The cough comes again, worse this time. My raw throat scrapes and hacks and there’s something there, something scraping at me. I stick my fingers into my mouth, reach right back and feel the brush of a soft, itchy thing. I pull, coughing and spluttering as it cuts free of my throat. I can’t see what it is, but in the sink it feels like a feath—
“Franny,” someone whispers.
I whirl in the dark but it’s only Niall.
Still, my frightened heart doesn’t do as it’s told. It thunders on, knowing something I don’t. He reaches for my neck, a caress, and then a tightening, and my air is gone. In a moment the eerie stillness of the bathroom dissolves and there is a violent twist of limbs as I surge forward and he swings my head into the mirror—
“Wake up!”
I blink and the pain is gone from my throat, gone from my skull, moved to live inside my feet, which are burning. It’s brighter here, wherever I am, silver and no longer red. It’s the forest in deep night, with moonlit snow and stars and my hands are around Niall’s throat.
I gasp in horror and he wrenches himself free, coughing once, twice, then taking my hand and yanking me through the trees.
“Quickly,” he says, softly as though frightened of being overheard.
“Where are we?”
“Inside the enclosure.”
My bare feet falter. Is this a dream?
“Franny, come on.”
“How did we get here?”
“You were asleep. I followed your footprints.” Like a tracker in the night.
I gaze around at the place I’ve longed to enter. Then at Niall, ghostly in the light. “Did I hurt you?” I ask.
His expression softens. “No. But there are hungry animals in here.”
I nod and we hurry. I can see the footprints he followed. They don’t belong to me, but to the woman who lives inside, the one who wants the wild so much that come nightfall she steals her way into my skin. If she can’t have wild, I sometimes think she’s intent on my death instead. Whatever sets her free will do.
We reach a decline and slow our pace to ensure we don’t slip down its edge. At the bottom is a shoulder of the loch, with no beach to protect it, only a steep jutting of hillside. I can see Niall’s intended course—he’s headed close around the loch, as it will bring us more quickly to the fence, but I pull him to a stop.
“I don’t think we should skirt too closely.”
“If we go up and around the ridge it’ll take too long.”
“Come on, we’re fine. Don’t be dramatic.”
“We’re not meant to be in here, Franny. It could get us kicked out.”
“Oh, please, they’re not gonna send you away.”
“Stop,” he snaps suddenly, startling me. “This isn’t an adventure. It’s serious.”
“I know that—”
“I don’t think you do. Nothing is serious for you. You don’t commit to anything.”
We stare at each other in the moonlight.
“I’m committed to you,” I say.
He doesn’t reply, not in words, but the air feels thick. “Come on,” is all he says in the end. “Your feet’ll be frozen already, aye?”
They are indeed, protected by no more than the drenched woolly socks I dreamed of pulling on.
“Put my boots on,” he offers, but I shake my head and take his path, angling down to the water’s edge.
It’s not me who falls, but Niall.
He slips almost soundlessly onto the frozen edge of the loch and then straight through the ice. It must be deep here, for he disappears instantly under the surface.
I step into the water behind him, a knife edge to my spine. The cold, my god. It’s rendered him immobile. But I’ve spent my life in cold water and my body knows how to move, how to reach for him and pull him to the edge. It doesn’t yet know how it’ll get us out; there’s nothing to grip on to but slippery snow. The shore of the lake is like a wall.
“Niall,” I say through chattering teeth.
He doesn’t speak, so I shake him hard until he nods and lets out a grunt. I scrabble for a hold and painstakingly drag us, hand by hand, around the shoreline until we reach a spot shallow enough to climb out.
“Hold on to the edge,” I order him, then pull myself up onto the snow. It’s so fucking cold. I’m having trouble making my limbs obey. “Niall,” I say, “I can’t pull you out, you have to climb.”
“Can’t.”
“You can—I just did it.”
I can see him trying, but he’s waterlogged and frozen.
“Niall,” I say, “try harder. Do not leave me alone.”
He struggles out of the water and with my arms dragging him, manages to lift his body free. For a moment he slumps on the snow, but I pull at his hands roughly. “Come on, quickly.”
We stumble around the loch, keeping a wider berth this time. Things rustle in the underbrush but we don’t see them, no reflective eyes or shadows in the night. I lock the gate behind us and support him along the path that leads to our cabin. No one has noticed our presence in the enclosure; it will be like tonight never happened.
Except for the cold we have smuggled out with us, deep in our bones.
I run a shower, not too hot, then help Niall out of his clothes. He’s shivering so hard, but once I get him under the running water he starts to calm. I undress and climb in with him, wrapping my arms about his body, pressing what warmth I have into him.
A time later. “Are you all right?”
He nods, reaching to cradle my head. Our lips are against each other’s shoulders. “Just a night dip, aye? You do them all the time.”
I smile. “Aye.”
“Must be your selkie blood,” he murmurs.
“It must.”
“I’ve missed you, darlin’.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“Why do you go?”
I don’t answer at first. “I’m not sure.”
“Can you try to think?”
I turn my mouth to his neck and press it there. Trying. “When I stay,” I whisper, “I think it does harm.”
“I think you’re frightened.”
It brings a kind of relief to admit it. “I am. I always am.”
“That won’t do forever, my love.”
I swallow, remembering the feel of the feather in my throat. “No, it won’t.”
There is a long silence, but for the fall of water.
“My father strangled a man to death,” I tell him softly. “My mother hung herself with a rope about her neck. Edith drowned on the fluid in her lungs. And my body suffocated our daughter.
“I dream of choking, and I wake to find myself trying to steal the air from you. There’s something broken in my family. It’s most broken in me.”
Niall strokes my hair for a long time. Then he says, very clearly, “Your body did not suffocate our daughter. She died, because sometimes babies die before they’re born, and that’s all.” Then, once more, “I’ve missed you.” And I am done with the universe between us. It is so perilous, this love, but he’s right, I will have no cowardice in my life, not anymore, and I will be no small thing, and I will have no small life, and so I find his mouth with mine and we are awake at last, returned to a land long abandoned, the land of each other’s bodies.