by Mike Shevdon
I placed the photographs of Helen and Debbie on one side and returned to the pictures of Trudy and Gillian. I'd started with five young women who were missing. I had Karen, who was living in Hull with her husband, Helen, who was a nursing mother, and Debbie, the party girl. Even if no one knew where they were, they were OK, and that was all that was important. As Greg had said, you had to figure out what people needed before you tried to help them. If Helen and Debbie didn't want their families to know where they were, then maybe they had their reasons. They were young women, not children.
That left me with two who were still missing. I looked up into the mirror. The bags under my eyes spoke of too many late nights and early mornings, but there was one more thing I could try. I placed my hand gently on the mirror and whispered softly into it.
"Alex?"
The glass cooled and clouded again, bringing a stillness into the room. No sound emerged, no hint of space or location, just deep silence. The glass under my hand chilled and moonlight crept into it, until it glowed from within. Still no clue emerged, but I knew she was there somewhere. With Gillian there had been a sense of dissipation, of dilution beyond any ability to hold the link. This was different. I couldn't reach my daughter, but I knew she was there. I dropped my hand again before my unconscious desire to find her intensified the connection and set off alarms as it had before. I would find her. It was just a matter of time.
It meant something, though. It meant that the two missing women were not unconscious, or somewhere in a coma, or protected from me. I couldn't find them because they weren't there to be found.
That thought stayed with me while I collected the pictures, replaced the bowl of pot-pourri and went back out into the church. I carefully placed the photos back in the positions they had occupied and, checking I was leaving everything as I'd found it, I locked the door behind me and returned through the darkened streets to my room at the Dolphin. The night was quiet. As far as I could tell, no one saw me leave or return, if indeed anyone cared.
Finally done for the day, I undressed and brushed my teeth and crawled into bed. With the light out, the glow from the window reflected a rectangle of orange on to the wall opposite. I thought of Blackbird, sharing watches throughout the night, surrounded by iron horseshoes, listening for any noise that might be an unwanted visitor, knowing that, by the time they heard it, it might already be too late.
My mind drifted to thoughts of Karen, tucked up with Ahmed above the cafe. Was she happy? It wasn't fair to have to choose between your family and your husband, but then life wasn't fair. I had found myself liking Karen, perhaps because she'd made her choice and was determined to be happy with it. A glimpse into Debbie's life and the contrast couldn't be more vivid. The quiet contemplation and study of the Qur'an were a long way from the pounding music and adrenalin rush of the dancefloor. What time would it be before Debbie made it home? Maybe after first light? If that was her choice, did it make it any less valid?
Was Helen happy? Had anyone known she was pregnant? Is that why she'd disappeared so suddenly, faced with a situation she felt unable to share with anyone? Did she wonder whether she could ever come home? If it were me, it wouldn't matter. An unwanted pregnancy was a serious matter and would affect the lives of more than just the mother and the baby, but it could be accommodated. It was nothing like the hopeless empty loss of a daughter that wouldn't or couldn't be found. Then again, I knew from past experience that not everyone felt the way I did. For some people the public disgrace of an unexpectedly pregnant daughter meant more to them than their child's safety and happiness, an attitude I found incomprehensible. Still, I knew it happened, the parents whose attitude and actions harmed the girl, the baby and ultimately themselves. Was that what Helen feared?
The fey were more pragmatic about such things. They had so few children now that every babe was treasured beyond sense or reason, except by the Untainted. Fey like Raffmir believed that children who were half-breeds, mixtures of fey and human heritage, were an abomination, an affront to nature and a pollution of their racial purity. They thought that humans with fey ancestry would be the downfall of their race, their bloodlines diluted until it made no difference who was fey and who was human. They had tried to prevent the mixing of the races through diplomacy, failed, and then tried to kill all the half-breeds in one fateful night. They failed, and as a result Altair had taken them into exile to another world, an exile he was now trying to end though negotiation.
But how could he? In order to return, the Untainted would have to accept the existence of the gifted, those humans who had, directly or indirectly, inherited the genes of the Feyre. Either that or the rest of the courts would have to abandon their children to a massacre, something I could never see happening. It was a stalemate, so why were they here? What could they possibly hope to achieve? The Untainted would no more accept the sharing of bloodlines with humans than humanity could accept the sharing of their bloodlines with animals.
That thought brought back the mewling, whining cry that had roused Helen from sleep. It was an animal noise. It was a noise I would have to get used to again, once my own baby was born. Feed one end and wipe the other; that was the way it went. I remembered the sleep-broken nights when Alex was tiny. At the time it seemed as if it went on forever but, looking back, it had flashed past. Before I knew it she was walking, talking, running and playing, from teddy bears and ponies to boy bands in the blink of an eye. I was beginning to think she didn't need me any more. Then she was snatched from me.
I would find her. I would.
I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. Bruised and exhausted, sleep should have claimed me, but the images of the young women were there every time I closed my eyes. Each time it ended with Gillian. The way she leaned across just as the camera flashed, capturing that moment of unconscious grace, preserving a tableau in two dimensions. In the morning I would have to find a way to tell Greg what I had discovered, but I would leave that problem for later. Maybe he would know how to tell Gillian's and Trudy's families what they needed to know?
