‘Sleeping beauty,’ she whispered to herself. ‘How am I going to explain you?’ A long-lost cousin, recently widowed? Very recently by the look of Glimmer’s umbilical cord. Besides, her sister Melissa would see through the cousin lie in a minute. She had to think of something plausible because Reg wouldn’t let her off the phone if she didn’t tell him what she wanted baby formula for, and if she told a clumsy lie now, further down the track she’d be caught out. They were staying indefinitely. Her story had to work on all levels.
She frowned at Pagan and tried to think. A political refugee fleeing … Russia? But what if a real Russian turned up? Could they get away with saying Pagan had been tortured and had amnesia?
He moved in his sleep and an arm came out of the quilt, the fingers of his right hand flexing and then closing shut, as though gripping something. After that he was still but Sarah watched his face, wondering if he was dreaming, what he was dreaming. She understood that Glimmer wasn’t his, but had he left someone behind? A woman?
She didn’t like that idea.
His thick brown jacket was torn at the shoulder and his smooth muscular biceps was clearly visible, but that wasn’t why she wanted to keep him to herself — not just because he was gorgeous, or mysterious, or that he was a protector of children. Maybe all of those reasons together, but there was more, she was sure of it.
Was it the needing? The fact that he was relying on her for his safety? Had that made her fall a little in love with him?
She turned away, made herself walk down the hallway to the phone. A little in love. What was she thinking? They’d just met, for godsakes. Talk about a hopeless romantic. Melissa would tell her that this was what became of women who suppressed their romantic urges and refused to read Mills and Boon books. They had breakdowns. Fell in love with strangers. Went mad.
She picked up the phone and pressed the fast-dial number on the keypad.
‘Reg’s store. Food and more.’
‘Reg, it’s Sarah McGuire. I need a few things. Can you deliver them this afternoon?’ Sarah suddenly realised that in her haste to walk away from Pagan she’d forgotten to construct a plausible story before she rang Reg. Should she hang up and ring back later?
‘Your car broken, Snug?’ Reg asked solicitously. He’d called her Snugglepot since she was a toddler with golden ringlets and big blue eyes, and promptly dubbed her baby sister Cuddlepie when she came long. Time had moved on and the ringlets were gone. Sarah was now the town’s funeral director, but to Reg Murphy she would always be Snugglepot McGuire. ‘I reckon if you rang Bob he could shoot over from the garage —’
‘The car’s fine, Reg,’ Sarah interrupted. ‘I’m just waiting for a delivery. I can’t go out.’
‘Embalming fluid? I’ll bet that’s expensive …’
Sarah gazed fixedly down at her telephone message pad. She really wasn’t in the mood.
‘… you’re not gunna start watering it down like them pest control blokes did with the dieldrin on Maddie Pen’s new house. She’s got termites the size of mice.’
Exaggeration and interrogation, these were the tools of Reg’s trade. ‘We actually don’t use embalming fluid any more. We have cold rooms —’
‘They’ll stink to high heaven,’ Reg warned.
‘Can I place an order?’ she cut in quickly, before he could commandeer the conversation again. ‘I’ve got a desk full of paperwork this afternoon otherwise I’d love to chat, Reg. You know me,’ she coaxed.
‘You? Spend five minutes chinwagging with a poor lonely old widower? That’d be the day,’ Reg declared, but he must have been busy because he took pity on her. ‘Alright, what are you after, luv?’
At last. ‘I need bread, milk, eggs, slab of bacon,’ Sarah racked her brains for what else she’d need foodwise, ‘couple of chickens —’
‘You having guests?’
Here we go. ‘I’ve got guests already. Just arrived, and one’s a baby, so I’ll need a couple of baby bottles and that milk formula they drink, along with some packets of disposable nappies, small size.’
‘A baby you say?’
‘Dear sweet little girl, Reg,’ she said, trying to distract him. ‘I’ll bring her in next week and let you coo over her, so start thinking of something totally inappropriate to call her. Although all the embarrassing names are already taken.’
He laughed. ‘A little girl,’ he said, but she heard the wistfulness in his old creaky voice. ‘Big blue eyes?’ he asked.
