Chapter Forty-One

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Glasgow

May 2024

CLEM

Clem takes the lift to the Burns Unit, alongside two visitors who chat about the news—politics, riots, war. She had forgotten about the outside world, about everything beyond the small hospital room in which her daughter lies.

She thinks of Edina, and the byre, and the book. How she has promised to return it to the Triskele. Except, of course, she has no idea where the book is now. She tries to piece together what she learned from the interview—Erin had the book, had tried to get rid of it, but it kept returning. And then she went to Orkney to destroy the book in a fire which killed her boyfriend and put her in hospital. Maybe the book burned in the fire? But would Edina and the Triskele be so convinced it still existed somewhere? How would they know?

Perhaps the book doesn’t exist at all.

Paul Renney seems an odd character, and his claims about witches and dark magic seem more of a distraction than anything else, an attempt to come across as eccentric rather than predatory. With a shiver, she wonders if he and Erin were involved. And her mind turns to what she found in Erin’s notebook. Arlo’s hands need to be bound …Did Paul ask her to kill Arlo? Was that part of the ritual to destroy the book?

She feels a migraine beginning its sharp pulse behind her right eye as she makes her way to Erin’s room. Bee is just leaving, and Constable Byers greets her with a smile.

“She’s slept all morning,” Bee tells her at the doorway. “That eye has healed well since you’ve been gone.”

“Thanks,” Clem says, feeling uneasy about the reference to her being away. It will have looked heartless, both of Erin’s parents not visiting for two whole days. But she doesn’t want to tell anyone they were in Orkney. Not while the police are ramping up their interest in Erin.

She sits quietly beside Erin, feeling equal parts relieved and doomed. She wishes she could shake Erin, shake the truth out of her. She knows Erin is vulnerable and lost and so desperate for her father’s love that she’ll go to any lengths to achieve it, and perhaps this really has led her down a dangerous path, one that has resulted in murder. Or manslaughter. A boy is dead, and Erin is hell-bent on telling anyone who will listen how much she doesn’t care that Arlo is dead. She hasn’t once asked about Senna, or Freya. It is heartbreaking. And yet, Clem knows her daughter through and through. She isn’t evil. She isn’t capable of murder.

But she didn’t know that Erin had joined a cult. Maybe she doesn’t know her daughter as well as she thought she did.

“Mum?”

Clem looks up, seeing that Erin is awake.

“Where am I?” she says, sitting forward. She looks over the room with panic, at the wires in her arms, at the machines around her. “Mum?!”

Clem can’t believe it; Erin is back again. Her voice has the same cadences of the voice Clem knows so well, her eyes are animated, and she surveys the hospital room as though she’s never seen it before. She is confused, and in a state.

“Freya!” she cries. “Where’s Freya?”

“She’s with your father,” Clem tells her. She shares a glance with Constable Byers, who looks as startled by the shift in Erin’s demeanor as she is.

“Is she okay?” he says. “Should I call the nurse?”

“Would you mind giving us a moment?” Clem asks Constable Byers. He looks wary, and it strikes Clem that he has only ever seen Erin snarling at everyone around him.

“You’re seeing this, aren’t you?” she asks him, checking she isn’t imaging it, and he nods.

“Your camera is on, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

She turns back to Erin, glad that Constable Byers is here to witness the change in her. Perhaps it’ll counter the claims against her, about Arlo. She watches Erin begin to cry, noticing her bandaged, ruined hands, her face crumpled. Clem knows she has only so much time before this shift fades.

“Erin,” she says quickly. “I need to know where Senna is. Can you tell me.”

Erin is crying loudly. “I don’t know! She ran away while I was trying to save him!”

Erin is somehow back , she is lucid, and Clem must take this chance in case it doesn’t last again. “Where’s the book, Erin?” she says. “The Triskele book?”

“The book!” Erin gasps, pulling at the wires in her body. “I felt I was going out of my mind. I need to get rid of it. The Brother’s dead so I can’t give it back. I’ve tried and tried…”

She tells Clem in a wild stream of words of all the ways she tried to dispose of the book. She put it in the wood-burning stove and set it alight, watching it burn for twenty minutes. But when she opened the stove door, the book was intact. She waited for the bin lorries to come and chucked it in the back. But when she came back to her bedroom, the book was in her room again. She and Arlo went to the Clyde River and threw it in, watched it—filmed it, even—being carried off downstream, the pages swelling with water. But when they came home, the book was in the hallway. As though it was proudly announcing that it would not, could not, be destroyed.

