Then the world seemed to stop, and pulse, and wash away into a glorious warm light. Lucas felt his heart beating slow and heavy, like the heart of the Earth. The pain of his wound eased to throbbing soreness. The light, softening to blue, entranced him.
“We’re in the Dusklands again,” said Jon. “You really scared me. What did you see?”
“I don’t know. Everything. Terrible.”
“Tell me.”
Lucas tried. “The doe told the story, but it was real. The white demon cut the rope—he was in the boat with the gods. They were bird-heads like Lawrence.”
“You’re making absolutely no sense,” Jon said gently. He began to craft a joint, shaving blackdrop resin along its length.
Lucas took a deep breath. He felt distant from the terror but it was still there, a motionless shape in the corner of his vision. “I fell into the Abyss. That’s why I was screaming.” He rubbed at his breastbone, wincing as he found a tear in his T-shirt and raw flesh underneath.
Jon looked up, frowning. “God, Luc, what is that?”
Lucas pulled his coat open and raised his T-shirt. On the breastbone was a red-raw circle, two inches across. To his distorted senses it seemed a bomb crater. “I don’t know. It’s as sore as hell.”
“It’s only on the skin. How did you get it?”
“Malikala shot me.” He laughed. “No. That’s crazy. I must have fallen over. I—I saw the rebellion of Jeleel against Malikala, like I was actually there . . .”
Jon was staring intently at him. “You really went through,” he said, soft with awe. “It worked. Next time, if we get the dose right—”
“No, no.” Lucas felt rising panic. “Never again.”
“I don’t mean now.” Jon lit the joint, took a drag and offered it. “Let’s chill and talk it over.”
Lucas, who rarely lost his temper, became violently angry. From the burnout of drugs or fear, he didn’t know. He struck the joint out of Jon’s hand. “Are you trying to fucking kill me?”
“What?” Jon flinched back, astonished.
“Keep it all away from me! I’ve had enough.” He pointed wildly at the rocks of Freya’s Crown. “Your father’s right. There’s something terrible in there. If we disturb it, we could all die—the world could end!”
Alarmed, Jon raised both hands as if to calm a startled horse. “Luc, cool down.”
“Am I still not making sense? Lawrence knows what he’s doing! There’s some appalling force behind the Gates. I don’t know what the hell it is, but the Gates keep it still, like a dam. If he opens them, it will wake and surge out like a flood. He was right to lock them. He had no choice. Are you satisfied?”
Jon stared at him. In the silence, Lucas looked up and saw the Gates in their true form, a great, raw monolith. All his rage and emotion rushed out like fire and hit the stone. He couldn’t stop it. The ground trembled. He saw flame running over the surface like ignited petrol, runes flashing in its wake. He felt heavy segments of rock grinding against each other, shifting an inch or two before juddering to a halt. He saw a thin dark split down the rock face that wasn’t there before.
Lucas held his breath, trying to grasp what he’d experienced. Hallucination. He closed his eyes and when he opened them, the crag had returned to its usual self. It contained not one crack but hundreds along its sheared planes.
They were in the surface world. A colorless, dewy dawn.
Jon hadn’t noticed anything; all his attention was on Lucas. “I wasn’t trying to poison you,” Jon said, reaching out to clasp his arm. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I’m shaken up.”
“I see that,” Jon began, but his voice was drowned. A towering, raging figure came out of nowhere, his overcoat flapping like crow’s wings.
“What are you doing? What the hell have you done?”
Lawrence.
Intent on each other, they hadn’t seen their father storming up the hill. The shock reawakened Lucas’s terror and sent it spiraling like a flock of birds. Lawrence seized them both by the scruff of the collar, like boys caught thieving, lifting them almost off their feet. Then he threw them hard onto the ground.
Lucas’s drugged heart stumbled, refusing to keep up with his panic. He was in the Abyss again, drowning in nightmares. “Who would dare to interfere with the Gates?” Lawrence ranted above him. “After all I’ve said, all my warnings. How dare you?”
“We haven’t done anything,” came Jon’s voice, high with alarm. “Dad, honestly—we were only talking.”