‘Big as saucers,’ Sarah replied, ‘and the sweetest little smile.’ She hadn’t actually seen Glimmer smile yet, but all babies had sweet smiles. ‘Look, I’ve got to go, Reg, I can hear my mobile ringing.’
‘You kids and your phones,’ he grouched. ‘Always cutting a man off in midsentence —’
‘And lots of fruit and vegies, Reg,’ she added to the order. ‘Whatever’s freshest.’
‘As if I’d send you stale fruit.’ He was really getting grouchy now.
Sarah felt like saying As if I’d bury stale bodies, but she didn’t. ‘Gotta go now,’ she said, and listened to another couple of seconds of harumphing before the disconnection click came through from the other end. She hung up her end with a sigh of relief.
She hadn’t needed to explain about Pagan. Reprieve. But half an hour later when the delivery van arrived she still hadn’t thought of anything plausible. Luckily Travis Tarone who did the deliveries would be more interested in the heavy metal blaring from his headphones than in who was lying on her guest bed.
‘Trav,’ she called, coming down the front steps, ‘I’ll give you a hand to put the boxes up on the verandah here.’ No point tempting fate by inviting him to tramp through to the kitchen. Travis wouldn’t care to be curious but Reg would pump him for information when he got back. She knew that for sure.
It was quite a shock then when she saw Reg himself coming around the back of the van, rather than his young delivery boy. ‘Came to see the little cherub myself,’ he called, and opened the van doors, easing his potbelly between them to grab a box.
‘Reg.’ She couldn’t think of another thing to say.
‘Lots of mandarins in but I didn’t give you any. I know you’ve got a tree,’ he said, handing her a box as she came up beside him, her expression no doubt dazed. ‘Apples and pears.’
‘Oh good,’ Sarah replied mechanically.
‘Potatoes aren’t the best but it’s been wet,’ he said conversationally, propping a box against his belly and starting up the stairs.
Sarah scrambled up behind him. ‘We’ll just put them on the verandah, Reg,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t want to wake the baby.’
‘I’m not going to wake it, I just want to look at it,’ he said, ‘and be introduced to its mother,’ a little of the reprimanding tone she remembered from her youth in his voice. Why was it that when you grew up in a small town every adult felt they had the right to teach you manners?
‘That’s not possible,’ Sarah said, but couldn’t think of the because that came after.
Reg put his box down near the front door and turned on her, ready to give her another lesson in civility. Sarah closed her eyes, a pained expression on her face as she struggled to think of something, anything!
‘Oh … the poor mite,’ Reg said and Sarah’s eyes opened cautiously. He was looking at her, nodding. ‘Her mother’s passed on.’
Sarah automatically nodded back. ‘It’s so sad,’ she said, and strangely, had no trouble conjuring wet eyes. The shock of the last few hours had unsettled her. Her emotions were all floating around the surface and if she wasn’t careful her abrupt sadness might snap into hysterical laughter. ‘It only happened quite recently, Reg. So, as you can understand, there’s a lot grief. They want to be left alone for now.’
‘They?’ His gaze rose to meet her own and he frowned at her in concern. ‘There’s more than one little —’
‘No. The baby’s father. He’s quite …’ Breathtaking. ‘… Distressed.’
‘Poo
r bloke.’ Reg shook his head, no doubt remembering his own grief when Beryl had died two years earlier, a few months short of their fiftieth anniversary. ‘I’ll see the little’un another time,’ he said and patted her arm awkwardly. ‘You come and get the last box.’
Sarah couldn’t believe she’d escaped so easily, yet a minute later she was standing with the box in her arms as Reg’s van fired up, and with a parting wave he was gone.
‘You didn’t even ask me who he was,’ she said softly, thinking Reg must have been moved by her story if he’d failed to wonder how she knew Pagan, and why she was putting him up. Later they’d have to work out a watertight story and practise it. But at this particular moment in time she had a baby to feed and groceries to unpack so she set her mind to the menial and plodded up the stairs to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later she had a bottle of prepared baby formula in her hand and had snatched up a clean tea towel to go with it. Babies and mess were synonymous, even she knew that.