“Is this why you went to Orkney?” Clem asks. “You found a way to get rid of it?”

“I contacted someone,” Erin says. “I found a man called Paul who knew about the Triskele. He told me what I had to do. It could only be done on Beltane, the Scottish first day of summer, in a place called Fynhallow in Orkney. He said we had to do a fire ritual to burn it.”

“That’s what caused the fire, then,” Clem says, and Erin nods again.

“We did it in a cave because it was really windy and we worried the wind would put the fire out.” She gives a choked sob.

“Tell me,” Clem says quickly. She can’t waste a second in case Erin becomes Nyx again. This version of her, and the story she’s telling—the truth, at long last—could all vanish in a moment.

“But it went wrong,” Erin says, her voice rising to a high pitch, as though her throat is squeezed tight by fresh terror. “I tied his hands together.”

A noise makes Clem turn. It’s Constable Byers, aghast at what Erin is saying. But she can’t stop now.

“Go on,” Clem tells Erin.

“We tried to save him,” Erin says. “We did everything that Paul told us to do. Arlo was nervous about performing the role of the Green Man because of the hand binding. But I told him it was okay. I promised him, Mum. I said, ‘You can trust me.’?” Her face falls. “Those were the last words I ever said to him.”

She tells Clem that they lit the fire in the cave. Senna was there on lookout. She was by the cave mouth, watching out across the beach as Erin and Arlo stood by the fire with the book. Arlo knelt down by the fire, which was small, flickering meekly amidst the bundle of logs. Erin said the words of the spell. And all of a sudden, the fire erupted, shooting out toward Arlo.

“I saw it climb up his clothes,” she says. “It just climbed straight up to his neck. He started shouting to get his T-shirt off. I pulled it over his head but it literally melted onto his skin. I was screaming…I didn’t even notice that I was on fire at this point. I couldn’t get his T-shirt off. He fell down and I was throwing sand over him but nothing worked. Nothing! Senna ran down to the shore to get water but by then he was completely on fire, I mean, every single part of him. He was clawing at me, begging me…”

Erin folds forward, gasping for air, her face crumpled. “I couldn’t save him, Mum! I tried, I tried so hard!”

“And where did Senna go?” Clem asks her, glancing at Constable Byers. “Do you remember?”

“The fire…” she repeats. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It just leaped out at us and…Poor Arlo. It burned and burned. We tried everything.”

Erin breaks into uncontrollable sobs at the memory of it, feeling frantic. Clem glances back again and Constable Byers now wears a deep look of suspicion. But the feeling that Erin could slip away again persists: This might be Clem’s only chance to hear what happened. To get information about Senna.

“Erin, Senna’s parents are sick with worry,” she says quickly. “Do you know where she is? Did someone take her?”

Erin shakes her head vehemently. “I tried to help him!” she sobs. “We beat the flames until I had blisters up and down my arms!”

Clem tries to console her, but Erin is lost to the memory of it. Suddenly, she freezes, something on her face shifting.

“I saw someone,” she says in a small voice. “Mum, I saw someone in the flames.”

“Who?”

“A boy,” she says. “A…”

But then, Erin seems to shrink back. Clem watches, astonished, as her daughter’s crumpled face slides into a look of fear.

“Please help me,” Erin says in a low voice.

“Erin,” Clem says, trying to reason with her.

“I need them to stop the fire,” Erin whimpers. “Please.”

“Stop who , Erin?”

“Stop calling me Erin, I’m not Erin!”

A loud knock on the door startles them both, and Clem sees Stephanie through the window, gesturing for her to come out.

She steps outside, reeling from Erin’s shift in demeanor, but the look on Stephanie’s face conveys a distinct urgency.

“What’s happened?” Clem asks, her gaze stuck to Erin, cowering in the bed inside.

“It’s Senna,” Stephanie says, and Clem’s eyes dart to her. “They’ve found her.”