“I don’t know.” She’d closed her eyes and gone somewhere else, but when she’d opened her eyes again, she couldn’t remember any dreams. It hadn’t been too bad. She clutched the duvet to her chest. “Is Jonathan…?”

“Connor went to the village and called the police, although it took them a while to get out here. He had to,” she added when Hæra gasped in protest. “Then he called Sue Kilbright, since there’s no doctor in residence tonight. She pronounced him dead and the police took him away to the Mainland for a post-mortem.”

Jonathan’s body was no longer here. No part of him was. That didn’t seem possible. His fiddle still rested in its case by the sofa. How could there be a fiddle with no Jonathan to play it? Or a closet full of clothes with no Jonathan to wear them?

Madeleine continued, “Once the cause of death has been established, we’ll get a death certificate. Then we can hold a funeral.”

“There are rites,” Hæra said to the wall. “Ceremonies for the human dead.”

“Yes. Do you know what he would have wanted?”

“Probably to be dragged with my brother into the sea.” It was a bitter truth.

“I don’t know about that. Hey. Let me see you, okay?”

She set the lantern on the nightstand. Hæra winced. Even such a minor change in illumination was a new adjustment. She rolled over. Like everything else, it hurt, and she groaned.

Madeleine peered at her neck. When they’d gotten back to the cottage, she’d cleaned and disinfected Hæra’s wound and put a bandage over it. “Is it still bleeding? I think I see a red spot. Let’s have a look.”

The underside of the bandage was red with blood. It looked awful to Hæra, but Madeleine said, “It’s not as bad as before.” Then she dressed the wound again, her touch gentle but sure. “We’ll have the nurse here in the morning. Keep your hand on it and apply pressure, like I said before.”

“I couldn’t stay awake.” Hæra pressed down on the bandage and winced. At least it didn’t seem to hurt worse than it would have when she was an Each-uisge. “To answer your question, Jonathan never spoke of what he wanted after death. He just worried about what would happen to me after he was gone.”

Now, in his absence, she and Madeleine looked at each other. Madeleine put her hand on her shoulder again and squeezed.

“He worried about me living for so long and people noticing,” Hæra continued, her throat thick. “He worried about everything that had to do with me not being human. Now I learn that everyone already knew.”

“Not everyone, but…”

“And I’m human now. I’ll get old and die when…”