It looked like the top of a huge tire inner tube, at least six meters (approximately twenty feet) long. It was only visible about five seconds, but it was definitely an animal of some sort.

—SUE BOYD, ART TEACHER

Chapter 30

Inverness

Brandy moved in with me that night. Having lost her home, all her worldly possessions, and her livelihood, she had nothing left.

She said it didn't matter, as long as she had me.

It was nearly 3:00 A.M., the summer sun already gray in the eastern horizon by the time we squirmed together between the crisp hotel sheets, our entwined naked bodies creating all the heat we'd need. Too exhausted to make love, I simply held her until she fell asleep, then I slipped out of bed and sat at the desk with my laptop.

I was exhausted. Sleep tugged at my brain, but I was too afraid to doze. The intensity of my night terrors had been increasing, and after what had just happened on Urquhart Bay, I was simply too exhausted to face them again. Images of my childhood drowning had now been replaced by something else, and this vision was even more terrifying because it was not of my past. In truth, I feared it was my destiny.

Stay awake until dawn. You'll rest easier in the daylight.

I forced myself to focus through the fatigue.

The last forty-eight hours had revealed new pieces of the Loch Ness puzzle, but they were swirling in my head, and I was too tired to think.

Organize your thoughts. Write them out so you can see them.

Activating the laptop, I began typing.

Angus and Theresa.

Anguilla eels and the Sargasso Sea.

Calum Forrest feeding the monster every winter. The mission of the Black Knights.

Adam Wallace.

The collapse of the North Sea aquifer in the early 1930s.

Calum Forrest erecting underwater lights last winter.

Oil seeping into Loch Ness.

Beta blockers found in eel's bloodstream.

John Cialino's death.

Angus deliberately lying about the salmon.

I stared at the screen, then cut and pasted, reorganizing my notes in what I surmised to be a chronological order.

Adam Wallace.

Calum had said Adam Wallace was the first Black Knight. Strange that my father had never mentioned him. Whatever the Knights' primary mission, it had obviously included feeding the species referred to by both Calum and my father as Guivres.