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I set about cranking up the wood burner, then spread his clothes to dry on the narrow mantel above.

And after that, with nothing to occupy myself until he woke, I pulled up a chair next to the bed, tucked the duvet tight around his cold body, and watched over him.

CHAPTER 6

CASPIAN

Something felt wrong, but for the life of me, I couldn’t work out what. Only that I didn’t greatly care for it and endeavoured to express as much.

A voice sounded in response, so crackly and thundery it could have ascended from the bowels of the earth. A part of the earth situated deep under France, seeing as it spoke in French. “You’re safe,” it thundered. “Go back to sleep.”

So I did, because it was also the kind of voice that scared me a little.

The next time I woke felt like a more normal wakeup; my blocked nose reminded me I was still full of cold, and a fire had been lit inside my throat. Confusingly, through a sliver of patent nostril, I detected the distinctive aroma of chocolate, but mixed with rubber. At about the same time, I also realised that my head hurt, my arm hurt, my face and especially my lip hurt, and that I was naked and supine in a bed not my own. So not normal, after all.

But more than that, I struggled to take deep breaths. When I cracked open one eye—the other eyelid refused to budge forsome reason—I was greeted by a huge black dog lolling on my chest. Panting gently, it pinned me to the bed, its nose inches from mine. Wherever I was, it wasn’t a hospital, although possibly I needed one.

At the dog’s single crisp bark, the thin stream of fear trickling through my head widened into a river. Now cruelly alert, my anxiety rode the rapids, the loudest, shrillest voice in the room as usual. A directionless fear, rendering me paralysed as nameless, shapeless thoughts flew through my brain, faster than I could make sense of them. Someone had rescued me. I was dying. I was safe. I was being eaten by a dog. Or a snake. Or a monster from the deep. A muscular band tightened around my rib cage, shrinking my heart and lungs. Long, wet tongue lolling obscenely, the dog grinned at me, as if I was about to be a huge bloody meal.

While my mind’s chaos threatened to sweep me away, a rumbly voice sliced through it. “Drink,” it boomed. Like it reached down from the sky, an enormous paw, a human one, slid around my shoulders, hauled me to a sitting position and thrust a mug of steaming chocolate under my nose. A swirl of squirty cream and mini marshmallows floated on the top.

My life had taken a bloody strange swerve. Was this a kidnapping or a sleepover? Had I wound up in heaven? Or hell? While still making up my mind, the dog vanished, sliding off my chest and out of view with a thump, allowing me to suck in a much-needed breath. “I’m… what… I…”

“Shh. Breathe. Drink.”

Seeing as the heavy arm around my shoulders gripped me like a clamp, and the mug bumped against my lips, I had very little choice.

Halfway down the drink, I paused to take stock. My companion/captor/saviour/nurse/poisoner/monster-from-the-deep/hallucination took the opportunity to put the mugdown, affording me a look at him. Or rather, at the wall of blue rubber topped by a vaguely familiar shaggy chestnut beard and mop of wild hair. Separating them was a great wedge of a nose and two intense brown eyes, watchful and wary, their gaze directed anywhere but on my face.

“Oh! It’s you!”

The colossal fingers gripping my shoulder tensed. The guy wore a utility belt, of the sort tradesmen favoured. A sharp chisel and a menacing, sheathed knife dangled from it. My breath quickened again as overarching panic came swirling back.Eviscerate me, Daddy.Fuck, I hadn’t meant it literally.

“Drink,” he repeated. “You’re with me. You’re safe.”

In retrospect, mild concussion was proving a bonus. As was a fever, because although naked under the duvet, I sweltered. While the overthinking, irrational part of me screamed I’d found myself in a very strange and quite perturbing situation from which I might never emerge, a not-insignificant, dazed part, chose not to fight it.

Actually, more than that. It chose toembraceit. Maybe it was the solid, unfussy strength in the thick arm holding me upright, or the reassuring steady beat of a human heart through the layer of rubber squashed against my left ear, syncopating with the contented thump of the dog’s tail. Or perhaps the way the man growled the wordsafeas if it brooked no discussion, and how I clung to it, wanting to believe. How, with one word, he sent my mind’s irrational ridiculousness scarpering for the hills.

Or perhaps the fear that a wrong move might result in my unfortunate disembowelment.

But, as I obediently drank down the sickly chocolate, an indefinablesomethingabout this peculiar person’s calm quietude brought with it a rare stillness of my own. My breaths slowed and deepened to an even in-out, in-out, like a set of mechanical bellows. Each sip of chocolatey sweetness infuseda sense of peace through my veins. External sounds, smells, sensations, emotions faded to insignificance, as if the bed, the three-legged dog, my saviour and me floated in an airtight cocoon made only for three. Like this strange man in his blue rubber suit was sweeping me far away from the rough swirling seas and torn sails of the last few years. Anchoring me to him. Shielding me in the eye of the storm.

Or perhaps all that was nothing more than fanciful, wishful thinking and a consequence of a head injury and high temperature. That really, I’d been abducted by a crazed knife-wielding murderer, that the hot chocolate was laced with poison, and I really should have made a will and put my affairs in order like my pragmatic mother frequently suggested.

Regardless, it was weird as fuck.

“There was a snake,” I said, my voice raspy and shaky. “In the cupboard. He’s huge; I mean, so big that no one should ever go in there; he owns that house now. That’s why I fell.”

“Kaa,” the man answered solemnly.

“What?”

“Kaa.”

Car?Fuck knew what that meant.

“A snake,” I repeated in a daze. “A big one.”

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