Page 42 of Kill the Beast
She should order him to go inside and find something they could use. Remind him, when he inevitably protested, that he had promised to do whatever she said. Iron from this place would be more powerful than anything, save a handful of coffin nails fromone of the Beast’s victims. But for some stupid reason, she didn’t have the heart.
He’d fall apart,she told herself.And he can’t fall apart until we’re finished.
“You all right there, Al?” she asked him finally, trying to keep her tone light.
“No.” He dragged his gaze to hers. “Do we have to wait until nightfall? Or can we just get it over with now?”
“The water must be gathered by the light of the waning moon,” she reminded him, and he sighed with bitter resignation. “It won’t be long until it rises, though. We should set up camp in the meantime.”
“I would really rather not spend the night here.”
“I understand,” Lyssa said, her throat tightening at the dismay on his face. “But we’ll need a good wall to get back to the cottage, and I don’t think I’m going to find one here.” She couldn’t draw a Door just anywhere—trees didn’t work the way walls did, and a crumbling estate full of ghosts probably wouldn’t lead them anywhere good.
Alderic sighed. “No, I imagine not. But can’t we just camp in the forest? Or go back down the mountain after we collect the water? I have—”
“Lanterns. I know,” Lyssa said gently. “But it’ll be too hard to see, even with lanterns, and the ground is still muddy. I don’t want either of us to slip and snap an ankle. Or run into whatever might hunt in those woods at night.”
“I just… hate the idea of staying here a moment longer than I have to.”
“We’ll leave first thing in the morning,” she told him. “I promise.”
The night was clearer than it had been in days. When the moon finally rose over the tree line, Lyssa looked up at it and frowned—it was already nearing the third quarter. They had lost more time than she’d realized, waiting out that thunderstorm inReedshollow. Still, she knew it had been the right decision, for all that Alderic had teased her about being afraid of “a little rain.” Walking around Warham during a storm was one thing. Hiking up a mountain was another. Alderic and his expensive steel-ribbed umbrella were just begging to get struck by lightning, and Lyssa was not interested in being next to him when it happened.
“Let’s get this over with,” Lyssa said. “And then we can eat something.” Brandy cocked his head at the word “eat.”
“Fine by me,” Alderic said, tossing another bundle of twigs down beside the fire he’d built while Lyssa set up the garish new tent he had insisted on buying. She was glad to have the stupid thing now, no matter how much she had argued against it in the shop. Her own poorly patched tent was pitiful in comparison, the fabric so threadbare that the wind rippling through the grasses would have chilled her to the bone by morning. It would be nice to sleep in something that actually kept her warm, for a change, even if it was an obnoxious shade of yellow and absolutely covered in painted daisies.
“Well, look at you,” Lyssa said, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the merrily crackling fire, the collapsible camp stools arranged around it just so. Alderic had even put an eiderdown cushion down for Brandy between the stools, and the idea that he had thought of her dog while he was overspending on camping supplies warmed her heart more than she cared to admit. “You’re quite the homemaker.”
The corner of his lips tugged into a smile. “There’s nothing that says we have to be miserable just because we’re spending the night on a cold cliffside.”
“Remind me to thank Ragnhild for forcing me to bring you along,” she said, and his small smile flashed brighter for a brief instant before he sobered again.
“Shall we?”
She nodded. “Brandy, you wait here.”
The bullmastiff refused to be left behind, though, and followed her and Alderic through the long grass and down the steps carvedinto the cliffside that led from the estate to the equally decrepit dock jutting out over the lake. A single rowboat thudded against the weathered pylons, and the splintered prow of another had beached on the rocky shore.
“Boating,” Lyssa said smugly, laughing when Alderic gave her that pinched look over his shoulder.
From this vantage, the shadowy silhouettes of the pines on the other side of the lake looked like sentinels guarding the black mass of mountains beyond them. Lyssa had never been afraid of the dark—she was the one who killed the things that crept in the shadows, after all—but this place felt haunted in a way she didn’t like, and she was glad for the bright glow of Alderic’s expensive lantern.
She picked her way carefully over the rotting boards of the dock. Behind her, Brandy whined, hesitating on the threshold where the stone steps ended and the dock began, too afraid to walk across the creaking wood to follow her.
“I told you to wait at the camp,” she scolded him before joining Alderic, who was peering down at the black water like he was thinking of jumping in.
Lyssa studied him for a moment, wondering what memories had resulted in the sharp line of his mouth, the furrow in his brow. Maybe it was the shared grief that bound them together, or the fact that he was unlike any of the other rich patrons she had worked for, but she found that she wanted to know more about… what was it he had said to her, back in Sunnyside?The circumstances that led to your formation.He was as much of a curiosity to her as she was to him. It was a rare feeling, the urge to know more about someone, and its presence unsettled her.
“It’s a little cold for a swim,” she said finally, when it seemed like he was lost enough in his own thoughts that he might need help getting out.
He flinched, as if he had forgotten she was there. “Good thing I’m not here to swim, then.”
“Good thing.” She took the lantern from him, setting it ather feet, and handed him Ragnhild’s canteen. It was made out of cured leather stitched with strange symbols in red thread, the cork attached to the neck by a braided cord of thick black hair.
Alderic turned the container over in his hands. “What do these mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Spells of some kind or another. It’s the only one Rags will let me use for this sort of stuff. The water won’t retain its potency, otherwise.”
