Sarah blinked again as little flickers of red light danced in the darkness, briefly illuminating Sean’s arms and hands as he composed his runes in the air. She sat upright. She’d never seen Sean’s runes shining red before. What was going on?
Sarah let herself fall back, contemplating the total, utter darkness that surrounded the car. The flickers of red light had gone. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine Sean’s arms around her, her head on his chest and his hands caressing her hair . . . until her body, exhausted, forced her into an unquiet sleep.
The blink of an eye, a heartbeat, was as much as it took before the dream possessed her, like it couldn’t wait, like the lack of sleep had stopped the visions from coming and made them even hungrier for her. She was in that place again, under a purple sky and standing in a sea of dancing grass, the colours heightened and unreal. She was alone, the wind blowing strong in her hair. All of a sudden, she realised that she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn during the last battle with the Scottish Valaya, the King of Shadows’ worshippers who had hunted her parents down, and then her. A smell of smoke and burning demon flesh clung to those clothes.
Two things happened at once: she felt a terrible pain stab her in her ribs and fold her in two, and she saw swings, a roundabout, benches, a climbing cage – all the trappings of a playground – rise from the grass around her. She was home, back in Edinburgh, or a mirror dream image of it. She was where everything had begun. Where Nicholas had taken hold of her and stolen her trust, by saving her life; where Sean’s lies had come to light and temporarily separated them.
Where she’d seen Cathy, her father’s jilted first wife, pecked to death by Nicholas’ ravens.
Do I have to go through it all again?
Is Nocturne going to come for me again?
What is this dream going to tell me?
Whatever it was, she was ready. Let them come. Her hands were itching with the Blackwater, all her senses heightened and ready. She turned around in a circle, eyes narrowed, waiting, trying to ignore the bite from her cracked ribs. Every injury or pain she suffered in her dreams felt real. Death felt real, too, and she had died so many times . . .
She waited, listening to her breath and her pounding heart, surveying the swings and the benches and the roundabout that she knew so well, paint peeling from years of use and children’s scuffing and scratching, incongruous and absurd in the sea of swaying grass. She waited, but no demons came.
She took a deep breath, her eyes shimmering with the Midnight gaze. “I am here! Come and get me!” she screamed, her voice frayed and weakened by the roaring wind. “Come and get me!” she repeated.
And they did.
A voice came from behind her. “Hi, Sarah. How are you, my dear?” Sarah’s body whirled in the direction of her name, and there she was, Cathy, her blonde hair and her skin covered in blood from a thousand little wounds – ravens’ pecks. And the most horrifying thing of all . . . where once her eyes had been, there were only bloody and empty sockets. The ravens had pecked her eyes out, too. Weeds hung from her hands, and her clothes were dripping. All of these were little reminders of when the ravens had attacked and thrown her corpse into the river. “Come and sit, let’s have a chat. I can only stay a wee while. Then I’ll leave you to Nocturne.”
Sarah’s blood ran cold. She remembered those words. They were exactly the same words that Cathy had said to her before breaking her bones.
A deadly heat spread across her shoulders, the smell of smoke intensified, together with the sickening scent of burnt flesh. And something with red eyes and gleaming teeth rose from the grass beside Cathy. Nocturne. Except his body was black and burnt, smoke rising from his blistered skin. They were dead, both Cathy and Nocturne. They were both dead and they had come back to haunt her.
A wave of rage overwhelmed her, drowned her. She ran to the dead woman and her demon and raised her scalding hands, but all of a sudden, they were cold. There was no Blackwater. Instead Sarah went white, and stood frozen, looking at her shaking hands. They weren’t burning any more, they were icy cold. Empty. Her power was gone.
The Blackwater was gone.
It was exactly what had happened during the last battle. She’d lost the Blackwater back then. It couldn’t be happening again. She was defenceless, her eyes opaque, the Midnight gaze gone, too. She was empty.
Cathy laughed. “There is no Sarah any more.”
