Winter gasped and pointed to the space between the oaks. There, the air was vibrating, rippling like water. Weak at first, then more and more visible, a silvery spiral took shape in between the tree trunks, whirling faster and faster.
“Put your palm on my palm and walk through,” Nicholas commanded. Sean was the first, grimacing as he touched Nicholas’ skin, as if it hurt him. Sarah hastened to do the same. Whatever was going to happen next, even if it was a trap, she wouldn’t let Sean fall into it alone. They stepped into the spiral and disappeared among the silver ribbons tumbling and turning. Niall and Winter followed suit, Winter’s silvery hair twirling for a moment like one of those otherworldly ribbons. Finally, Nicholas took Elodie’s hand, burning the spiral pattern into her hand, and together they entered the Shadow World.
10
Deceptions
Rotten blood and still
We call this power
Tancredi Falco shivered uncontrollably as a feverish sweat drenched him and froze to his skin. He pulled his cape closer, fighting off the bitter wind. One minute he was so cold he thought his skin was turning to ice; the next he burnt with fever, and the leather mantle he wore to aid his flight and the headdress of feathers that helped camouflage him when he was high in the sky suffocated him. Nothing could save him now.
Not that he wanted to be saved. Everything he knew was gone. Nothing mattered any more but killing Sarah Midnight. And maybe then his sister, the last heir of the Falco Family, now sheltered by the Vendramins in Venice, would be given a chance to live. Micol’s beloved face danced before his eyes. His sorellina, alone. Ranieri had been there with her, but he was dead now. He’d died soon after Tancredi had left for Scotland to look for Sarah Midnight. Tancredi had felt his brother’s death one night, like a stab in his heart – and then emptiness. Another heir taken by the Azasti, instead of finding an honourable death in battle like they were meant to. Another piece of his family gone.
Tancredi staggered on, following the trail left by Sarah and her friends. He’d flown all the way to that point, using the last of his vital force, keeping track of his prey as they drove on the frozen roads. He’d witnessed the demon attacks, one after the other, and marvelled and seethed as Sarah survived every one of them. What were the chances of him killing her, when not even all those demons could? No point in even asking himself.
Long ago, he’d been more powerful than any of those demons; he could have cut them all in two with the Falco claws, forged of a metal unknown to anyone but his family, ambushing them from above. But that was before. Before the Azasti had taken every last ounce of strength from him. Now only despair kept him going. At Palazzo Vendramin, they’d believed he was delirious, that his search for Sarah was a consequence of the madness brought on by the Azasti. But he knew it wasn’t. His dreams had told him to hunt her. They told him what was in store for her, and his dreams never lied.
He could not allow Sarah to survive. He had to destroy her, or make Sean Hannay and Niall Flynn see what he could see, tell them that Sarah would betray them all, that her destiny was written and there was no way to change it. Maybe then they would kill Sarah themselves. She could not be allowed to live after such betrayal. They couldn’t allow a power like hers to join forces with the King of Shadows.
He made himself put one foot in front of the other, and one more and one more, until he saw something black and shiny beyond the trees. One of the cars Sarah and her friends had been driving, abandoned. In front of him lay a condemned building, its windows broken and its paint peeling off the walls – a strange sight, right in the middle of this wild place. Tancredi examined the snowy ground and then followed the footprints in the snow.
Suddenly, alerted by something only he could feel, he crouched behind a fallen tree. A hundred yards away from him stood Sarah Midnight, slender and strong, her long black hair loose around her shoulders.
Tancredi’s heart bled with regret as a painful thought travelled through his mind. Had she not been chosen as the bride of the Underworld, Sarah would have been a powerful asset for the Secret Families, maybe the most powerful. In other times she could have been their hope and their pride, a legend among the heirs. And now he was about to cut her throat.
A wave of fury hit Tancredi as he spotted Nicholas, tall and raven-haired, his skin otherworldly pale. He was the monster who, together with his father, had been the cause of the Secret Families’ demise.
