The Hunter

“Good. Miss Lena’s calling round here in a while; I’ll ask her to bring you a change. Those smell like smoke.”

Trey pulls her T-shirt neck up to her nose and sniffs. The smell is fierce, black and woody. She decides to keep the T-shirt as it is. She can use it to wrap Brendan’s watch. “Ask her can she bring Banjo as well,” she says.

“And tomorrow,” Cal says, “I’m gonna take you into town and buy you some jeans that cover your damn ankles.”

Trey finds herself grinning. “So I’ll be decent, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Cal says. Trey can hear the unwilling grin rising in his voice, too. “That’s right. You can’t go round showing your ankles in front of God and everybody. You’ll give some little old lady a heart attack.”

“Don’t need new jeans,” Trey says, by reflex. “These’re grand.”

“You give me any shit,” Cal says, “and I’ll stop by the barber while we’re there and get this whole beard shaved off, clean as a whistle. You can say hello to my chin warts.”

“Changed my mind,” Trey tells him. “I wanta meet them. Go for it.”

“Nah,” Cal says. “No point. The weather’s changing. Smell: there’s rain coming.”

Trey raises her head. He’s right. The sky is too dark to see clouds, but the air is stirring against her cheek, cool and damp in her nose, moss and wet stone underlying the flare of smoke. Something is sweeping in from the west with purpose, gathering overhead.

She asks, “Will it put out the fire?”

“Probably, between that and the firefighters. Or at least wet things down till it can’t keep spreading.”

Trey looks up at the mountainside, where Brendan is lying and where she almost joined him. Her chance of finding him, a slim one from the start, is gone now. The fire will have taken any signs she could have spotted; if his ghost was ever there, now it’s a slip of flame, twisting upwards amid smoke and gone into the night sky. She finds, to her surprise, that she’s OK with this. She misses Brendan as much as ever, but the jagged need has gone out of it. With him, too, her footing has changed.

Something light as a midge hits against her cheek. When she touches it, she feels a speck of damp.

“Rain,” she says.

“Yep,” Cal says. “That’ll make the farmers easier in their minds. You want to go inside?”

“Nah,” Trey says. She should be wrecked, but she’s not. The cool air feels good. She feels like she could stay right here all night, till the fire is out or till the morning comes.

Cal nods and rearranges his arms more comfortably on the wall. He texts Lena about Banjo and the change of clothes, and shows Trey the thumbs-up she sends back. The rooks, alert and edgy in their tree, make hoarse comments on the situation and tell each other to shut up.

The line of flame has stretched wider across the horizon, following the dips and rises of the mountains’ crest. The sound of it reaches them very faintly and gentled, like the shell-echo of a faraway ocean. It’s late, but far into the distance on every side, the fields are dotted with the tiny yellow lights of houses. Everyone is awake and keeping vigil.

“ ’S beautiful,” Trey says.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “I guess it is.”

They lean on the wall, watching, as the rain flecks their skin more thickly and the bright outline of the mountains hangs in the night sky.

Acknowledgments

I owe huge thanks to Darley Anderson, the finest ally and champion any writer could have, and to everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Georgia, Rosanna, Rebeka, and Kristina; my wonderful editors, Andrea Schulz and Harriet Bourton, for their near-magical ability to see exactly what this book needed to be and then show me how to get it there; superstar Ben Petrone, Nidhi Pugalia, Bel Banta, Rebecca Marsh, and everyone at Viking US; Olivia Mead, Anna Ridley, Georgia Taylor, Ellie Hudson, Emma Brown, and everyone at Viking UK; Cliona Lewis, Victoria Moynes, and everyone at Penguin Ireland; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Steve Fisher of APA; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro, and Sue Fletcher, who set all this in motion; Aja Pollock, for her eagle-eyed copy edit; Darren Haggar, for a stunner of a cover; Peter Johnson, for rabbit preparation tips; Graham Murphy, for working out what’s not on the telly on a Monday in July; Kristina Johansen, Alex French, Susan Collins, Noni Stapleton, Paul and Anna Nugent, Ann-Marie Hardiman, Oonagh Montague, Jessica Ryan, Jenny and Liam Duffy, Kathy and Chad Williams, and Karen Gillece, for laughs, talks, support, creativity, nights out, freezing our feet on a beach in winter, and all the other essentials; my mother, Elena Lombardi; my father, David French; and, more every single time, my husband, Anthony Breatnach.

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