But even if Greg told them, how would they know it was true? I knew what it was to be told of a death without the evidence of my own eyes – without proof. Even if he told them, would they believe him? The anger at what had happened to Gillian, to Trudy and to Alex, welled up in me, making my heart pound in my ears and banishing sleep. My thoughts returned to Blackbird and my unborn son, and I started again.
How many times my thoughts travelled that circle, I couldn't say, but sleep must have come eventually because I knew I was dreaming.
It was always cold here, yet I didn't feel cold; certainly it was nothing like the bone-chilling ache that Solandre had induced in me to feed from my life force when she trapped me here. Naked, I walked along the path, brushing fingers of pine branches that only moved as I stirred them, the faint scent of resin hanging in the air as I passed. No breeze ever stirred this place.
Looking up, I saw the black sky freckled with stars. They hung there without blinking, like pinpricks in the veil of night, silent watchers of all that transpired here. Beneath my feet, layers of hushed pine needles muffled my tread as I walked between the trees. The path was outlined in moon-shadow where no moon ever shone. All was dark, yet I could see away from the path that the trunks clustered together until there was no space to squeeze between them.
The path widened, as it always did, opening out into a glade surrounded by tangled briars as thick as ropes, spiked with thorns an inch long and wickedly barbed. I hesitated at the boundary, but it was already too late. By the time I looked behind me the path had vanished. The thorns had closed around me and I was trapped.
In the centre of the glade were clothes – a shirt of black silk, trousers of peach-soft black cotton. There were soft leather boots for my feet and silver rings for my fingers. I dressed, but slipped the rings into my pocket. I was wary of accepting gifts if I didn't know who the giver was.
I walked to the centre. It was bigger than I
remembered and the ground rose so that all I could see about me was thorns and trees. The sky formed a bowl above me, echoing the ground beneath it.
"Where?" The voice was behind me and I spun around.
A figure was standing at the edge of the thorns. Her hair was short and spiky and she was slightly overweight. I could see this because she was naked. Her skin was pale in the starlight and it made her breasts look full and heavy. She was wearing dark eye make-up and her lips were stained purple, contrasting oddly with her naked state, as if she'd just got undressed and had yet to clean off her make-up. Suddenly conscious of her nakedness, she cupped her arms around her breasts, failing to conceal the bush of pubic hair between her legs.
"Where am I?
I walked slowly towards her, not wanting to cause alarm.
She watched me. "Who are you?" she asked.
I already knew who she was. I had been looking at her photograph, but the accent confirmed it.
"My name is Niall, and you are Debbie."
She looked around and then back at me.
"Niall," she said, as if testing the name on her tongue. "I like your shirt."
"Don't you want to know how I know your name?" I asked her.
She shook her head, "No, don't be daft. You're in my dream. Of course you know my name."
"This isn't your dream. It's mine."
She looked around. "Where is this?"
"I don't know," I admitted.
"If it's your dream, how come you don't know where it is?"
"That's a good point," I said. "Maybe it isn't my dream either."
"Are you going to do me?"
"Am I what?"
She shrugged, then let her arms fall away and cupped her breasts in her hands, holding her nipples up as if for inspection. "You know, here on the ground. It'll be good. All the guys say I'm good."
"All the guys?"
"Are you trying to make out I'm a tart? I'm very choosy, me. I like the strong ones. Do you work up a sweat?"
"A sweat?"
"In the gym. You're pretty toned for an old guy. You are old, though. I would have liked you younger." She started walking around the edge of the glade. "Isn't there a bed, or at least a mattress? I don't wanna get grass stains, even in a dream."
"Debbie. We are not having sex."
She turned back to me. "You're shy." She smiled sweetly. "I like the shy ones. Do you want me on top or underneath?"
"Neither. I mean it. We're not having sex and you have to go now."
"Why?" She turned away. When she turned back, her eyes had filled. "What's the matter with me? Why are all men such bastards?" A wet tear trickled down her cheek. "Now even my dreams don't fancy me."
I stepped forward. "It's not like that. I'm sure you're very…"
She stepped in towards me, sliding her arms round my waist, pressing her breasts into my chest. She lifted her face. "Kiss me," she whispered.
"Debbie!"
I tried to gently ease her away, but she only used the opportunity to rub her breasts on the silk of my shirt, gripping me round my waist and grinding her hips into mine.
"You want me. I know you do. I can feel you."
"This isn't what you think it is."
"You're not small either, are you, baby?" She grinned. "Maybe there's somethin' to older men after all."
"I'm old enough to be your father." I was trying to disengage her, but she clung to me, pressing in.
"You could actually be my father for all I know. Would that make it better? Do you want to be my daddy?"
I grabbed her arms and unwound them from my waist, holding her wrists up between us. I was trying not to hurt her, but she was very determined. She tried to pull her hands away, but I held her tight. She was breathing hard, but it wasn't from struggling. Her pupils were dilated and her tongue licked across her purple lips wetly.
She tested my hold on her wrists. "You're in control, baby."