Tancredi tensed and held his breath as the French heir, Elodie, turned towards his hiding place for a moment. She could sense him, he knew that. The Bruns were known for their psychic abilities, among other things. He was about to take flight and pounce on Sarah from above when he spotted something flickering in front of them, something shimmering and twirling. They’d opened an iris! In his generation only Lucrezia Vendramin, as far as he knew, could do something like that. Tancredi watched Sean touch Nicholas’ hand and then step into the rippling air, disappearing from view, out of his grasp. And then Sarah, the Flynn boy and the silver-haired Elemental followed through, and finally Elodie and the monster, the son of the King of Shadows. Without thinking, Tancredi ran blindly. He knew that he hadn’t been marked, he hadn’t touched the monster’s hand. There was no way he could have followed them, but he was beyond rational thought. With a scream of despair he threw himself into the rippling air, expecting to bounce back, or burn up, or whatever happened to those who tried to step through unmarked. But none of that happened. He swayed and struggled for balance as he found himself in the Shadow World, barely registering a full moon shining cold in the black sky. And then he saw the spectre. He saw them all.
11
Heir to Silence
The day I saw you dying was the day
I died myself
Venice
A few hours earlier
Alvise threw the bow and arrow on the mosaic floor. The sound echoed throughout the palace. Once again the Falco girl had run away. Once again she’d put them all in danger. Foolish, foolish girl. A child – fifteen years old, only three less than him, but still a child. Alvise cursed the moment his father decided to take the Falco children under his roof. Ranieri died quickly – poor soul, eaten alive by the Azasti. Tancredi had run away, in a delirium caused by his illness. And Micol was left, hating every day she spent with the Vendramin, convinced that they wished her ill, convinced that they were torturing their own little Lucrezia, Alvise’s sister. Completely delusional.
If only he still had his powers, or their Gamekeepers were still alive. But they’d all been killed, in ways Alvise didn’t want to remember.
He sat at the piano in anger and started hitting the keys. The music he played was full of sorrow and tension, and the face he saw was the face of a woman with long, nearly white hair, like his.
A dark-skinned woman with grey hair pinned back and a crucifix around her neck peeked through the door. Cosima.
“Signor Vendramin! Lucrezia is talking. Hurry!”
Alvise jumped up from the piano and ran down frescoed corridors towards Lucrezia’s room. Immediately his sister’s odd scent, a flowery fragrance so heavy it was nearly rotting, hit him like a wall. There were no flowers in her room that day. It was Lucrezia’s chemistry, her skin and breath that produced the strange scent.
Lucrezia lay still in her bed, her eyelids flickering, her hands abandoned by her sides. Hair so light it was nearly white fanned over her pillow, loose strands at her waist. She was whispering, a jumble of words and sounds that made no sense – but they knew that soon her gibberish would condense into a message.
Alvise sat on her bed and held her hand. Micol could read in his face the pain that Lucrezia’s terrible predicament brought to him. Forced into immobility, turned around like a doll to avoid bedsores, the endless, restless sleep and continuous dreaming. It was no life for his sister.
Alvise had spent many hours sitting by her bed, lulled by her murmuring. Occasionally he would stroke the loose hair away from her face or caress her hand. Whenev
er he touched her or spoke to her, Lucrezia’s babbling seemed to soften, until just her lips moved and no sounds came out. At times she took a deeper breath, as if his touch brought her some relief, as if she were aware that she wasn’t alone.
Sometimes silent tears rolled down her cheeks, and Alvise could feel his heart breaking. He sat there, eyes dry, wishing death would take his sister at last.
“You must go,” Lucrezia’s clear, young voice resounded in the high-ceilinged room. She had spoken in her native Italian, and not in the Ancient language. The cold light of dawn was seeping through the shutters, illuminating the girl’s pale face and lips. Alvise leaned towards her, waiting for her to explain. A torrent of murmurs followed, something about a silvery winter and an incandescent stone, mixed with sounds in the Ancient language and some in a language that was only her own. And then, more Italian words, enunciated clearly, slowly, as if something else had taken possession of her vocal cords and mouth and was painstakingly forcing muscle and tissue into the right shapes.
