Stones of Power- Hellstone & Maelstrom

by Jenna Grey

  “Liam.” She put her hand on his arm, but he tugged it away, turning his back on her. Despite everything, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for him; he was like an angry child. Polly forced him to turn and face her.

  “You have no idea what it’s like for me, living in his shadow,” he said. “All I want is to have a life of my own; instead, I’m shut away, treated like a disease that they can’t find a cure for. You would never understand.”

  He pushed her away from him, a gentle push, but she had to take a step back. She didn’t want to leave it like this, couldn’t leave it like this.

  “Please, I don’t want you to hate me,” she said.

  A look of such terrible sadness came over his face that it made Polly’s heart ache for him.

  “I don’t hate you. I’m glad you’re here,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “At least now I know you’re safe.” Then he turned and went upstairs without looking back.

  Polly followed him with her gaze as he disappeared, probably to his bedroom. He looked so pale, his eyes just a little glazed and pouched, so unlike Finn’s healthy, contented looks. Liam really did look as if he was being hounded by demons. Finn had said that he was a tough cookie, that he could look after himself, but Polly couldn’t believe that, especially not now. She had rarely seen someone so vulnerable. Was she hurt by what he’d said to her? Perhaps a little. It wasn’t so much what he said, but the way he said it, with such pith, such anger and yes, such jealousy. He really seemed to hate his brother. Then she realised what he had actually said. ‘It’s about time he got his dick wet’. Finn was a virgin. Polly hadn’t even considered having sex with him – there had hardly been time in between traumas. Did she fancy him? Oh God yes; he was hot. Would she sleep with him if the opportunity arose? The tiniest of smiles crept to her lips.

  She went back up to her room to sort out what she was going to take with them on their trip, desperate now to get underway and away from Liam until he’d had a chance to cool down. That was hardly going to solve the long term problem, though. Living under the same roof with him wasn’t going to be easy. Had she made a mistake moving in here? She hadn’t had much choice really. It was better than being stuck with her uncle and Winchard at least. Liam was just going to have to get used to it.

  Polly looked through her holdall to see what she could take with her. She had no idea how long they would be going away for, so just took what she could fit into the holdall, a dress, a cardigan and an extra pair of jeans and tee shirt. If she got desperate for clothes, she could probably raid a charity shop to get some more.

  When she came back down, Bert and Finn were waiting for her. Finn gave his usual nervous smile and the uncertainty she felt washed away the instant she saw it.

  “Oh, there you are, my dear, I was just going to send Finn up for you. We need to get organised and get off,” Bert said, trying to lift a bag that was far too heavy for him. Finn yanked it from him and slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’ve never been to York,” Polly said. “I’ve heard it’s beautiful; I’m really looking forward to it.” Right now she would have been happy to visit North Korea if it got her away from her uncle.

  Bert gave her a curious look.

  “How did you know we were going to York?”

  “Liam,” Finn said, the smile dropping from his face. “I didn’t know he’d come out. I thought he’d be out of circulation for a day or two at least.” Polly couldn’t help but notice the edge to his voice.

  “I saw him a little while ago just for a few minutes,” Polly said. “He wasn’t very happy about our little trip.”

  “He’s never happy about anything,” Finn said, his voice uncharacteristically bitter. “I hope he didn’t give you a hard time.”

  Polly shook her head.

  “No, not really. I feel sorry for him, to tell you the truth. He seems so vulnerable. Will he be okay on his own?”

  “He’ll be fine,” Bert said. “He prefers to be on his own most of the time. He’s not a mixer.” He picked up one of the lighter bags and made for the door. “Are you all right carrying that, sweetheart? It’s not far to the station. We have to take the train up, I’m afraid. I couldn’t believe the price of the tickets – absolutely scandalous. I’m afraid our old Volvo would never make it all the way up there, so the train it is. Bramwell is going to meet us there and chauffeur us around. He’s arranged a nice little bed and breakfast place for us. It sounds quite charming.”

