Shavi thought about what she said for a moment. "You are a good person," he stated firmly.
"No, I'm not. I'm a bad girl. And I've got coming to me what all bad girls get."
"No-"
Her face flared with long-repressed emotion. "Don't give me all that redemption shit! Don't even begin to tell me everything will turn out bright and sunny. That's not how it works!"
"It does in my world."
That brought her up sharp. She eyed him askance, then looked away, her expression so desolate with the flood of uncontrollable feelings and ideas that Shavi wanted to pull her tightly to him to comfort her.
But before he could act he caught a movement away in the trees. It was barely anything, a shift of a shadow among shadows in the gloom, and it could easily have been some small animal investigating the fire, but his instincts told him otherwise.
Laura felt his body stiffen. "What is it?" she asked, sensing his urgency.
"I do not know." He rose and advanced to the fire.
"Didn't you ever see Halloween?" she cautioned. "Don't go any further, dickhead."
"I am simply trying to see-" The words strangled in his throat in such an awful manner Laura didn't have to see his face to know he had glimpsed something terrible.
"What is it, for God's sake?" she hissed.
The fear surged into a hard lump in her chest, but it melted into burning ice when she saw him moving quickly away from the firelight into the dark.
"Don't go!" Her yell trailed away in dismay and disbelief. How could he be so stupid?
And then she was alone in that dismal place with the dark pressing tight around her, feeling small and weak in the face of all the awful things loose in the world. She couldn't bring herself to move even a finger. Instead, she strained to hear the sound of his returning footsteps, any sound from him that proved he was still alive. But there was nothing. Just the constant rustle of the leaves, the creak of branches under the wings of the wind, the rumble of the river; the lyrical sounds oppressed her. It was too noisy, too alive with nothing.
"Shavi," she whispered, more to comfort herself with the sound of a voice than in the hope he might hear. Don't do this to me, she wanted to say. I'm not strong enough to deal with this on my own.
She sat there for an age while she grew old and wizened. Her rigid muscles ached, her stomach was clenched so tightly she thought she was going to vomit or pass out. And still there was no sign of him. He could have been swallowed up, torn apart; there could be things feeding silently on his remains right then, waiting to finish their meal before moving on to her.
And then he suddenly lurched into the circle of light and all of it erupted out of her in a piercing scream.
"Don't worry," he croaked.
"You stupid bastard!" she shouted in a mixture of embarrassment and angry relief.
But then, as he clambered down next to her, she saw his normally dark, handsome features were grey and there was a strained expression which made him look fifteen years older. "What was out there?" she said, suddenly afraid once more.
He couldn't seem to find any words. Then: "Nothing."
It was such a pathetically inadequate response she hit him hard on the arm. "Don't treat me like an idiot. Don't try to protect me like some stupid little girlie. That's the worst thing you can do to me." She swallowed, glanced fearfully beyond the firelight.
"It is nothing. Nothing for you to worry about."
"Then, what?" She searched his face and saw things in his eyes which unnerved her on some deep plane. With his philosophical outlook, Shavi had always seemed immune to the terrors that plagued the rest of them; he was an anchor for her, a sign that it was possible to cope better. And suddenly all that fell away. "What is it, Shavi?" She reached tentative fingers to his cheek. "What did you see out there?"
"What did I see?" His voice sounded hollow. "I saw Lee. My boyfriend. Two years dead now, two years dead. His head smashed out in the street. And he spoke to me. The things he said…" His voice was dragged away by the wind.
Laura recalled how Shavi had told them of the murder arranged by the Tuatha lle Danann, one of the deaths that had prepared them all for their destiny. "He was really there?" Her concern for Shavi was suddenly overtaken by the sudden fear that if Lee was there, her dead mother could be too. And that really would be more than she could bear.
Shavi seemed to sense what she was thinking, for his face softened a little. "It is my burden. The price I had to pay for getting the information from the spirits in Mary King's Close."
"But that's terrible! That's not a price, it's a sentence! It's not fair!"
"It is my burden. I will cope with it." It was obvious he couldn't bring himself to speak any more, and however much she wanted to ask him what the spectre had said, she knew it was something he would never tell. But she could see from the expression on his face that it must have been something awful indeed. How much longer would he have to put up with it, she thought? The rest of his life? The thought filled her with such pity that all she could do was hug him tightly and bury his face in her shoulder.
When she awoke in the dead of the night, she was surprised she had actually managed to fall asleep. Shavi's haunted face had hung in her mind, feeding every deep, mortal fear she had about death and what lay beyond it. She remembered stroking his head as it lay on her breast, desperately trying to comfort him, although he gave no voice to his fears; but then she looked in his eyes and she knew there was nothing she could do that would ever make him feel better.
The thoughts faded with the realisation she was awake, and the knowledge that she had woken for a reason. At first, in her sleep-befuddled state, she had no idea why. Shavi slept soundly beside her. Outside the tent the wind moaned gently among the trees and the leaves and branches sighed, but no more nor less than at any other time during the night.
As she went to lower her head back to the pile of clothes she was using as a pillow she realised… it was there on the edge of her senses, barely audible, almost a hallucination. Her fingers felt the gentle yet insistent throb of it from deep within the ground. When she lowered her ear towards the groundsheet, she could hear it. Lub-dub, lub-dub. So distant, which made her realise how powerful it must be; never ceasing. She tried to tell herself she was mis-sensing it on the edge of a dream, that it was a water pump, that it was the reverberation of the river through the soil and the rock.
Lub-dub, lub-dub.
It seemed to be calling out to her and issuing a warning at the same time. And then she knew what it really sounded like. The beating of a heart that would never know death, buried far beneath the ancient landscape. The image spawned a wave of terror. Laura screwed up her eyes and covered her ears, but it was there inside her head and there was nothing she could do to get it out, and she knew she would not sleep again that night. Lub-dub, lub-dub. The relentless rhythm of death and madness.
While Laura and Shavi were just winding their way out of the city centre, Church and Tom skirted the edge of the Old Town before cutting across its easternmost edge to break into the green expanse of Holyrood Park. The sedate mass of the Royal household loomed up silently through the haar which obscured all of Arthur's Seat apart from the lowest twenty feet. The area, normally a haven for joggers and dog-walkers, was deserted. In its desolation it seemed unbearably lonely and ancient.
No words passed between them until they were standing before the wellhead, feeling unseasonably cold.
"Here we are then," Church said banally.
Now they were there, they could see how out of place the well-head looked, surrounded by the wild grass and bare rock of the wilderness that soared up above the city: a defiant statement that man would not be bowed by nature. Iron bars ran on both sides of the forecourt before the well and up the hillside over the top of it. The well-head itself was dark stone stained with the residue of years; the water trickled out into a small pool just out of reach beyond more vandal-proof bars. It smelled of cold iron and dark tombs. Above it was a plaque which said: