Tide (The Sarah Midnight Trilogy)

by Daniela Sacerdoti

  “Why did you do it?” Elodie’s voice is as cold as the snow outside.

  “Because I made a choice. You helped me make it, Elodie. I won’t help my father kill anymore.”

  I fight the impulse to bury my sgian-dubh straight into his heart. This liar killed Mike as surely as if he’d shot him in the head.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Sean. But I’m the only chance you have.”

  I laugh. “How selfless you are. You want to be kept alive for our good! You pathetic bastard.” But I know he’s telling the truth. I know he’s not imploring us to keep him alive. He’s imploring us to keep ourselves alive.

  Elodie’s eyes are fixed on Nicholas’s. “You saved me. Twice. It was your father, wasn’t it, who ordered the ravens on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you stopped them.”

  “Yes.”

  My anger is all-consuming, I’m sure I could burst into flames at any minute. “Your father started all this. Your father killed them all. Harry, Mike, all the Secret heirs around the world.”

  “I want to stop him. I’m going to take you to him. The gate the book described is in an ancient forest, hundreds of miles from here. We need to head east.”

  Elodie and I look at each other. I’m chilled at the cold fury in her eyes.

  “How do we know you’re not lying? That you can be trusted? That you won’t turn on us? What is your word to us after all this?” I ask bitterly.

  “Do you have a choice, Sean? You want this destruction to end, don’t you?”

  “Shut up. Now.”

  Elodie and I turn at Sarah’s biting words. We’ve been so absorbed in what was happening that we’ve forgotten all about her. She’s been standing there, at a distance from us. Her eyes are shining bright green, sharp as two blades, cutting whoever looks into them, and I see that her hands are raised, ready to hit.

  “You lied to me all this time.”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah,” Nicholas begins. His face crumples.

  “You lied to me, you pretended you loved me! Why did you not just kill me straight away? Why did you not kill us all! Did you want to play with us a little bit longer?” she hisses through gritted teeth.

  “You were never supposed to die, Sarah. You were chosen as my bride.”

  An icy shudder runs down my spine and I hear myself unleash a deep growl. Over my dead body!

  Then Sarah strides over to the bed. “As your what? Are you insane? The bride of the … Prince of Shadows, or whoever you are? What is this, some crazy fairy tale?”

  Nicholas is gripped by a coughing fit so hard he might choke. And it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if he did. There’s a bluish tinge to his cheeks, and his breathing is fast and shallow.

  “Stay awake, Nicholas. Don’t you close your eyes!” Sarah’s tone is deadly. Nicholas shivers. He’s losing consciousness again.

  “Look at me!” Sarah shouts, and then she pounces on him, her hands in front of her. Elodie and I grab her at once, holding her back. In the scuffle Elodie cries out in pain.

  “You can’t kill him, Sarah. As much as you want to – and believe me, so do I – we need him alive!” We’re holding Sarah from behind, trying to avoid her deadly eyes.

  “His father killed my parents! And Harry! He’s killing us all!”

  “We need him to take us to the Enemy. Think, Sarah, think! Don’t let your rage win, Sarah. Think of what’s best. Don’t let your rage win.” I repeat, like a mantra. Eventually Sarah’s body softens in our grip.

  Elodie unwraps her arms from round her waist, letting me hold her alone.

  “You’re not a man. And you’re not a demon. You’re a monster,” Sarah whispers. Nicholas has his eyes closed, too weak to reply, too weak to move. “You can let me go, Sean. I won’t touch him,” she adds, composed.

  I free Sarah from my hold, and Elodie takes her other arm, keeping her face turned away from Sarah’s. “Come on. Come with me.”

  Sarah allows Elodie to lead her away, but at the threshold she turns around. “Why me, Nicholas? Why?” Her voice is laden with fury, and hurt.

  “My father chose you among the heirs. You are the most powerful Dreamer of your generation. And your blood is still strong.”

