“Better, we’re the faerie folk,” said Rosie, laughing even harder. “Oh dear—Matt really hasn’t told you, hasn’t he?” And suddenly she stopped laughing.
______
Later, Lucas slipped through the gap in the hedge and Jon was on the other side, waiting for him. He was a soft silhouette in the twilight, hands in pockets, hair blowing around his shoulders. “Hey,” Lucas greeted him.
“Hey,” said Jon. “You okay?”
“Had to get out of there. I, er . . . found out some stuff.”
“Me too.” They looked at each other. “About my father and your mother?”
“Um, yeah, that,” Lucas said awkwardly.
“Let’s walk,” said Jon. They took the thin footpath along Oakholme’s boundary, making for the village. “They told me when I got up. Which was at lunchtime. I don’t think Dad would ever have admitted it if Sapphire hadn’t made him. She’s known for ages, apparently. I bet he’ll put off telling Sam too, but he needn’t think I’m doing it for him.”
“Are you angry?” Lucas’s greatest fear was that Jon would reject him.
“No. Annoyed with my father, that’s all.”
“It’s horrible,” Lucas stated. “I can’t imagine my mother . . .”
“Why not? She’s incredibly pretty.” There was a touch of mischief in Jon’s remark. “Father says my mother knew, but he swears it’s not why she left. He said he’s not proud of what happened, but not ashamed either. Shame is for humans.”
“Right, he’s so ‘not ashamed’ that he had to get drunk first and tell me in the dark,” Lucas sighed.
“At least he did, finally.” Jon smiled. “He and Sapphire are dying to get to know you. How scary is that?”
“It’s weird.”
“The point is, when they told me, I wasn’t surprised,” Jon went on. “It was as if I’d always known. I feel a link with you. We’re brothers.”
Lucas laughed. “Yes, we are.”
“I’m glad, aren’t you? I’ve acquired a brother I can actually get on with. When I go back to college, you should come with me.”
Their walk brought them to high ground above Cloudcroft, the ridge called High Warrens. Below them lay the undulations of Charnwood landscape with outcrops standing rough against a wild sky. Across the valley, they could see the roof of Stonegate Manor, with the crag of Freya’s Crown to its left.
Lucas thought about his parents; a mother he didn’t know anymore, a father who wasn’t really his. He put his head back, feeling that a gust of wind would take him into the sky, weightless. “I feel strange,” he said. “It’s as if I don’t belong anywhere. Except for Rosie, I could walk away from the lot of them.”
“They don’t matter anymore,” said Jon. “There’s just you and me now. We have far more important things to do.”
Jon took his hand, pulling him bodily into the Dusklands. In the oceanic light, they entered a glade of birches with a wide tree stump in the center and a steep slope curved like a horseshoe to one side. The trees moved fluidly, like underwater corals. Jon began to climb, bending now and then to investigate wild plants in the grass. Lucas followed him in a dream, thinking, We’re brothers, linked by seed.
Jon’s ghostly, graceful figure cast a gradual spell over him. Suddenly he saw why Rosie was in thrall to him, albeit in a different way. With his slim form, long legs and rippling fall of hair, he seemed the mysterious essence of an Otherworld that was tantalizingly out of reach.
“Did you know that plants gathered in the Dusklands have different properties from those in the surface world?” Jon turned to him, displaying a domed black toadstool. The surface was as velvety-delicate as moleskin, with a ragged hem drooping over purple gills.
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’ve experimented with all sorts.” Jon leaned on a tree, one foot up on a mossy stone. “Ever wondered why I was so popular at school? I always had the best drugs.” He grinned, teeth white in the gloom. “If we can’t break through the Gates physically, we should at least be able to send our mind and essence through.”
“Lawrence ever caught you?”
“Not yet. Sam did and went nuts, but he can’t stop me. It’s our birthright, Luc. My father doesn’t own the inner realms. We’re shamans and we can find our own way in.” He tore off a piece of fungus and held it out teasingly. “So, are you up for trying again?”
Lucas looked at him and said nothing. Fear snaked through him.