She found Glimmer lying exactly where she’d left her, but this time the baby wasn’t alone. Claude the cat was up on the bed beside her and all the warnings Sarah had ever heard about cats suffocating children rushed into her mind. Her fingers clenched around the bottle and she was about to shout at Claude when he raised his head and gazed at her with that peculiar knowing glance cats have.
For some reason it held Sarah at the door, and as she watched, the cat looked back at Glimmer and then raised a paw to rub delicately on the side of the baby’s nose. Sarah’s mouth fell open in surprise. The glance that passed between baby and cat was so … eloquent. Then Claude dropped his paw and Glimmer’s face contorted. A small, sharp noise emerged, and although Sarah was startled by it, Claude remained still, as though it was nothing he hadn’t been expecting.
A sneeze. It was only a sneeze. Sarah told herself to breathe but the air was locked in her chest.
Glimmer’s tiny face smoothed again and her rosebud lips curved into a smile. Claude dipped his head as though acknowledging her gratitude, then he turned and jumped from the bed. Sarah was rooted to the spot as he came straight towards her but he merely rubbed up against her ankle on his way out the door.
She turned back to the bed and simply stood there gazing at Glimmer, the bottle in her hand completely forgotten.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lae of Be’uccdha stood in the crypt doorway, her hands tied roughly behind her back, her captor Kert Sh’hale’s cruel hand on her arm. Before them, darkness was rapidly falling across the land as the scythe of death covered their sun. Her Champion Mooraz lay below them on the crypt floor, his arm severed from his body by Sh’hale. He would die in this lonely place and all because Lae had foolishly trusted the man who now held her hostage.
‘Come, traitor, this sudden night suits my purpose,’ Sh’hale said and tugged on her arm impatiently.
Lae resisted. ‘My father is the traitor, not I,’ she said, but knew he would not believe her.
Her powers of discernment, which would one day see her inherit the title of The Dark from her father, showed Kert’s aura to be swirling with obsession and violence. She wished now that she’d discerned that sooner, but the Ceremony of Atheyre had shocked them all. Talis and Pagan had used their Guardian power to open the way between the worlds and the blinding Column of Light had appeared in the Royal Shrine, ready to take their dead King Mihale and his Champion Kert to the Airworld where Khatrene was sure her brother would live again. Instead Atheyre had called Talis and Khatrene, who had risen through the opened ceiling of the shrine with Mihale and disappeared into the clouds, leaving Lae holding the newborn Catalyst, and Kert raging with fury.
The king’s murderer, her own father, had been nearby searching for his child, and Pagan had been their only hope for securing its safe exile. Yet rather than help their cause as a loyal lord should, Kert had railed against being left behind and had blamed Lae for interfering in the ceremony, as though she were in collusion with her father to overthrow the throne.
In his fury he had attacked her, and Pagan had been forced to defend, risking his life and thereby the future of The Catalyst. If not for an attack by a band of Raiders, Pagan would never have escaped. Yet that very attack had prevented Lae from accompanying him into exile, and when Kert’s sword had saved her from the Raiders she had thought her actions in securing The Catalyst’s safety had won over his distrust. How wrong she had been.
Kert pulled on her arm again and she pulled back. ‘Can we not wait for the scythe of death to be banished?’ she begged. Always in the past, her father had sacrificed one he named evil to right the imbalance that had caused the scythe of death to come. This was his role among them for which he had been revered. Yet Khatrene had spoken of her time in Magoria and the idea that the blackness was a sky cycle that had no connection with evil.
Sh’hale turned on her, his eyes narrowing in hatred as he gazed on her newly conferred facial tattoo, the swirling pattern that covered her right cheek and forehead, marking her of the house of Be’uccdha and the daughter of The Dark. Seeing his sneer, Lae wondered how she had ever thought Sh’hale handsome.
‘I care not what your father does,’ he told her, ‘save that he not interfere with my mission. It is more likely his own evil has brought this darkness to Ennae. Do you think he will sacrifice himself to the fires of Haddash to save us?’
The inky black of a moonless night was quickly upon them and though they could not see the ground beneath their feet, he dragged her forward and Lae had no recourse but to stumble along beside him across grass that still held the sun’s warmth. She hoped they would not walk headlong into one of the other House crypts that dotted the Shrine area. Sh’hale was silent beside her.
