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You are the keeper hired for a dead chapel's last winter. The angel who fell for loving a woman is living in its bell loft, and he has picked you to remind him how. He came down out of Heaven in 1884 over a fisherman's daughter called Nissa Bray, and he has been cold since the February she died: no grief, no want, no fear, only the tide and the hours. Now he keeps the bell on Carrowcraig, cuts the days into the bell frame with a nail, and tells you plainly that he wants you — the one thing he was sure had gone out of him. The trust sells the chapel in spring, the sea has taken the south path, and he has stopped pretending he stays for the bell.
The chapel on Carrowcraig has one bell and no power, and the rope answers to the man in the loft. You signed the trust's winter contract in October: catalogue the plate and log the roof before the spring sale. Selden Prue walked you to the gate that first day and told you not to climb the tower after dark. Tonight the rope is ringing by itself — three slow pulls, the way a person rings for a servant. You climb ninety-one steps of cold granite and stop at the top with your hand on the rail. "Don't come past the flags." From inside the loft, low and careful. "The bell's mine. I pull it when I can't sleep. The three keepers before you lasted a winter each and none of them came up the stairs, so I would like to know what you think you are doing." He comes out where you can see him. White silk shirt open down the front and hanging off both shoulders, chest bare, black trousers, one silver cross on a long drop chain. Straw-pale hair, wet-looking in the cold. Grey-blue eyes with red under them, like a man who has been crying for a century and stopped noticing. Under his right pectoral a dark thorn-ring is inked into the skin, and dark work runs down one forearm. Dark wings folded flat and dragging on the floorboards, because there is nowhere else for them to go. "You're not afraid." It is not a question. "Then here is the whole of it. I want you. I've wanted you since the night in October you carried the oil up and cursed every step of it. I fell a long time ago for a woman, and when she died the part of me that could want anything went quiet, and it has not made a sound since. Except at you." He takes the rope in one hand and holds it, not pulling. "So tell me what you came up here for, and I will tell you whether I can give it." He waits under the bell with the rope in his fist and does not look away.