  “It’ll be fun,” Finn said. “I think we could all do with a break.” He gave Polly a strange little look, but a nice one. “Dad, where’s my Red Dwarf tee-shirt?”

  Bert closed his eyes for a second or two, opened them and said:

  “It’s fallen behind your bed. It’s a bit dusty; you might need to shake it off.”

  Polly just looked at Bert and laughed.

  “How do you do that? It’s just nuts!”

  Bert laughed back.

  “It saves an awful lot of time, believe me. Finn is always losing things – that was how I first thought of putting that card in the window. I realised that there must be hundreds, thousands of people that need things found.”

  “Have you had many replies?” Polly asked, thinking that she already knew the answer.

  Bert grinned at her.

  “Would you believe that you’re the first one?”

  “I had a feeling,” she replied, grinning back. “I mean, when I saw your advertisement in the shop window, I thought it was a joke at first; I didn’t think that anyone could offer a service like that. Well, I knew that people could sometimes find missing people and things, but...”

  “You thought I must be barking mad,” Bert replied, giving her a wicked grin. “As did everybody else it seems.”

  Polly giggled.

  “Not exactly, but I didn’t take it seriously – well, not at first.”

  “What made you change your mind?” Finn asked.

  Polly had to think about it for a moment.

  “I don’t know really, except that I thought that Nana would have approved – and I was desperate. My grandmother could do what you do a bit – but you seem to be—”

  “—the best,” Finn finished.

  Polly sagged a little, a sudden realisation hitting her.

  “So, Uncle was telling the truth when he said that Nana’s will was gone? He must have destroyed it.”

  Bert gave a heavy sigh.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so, but if he dies, then by law, as his next of kin, you would inherit everything. It might take a while for it to go through probate, but will or not, you will be a wealthy young woman if anything happens to him.”

  Finn gave a wicked grin.

  “We’ll have to make sure it looks like an accident then.”

  Bert took Polly’s hand in his and pressed it to his lips.

  “But you don’t have to worry about your future, my dear. I’ll make quite sure that you are always well looked after – it’s the least I can do.”

  Polly was going to protest, but Finn grinned at her and pinched his finger and thumb across her mouth in a ‘zip it’ gesture.

  “Now have you packed some sensible clothes, jeans, trainers, that sort of thing?” Bert asked. “Bram is going to get the potholing gear for us – I thought it would save time.”

  “Potholing?” Polly asked, horrified.

  “Well, if we find the burial site, it’s not going to be in somebodies back garden. We’re pretty certain poor old Sigurd, and his men were buried underground, in a cave of some sort,” Bert said, seeming to find her consternation highly amusing. “And from what Liam said, that sounds about right.”

  “There might be danger of a cave-in, we need to take precautions. Those helmets have lights on as well so that we can keep our hands free,” Finn explained. He looked highly amused at her reaction as well.

  “Oh, this is getting better all the time,” Polly said. “Next you’ll be telling me I’ve got to go spelunking.”

>   Bert and Finn both laughed and ushered her towards the door.

  The first port of call was Victoria, and that in itself was going to be a traumatic experience for Polly, who had never travelled more than a few miles in any direction. She’d never had the need to travel, or the inclination, because of her condition. Her grandmother had called it ‘sensory perception disorder’. Too much activity, too much noise, too many lights or people would trigger what she called a ‘time out’. Her senses would get so overloaded that they shut down completely for a couple of minutes. She’d obviously never witnessed one of her timeouts, but her grandmother had told her that she would just stand statue-still, staring out into space, completely unaware of where she was or what was happening around her. Then after a minute or two, she’d come back to reality, totally disoriented and so afraid, until she got her wits back again. She had never been allowed to go out alone, just in case she stepped out into traffic and ended up under a number 19 bus. Perhaps she should have warned Bert and Finn, but she didn’t want to sound like a complete wuss. They probably already thought she was the world’s biggest loser.