"Stop it. Stop it now."
She tried to twist out of my grip, forcing me to tighten my grasp. She wriggled under her arms, turning under them so that she could twist into me, her rear pressing roundly into my groin. I released her arms and gave her rump a firm shove, not wanting to hurt her, but making space between us. She stumbled forward, unbalanced, and fell forward on to the nest of thorns.
She screamed as the spikes bit into her flesh, thrashing on the barbs, making it worse. I tried to grasp her arm, to help her back, but she struggled and shrieked, jerking out of my hand. I stepped away, giving her some space. Gradually she stopped struggling and gently and painfully extracted herself from the tangle, unable to contain the gasps of pain as the thorns withdrew. Turning, she opened her arms.
"Look. Look at me."
The blood was running in tiny dribbles from the scratches and punctures all down her arms, legs, breasts and body.
"Look what you've done!"
She wiped her hand over her breast, striping it across the skin so that her hand came away smeared with red. That wasn't what was disturbing me, though. Where the drops fell to the ground or rolled off her skin they vanished. No spot marked the grass. Every one was absorbed by the ground where it fell.
"You're all such bastards," she wailed. "All the same."
She cried, real tears this time, running black mascara down her cheek. Wrapping herself in her arms, she sobbed, and as she held herself, she faded, until there was only the echo of her. The echo died, leaving me alone in the glade under the silent stars.
I jerked awake, sweating. The sheets had clung to my skin where I was wrapped tight into them. It took me a moment to disentangle myself, wondering whether the briars in my dream had been created by getting tangled in the sheet in my sleep. I wrestled free and then stopped. I looked at my arms.
Where I had tried to pull her from the thorns, my arms were criss-crossed with livid weals and deep scratches. My dream had left its mark.
Going back to sleep was out of the question. The thought filled me with a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. Besides, it was getting light and I had things to do.
I went into the shower and washed the scratches on my arms, drying myself with a towel still soggy from the previous night, dabbing gently at the cuts. The day had dawned wet, heavy clouds hanging low with driving rain coming in off the sea, making the windows rattle and leaving the room in semi-darkness. I left the lights off and opened the curtains, allowing in the minimal daylight through the condensation-clouded window. By the time I'd got clean and dressed, only the worst of the weals remained. One of the advantages of my fey heritage was that I healed pretty quickly, and these were only surface scratches. Even allowing for that, though, they healed with extraordinary speed, as if they weren't really there.
I looked up at the mirror and hesitated. If Blackbird was sleeping then I didn't want to rouse her. They would have swapped watches during the night and she had started out with a sleep deficit. The last thing I wanted to do was wake her when she was getting what little sleep she could. On the other hand, I needed to talk to her and I had no idea whether she would be sleeping now or later. I would have to take my chance.
I placed my hand gently on the mirror and reached within to connect it to the core of power within me.
"Blackbird?"
ELEVEN
Blackbird wasn't happy to be woken by being prodded. "What?" It had taken her forever to get to sleep and now she was awake again.
"There's something wrong with the mirror," said Claire.
"What time is it?"
"Just after six."
"Six? I thought it was my turn at four?"
"I didn't wake you. I'm not going to be able to sleep with all this going on and you looked like you needed it."
"You're the second person to say that to me," Blackbird grunted as she struggled upright.
Claire stood by the bed, wringing her hands. "It's doing that thing again, where it makes noises."
"Someone is trying to talk to us. It's probably Niall. Giv
e me a moment."
Claire bustled away while Blackbird struggled back into the smock-top and pulled on clean socks and shoes. She pushed her hair back from her face and scrubbed her eyes with her knuckles. It would have to suffice.
"Listen," said Claire, returning from the kitchen, nodding towards the big mirror over the fireplace.
There was a random ticking sound coming from the mirror, like an insect compulsively scratching.
"Have you got the portable mirror we used last night?"
Claire fished around in her handbag while Blackbird retrieved the horseshoe she had secreted under the pillow. Blackbird took both items to the fire door at the back of the kitchen. She tugged back the curtain and surveyed the grey morning. There was no sign of anyone on the fire escape, but then she knew she would be unlikely to see them until it was too late. Holding the horseshoe up like a talisman she prodded the fire door open and edged out on to the metal balcony. Checking carefully around, making sure that nothing had been tampered with and that the balcony would still hold her weight, she surveyed the back of the flats. Then she jammed the door open with the horseshoe and opened the mirror compact.
"Blackbird?" Niall's voice came clear through the mirror, making her smile.
"I'm here," she said. "Can you hear me?"
"I was beginning to wonder if you were OK," said Niall. His voice sounded tinny and distant.
Claire made hand signals through the doorway.
"Not coffee," said Blackbird. "Tea would be nice, though."
"What?" said Niall.
"It's just Claire. She woke me when she heard you trying to contact us through the mirror. She's getting me a drink."
"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you. I had no way of knowing whose turn it was."
"Never mind. Claire was supposed to wake me hours ago, but she didn't feel like sleeping, so she left me. My back aches like a coal miner's. That sofa should have a warning sign on it."