  “Still” strong? What does that mean?

  Nicholas looks like a wax mannequin, white but for the blood that stains his face, still, nearly lifeless. I wish I could strangle him with my own hands.

  “Get up and get dressed,” I say instead. “We’re leaving this place, and soon.”

  Sarah is standing at the bottom of the stairs, her hands over her face. It’s so surreal to see the lovely, pristine stone floors strewn with ash and debris, and where the great hall used to be – the room that Sarah always modestly called the living room – is a blackened, gaping hole.

  “Sarah.”

  “I just can’t believe it, Sean. I can’t believe it.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “I thought you were just jealous of him.”

  I nodded. “I was. But there was something else as well. I often thought he could be corrupt, I wondered whether he was collaborating with the Sabha. That maybe he was a member of a Valaya himself. I knew there was something about him that didn’t quite add up. But I could never, ever have suspected that.”

  “The King of Shadows is his father,” Sarah hisses. “How is this even possible?”

  “I have no idea, Sarah.”

  She abruptly turns on her heels. “I need to get out.”

  “I’m coming with you.” I’m expecting her to protest, but she doesn’t. I grab coats for both of us and follow her outside. We stand together in the snow that has covered the grass at the back of the house. The snow is still falling. Sarah is looking towards the beach and the water, a million dancing snowflakes falling silently on the sand and the sea. Dawn is seeping through the clouds, turning the sky a light purple.

  “I’ve been close to him all this time, Sean. I never suspected …”

  “It’s not your fault. He deceived you.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. Oh.” She takes a few steps, and starts retching. She falls to her knees, her black hair even blacker against the snow.

  I brush her hair away from her face, holding it clear until she’s finished. She’s very pale, and a film of cold sweat covers her forehead.

  “I left him,” she tells me quietly.

  “What?”

  “It was after you said we could never be together. Because of all that genetic crap.”

  “That wasn’t crap. That’s the way things are,” I whisper. My heart is in pieces.

  “Great. Just great. First I fall for you …”

  I hold my breath. I wasn’t just imagining it, then. “But I couldn’t have you, and then I found out you betrayed me,” she continued. “Then I end up with Nicholas, and it turns out that he’s a monster. What else now?”

  “Did you …”

  “What?”

  “Did you love Nicholas? Really?”

  She frowns and sighs heavily. “I thought I did, but there was always something. I don’t know, something wrong. Whenever he was around I felt … I couldn’t think clearly. It was as if he controlled my thoughts.”

  “And I wasn’t there to kick his face in.” Anger is making my hands shake.

  “I had sent you away.”

  That was true. “I should have done something, though.” I raise my head as we speak. I see Niall in the kitchen, looking out of the big glass windows. Winter is standing beside him, her silver hair strewn over his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. For a second, Niall looks like an old man. My heart skips a beat. Now that Mike is gone, nothing will ever be the same.

  “Things had changed, though,” Sarah continues. “Since we’d come to Islay he didn’t seem to have the same effect on me, confusing my thoughts, I mean.”

  The snow is falling thick and fast around us, resting on Sarah’s face, on her black c
oat. A sliver of sunlight is shining on the sea. “He was much more worried about things, always seemed to be upset about something. Not as confident as he used to be. Not as arrogant.” She shrugs. “I wonder what brought all this on. This … repenting thing. Deciding to turn against his father to help us. Who knows?” Sarah shivers, wrapping her arms around herself.

  “We’d better go. You’re freezing. I’ll make Nicholas coffee – that should wake him up fast. And then I suppose we have to trust him to take us to where his father is. At least we know now what we’re up against.”

  I can’t even begin to think about all that now. I’m set to go, and I turn to head for the house, but Sarah puts a hand on my arm, stopping me. “Sean? He said my blood is still strong. What did he mean?”

  “Maybe he was talking about your powers. The Blackwater?”

