Chapter 42: The Hum

The coffee was still warm in her hands when the bird flew into the kitchen window.

Not hard. Not the awful thump of a bird that had not seen the glass at all and would have to be quietly buried under the rosemary by the back step. A softer sound, deliberate, almost a knock. The small grey-and-white body landed on the windowsill outside and tilted its head and looked directly at her through the pane.

Isabel set the mug down on the counter.

The bird did not move. Tilted its head the other way. Considered her. The cottage had been full of birds since the morning she arrived, but they had been birds in the trees, birds in the garden, birds going about the small bright business of birds. This one was on the sill of Jean’s kitchen window with the studied stillness of something that had come specifically to look.

Without thinking about it, she lifted her hand, palm flat, and pressed it gently against the inside of the glass.

The bird hopped forward and pressed its small downy chest against the same spot on the other side.

A warmth ran down her arm. Not gold. Something quieter. The faint specific recognition of a creature deciding she was safe.

The whole exchange lasted maybe four seconds. Then the bird tilted its head one final time, lifted off the sill, and was gone in a soft grey flash through the garden.

Isabel stood at the counter for a long moment with her hand still flat against the window, the warm shape of where her palm had been fading slowly out of the glass.

Well, she thought. Alright then.

The coffee was still good. She picked it up, took another sip, and turned to face Jean’s kitchen with the small steady awareness of a woman who had just been bowed to by a wild animal and was not, this morning, going to let it ruin her good mood.

Sun was coming through the kitchen the way it had not yet come through any morning of her stay. Real sun, the kind of unhurried gold that meant the day had decided to be generous. The cottage was very quiet. No phone ringing now. No kettle. No footsteps. Just the slow soft creak of a house full of warm wood breathing in and out, and somewhere on the windowsill in the front room, the soft purr of a creature she had not yet visually located but whose presence was as clear to her this morning as the smell of the coffee in her cup.

The thought of Jean and Mora landed gently. They had taken the Porsche somewhere yesterday afternoon and never come home. There had been no call. No note. The fact that Isabel was not worried about this was, she suspected, a small piece of evidence about the kind of women they were and the kind of mornings they had been having for fifty years. They would turn up. They always turned up. The cottage would tell her if there was anything to be worried about, because the cottage, somewhere in the last three days, had begun to function as a kind of barometer for her, and the cottage was, this morning, perfectly calm.

Her body, as it turned out, was not.

Standing at the counter, sipping her coffee, Isabel became slowly aware of a low warm hum running through her. Not the hum of the cottage. A different one. Hers. Living somewhere in her sternum and radiating out through her ribcage and into her arms and her hips and the soles of her feet, steady and unmistakable, the way a tuning fork hums when something nearby has struck it.

She set the coffee down again and looked at her hands.

The gold was there. Not blazing. Settled. A faint warm shimmer beneath the skin of her palms and the pads of her fingers and, when she turned them over, the inside of her wrists. Steady. The way an ember looks when it has decided not to go out.

Hello, she said, silently, to her own hands.

The hum, in response, deepened by half a note.

She did not know what to do with this. Not yet. There was no manual. There was no person she could call who would know what she was talking about. Brad would have her committed. Tara would call security. Her mother, somewhere in the suburbs of her old life, would tell her to drink more water. The only people she could even imagine asking were a Scottish woman in her seventies who was currently somewhere on the wrong side of the country in a Porsche with a witch in matching white robes, and a cat who had told her, very clearly, the night before, that tonight was not the night for that conversation.

So Isabel did the only thing she could think of.

She listened.

Stood at the counter, both hands on the warm stone, eyes half-closed, and let the hum tell her what it had to tell her. There was no language to it. There was a feel. The feel was more. The feel was yes. The feel was we are awake now. The feel was the soft specific certainty that whatever had begun in the dream the night before had not stopped when the dream ended, and was now, in the bright daylight of Jean’s kitchen on a Wednesday morning, continuing.

The hum was Alexander.

She did not know how she knew this. She knew it the way she had known the smell of her grandmother’s shortbread on the path to a door she had never walked. The way she had known the cat was safe. The way her body had known how to walk in the heels in the dream office. Whatever the gold in her was, it was in him too, and the two of them, having found each other once, were apparently no longer in the habit of fully letting go.

She felt the small flush travel up her neck.

She let it.

The cat, somewhere in the front room, made a soft low sound that was not quite a purr and was, she suspected, the closest thing to laughter he had given her so far.

“Don’t,” she said out loud, to the empty kitchen, smiling.

Wouldn’t dream of it, came the dry reply. Behind her sternum. Right where the hum lived.

She picked her coffee back up and walked, slowly, in her bare feet, into the front room.

The cat was on the back of Jean’s reading chair, exactly where she had not seen him a moment ago, with his tail wrapped neatly around his paws and his eyes catching the morning light in that way they did. The fire was not lit. The room was warm anyway. Sun was coming in through the big front window in long honey-coloured slats, and a small dust mote universe was turning slowly inside each of them.

Jean’s bookshelf was on the far wall. Seven of the books were still slightly out of place from yesterday afternoon’s three-hour campaign to break into the dream realm by force. Isabel walked over to the shelf and straightened them, one by one, the way Jean had folded the quilt at the foot of the bed the first night. Not because she had to. Because the cottage had given her something, and she wanted to give a small piece of it back.

When she got to the seventh book, her fingers paused on the spine.

The book had not been here yesterday.

She knew this with the small bright certainty of a woman who had taken every single book off this shelf the previous afternoon in a rum-fuelled philosophical research project and put them all back. The seventh book was thinner than the others. Older. The leather was darker, almost black, and there was no title on the spine. Just a small symbol pressed into the leather in a pale gold that caught the morning sun the same way her own fingertips caught it.

Two interlocking circles. A small flame inside the place where they overlapped.

Isabel’s throat went dry.

Behind her, very softly, the cat made the low sound again.

Now you’re getting it, he said.

She pulled the book off the shelf and did not, this time, drop it.

.