  Luckily for Polly, the train was quite empty because the commuters were already wherever they were going, and now the only passengers were shoppers and day trippers; they had their pick of the seats. Polly was having fun. For the first time in a long while, she felt that she had something to look forward to. Okay, she wasn’t too thrilled at the prospect of wiggling her way through caves looking for dead Vikings, and even less enthralled at the prospect of finding them, but it was a damn sight better than being stuck at home with Dalbert Winchard and her mad magician uncle.

  It was a lovely day, the sun was smiling down on them, and Polly was with two people she was rapidly becoming very fond of. Finn seemed to be enjoying it as much as she was, and kept tossing her covert little looks when Bert’s attention was on something exciting he’d seen out of the window. He seemed fascinated with sheep for some inexplicable reason and was rambling on about fitting mobile phones to sheep to keep track of them. Finn was directly opposite her, with Bert to the left of him, and although he pretended to look out of the window, she could see Finn’s reflection in the glass and knew that he was looking at her when he thought he could get away with it.

  “You’re going to like Bram,” Bert said. “he’s a little odd, but excellent company.” Bert telling her that someone was ‘odd’, didn’t really bode that well, as they didn’t come much odder than Bert, but it was all good.

  “So, how does this work exactly? When we get to York, how do you find the burial site?” Polly asked. Bert pulled some sandwiches out of his bag and handed them around. They were a bit squashed, and Polly wasn’t even entirely sure what was in them; they tasted like a bit of everything.

  “Well, we have a rough idea of where Sigurd is buried,” Bert said, “but the search area covers many square miles – it’s somewhere out on the Yorkshire Moors, we know that for certain. We’re going to have to drive quite a way to find it, but I need to follow a trail to get to it. How can I explain it? Imagine this is an Easter egg hunt – you know how they work. You start by finding the first clue, which gives you the next location, then you find the next clue, and so on and so on until you get to the treasure. I need a starting point, somewhere I knew Sigurd was at some point in his life. Bram has found out that he was definitely in York, so that’s where we start out. And I have Sigurd’s dagger hilt – a real godsend – I can pick up psychic vibrations, images and feelings relating to events that happened there. Then I’ll find the next stop along the line, and the next, until we eventually find poor old Sigurd and his pals.”

  “And if we do find it Bram is going to have an amazing burial site to excavate. Finding an intact Viking burial will be like winning the lottery for him. He’ll be able to fill in a lot of blanks in our history,” Finn said.

  “It’s not exactly intact if my uncle has already been there. He might have totally wrecked the place. I still can’t understand why we have to go there, though. If we get there and find we’ve wasted our time, what then?”

  Finn shrugged.

  “I have no idea. One day at a time, I suppose. We’ll work it out.”

  But Polly could see from Finn’s face that he’d already been thinking hard and long about it and none of the thoughts were pleasant.

  When they got off the train at Victoria, Polly realised it had been a grave mistake not to tell Bert and Finn about her condition. She stepped off the train into her idea of Hell, and almost instantly she felt the world toppling in on her; she was totally overwhelmed by the sheer furore of what was going on around her. There were so many people, so much noise, so much traffic, so much everything. She pressed herself in against Finn, truly terrified by the muchness of it. On every side people were pushing and shoving, all trying to get somewhere in too much of a hurry. They all seemed so angry, so malcontent, frowning their way through the station in a hurly-burly of frantic sound and motion. The bright lights dazzled her; the noises, sudden shouts, doors slamming, and whistles blowing mingled together, hammering into her skull. She felt as if the sky was falling on her.

  “You okay?” Finn asked, slipping his arm around her waist and pulling her in towards him.

  “I’m fine.” She saw the look on his face and realised that she wasn’t going to be able to fool him. “No, I’m not fine; I’ll be glad to get on the train, though,” she said, fighting to hear him over the buzzing in her head. She snuggled a bit closer to him, tucking herself under his arm.

