The Scorpio Races

I can hear my heart or Finn’s heart or maybe the both of them, and it’s going so fast and loud that I can’t breathe. My hands are fisted over the hay, the nails biting into my palms.

We’re hidden, you can’t see us, go away.

Dove is utterly still.

The capall uisce looks at her and opens its jaw, and then it makes a sound that turns my blood into ice. It’s a hissed exhalation with low clucks behind it, clicking from somewhere deep in its throat: kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.

Dove flattens her ears back to her head but doesn’t move. How many times had we been told that the capaill uisce want a moving target? That to move is to die?

Dove is a statue.

The capall uisce pushes again. The boards creak again.

I hear Finn sigh. It’s so quiet that I know no one but me could’ve heard it, and only me because I’ve spent my whole life listening to every sound that my brothers could possibly make. It’s a soft, scared little noise that I haven’t heard him make in a long time.

Then I hear a wail.

It’s coming from out in the pasture. Both Dove and the capall uisce flick an ear toward it.

It comes again, and my stomach is an endless pit. It’s another one, I think, that’s pushed down the fence on the other side, that’s in the pasture with us, not even three nails a board to keep us alive.

The black monster swivels its strange long ears again.

The wail, again. It sounds a little like a baby crying, and then I see Finn’s mouth moving. It’s about all I can see of him.

He mouths at me with exaggerated syllables: Puffin.

The sound, again, and this time, I recognize it immediately. Puffin the barn cat, always in search of Finn, back from her travels and drawn by our light. She wails again, her baby-cry meow that she uses to call him. When he’s feeling indulgent, he’ll repeat it back to her and she’ll use the sound as a homing beacon.

Now she cries again, closer, and the capall uisce shifts its weight away from the fence.

In the gray light of the mist that the rain drives up from the ground, I see Puffin’s form, trotting toward us, her tail a question mark. Wow? she asks.

The capall uisce’s grin closes.

Puffin sees the capall uisce only when it moves. The fence tears like paper, the boards exploding off with a sound like the world being destroyed.

She bolts and the capall uisce charges after her, made hungrier by the chase. They both vanish into the mist, and the last thing I hear is hooves scrabbling, frenzied, and then Puffin wailing.

Finn covers his face, the hay falling from his hands, and I see his shoulders shake.

I can’t think about that, though. I think about this: the capall uisce coming back and killing my brother.

I grab his shoulder. “Come on.”

I don’t have a plan yet, but I know we can’t stay.

From behind me, I hear a sound, and I jerk so hard my muscles hurt. It takes a full second for me to realize it’s a voice, saying my name.

“Puck!”

It’s Gabe, stepping through the ruined bit of fence the horse has just plunged through. His voice is a hiss as he takes my arm. “Hurry up. It’ll come back.”

I’m so shocked to see him – now, now of all times – that at first I can’t get the words out. “Dove. What about Dove?”

“Bring her,” snaps Gabriel, just audible. “Finn. Wake up. Come on.”

I snatch up Dove’s halter; she tosses her head in the air and jerks my arm at the shoulder. She’s trembling like she was on the cliff top. “Puffin,” I tell Gabe.

“She’s a cat. I’m sorry, but come on.” Gabe pulls at Finn. “There’s two others. They’re coming.”

Gabe leads the way back through the ruined fence. When I get Dove to the fence, she pulls back, held by the memory of it being a barrier, and for a brief, terrible moment, I think I’ll have to leave her behind. I cluck, softly, and she finally steps over the broken boards. In front of the house, I see headlights, and now there’s Tommy Falk with half his face illuminated. He jerks open the car door and gestures hurriedly for Finn to get in.

Gabe appears beside me with a lead rope. “Hold it out the window.”

“But -”

“Now.”

And just as he says that, I hear the same cluck that I heard earlier, only now it comes from somewhere in the paddock where we just were. Distantly, I hear it echo back through the mist, an answering sound. I clip the lead onto Dove’s halter and scramble into the car. Tommy Falk’s already behind the wheel, and Gabe slams the door after himself.

Then we’re off down the narrow road, the headlights reflected in the mist and rain as they jump back up from the ground. Beside us, Dove trots and then canters. I roll up the window to leave just enough room for the lead to fit through. Tommy Falk is utterly focused on his driving – checking the mirrors constantly, making sure that we’re not being followed, taking care to make it easy for Dove to keep up with us – and the intensity of it makes me remember, suddenly, that I saw him on the beach just earlier today.

The car is silent and hot; the heater was turned up all the way and no one’s thought to turn it down. The entire car smells, not unpleasantly, of the inside of a new shoe. Beside me, in the backseat, Finn is insensible because of Puffin.

The only thing that’s said is when Gabe turns his face to Tommy and asks, “Your place?”

Tommy says, “Not with the pony. Has to be Beech’s.”

Then Finn pinches me and points out the front window. Just illuminated by the headlights is a dead sheep. It’s mutilated and strung out all the way from the ditch to the middle of the road.

I can’t stop seeing its torn body, even after we have left it far behind. That could have been us. Tommy and Gabe don’t comment on it, however. They don’t comment on anything, actually. They sit in grim, familiar silence, Gabe looking out windows and communicating to Tommy that it’s all clear without saying a word.

Tommy doesn’t take the road to Skarmouth as I expected, but rather the one toward Hastoway. He slows at the crossroads but doesn’t stop, and both he and Gabe peer anxiously out in all directions until we get going once more. I press my face to the glass, to make certain that Dove is not having a hard time keeping up.

“I could ride her and follow you,” I say.

Gabe’s voice leaves no room for negotiation. “You’re not getting out of this car until we’re well clear.”

And then there’s silence again, nothing but night and stone walls and the rain.

“Finn,” Gabe says, finally, his voice raised to be heard over the sound of the engine. “This storm that’s coming – how long will it last?”

Finn’s eyes are bright in the backseat, and he’s so incredibly pleased to have been asked that it hurts me. “Just tonight and tomorrow.”

Gabe looks at Tommy. “One day. That’s not long.”

“Long enough,” says Tommy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

PUCK

Tommy Falk takes us to the Grattons’ house, which is near Hastoway, though how near I can’t be sure, because everything looks the same in the spitting rain and narrow yellow of the headlights. Beech meets us, his shoulders hunched against the wind, and shows me where I can leave Dove. He swings his torch around to reveal a