“Don’t lie to me! What were you doing here?”
Lucas climbed to his feet, saw Lawrence hauling Jon up by his jacket lapels, clutching handfuls of his Indian shirt with them. Jon stared sideways at Lucas, eyes huge and pleading. “Dad, we were only—”
Lawrence’s face was frozen stone, as furious and heartless as the frost demon or the giant in the Abyss. “What’s the matter with you? Are you drunk, or drugged?” He shook Jon. “You reek of smoke. You think it’s a game to come here and weave your foolish twig tokens? Did you actually think you could go through? How dare you try, how dare you even think of it? You’re going to tell me everything and, by the gods, you’re going to be sorry you disobeyed me and set foot on this sacred place.” Lawrence’s head swiveled slowly to take in Lucas. “Both of you.”
His expression was the most horrifying thing Lucas had ever seen. He began to back away, stumbling on the rough ground. The growing impulse flared. His nerve broke and, in blind panic, he turned and fled.
_______
The house was a wedding gift from Auberon. A perfect three-bedroom detached Fox Home on the edge of Ashvale. With a small garden front and back, it was set on a curving road arranged to capture the feel of a charming old village. Ideal start to a new life.
Rosie knew she was spoiled rotten. Other couples struggled for years to afford the most basic home. She felt guilty that she couldn’t love it.
Each day she drove to the office with Alastair and worked between him and Matthew under Auberon’s benevolent eye. It was a pleasant life and she drifted through it as if sedated. She felt cocooned between husband and brother; simply letting it happen because it was so safe and warm.
Sometimes too warm. Hot, stifling. She was struggling to burst out of a too-tight skin; but when she looked for the cause of her distress, the world was serenely ordinary. No one was imprisoning her. She was free to walk out of the door and see anyone she chose at any time. Then she’d wonder if she was going insane.
Most weeks she was on site, working on the gardens she’d designed. That was her escape. Yet she never touched the Dusklands while landscaping these new, bare plots of earth. She’d walked along golden beaches with Alastair, soporific with heat, and never sensed the Dusklands there, either. They were closed, gone, as if she’d become human; and the worst thing was that she couldn’t talk to Alastair about it, couldn’t turn to him and say, “Is it me, or do you feel it too?”
On honeymoon she had longed for home, but when they came back, it seemed the Dusklands had turned sideways like a sheet of paper, folded away and vanished.
Married to a human, banished from the faerie realm? That was how it felt.
Alone in the new house, she would walk around searching for a taste or scent of the Dusklands, for hidden rooms to appear as they did at Oakholme, for her secret tree and mystical fiery lights. The rooms, however, stayed solid and prosaic, as though sneering at her search. She couldn’t bring herself to decorate the plain white walls. That would feel like surrendering to the house.
Alastair, of course, was oblivious. She knew that if he became aware of her behavior, he would quite reasonably think she’d gone mad.
There was almost a hint of Dumannios in the atmosphere . . . not even that, because Dumannios at least had a malign energy. This house had nothing. It was dead.
And then, one Saturday morning, she realized what was wrong.
“Can you feel it, Dad?” She’d asked Auberon t
o come round while Alastair was at rugby practice. “Or rather, not feel it?”
At work he was very much the boss in his suit; but today, in causal trousers and earth-brown sweater, he was her father again. She followed as he went from room to room, pausing in each one to consider the atmosphere. At least he was taking her seriously. He looked carefully over the whole house, then said, “Any chance of a coffee?”
As they sat together in the small bright kitchen, Auberon asked, “Well, what do you feel is the problem?”
“I don’t want you think I’m ungrateful,” she said hurriedly. “It’s not that at all; we like the house, it’s great. But Dad, people buy Fox Homes because they walk in and it feels like home. That’s your magic. You bring the earthly, homely part of the Otherworld into the building, and even humans feel it and fall in love. But it’s not here. It’s because the Gates are closed, isn’t it? The magic’s failing.”