  “Yes. That must be it. The most powerful Dreamer, he said. Some good it does me.”

  Before I can stop myself, I take her hand in mine. “Why did you leave Nicholas?” I ask, hoping and praying for the answer I want.

  “Because I love someone else,” she whispers. Our eyes meet for a second, and what I wouldn’t give to put my lips on hers.

  “I thought about the message Harry left in the fairy-tale book.” She interrupts my thoughts.

  “Yes?”

  “It occurred to me, ‘Morag’ in Gaelic means Sarah. The message is about me, not about my grandmother. Watch over Sarah, she’s the key. That’s what it meant,” she whispers, and walks away, letting go of my hand. Our fingers hold on for a second. Her soft scent lingers in the air, and as she goes, I feel like a part of me has just been cut off.

  But my heart is beating wildly. Sarah doesn’t love Nicholas. She loves somebody else.

  And I know it’s me.

  It’s the answer I’ve dreamt of, but not an answer on which I can act.

  I watch her walk through the falling snow towards the broken house. There’s a cold, hard splinter in my heart. It’s her absence. I feel it when I breathe, when I walk, when I speak. It’s lodged in there and shows no sign of vanishing. But I’m right about us not being able to be together, I know I’m right. However painful and unbearable that might feel.

  I curse the Secret Families for never having told me I couldn’t be with a Secret. I curse my own blood for being all wrong. Everything is wrong. While Sarah and I were falling for each other life has been mocking us.

  I stand in the snow for a little longer, going over the conversation earlier between Sarah and me, when she told me what she’d discovered about my parents.

  The truth about my parents, Amelia Campbell and Allan Hannay, has blown me apart. Would it have been better if I hadn’t ever known? Sarah thought she was doing the right thing by telling me. But I’m not sure. Should I say I’m bitter for what was denied to me, my rightful inheritance, my place in the world?

  My parents, a proper family.

  The truth is, I never knew, and I never suspected. I thought it’d been the Gamekeeper training that taught me how to use the runes, how to move under a mantle of invisibility. I suppose I should have noticed that no other Gamekeeper I knew had talents as special as mine. I would have noticed had I not been so busy doing my bloody job. Harry did say a couple of times that the way I used the runes was special, but he never made a big deal of it. Now I know why. I was never to know of my half-Secret, bastard blood.

  They lived in a different world, Stewart Midnight, Morag, and Amelia. My mother. A world of old prejudice and suspicion, set in ways as ancient as this rugged rock they call Islay. They exiled my mother, and for what? So she fell in love with someone who wasn’t of her kind. She failed the Secret Family, she failed them all. And because of this, they destroyed her.

  The irony is, she ended up having no more children, so their plan didn’t work. Her powers weren’t passed on anyway, not to any proper Secret heir, I mean. Just me, the mongrel.

  And because of my parentage, I can never be with the woman I love.

  Before I head inside I turn around one last time to look at the little snowy mound where we’ve buried Mike, shimmering faintly in the lilac light of morning. I bet he never thought he, a man from Louisiana, would end up buried on a Scottish island. An unmarked grave, for now. Just for now.

  I’ll come back and see that you get a proper burial, Mike. I’ll come back and see you.

  57

  Alone With You

  That night you said our souls

  Are made of the same thing

  Niall couldn’t cry, he just couldn’t – even if the lump of tears he had in his throat was suffocating him. He needed to be at sea, but he couldn’t do that either. They had to stay together. All of them.

  As the thought formed in his head, Niall felt a stab of pain in his heart. No, not all of us, he remembered. Just those who are left.

  He watched the waves ebbing and flowing from the window in his room. Every wave called to him. Only the water could have healed his raw soul, but the water was forbidden to him for now. Only Winter, who was standing beside him, the same longing in her eyes, could understand how he was feeling. She’d held his hand throughout the burial and never left his side since. Winter’s hand in his, her warm body beside him, reminded Niall that he was still alive, that he wasn’t lying in that grave with Mike. Though it felt like it.