“What do you mean? Tell me! What do you mean?”
And then she saw it, something white and milky and opaque, a little sphere, twirling in front of her, a few inches from her forehead – a terrible pull originated from the sphere, as if it was stealing her energy, stealing herself.
She watched in dismay as the sphere flew into the sky.
“There is no Sarah. Your body is here, but you are gone,” Cathy shrieked, and suddenly everything disappeared. Cathy, Nocturne, the play park. She was no more.
She woke up panting. A strangled sob took the place of the scream she’d felt rising in her throat. She forced herself to remain silent as she shivered violently on the car seat, covered in sweat, her wet skin freezing slowly.
What did it mean? What had they done to her?
The horror of Cathy’s eyeless face and Nocturne’s burnt, blistered skin kept dancing in front of her eyes. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks, the helpless tears of powerlessness; she’d faced something she simply couldn’t fight. Something invisible, something that had turned her into nothing. An empty shell.
She turned around. Niall and Winter were asleep. Sarah felt for the handle with a trembling hand, and opened the door. The freezing night air hit her like a bucket of icy water.
I need to find Sean. I need Sean, was all she could think. There were no more red flickers in the air, and she didn’t know where he was.
“Sean!” she whispered to the darkness. “Sean!”
He materialised out of the night and held her in his arms. She clung to him. For a moment, she allowed herself to let him sustain her. Sean’s scent enveloped her once more – coffee, and something else, salty, manly, somewhere between the ocean and a unique Sean scent. He smelled of home and comfort. He smelled of strength. Being back in his arms was like being home. How could they keep denying themselves?
But soon, too soon, Sean disentangled himself from her embrace, leaving her bereft.
“Come here. Come on,” he murmured, and led her away from the car to the oak tree he’d been sitting under. “You’re freezing. There.” He lifted his sleeping bag and covered her with it. He sat beside her, close but not too close.
“What happened?”
Sarah closed her eyes tightly. She took a deep breath and forced herself to find the words. “I dreamt. Cathy was there. But she was dead. And Nocturne too, all burnt up. I was in the play park back home.”
Sean frowned. He hated to remember when Cathy revealed the truth about him, the lie he’d been telling about his identity. That night Sarah rejected him and sent him away. That night Sean would have let her kill him, had she not lost the Blackwater suddenly.
She braced herself to tell the last part of the story. “I tried to use my powers against them, but they were all gone . . . I was gone. The whole of me. I can’t explain it. It was like my body was there, but I didn’t exist any more. There was something in front of me. A stone. A white stone. It was hovering in the air. It took everything away from me, and then it flew away. I kept asking myself: who am I? Who am I? I couldn’t remember.”
“A white stone?”
“Yes. White, with some bright-red edges,” she recalled suddenly. “I have no idea what it meant.”
“Whatever is coming, we’ll face it together, Sarah. Try to sleep now, if you can.”
Sarah knew that sleep wouldn’t come, but she silently revelled in Sean’s closeness. She allowed herself to believe that he would protect her, that he would save her from whatever was coming.
But she knew, deep down, that nobody could.
5
Awakening
Somewhere we can be
Just you and me and let the rest
Be memories
Sean
I try not to touch her, not to get too close. But I long to brush her fingers with mine, to hold her when nobody can see us. I call her name in my dreams. I dream of the day it will be only us: no demons, no mad suicidal missions, just us. To live our love, to even flaunt it, in that careless way Niall and Winter do. Their smiles, their whispers, the times they disappear and come back flushed and happy, all this can never be Sarah and me. How can we be together, knowing that children of a Lay man and a Secret woman won’t carry Secret powers? How could we risk making the Midnight powers – so precious for this world, for all of us – disappear entirely? There are no other heirs to the Midnights. Sarah is the last one. If she marries me, it’s all over.
And anyway, let’s look at the facts here: what are the chances we’ll survive our little trip into the Shadow World?
Probably zero.
