"Hello?" Jule prompted. "Somewhere safe? A friend's house? Preferably if the friend is a doctor?"
"I don't have any friends," she said.
"I find that hard to believe."
"Stop mocking me. I'm so fed up with people making fun of me because I'm different," she said, frowning.
"That's what you thought I meant?" He chuckled and then coughed. "You're beautiful and courageous. I'd have thought you had tons of friends."
She shot him a look, suspecting he was messing with her. He was serious. Her anger turned to embarrassment.
"You're getting weaker," she said, as aware of his condition as she was his warm body. The bond between them was weakening with him.
"Yeah."
"I think I know a place."
"Don't take me to your father."
"I won't. I kind of owe you. You saved me. Well, you tried anyway."
He muttered in response.
"You're the only one who's ever tried," she added.
"Glad I could almost help."
His head dropped back against the headrest, and she sped up. The familiar path down the coastline passed the Cliffs of Moher and continued for a short distance. She meant what she said; she had no friends, but a long time ago, she'd had one whose family had a summer cottage near the coast. She went there for two summers, until she began turning everything she touched into something else, and her father was forced to pull her out of school at the age of twelve.
Jule began shivering, and she turned up the heat until it was too hot for her to stand. The rain picked up again. Yully reached the turnoff for the cottage and sped as fast as she could through a winding road. It dead-ended at the cottage, surrounded by a stone fence line. She eased into the carport but left the car running.
The cottage was vacant and the windows boarded up for the winter. Yully went to the back door, which she remembered always being open. Even it was locked. She wrapped her hand around the doorknob and turned it from steel into a rag and pushed the door open. She crept in and turned on a light, relieved when it worked.
A pot-bellied stove in the middle of the main room provided the main heat in the two-bedroom room cottage. Wood was stacked beside it, and she turned the book sitting on the coffee table into newspaper to burn. She struck fire with the third match and tossed it into the stove. Newspaper crinkled and crackled.