He put his large hand over hers. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to go out of business.” He smiled, but his eyes were serious. “Selling houses isn’t sorcery. It’s all about design and materials. We mimic that feel for human buyers, it’s true, and they fall for it, but I can’t create actual magic for them. Rosie, are you sure it’s the house?”
“How do you mean?”
“This is all new for you, love. It’s only been two months. It’s bound to take time to settle in.”
“Of course,” she said. “I miss Oakholme. I took the Dusklands for granted. It didn’t matter that the actual Gates were closed, because I couldn’t miss the deeper realms if I’d never been there.”
Auberon nodded. He was the one person who made her feel safe without stifling her. “But we bring the Dusklands in ourselves,” he answered. “I can’t build them into a house, love; either they seep in or they don’t, rather like a stray cat sensing where it’s welcome.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “So a human in the house might be a barrier?”
“Perhaps. An Aetherial might be, too, if she was unhappy. Rosie, is anything bothering you?”
“No! No. Dad . . .” She caught a breath and was on the point of spilling it all out.
That nothing felt right and she’d made a mistake, living with Alastair was like rubbing along with a friend, comfortable enough but that didn’t mean you wanted to live and sleep and eat and work with them and because her life was so perfect on the surface, she had nothing to struggle against and that made her feel trapped and if she loved Alastair why was she so numb and indifferent to everything, why was she sleepwalking through what should have been her life . . .
“Dad, I, er . . .”
The phone rang, making her jump. She went to answer it and Faith was on the other end, sounding nervous and too cheerful, as she did when something was wrong. “Rosie, can we meet up sometime? I can’t tell you on the phone . . .”
“Course, what is it?”
A soft sigh. “About Matt . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Is he okay? Is it urgent? Only Dad’s here and . . .”
“No, no, not urgent at all. I just need to talk something over. It doesn’t matter, really.”
“Yes, it does,” Rosie said firmly. “I’ll call you back later, okay?”
When she returned to Auberon, the moment for confession had passed. “Sorry, Dad,” she said. “It’s just . . . I can’t stop thinking that we should have paid you for the house. You’re too generous.”
“Nonsense. If I can’t give my daughter a gift, what can I do? Let’s hear no more about it.” He patted her shoulder. “Give yourself time to settle in, Rosie. And any problems, don’t hesitate.”
After Auberon had left, she headed towards the phone, meaning to call Faith back. Just as she touched the receiver, someone knocked at the front door. She opened it, and Lucas came spilling through like a wraith.
He was dressed completely in black with a long overcoat pulled around him. Underneath it he was hunched and shivering like a man caught in a storm. “Luc?” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you.” He looked jumpy, haggard and exhausted.
“Come in, come in.” She closed the door and pulled him into the front room, all thoughts of Faith flying out of her mind. “Dad was here a minute ago . . .”
“I know. I waited until he’d gone. He can’t hear this.” He collapsed on the sofa.
“Why not? You look awful.” Suspicion flared. “Have you been with Jon?”
“We’ve had a massive row with Lawrence, Jon and me. He’s going to kill us.”
“Lawrence? Why?”
He closed his eyes and shivered. Briskly, Rosie prised his coat from him, finding it damp with mud and grass. He sighed shakily. “We were at Freya’s Crown again. Lawrence caught us. He went absolutely crazy. I panicked and ran for it, jumped on a bus.”
“Oh, Luc!” She clasped his shoulder. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No,” he said, touching her arm in return. “It wasn’t the shouting. It was the look in his eyes.” He rested his head back, skin bleached against the blackness of his hair. He looked like an ethereal black-and-white image from an anti-drugs poster.
Sitting beside him, she asked, “When did you start seeing Jon again?”
“Yesterday.”
“For heaven’s sake,” she sighed. “You were fine, all the time you kept away. Now you’re with him for one night and you look like death!”
“Yeah, you told me so. God, I hope he’s okay. I should have stayed, but I was so scared . . . You know how there’s this light in your head that should come on but won’t, for some reason?”
“Oh, yes,” said Rosie. “I know that one. Please tell me there weren’t drugs involved.” Instinct had told her long ago what Jon’s shivering and shadow-haunted eyes had meant. She hadn’t wanted to admit it. “Oh, Luc!”