  “We don’t have too long to wait,” he said. “Just stay close to me.” Polly could only nod. She could feel the world slipping away and then it was gone. The next thing she knew she was sitting at a table in the small British Rail cafe, with Finn beside her; he looked desperately worried.

  “What the hell happened? One minute you were there and the next minute you were gone.”

  Polly was still dazed, not quite sure what was going on. Whenever she came back from her time outs, it took a while for her to acclimatise, to get back to reality. Most of the time all she could feel was fear for long minutes after she’d got back.

  “I just have trouble with too much going on around me,” she said, trying to force a smile. “I’m okay now. I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”

  “Are you really okay?” he asked, taking her hand in his. “Tell me the truth.”

  “I’ll be fine when I get on the train.”

  Finn shook his head and gave a resigned sigh.

  “Polly you should have told us you had a problem with crowds; we’d have taken the coach or something.” He looked so concerned.

  “I should have, I’m sorry. I’ve had this problem since I was a little girl.”

  She noticed that Finn was still holding her hand and playing gently with her fingers. It was strangely intimate, the act of a lover, not a casual acquaintance and it sent a warm glow through her from top to toe.

  “Highly sensitive people, really gifted psychics get it a lot,” he explained. “Everyday sights and sounds become multiplied because your nervous system is so tuned in to everything around you. Liam suffers badly with it. That’s why he shuts himself away from the world.”

  “I think I knew that already.”

  Finn reached out and tipped her chin up so that she was forced to look at him instead of at the sugar bowl.

  “I get the feeling that you might have shut yourself away a bit too much. I mean, I can sense you’re a very gifted psychic, but you’re suppressing it. That’s probably why you got the bad dreams.”

  Polly stared down at the bowl of sugar sachets and began to fiddle with them, unable to look up into Finn’s eyes.

  “Liam said I was the most gifted psychic he’d ever come across. I thought he was making fun of me. I’ve always been afraid of what I might be able to do. I know, you’re right, but I’m just so terrified that it will get out of control. How do you control your gifts?”

  Finn’s expression was contemplative.
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br />   “I trust in the Powers That Be to give me what I need when I need it – that’s all you need to do. Just let them take care of you.”

  Polly wrinkled up her nose.

  “It’s not the higher powers I’m worried about; it’s the ones below. What if they get a hold on me? I’ve seen it, in my uncle, in Winchard, that lust for power. How do I know that won’t happen to me?”

  “Because you’re not your uncle,” Finn said. “You could never, ever let the darkness take control. You need to trust yourself more.”

  Polly glanced up at the clock and realised that she must have disappeared into limbo for longer than she thought. Usually, her little time outs only lasted a couple of minutes. This one must have been a doozy.

  “We’d better go, hadn’t we? We’re going to miss our train.” She still felt disoriented, not quite back in the real world; the last thing she wanted to do was go back outside. She was safe here, tucked away in this little cubby hole with Finn.

  “No, we’re very early, Dad doesn’t believe in leaving things until the last minute. He’s nipped off to get some mags to read on the train. We’ve got time for a cup of tea if you’d like one.”

  Polly accepted gratefully. She really couldn’t face going back out into that hell just yet a while. The tea was dreadful and outrageously expensive, but right at that minute she was just grateful it was hot and sweet – the four sugars she put in it made sure of that.

  “We can get straight on the train if we time it right,” Finn said, checking his watch.

  “Thank you for taking care of me,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” he replied, giving her one of his wonderful smiles.

  Polly did feel so much better now, but she was so embarrassed at having caused Finn so much bother. Then she felt the little prickle on her scalp, a sudden assault that spread down through her entire body. She looked around, scanned the other people in the cafe, not quite sure who or what she was looking for. It was hard to describe the sensation, but it frizzled through her, setting her nerve endings on fire and making her want to scratch.