“Humans are useless visionaries, and I’m not much better,” Jon went on, “but you’re special. I know you can break through, given the right substance, the right guidance. I believe in you. Our secret?”
Luc took a deep breath. Then he peeled off fear like a cape and threw it away. He wanted this. He wanted his new brother to accept him, wanted to prove to Jon that he was courageous and would not let him down. The nascent secret between them was the most wonderful thing he’d ever known. The world trembled with magic.
Looking straight into Jon’s eyes, he accepted the purple-black flesh from him. “Dream agaric?”
“This one’s called devil’s nightcap,” Jon answered with a smile as Lucas tried the spongy bitterness on his tongue and, without flinching, slowly chewed and swallowed.
_______
After the storm, nothing was the same again. It passed, but the truth had pressed their world into a different, spikier shape.
Jessica loved Auberon, and yet she’d slept with someone else. While Rosie was still a toddler, her mother, for reasons only she understood, had turned away from Auberon and twined herself around cold, mad Lawrence. Lawrence and Jessica naked, gleaming like marble in a wash of iced moonlight, joined and thrusting . . . Rosie cringed in embarrassment at her own imagination. Why, why?
All was peaceful again, but the buried tension was like a physical force that wanted to push her out. So Rosie would take long walks around the village at twilight, climbing until she stood shivering on High Warrens, hunched against the wind. From here she could see all of Cloudcroft, a sprawl of houses strung along lanes that wound in all directions up into the Charnwood hills. The village was an inky blur with flecks of light; the woods and hills indistinct blue-grey masses. Tonight the sky hung low, painted orange by the lights of Leicester, Loughborough and Ashvale around the horizon.
She was worried she’d said too much to Alastair. Three large vodkas and she’d begun to let slip words like Aetherial. Alastair had been an attentive listener; the attention was flattering, when she got so little from Jon. Her concern was that Matthew would tear her to shreds for saying too much.
She took a breath. The air tasted harsh, like metal, the night cold, wild and brooding. She could feel the closed Gates. Couldn’t define how she felt it exactly, but it was like a pressure, a blind spot in the vision, nothingness where something rich and solid should have been.
The great festivals that her parents had enjoyed were no more. Small groups of Aetherials still gathered to mark those occasions, and at the annual Cloudcroft Show each May, they still held a carnival-style dance called the Beast Parade—but the climax, the ceremonial entry to the Spiral, was missing. These events were no more than wistful tributes to what had been. What they felt like, Rosie thought, was arriving at a party with gifts but never being let through the closed door.
Fear blew through her. We need Elysion, her mother had said. Brewster the bull had starved for lack of it; it broke her heart to think she’d never see it . . . and then she remembered the darkness in her father’s eyes when he said that he believed Lawrence. The Great Gates had become their barricade against some hideous, unspeakable threat. Oh, but to step into the Otherworld, to face the danger regardless . . .
The wind grew stronger and she tasted rain. Double-wrapping her scarf and pulling on gloves, she began to descend. Trees lashed around her. As she reached the first of the houses and the sanctuary of streetlight, there was a blackout. The world turned to swirling rain and darkness.
Rosie swore and hurried o
n, barely able to make out the footpath beneath her feet. She felt spooked, disoriented. She couldn’t tell if she was walking in the surface world or Dusklands, and there was some creature snarling in the storm . . .
Right by her ear.
She froze. All around her was boiling cloud with lightning flickering inside. Then the cloud split like a fruit and out fell two demonic, spiny-tailed beasts, screaming and growling and tearing into each other with fangs and claws. Yellow fires flickered around them.
Rosie scrambled up a grassy bank that ran between the footpath and the houses. There was an ash tree there and she pressed behind the trunk, staring as the creatures wrestled. She saw rain and blood glistening on their scales. They were fighting, with yellow-eyed hatred, to the death.
All right, she told herself. I’m definitely in the Dusklands. Just have to step sideways into the surface world . . . She couldn’t do it.
Surely the creatures’ battle must rouse the whole village. Their screeches were deafening. One demon fell and the other crouched over it, piercing the armored throat of its enemy with curved claws. The screeching ceased. The victor’s tail lashed, scraping the gravel of the footpath and gouging the turf.
