on for a second. Her soft scent lingers in the air, and as she goes, I feel like a part of me has just been cut off.
But my heart is beating wildly. Sarah doesn’t love Nicholas. She loves somebody else.
And I know it’s me.
It’s the answer I’ve dreamt of, but not an answer on which I can act.
I watch her walk through the falling snow towards the broken house. There’s a cold, hard splinter in my heart. It’s her absence. I feel it when I breathe, when I walk, when I speak. It’s lodged in there and shows no sign of vanishing. But I’m right about us not being able to be together, I know I’m right. However painful and unbearable that might feel.
I curse the Secret Families for never having told me I couldn’t be with a Secret. I curse my own blood for being all wrong. Everything is wrong. While Sarah and I were falling for each other life has been mocking us.
I stand in the snow for a little longer, going over the conversation earlier between Sarah and me, when she told me what she’d discovered about my parents.
The truth about my parents, Amelia Campbell and Allan Hannay, has blown me apart. Would it have been better if I hadn’t ever known? Sarah thought she was doing the right thing by telling me. But I’m not sure. Should I say I’m bitter for what was denied to me, my rightful inheritance, my place in the world?
My parents, a proper family.
The truth is, I never knew, and I never suspected. I thought it’d been the Gamekeeper training that taught me how to use the runes, how to move under a mantle of invisibility. I suppose I should have noticed that no other Gamekeeper I knew had talents as special as mine. I would have noticed had I not been so busy doing my bloody job. Harry did say a couple of times that the way I used the runes was special, but he never made a big deal of it. Now I know why. I was never to know of my half-Secret, bastard blood.
They lived in a different world, Stewart Midnight, Morag, and Amelia. My mother. A world of old prejudice and suspicion, set in ways as ancient as this rugged rock they call Islay. They exiled my mother, and for what? So she fell in love with someone who wasn’t of her kind. She failed the Secret Family, she failed them all. And because of this, they destroyed her.
The irony is, she ended up having no more children, so their plan didn’t work. Her powers weren’t passed on anyway, not to any proper Secret heir, I mean. Just me, the mongrel.
And because of my parentage, I can never be with the woman I love.
Before I head inside I turn around one last time to look at the little snowy mound where we’ve buried Mike, shimmering faintly in the lilac light of morning. I bet he never thought he, a man from Louisiana, would end up buried on a Scottish island. An unmarked grave, for now. Just for now.
I’ll come back and see that you get a proper burial, Mike. I’ll come back and see you.
57
Alone With You
That night you said our souls
Are made of the same thing
Niall couldn’t cry, he just couldn’t – even if the lump of tears he had in his throat was suffocating him. He needed to be at sea, but he couldn’t do that either. They had to stay together. All of them.
As the thought formed in his head, Niall felt a stab of pain in his heart. No, not all of us, he remembered. Just those who are left.
He watched the waves ebbing and flowing from the window in his room. Every wave called to him. Only the water could have healed his raw soul, but the water was forbidden to him for now. Only Winter, who was standing beside him, the same longing in her eyes, could understand how he was feeling. She’d held his hand throughout the burial and never left his side since. Winter’s hand in his, her warm body beside him, reminded Niall that he was still alive, that he wasn’t lying in that grave with Mike. Though it felt like it.
Niall couldn’t get Mike’s face out of his head. His voice, his jokes, his mannerisms. In the short time they’d spent together Mike had won Niall’s friendship, his admiration, his complete and utter loyalty.
And now he’s gone,