Chapter 4: The Wrist

I slept in a box bed off the kitchen, with Morag's shotgun on the chair.

I woke with the headache sitting on my skull.

The window had gone the colour of a plum.

Footsteps were coming up the cellar stair, slow and even.

The key turned from the inside, and Niall Kerr came through the door with his hair loose around his shoulders.

He looked worse than he had the night before.

His cheekbones stood out, and the skin beneath his eyes was bruised.

His hands shook, and he closed them into fists to hide it.

"Morag tells me you faced the factor in my yard," he said.

"I did."

"She tells me you told him about his lungs."

"He's been dying of it for a year," I said.

"Everyone else was too frightened to look."

Something moved in his face.

It was too quick to name.

"Sit down, Miss Munro."

"I am sitting down."

"Then stay sitting, and let me say my piece."

He stood across the table from me, with a whole room between us.

"You know what I am," he said.

"You are a vampire. You haven't eaten in forty years, and you can't stand my blood, and you sleep in a cellar."

"Yes."

"And you own this glen."

"By an old deed. Nobody has ever challenged it, for the same reason nobody has ever seen me at noon."

"Then why were you in the road?"

He was quiet.

"I was told long ago that a woman would come to me in a storm with the sight."

"I was told what would happen if I let her stay."

"What would happen?"

"Nothing good for either of us," he said.

"So I am going to give you a horse, a purse, and the name of a woman in Inverness who takes in seamstresses."

"You will be gone before the factor returns, and he will find a very rude housekeeper."

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