“They are coming. You must go.”
Alvise’s mind raced. A new message meant a new task. More demons to destroy. He knew his father should hear this. “Father,” he called, looking frantically at his sister. “Father!”
Within moments, Guglielmo Vendramin was at his side, sweeping into the room in traditional hunting garb.
“What is it?”
“Look at Lucrezia.”
Slowly, slowly, Lucrezia began to raise her right hand and her thin white arm.
“You must go, Alvise,” said his father.
“I know.”
They had to be quick. Lucrezia’s arm was rising, rising, revealing her palm. Burnt into her skin was a spiral, shining gold. A memory flashed before his eyes: his sister screaming as the spiral was carved into her hand under the eyes of the Sabha, and pure gold poured into the wound.
Between them the iris grew, gaining strength with every second.
“Good luck, my son,” he heard his father whisper. He always did that before a journey through the iris, like a blessing. Alvise accepted his father’s great bow and sling of arrows, then stepped toward his sister.
Already a golden ribbon was taking shape in the room, circling slowly to create an inward spiral. The scent of dying flowers was unbearable. Alvise stepped beside Lucrezia, lying immobile with her arm raised, a strange glow emanating from her palm. He took her hand so that their palms touched, and he felt a sudden pain – something that had never happened before. And then he stepped into the spiral.
He’d been through the iris many times and knew the sensations well, and still, this time there was something different, more intense, even violent. His body felt torn apart, fragmented into its molecules, whirling around like snowflakes in a storm, and then forced back together. It felt like all the bits of him were still unglued, kept together by some magnetic force, instead of bonding to each other, and the slightest force, the slightest shift in energy, would scatter them once again and he’d be no more.
Fear gripped his stomach and took his breath away, and for a moment he believed that Lucrezia had made a terrible mistake, that the iris wasn’t functioning the way it was supposed to, that it would kill him. He twirled in gold for what seemed like a long time, every fibre of his being fighting to get a grip of itself, of the molten gold that danced before his eyes. And then, all of a sudden, it was over.
12
Shadows of the Moon
Indian or African skies
The southern hemisphere
Or the sky above the lochs of our home
You said you’d think of me
Every time you saw the moon
Sarah felt her hair standing on end, a soft buzz in her ears and a feeling like a painless electrical current running on her skin. A wave of nausea hit her as she realised she didn’t know what was up and what was down any more. All she could see was a grey, opaque, cloudy light, as if she’d lost her sight.
She squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them again everything was black. She really was blind, she thought, and felt the sharp bite of panic. Then she realised that the blackness was dotted with twinkling silver lights – stars. She was looking at the night sky. It had been morning when they left the human world.
In an instant she was on her feet. Her elbow brushed against something and she jumped, her hands flooding with heat already and her eyes burning green. But she saw that it was Sean. He was standing in a daze, looking ahead of him, slightly hunched on one side, as if unable to support his own weight. She took him by the arm and shook him.
“Sean! Sean!”
He blinked several times. Then his expression tightened as he steadied himself. Sarah felt someone behind her – movement, a cold current – and turned in alarm. Niall and Winter, followed by Nicholas and Elodie, stepped through. Relieved, Sarah turned around again and a spectral face, white like the moon, rose out of the darkness to meet hers. Two transparent arms followed, ready to grab her. She raised her hands instinctively. The Blackwater called her.
“A moon-demon! Don’t touch it!” A voice came from behind. Niall. Sarah froze at once as the transparent face moved towards her. Niall’s song began to rise into the air, deafening already.
Sarah stepped back, watching the spectre dance a fitful dance of pain. The white rays of the moon were everywhere, brilliant and pure and . . . moving, condensing into limbs and faces, horrendous faces with black holes for eyes. One, two, five more creatures took shape from the moonbeams and began marching towards them.
