The Book of Shadows

by Ruth Hatfield

  “It is,” said Danny. “It is over. You’re finished. I’ll never dream about you again, nor will anybody else. And if someone wants to sell their soul, they’ll have to find another way to do it. I’m going to rip this book into confetti.”

  “Go on, then,” said Sammael. “Have the courage of your convictions. Tear it up.”

  Danny tightened his fingers around the little book. It felt like something he remembered—snakeskin? Not snakeskin, but some kind of skin, definitely. Rabbit skin? No, it wasn’t that soft. Human skin? For a moment, he shuddered.

  But it wasn’t that. It was a little softer still. Perhaps the delicate furred skin on Shimny’s nose. It reminded him of Ori’s ears. Of his parents, and Tom. Of all the things that made his heart sing.

  He cleared his throat again and spat on the ground, hoping it would seem like he was just spitting out more battle dust.

  “What’s it made of?” he asked, trying to stop his cheeks from flaming up.

  “I told you,” said Sammael. “It’s made of creatures who wanted to change the world. They wanted to know more, to see farther. They entrusted themselves to me, and I gave them what they wanted. In the end, each and every one of them made the whole miserable world of Xur into a better place, even if just for a single blazing second. Why do you think their dreams fought with so much heart against you? You’re trying to destroy all the hope they ever believed in.”

  “Shut up!” Danny felt his voice wavering with uncertainty. Sammael was trying to confuse him again. He needed to keep his head clear, follow his original plans. He had Sammael’s book. All he had to do was destroy it.…

  Deliberately looking away from Sammael, he tried not to think about any of the things that had just been said. He twisted the little book between his hands and tugged at one half, pushing at the other.

  “Danny!”

  Of all the voices in the world, it was the only one that could have stopped him. In front of her—if she saw what he was doing, if she realized he was tearing up Sammael’s last power …

  He’d see her face, and he’d never be able to live with himself.

  “Danny!”

  What was she even doing here? She should still be on earth, waiting to be summoned to the new world along with everybody else.

  He turned around.

  She was sitting astride a red and gold horse, a horse that shone brighter than any polished sword. The hare Barshin was tucked into her chest. Both were covered in a flowing cloak that seemed to hold all the colors Danny had ever seen in his life—apart, he thought, from a few greens found around the edge of the school playing field—and they carried something with them, draped over the horse’s withers. It was long and pale, and it appeared to weigh very little, for Cath had her hand on it and was holding it firmly down.

  She was thin and dirty, and dark shadows sat in the hollows of her gray cheeks. Wherever she had traveled, it had clearly cost her.

  And then she smiled, and her face reflected the yellow of the sunshine and the blue of the sky.

  “We’ve got him,” she said. “We’ve found him. You can have him back.”

  Danny’s eyes went to the pale lump dangling down the horse’s shoulder. And although he knew the answer, he swallowed hard and croaked, through the lump in his throat, “Who?”

  “Tom,” said Cath. “We’ve brought him back for you.”

  CHAPTER 21

  TOM

  Danny lifted the pale body down from the horse’s back. It weighed nothing at all, and felt as papery as the dream version of Kalia that he’d once brought out of Chromos to fool Sammael with.

  He laid it on the desert sand and forced himself to look at it.

  It was Tom. Not the shining, lively cousin he had once known, the staunch friend who had taken him on so many adventures, who had always been ready with a sandwich and a slice of pie, dragging him out into the midnight woods. Not the tall, clever companion who knew every path and tree for miles around, who could knock a fence post in with three blows of a sledgehammer or wrestle a fractious cow to the ground.

  It was something left of Tom’s body. A fragile structure held together by light and dreams. Tom’s soul.

  “Where did you find him?” he managed to say as Cath slid down from the red and gold horse, clutching the colored cloak around her.

  “The ether,” Cath said. And that was all.

  “How?” Danny asked her, but she had lost her smile, and shrugged.

  “You know the Earth’s burning up?” she said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got this now. I’ll scribble out what I wrote in the Book of Shadows, and we can go back to Earth. Nothing bad will happen there anymore.”

  He held up Sammael’s book for them all to see. Even though Barshin must have seen it before, Cath, Shimny, and the hare all shrank back from it. Only Ori remained close to Danny, solid and trusting at his side.

  None of them spoke.

  “It’s Sammael’s,” said Danny, into the empty air. “He can’t get any more sand without it.”

