what you know, out loud, in front of everyone. And then take whatever you get."

"That's not a deal."

"No. It's the truth. That's all I've got for you."

"You think you've won." The sugar came back into her voice, all at once, hard as boiled sweets. "You haven't seen him lose. He doesn't."

"I saw him lose once. I was twenty."

She hung up.

Jago had heard every word. He was sitting on a crate of bottles with his elbows on his knees.

"You could've had her," he said.

"I could've had her for a week. She'd have sold me to him by the Friday."

He thought about it, and nodded.

At seven the next morning Paul rang from the north.

"She's gone," he said.

"Bethany?"

"Silver Jaguar at the kitchen door at dawn. She came down the back stairs with one pink suitcase and got in. Didn't say goodbye to anyone." A pause. "Mind you, nobody's spoken to her in a week."

"Did Duncan see?"

"He watched from the study window. He didn't go down."

So she'd run home to her father.

I didn't let myself think about what she'd told him.

There wasn't time.

We bottled all week.

Monday, four hundred.

Tuesday, three hundred and eighty, because a cork machine jammed.

The pack mechanic took it apart on the chapel floor and swore at it in two dialects.

On Wednesday the Night Whisper girls sang the whole afternoon, and the Cornish wolves sang back.

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