“Nobody touch them,” shouted Nicholas above Niall’s song. His hands were burning and crackling with blue flames. “They’ll turn you into one of them.”
Sarah’s blood chilled. She remembered the demon shadow, immortal, forever unable to feel, unable to touch. A half-life worse than death.
She thanked Nicholas begrudgingly for having warned her a split second before she’d tried to dissolve them, and narrowed her eyes. The Midnight gaze glinted green in the semi-darkness. She couldn’t hit them all at once, so she chose one and concentrated on destroying it. Niall’s song was now in full flow, a thing of power and fury, and soon two of the spectres were on the ground, jolting and shuddering like marionettes. Out of the corner of her eye Sarah could see Sean’s hands tracing the invisible runes in the air, his sgian-dubh dancing so fast it was a blur – and then the sparks began, scarlet, like silent fireworks flowering all around them. Sarah blinked in wonder for a moment, and the moon-demon she was tormenting took its chance, jerking its way towards her at a terrifying speed – but something red and sharp hit its transparent body, lodging itself where the demon’s guts should have been. One moment, just one moment, and the demon exploded without a sound, spilling moonbeams all around. Sean met her eye, and Sarah could see Sean’s amazement at his own power.
Niall’s song was arresting the moon-demons’ advance. They were losing consistency, turning more and more transparent as he sang. Sarah shook herself and turned around to check on Winter, and she saw that the Elemental girl was standing still, a look of terror on her face, a useless blade in her hand.
And behind her, rising quietly, was a moon-demon.
“Winter!” Sarah screamed. She would not reach her in time. Winter didn’t stand a chance.
And then blue flames burnt and crackled all around Winter, surrounding her in a wall of cold fire. She screamed in terror, falling to her knees. The spectre couldn’t reach her through the flames. Elodie was holding Nicholas’ arm and had her own arm around his waist. She’d shown him where to strike. Niall’s song was slowly failing – the shock of starting it so suddenly had drained him.
A few straggly remains of Sean’s red ribbons were still flickering in the air, glimmers of light among the black branches. Sarah was standing further away from the others, panting, eyes wide, unable to move. Winter and Elodie fell to the frosty ground, back to back. Nicholas crouched beside Elodie.
Niall leaned against an oak tree, trying to keep himself
upright after the effort of the Song. His eyes were fixed on Winter. He’d nearly lost her. What have I done, he thought helplessly, agreeing to bring her here?
Sean studied his hands in disbelief. He couldn’t believe what had just come out of them. He heard a soft noise above their heads.
It was then that something fell from the trees and jumped right on Sarah, dragging her to the ground with the inertia of its fall, and clawing at her back. She screamed as her knees hit the ground with a thump. She could already feel the thing’s claws on her neck. She couldn’t see what it was, but she could feel something soft against her skin, something feathery.
It’s the demon-bird, she realised, and fury streaked through her. A searing pain made her scream as the thing began to dig its claws into her neck. Just as her friends were running to her rescue, Sarah turned around and overcame the demon with one fluid movement, throwing it to the ground and crouching over it, a knee on its chest.
Too easy, she said to herself, and her body tensed even further, expecting a nasty surprise. But none came. The Surari just lay there, apparently having run out of energy.
Its face was black and thick like leather, and black feathers crowned its head. It looked like a hybrid between a bird and a human being, its eyes dark and almond-shaped, deeply encased in its skin. Sarah felt nauseous at its monstrous appearance, and pinned its clawed hands to the ground, without mercy. The demon seemed . . . weak.
Why is it so easy, she wondered as it offered nearly no resistance. Why will it not fight back?
Sean and Niall, as if of one mind, took Sarah’s place in holding the creature’s claws. Sarah placed her hands on its chest, ready to dissolve it into Blackwater – and then she remembered. Her powers, for some mysterious reason, didn’t work on the demon-bird. She had learnt that the hard way the first time it attacked her, in Edinburgh. Sean lifted his arm, ready to plunge his sgian-dubh into the demon’s heart.
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