She could now see that he was her enemy, yet he had spoken truth. Her father was evil. Lae had not realised how evil until he had killed their young king Mihale with a stab to the side while Mihale faced Mooraz — poor Mooraz who had been placed in the impossible situation of defending The Dark against his own sovereign; Mooraz who, like all of them, had known nothing of his lord’s treasonous intentions.
Had Kert Sh’hale been at his king’s side, where a Champion should have been, The Dark would not have killed Mihale so easily. But Kert had been pursuing personal vengeance against Talis, the result of a long-standing enmity which had begun when Talis, and not Kert, had been appointed Champion to the young White Twins. Later, after Khatrene’s marriage took her to Be’uccdha, Talis went with her, becoming her Champion alone. Thus Kert’s long-time desire, to Champion the king, was realised. Yet the bitterness he felt for Talis would not die, and had caused him to leave his king vulnerable to The Dark’s ambition.
Lae hoped that Kert carried that guilt to his grave. Her father, who might even now be stalking them, would feel no remorse, yet Mihale’s murder was the most cowardly and heinous act Lae had witnessed in all her fourteen years. Any last vestiges of misguided love she’d harboured for her father were now dead.
In contrast to The Dark’s cowardice, Mooraz had come into the crypt to rescue her from Kert, swearing that he would not return her to her father. She should have used her powers of discernment to read Mooraz’s aura but in her fear she had panicked, trusting Sh’hale instead, and now she was his captive while Mooraz, who had been Lae’s faithful Champion and had apparently gone against her father to rescue her, lay dead or dying behind her.
With the exception of her Cliffdweller playmate Hush, back at Castle Be’uccdha, Lae had no allies left on Ennae. She knew it was unlikely that she would ever see Hush again, but the thought of her friend’s large golden eyes and expressive hands brought some courage to her heart, even as her body railed against the forced march Sh’hale inflicted on her. She wished that she had Hush’s hard trotters to walk upon instead of her own soft feet clad in their threadbare slippers.
A lady of Be’uccdha, Lae was more accustomed to the comforts of a castle than the rough accommodations she’d recently shared with her friend Khatrene who was The Light of Ennae. Th
ough Lae had initially hated Khatrene for marrying her father and stealing his attention, she was soon to discover that their marriage was a sham designed to give her father control of the child Khatrene would bear. When Khatrene escaped the Hightower room The Dark had secretly locked her into, Lae’s loyalty towards her father reached its lowest ebb. She and Pagan, who had hitherto done nothing but squabble together, had worked in unison to secure Khatrene’s escape into sanctuary with the Plainsmen.
In their flight from her father Lae had suffered much deprivation, and now as she staggered beside Kert Sh’hale, she wondered how much more her body could take before it collapsed. Yet even as these thoughts came to her, Kert tugged viciously on the rope that bound Lae’s hands behind her back. The action jerked her sideways and she fell onto dirt and sharp stones, crying out as they pierced her skin.
‘Do not think to slow me with your antics,’ he hissed as he dragged her to her feet.
Lae gathered her ragged breathing and glared at him in the darkness. ‘If you wish me bruised and scraped, why not beat me where I stand?’ Her words were brave but her arm throbbed where she’d fallen on it. Misery welled up within her but she fought it down. All her life she’d cried over petty injustices like a spoilt child, while around her great cruelties went unnoticed — not only her father’s sedition, but Khatrene had told her that he’d boasted of sexual excesses with the ghostly Shadow Woman who had been his hidden source of power, and of feasts where they had eaten captive Plainsmen children. When Lae thought of it she could scarcely breathe for horror. Her days of living in blissful ignorance were over and she cared not what Kert Sh’hale thought of her, she would not cry before him. She was still the lady of a noble house of Ennae and she would henceforth behave as such.
‘If you do not obey me,’ he replied, ‘I will beat you.’ His disembodied voice in the impenetrable dark was foreboding; however, they set off again without further violence and Lae noted that he did not jerk the rope. To save herself further injury she attempted to keep her footing on the uneven surfaces, and eventually, after some minutes, the sky began to lighten and she could see the ground beneath her feet.
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