Everyone is sleeping now, except for our very own Prince of Darkness, who’s wandering around in little circles, leaning on whatever is at hand, like a drunken man, as always. He’s worse than me when it comes to insomnia. I slip out of the car and sit with my back against a tree. I’ll practise the runes a bit, to try to channel the thoughts gnawing at me tonight, like every night.
A while into tracing runes with my sgian-dubh, red sparks start to appear in front of me, and then they turn into red ribbons dancing and twirling in shapes and patterns. Suddenly, I can see the runes I’m tracing, burning bright red in the air. This only happened to me once before, when the soil demons attacked Elodie and me on the way to Sarah’s house. I wondered why it hadn’t happened today when I needed it, when the demon at the petrol station was on its rampage. But for whatever reason, it is happening now. The sparks are mesmerising, rivers of fire popping in the air around me like fireflies.
I stop at once, in case the lights attract unwanted attention. Something is awakening inside me, something that scares me and excites me at the same time. But it’s still not fully awake. Not yet.
Not long ago, in the ancestral Midnight mansion on Islay, Sarah found a letter among her grandmother’s things. A letter from my mother. Not my adoptive mother, but my birth one, Amelia Campbell, the one I was taken from. In the letter, my mother asked Stewart Midnight, Sarah’s uncle, to look out for me, because I too have Secret blood. I thought I was a Gamekeeper, someone trained by the Secret Families to guard and help them, someone with skills but no powers as such – and I was proud of it, it was all I knew and all I wanted – but it turned out that my mother was a Secret heir. Her love for my father, a Lay, was forbidden for the same reason that Sarah and I can’t be together: children born from such a union don’t inherit any powers.
My mother was banished from her family, the Campbells, and sent to New Zealand. She died young, but the letter she left for Stewart was her last wish. It was Stewart’s son, Harry Midnight, who took up the task of fulfilling her request. Without telling me the truth about my birth, just like she’d instructed his father, Harry trained me as a Gamekeeper. For years I’d thought that our encounter late at night at my university campus had been a fluke of fate. Now I know better. Harry Midnight, the man who’d asked me as his dying wish to take his identity and watch over his cousin Sarah Midnight, had had me pegged from the beginning.
And I fell in love with the girl he’d wanted me to save.
So here I am, Sean Hannay of Campbell blood. As a child of a Secret woman and a Lay man, I’m not supposed to have inherited powers.
Then what about these red lights flowing from my runes, the surge of strength I’ve been feeling recently, as if there was something asleep inside me waiting to awaken and be unleashed? Can I dare hope? Because I’m not that good with hope. I’m not good at thinking things will work out for me the way I want them to. And what are the Campbell powers? The family seems to have been swept away by the Surari surge, like so many Secret Families. Sarah, Elodie and Niall don’t seem to know what gifts the Campbells carried, and we left the Midnight mansion in such a hurry that I had no time to research in its library.
In a way, my blood is still a mystery. Yes, I can put a name to it now, but that’s about it. If I had powers, would I kill people with a look like Sarah, or with a kiss like Elodie? Or maybe this seed of power inside me will just wither without ever sprouting. Barren, like I’d felt for a long time. Before meeting Sarah.
Before falling for her.
If it’s so, if this little hope born inside me proves to be nothing, Sarah must marry a Secret man.
She must marry someone who’s not me.
Just thinking about it makes me want to stick my sgian-dubh through my hand – it’d be less painful than contemplating the idea of Sarah with someone else, making love with someone else, another man running his hand through her hair . . .
Suddenly, I hear Sarah calling in the dark, calling my name. I lead her back to my sleeping place, beneath the oak tree. I wrap her in my sleeping bag. She’s trembling. She’s dreamt again, and this time it seems to be bearing a message. I would do anything to stop her pain and suffering and keep her safe. I can only dream of holding her through the night and stroking her hair slowly, cradling her like a child, just like I used to.
Since Sarah gave me my mother’s letter, I don’t know who I am. But I still live my life to the same rules. I’m still a Gamekeeper.