  Niall couldn’t get Mike’s face out of his head. His voice, his jokes, his mannerisms. In the short time they’d spent together Mike had won Niall’s friendship, his admiration, his complete and utter loyalty.

  And now he’s gone, killed by those bloody bastards we’ve been hunting all our lives.

  “We must go and look for the King of Shadows. We must at least try and destroy him. Or we’ll be picked off one by one,” he murmured.

  Winter touched Niall’s face. “I know.”

  “I might not be back.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  He turned to her in shock. “You can’t, it’s too dangerous! Please, Winter, stay on Islay. Wait for me.”

  “Do you really think I’d be safe here? After what happened in this house? We’re all in danger, wherever we are. On land or in the water. There are no heirs left here, Niall. The nearest Families, as far as I know, are further north or down south in England, and I have no idea if they’re still alive. Islay is not safe anymore.”

  “Probably, but it’s certainly safer than coming with us.”

  “I’m not going to leave you,” she said. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and pressed her warm lips to his. They tasted salty, and there was the usual scent of fresh air and seawater coming off her skin.

  Kissing her is like kissing a wave, Niall had time to think before all thoughts ebbed away. With her hands on him, and her lips on his there was no time to think, no time for anything but to wrap himself around her and dive into her warmth. He let his sorrow melt into her, he let his tears flow away, a river of sadness dissolving into the sea.

  *

  Dawn found them entwined, Winter’s silver hair on his chest, her soft breath in his ear. He opened his eyes to see her lovely face resting on his shoulder, her body against his. The sorrow for Mike’s loss invaded him again, but there was a little light of hope nesting in his heart now, that he would drink from her again and again, and that if night had to close on them forever, at least it would happen when they were together.

  58

  Blind

  Pain is a secret society

  That makes those who feel it

  Kin

  Elodie sat quietly, her hands in her lap. A frozen, still sky was pressing against her window, dotted with a million swirling snowflakes.

  So that’s what it was. My hair standing on end every time Nicholas was around, those whispers that crawled in my ears and I couldn’t get rid of – that sense of unease, of danger – fighting with the evidence, the fact that Nicholas had saved my life. The fact that he could have killed me, twice, and he didn’t.

  There he was, in fl
esh and blood, the man ultimately responsible for Harry’s death. The man who destroyed her life.

  He was lying sleeping, curled up, as harmless as a child. He’d tried to get up, but had fallen on the floor, his legs giving way. He lay so still, so white, that for a moment Elodie thought he was dead – then she realized he had fallen asleep suddenly, like babies do. The torture he had suffered for hours, that terrible thing he’d called brain fury in his delirium, had left him half-dead and spent. And blind.

  So this is the man who killed me.

  There was nothing Elodie would have wanted more than to give Nicholas her poisonous kiss. It would have been an immensely stupid thing to do, of course – it didn’t take Elodie long to see that clearly, to turn her rage into a plan. The final plan. The time when everything would come together, and Nicholas would take them straight to the lair of the beast.

  Elodie wetted a towel and washed the blood off his face, calmly. She’d never seen anyone bleed from their eyes before. She’d never seen anyone in so much pain. He had clawed at his own cheeks and bit his lips until they were shredded and bleeding. He’d bear the scars for as long as he lived.

  Elodie had no sympathy for him, not even now, lying here a broken man. He hadn’t chosen to be born a monster, but he had chosen to do his father’s bidding, to kill and destroy for a long, long time. Until life had taken him to Sarah.

  What is it about Sarah that enchants them all?

  “Elodie?”

  She jumped out of her skin. Nicholas was looking at her with black, shiny, unseeing eyes, so dark that the pupil fused with the iris. Elodie felt a wave of hatred, but didn’t betray any emotion. “You need to get up. We must go.”

  He groaned. Immediately, he was sick by the side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.