  Barshin struggled out of Cath’s arms and landed at Danny’s feet. Gray and dusty, he blended into the desert as if he’d been sculpted from it.

  “We braved great fears to bring you Tom,” said the hare, looking up at Danny. “You must honor us by facing him and deciding what to do. Where do you think he should go?”

  Danny couldn’t answer for a moment. He looked at Sammael’s book again. So many pages. That tiny, spidery writing, covering the thin paper. Who would he find in there if he read the whole thing? Olaf Thorn. Secundus. An old man called Abel Korsakof. Barshin. Ori.

  He turned to the last pages of writing. It had to be there—

  And then he found it.

  Tom’s bargain.

  “I, Tom Fletcher, give freely my sand…”

  His eyes stung with a sharp pain. If only he had been there to stop Tom from signing it. If only he had managed to get in the way somehow. If only he had been able to bring Tom back, the real Tom, gentle and bright and alive.

  But Tom’s life had been lived, and it had ended, and that was the hard, solid truth.

  “I don’t know,” he said, eventually. His voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper. “I don’t know where he should go. What do you think?”

  He turned his eyes on the hare. Without Barshin, Tom would still be alive, but Danny didn’t even blame Barshin now. He was too tired and confused to blame anybody. Tom was dead, and that was it.

  “You have two choices,” said Barshin. “Either leave his sand to Sammael, as he wished, or make your own bargain with Sammael and ask for Tom’s soul back. Then return it to Death, and she will put it into the earth, as you wish.”

  “Sammael’s powerless now!” said Danny. “And Tom didn’t want to be with him, anyway. It was a trick. Tom didn’t know anything about Chromos, or the colors, or any of that. He just wanted to be able to talk to birds and animals.”

  “You must accept,” said Barshin gravely, “that Tom made his bargain freely, according to the desire in his heart. He may not even have been able to spell out what it was. But it was inside him, and it drove him. May I tell you, briefly, what happened to me?”

  Danny shrugged. “I know you lost your girlfriend, then you made a bargain with Sammael—probably that one day you’d see her again, I guess. Isn’t that it?”

  “My love, Marija, was a champion boxer,” said Barshin. “A true champion, whose lightness of paw pulled her high above ordinary hares and secured her a place among the very stars. She was as nimble as a spider casting out its first thread, swinging weightless into the air in search of a distant anchor. I loved her, and she loved me. But when I met her, her soul was not her own. She had given it already to Sammael, in return for her boxing skills.”

  “So she wasn’t that great, really, was she?” said Danny. “She just bought her skill.”

  “A great fighter requires an even greater opponent,” said Barshin, his voice so tight that it threatened to snap
in two. “The better one is, the more others must progress. In that way, skills advance, and everyone benefits. But while some work on their skill, others prefer to profit by deceit. Marija took on an opponent who had laid a trap in the ground. She fell into it, and he … he killed her. For months, I was plagued by dreams about her, that she was still alive, that she came back to me. But gradually another figure began to creep into those dreams.…”

  “Sammael,” said Danny. “Yeah, he gets about in dreams, doesn’t he?”

  “Sammael,” agreed Barshin. “He gave me the chance to look into the darkest corners of my mind. I began to recall stories Marija had whispered in my ear as I slept. I remembered the way she twitched her ears sometimes, listening to silence. And I began to understand that Marija had not returned to the earth, but left her spirit in the hands of another. And I could get no peace.

  “So I sought out Sammael for myself, and I asked him for Marija’s soul back. I wanted to return her to the earth. I wanted to lie down and press myself to the soil and feel close to her and know that the worms were singing her songs. I wanted to know where she was.

  “As you know, I made a bargain with him. I freely gave up my own sand to him, and I agreed to try and trap you, in exchange for the promise that once the business was concluded, Marija’s sand would be returned to the earth. So now we come to the point where I should be asking one final favor of you.”

  Danny stared at the hare. “I don’t owe you anything,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  “Indeed you don’t,” said Barshin. “But you now hold the soul of my beloved Marija in your hand. Sammael needs his book in order to release her.”

  “So? That’s not my problem. You should have gotten her ages ago.”

  “Nevertheless. While you have that book, Marija is in limbo, and Tom is in limbo. Only Sammael can release their sand from the bargains they made with him.”

  Danny looked around at the armies, the sky, the sand, his tiny bunch of friends, and Tom on the ground.