The eerie fires vanished. Now Rosie couldn’t see a thing and she daren’t move. Was the demon still there in the dark, raging and hungry? She saw the faintest hint of light sliding over rain-wet, scaly haunches as the victor sloped away from the body of its rival.
Streetlights and house lights flicked back on, making Rosie jump. She looked down at the scene of the fight. There was nothing there.
“Fine,” Rosie murmured under her breath, head down into the rain as she ran the rest of the way home. “All right. This must be what Matthew means. Walk in the Dusklands and we start seeing things we shouldn’t. We start to go mad. So he’s turning his face against the Otherworld and living on the surface, to save himself from insanity. Fine. I get it.”
Even their own garden seemed threatening tonight and she hurried along the front path as if specters were waiting in the greenery to ambush her. The warm lights of Oakholme spilled out. As she put her key in the lock, a pale hand came out of the night and grabbed her arm.
Rosie let out a short, heartfelt yell.
“Rosie, I’m sorry,” a small voice whispered. “It’s only me.”
A pallid face moved into the porch light. It was Faith. She was soaking wet, hair plastered down, rain trickling down her thin face.
“Oh, shit,” Rosie gasped. “Wait until my heart starts beating again. God.” She took a breath. “What’s up, mate? Are you okay?”
Faith was plainly not okay. Her eyes were wide with trauma, a thousand years past crying. “My parents,” she whispered. “They had a fight, the worst ever . . . The police and ambulance came and . . . I think my father’s dead.” Faith stumbled forward and Rosie caught her. “I can’t go back there, Rosie. Can I stay with you, just for tonight? I’m so sorry to be a nuisance. Only tonight.”
7
Self-Defense
Faith stayed.
Neither of her parents was dead, but after a spell in hospital, there were police reports and restraining orders, separation, her two sisters taken into foster care, the crumbling family demolished. Faith, although shell-shocked, was old enough to decide her own fate. She took refuge at Oakholme.
Soon she became Jessica’s shadow, always running around dusting, washing up, offering to mow the lawn or shop. Her eagerness to help was painful, but no one could stop her. Every single day Faith had to show them her gratitude for their love. When they asked her if she wouldn’t like to try for university, she backed away like a frightened horse. She wasn’t ready, she insisted. In her family, any hint of ambition had been mocked and crushed.
After a while, Faith got a part-time job in the village post office and seemed content with that. To pay her own way—even though the Foxes didn’t need her to—was essential to her pride.
Rosie, meanwhile, began college. The school of horticulture was in the Cotswolds, based in an old stately home surrounded by magnificent gardens, with orchards, vegetable plots, acres of greenhouses. There she shared a cottage on the estate with four other students. Although it was drafty, basic and in the middle of nowhere, she enjoyed her new life. Losing herself in work, she could exorcise recent memories.
She tried not to think about Jon. She’d bumped into him and explained that she was going away and lightheartedly suggested they write to each other; and Jon had agreed yes, that was a great idea. She’d written one letter—probably giving too much away—but he’d never replied.
Meanwhile she dated a handful of men and had pleasant sex with two of them. Each reminded her of Jon, but neither was him, so in the end it was worse than nothing. Virginity lost, experience gained, fine—but not with the man she’d dreamed of. No one moved her heart.
One lover was so upset when she dropped him that he staged a protest outside the cottage, armed with roses. Rosie watched him from behind voile curtains. She wondered if he saw her as coldhearted, ethereal and untouchable, regarding his pained longing from behind her windows without a trace of compassion. In other words, did he see her as she saw Jon?
It was a relief when he gave up.
When she visited home, it was lovely having Faith there, like a sister. Matthew and Alastair were often around and the four of them would go to the Green Man together. Alastair was easy company and kept the jokes going when Matthew was moody.