And I’m still in love with Sarah Midnight.
6
King of Pain
A mask on my face and another beneath
Ripping them off like I’d rip my own skin
Nicholas felt for the handle and opened the car door, shifting his feet on the grass. His head spun again as he lifted himself out and took a few uncertain steps, his arms extended in front of him. Elodie’s slightly laboured breathing came from the back seat. Every night it was a little coarser, a little heavier.
Night or day made no difference to him. For him, it was always dark. He advanced until his hands felt something hard and rough – tree bark. He stepped towards the tree and leaned against it, his strong frame disappearing among the shadows. For a minute or so he stood still, listening hard to make sure he was alone. When he was satisfied, he took a deep breath. To his shame, his breath ended in a silent, terrified sob. He tried to calm his heart, but it was no use. The worst threat, the worst pain, was not outside of him: it was inside his head. There his father, the King of Shadows, could always reach him. No weapons, no magic, nothing could keep him out. Since he’d betrayed his father to save Sarah and her friends, Nicholas had been locked in his own personal hell.
He clasped his hands together to try to keep them from shaking. His body remembered what happened the last time he’d spoken to the King of Shadows, the burning pain of the brain fury that lasted for days and nights and broke him from the inside. And took his sight away.
His mind put up barriers, desperately. It wouldn’t let himself go there. But he had to. He had to speak to him.
He whimpered softly in the dark, forcing his thoughts into shape, forcing his mind to destroy every wall leading to his father’s consciousness. And finally, he succeeded. He was steady and calm as he heard the King of Shadows’ voice resound in his mind.
“Father,” he whispered in the darkness. “It’s me. I’m sorry. I’m back. I’ve come back to you.”
7
Untamed
Dead flowers and marsh waters
The endless sleep of dismay
The way your life stood still
And never moved again
Venice
A few months after they’d arrived, Ranieri was dead. Tancredi had become so ill that he had run away on some crazy mission, and Micol had found herself alone. So alone that she’d taken to spending time with Lucrezia, as much time as you could spend with a person who never held a conversation with you.
She hated Lucrezia’s room. The scent of fl
owers nauseated her, and the note of decay underneath made her feel as though she was inside a tomb. Apart from her constant whispering, it was as though Lucrezia was dead already and in an open casket. And still Micol sat with her often – at first because she was so desperately lonely, but recently because she didn’t want Lucrezia to be alone either. For some reason, Micol had started feeling a bond with the sleeping girl. They were the same age, and they were two Secret heirs with the world crumbling around them. The only difference between them was that Micol’s gifts were nowhere near as powerful, but they left room for her to live her life. Lucrezia’s gifts were immense and unique, but condemned her to a living death.
And so Micol sat with her, curled up on the windowsill, the shutters open (against Vendramin’s instructions) to let the Venetian winter sunlight seep in. Beyond the walled garden and its statues and fountains, the Grand Canal’s water shimmered.
Micol tried her best to block out Lucrezia’s constant, frenzied murmuring, and instead she told her little stories, about her life in Tuscany before it all happened, about her brothers, her parents, the horses and dogs they used to rear in the grounds of her villa in the hills. As she told Lucrezia about her old life, her recollection was so strong she could nearly feel the wind in her hair and smell the earthy scent of vineyards and pines and sunshine. Her favourite memory was riding Nero, her stallion – she’d refused a pony or a mare. Reliving those moments, Micol could once more feel the freedom of a life without boundaries, without fear. Lucrezia never paused to listen, of course. She continued her endless gibberish. But Micol spoke anyway, and sang little tunes she used to know, songs and lullabies her mother used to sing to her.
She sat there until it got too much, until she couldn’t force herself to breathe that cloying air any more, then she ran out into the maze of gilded rooms that was Palazzo Vendramin and stepped into the garden, taking deep breaths of life. And still, it was the decaying smell of the canal that greeted her, not the pines, the lemons, the familiar scents of home.
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