He looked away. “Not street drugs, I told you, only Duskland stuff.”
“Natural doesn’t equal harmless! Christ, you could have poisoned yourself!”
“I know that,” he flared back. “We thought the risk was worth taking. Shamans have always done it, Jon said. It was to see through the Gates.”
“And did you?”
He paused. Slowly he unbuttoned his black shirt and pulled up the T-shirt beneath to reveal his chest. On the pale and hairless skin was a disk of blistered flesh, lividly red and weeping. “I went through,” he said hoarsely. “I came back with this.”
She was staring. “That looks sore. What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Before her curious fingertip could reach him, he pulled his shirt down again, wincing as fabric touched the wound. “Every time I’m with Jon he pulls me into this nightmare.”
“That time you were ill at his party?”
“That was the first time, yes.”
“God, I might have known,” she exclaimed.
“I believed in him. He’s so compelling, it took me forever to see what a problem he’s got.” In response to her questioning look, he went on, “Aetheric blackdrop, it’s a resin he cooks up from the sap of Duskland poppies. Makes all your problems float away, like opium. He said if it was good enough for nineteenth-century poets, it was perfect for us.”
“Well, that sounds romantic and every bit as nasty.” She drew up her feet and sat cross-legged, holding on to her toes. “Is he an addict? Are you?”
“He said our bodies are more resilient than humans’, so it’s easier to stop—if we want to. It makes all the pain go away . . .” His dark head drooped. “I stopped, but he won’t. I feel sorry for him, really.”
“When he came to the cottage about Sam, I thought he was all pale and shaky because his brother was in prison. What kind of idiot am I?”
“One with a decent heart,” Lucas put in.
“Great, my supposed soul mate and your brother—You could have said no.”
Lucas’s dark eyes flashed. “Like you’d have said no to him? He didn’t force me, I wanted to—to prove I had the guts to travel with him.
”
“Doesn’t sound like he’s going anywhere,” she said bitterly.
He took her hand and held it hard. “He was like some mystical shaman with all the answers. I didn’t want to let him down. Last night was horrendous—I saw things so real, so horrible . . . When I came out of it, I looked at Jon and realized: The reason he wants to escape through the Gates and the reason he uses drugs is the same. He’s empty inside. And he was taking me with him. This morning I looked at him and thought, I can’t go back to this. We’ll both be dead in a gutter within a year.”
Lucas wept, head turned away from her. She reached for him and drew his face into her shoulder. “Don’t. He’s not worth it,” she said.
“But you love him.”
“No, I don’t, Luc. Not anymore.”
“So why are you crying?”
“I’m crying for you, idiot,” she said.
He pulled away from her, sat wiping his cheeks with his hand until she reached for a box of tissues and handed one to him. “There’s this fantasy that when you meet your soul mate, you’ll know,” she said. “When I saw Jon I thought I knew, but I was so wrong. And it’s nothing to do with his behavior. If he’d loved me back, no doubt I’d have let him get away with murder.”
“Like I have?” Lucas put in.
“Yes, dear, like you have. Instead I had a lucky escape. We saw through him in the end, and it hurts.” Luc nodded. He closed his eyes in a brief, sharp expression of pain. She said gently, “D’you want to tell me about this vision?”
“Yes. No. It was . . . It seemed real, but . . .” He gave a violent shudder. “I just want to forget it, Ro. Any chance of a drink and a shower?”
She sent him to the bathroom, made coffee. When he came back, in a shirt and baggy jeans of Alastair’s, he was calm. “Jon’s not all bad,” he said. “He’s had . . . tough things to deal with. I shouldn’t have left him with Lawrence. I hope he’s all right.”
Looking up, Rosie saw a movement outside the window, a haunted face looking in at her. She gave a small gasp. “I think you’ll find he is.”
Jon was on the doorstep, a terrified refugee. He had his arms wrapped around himself and kept glancing over his shoulder. He smelled of the outdoors, of damp grass and bonfires. “Is Lucas here?”
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