It was always a battle of wills between them. Matthew telling her how to behave and who to see, trying to control her as he always had; Rosie blithely defying him. When he’d had a few beers, he would put his arm around her and tell her what a great guy Alastair was, causing Alastair to turn red in embarrassment. Meanwhile, Faith would gaze at Matthew with the sort of look Rosie reserved for Jon—while Matt sat equally oblivious, managing to bask in her admiration yet ignore it at the same time.
“I had to tell Alastair about Luc,” Matt had told Rosie on her first trip home from college. “Didn’t want to, but it would be worse if he found out later.”
“Oh, right.” So Alastair hadn’t revealed that she’d already told him. She mentally awarded him a gold star for discretion.
“But let’s keep the weird side out of it, shall we? Humans get funny ideas about us. They either think we’re delusional, or they get star-struck.”
“What does Alastair know about us, then?” Rosie asked, desperately affecting innocence.
“Same as most people in Cloudcroft; eccentric family traditions, sort of thing. No big deal.”
She laughed. “Fine. Is that what you told him?”
Matthew’s eyes sparked with anger. “Have you any idea what I’d give not to be forced to explain my family? I don’t want his face rubbed in it, that’s all.”
“You want him to think we’re ordinary, normal and not odd in any way?”
“Exactly.”
“But we are!” Rosie exclaimed. “If he wants the flaming Addams family, let him take a stroll up to Stonegate Manor.”
Matthew grimaced. “You said it.”
“Look, Matt, he probably knows more than you realize. I know I’ve said things in unguarded moments. He’s still around. You won’t scare him off that easily.”
“Fine, I’m just pointing out that he’s a good mate and I want to keep it that way. His last girlfriend gave him hell, sleeping around and doing drugs. He was close to a breakdown over it. He deserves better than that.”
“I’m sure he does,” she said, pointedly ignoring the implication. She felt relaxed in Alastair’s company because he never tried to make a clumsy pass at her. He was just Matt’s friend, as reassuring as a teddy bear. “Hey, you’re not trying to get him and Faith together, are you?”
Matthew rolled his eyes. “Send me a postcard when you wake up, Rose.”
Rosie thought Lucas and Faith would make a sweet couple, both shy and kind-natured. However, as her first and second years at college slipped by, no one beha
ved as they were supposed to. Faith still worshipped Matthew, while Lucas spent more and more time at Stonegate Manor.
Since the revelation Luc had grown distant. It worried her. If she questioned him, he would simply smile and slip away. Rosie was perhaps the only one who could have enticed him back to Oakholme; but, selfishly, she didn’t try too hard. Lucas’s newfound friendship offered her chances to see Jon.
“It’s what I feared,” Jessica said softly to her daughter one day. “That the moment he found out who his father was, they’d take him away from us. It’s exactly what I dreaded.”
A chill breeze blew into Jessica’s face, laden with the scent of wet woodlands. She and Phyll and a handful of other Aetherials were gathered around a hollow tree a few miles from Cloudcroft. Tea lights in green glass holders made an eerie glow in the dark. It was the summer solstice; even though the way to the Otherworld was barred, they still kept alive the tradition of gathering around an ancient portal on such festivals. It was their quiet way of keeping the flame of hope alive.
Jessica looped the albinite bracelet over her middle finger and held it up. In the Dusklands the stones glowed violet, but there was no flash of scarlet or green to indicate the presence of an open way. She sighed. She didn’t need Elfstones to tell her that the portal was still sealed.
The auburn-haired Lyon women and Maeve Tulliver with her sad dark eyes—all looked resigned. Led by Phyll, they began to sing softly,
All the demons of Dumannios
All Maliket’s fire and Melusiel’s flood,
All the stern towers of Tyrynaia
Cannot keep me from you, my love, Elysion.
As if I lay down with a lover, I will lie down in Elysion
And drink your sweet dew . . .
Jessica mouthed the words, not trusting her voice. She felt overwhelming sadness. She and Phyll had walked mountains in Wales and Scotland, landscapes as high and airy as Sibeyla; they’d explored forest glades and sea caves, springs and ancient paths, every place they knew that had been a minor portal. Each one was dead, sealed shut along with the Great Gates. There was no leakage. In one way it was a good thing, proving that the system protected them. But it was also very hard to bear.
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