  The fragile case of Tom, waiting to become something new.

  Tom hadn’t tried to improve the world. He had only loved it. He would have wanted Danny to do what was best for it, to rid it of Sammael, even if it meant that he, Tom, had to stay in limbo forever …

  Wouldn’t he?

  And Danny realized that he didn’t know. He had never asked Tom what he wanted, and he couldn’t now. He had to decide for them both.

  He looked up at the sky. There were no birds in it, apart from the weary, exhausted birds of his army and Sammael’s dreams, and both those sets of birds were sitting sullenly on any perches they could find—heads, spears, shield rims.

  Danny remembered the skylarks on the farm, soaring above the fields, their endlessly jumbled songs patterning the sky. He recalled the crows and jays, the blackbirds, the gulls, the pigeons. Tom had loved all the birds. Perhaps he would like to stay with them?

  But he had loved the cows, too. And the badgers. Those slow, lumbering creatures of the soil, who rooted around for insects, shuffling through the darkness. Cows were only a brief jump into the air between two earthbound ends. Badgers were the same—barely even a jump—their noses and tails sunken into the soil.

  “The earth,” he said. “Tom belongs to the earth. He always did.”

  Barshin said, very gently, “But only Sammael can release him from that book. So what are you going to do?”

  Danny looked down at the book. For a second he wavered. He couldn’t give the book back to Sammael, surely? It would restore some of his power. And then Sammael might just take Tom’s soul and burn open Chromos with it, and refuse to honor any pledge Danny had managed to get out of him.

  He looked up at Sammael. There was no trace of emotion on the creature’s face. If anything, there was a concentrated blandness.

  I’m done for, thought Danny. I don’t know how this power works, or what to use it for. I blundered into this entirely by mistake, a long time ago. And I never really wanted to rule the entire universe. I just want to do what’s best for Tom.

  Sammael smiled, very thinly indeed.

  “In that case,” he said. “I’d like my book back, please. And while you’re about it, I’ll have your soul, too.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE BARGAIN

  “No!” Danny gripped the book. That couldn’t be right. There must be some way he could give the book back, or learn how to use it, without having to give himself to Sammael. That was the thing he’d sworn he’d never do.

  “That’s the bargain,” said Sammael. “You give me back my book, and you give your sand to me. Otherwise everything stays as it is. Your cousin stays as he is, and you live with it. Your choice.”

  That would be okay, wouldn’t it? Danny looked at the husk of Tom, lying on the sand. It would be okay to just leave him there and get on with building the new world, building a new Tom …

  And the claws of all that he had learned over the past weeks and months rose up from the sand and plucked at his shoulders, dragging them down. He couldn’t build a new Tom, and he couldn’t forget the old one.

  He choked on the dryness in his throat and had to draw hard at the air to breathe. It reminded him of being in the ether. “How do I know you won’t take his sand and use it to break open Chromos again?”

  “I never break promises,” said Sammael. “Right or wrong, I never break them. Once they’re written down, I leave the rest to the legends and the stars.”

  Legends. Danny looked at the book in his hand and drew out his own book again from his pocket. Two legendary books, and he held them both.

  There had been too many books and stories in this journey. He couldn’t know if any of them had even a grain of truth in them anymore. He had come to the end of the final page.

  His leg shuffled sideways against Ori’s bulk, and he looked around for Cath, but she had sunk to her knees in the sand and was clutching Barshin. They were as gray as dusk.

  His friends.

  “Can you save them?” he asked Sammael.

  Sammael shook his black-curled head. “You closed me off from Chromos,” he said. “I can’t do anything for them now, unless I find a way to get back in there.”

  Tom. Cath. Barshin.

  What about his parents? If he agreed to give himself up to Sammael, they would lose another child.

  So many lives, all in Danny’s hands.

  He closed his eyes and held out Sammael’s little book. “I’ll do it,” he said. The words felt like stones, dropping down his throat. “You can have my sand, if you give me Tom’s. And I want enough time to give Tom to Death so she can put him into the earth, and I want to save Cath and Barshin. That’s all. After that, you can kill me and use my sand for whatever you like. I won’t know. I won’t care. As long as you make sure my parents don’t know anything about it.”

  “What a hero,” said Sammael. He took the offered book. As it left Danny’s hand, Danny felt a hundred times lighter. There was nothing to fight for anymore. He knew what was going to happen, and that was it. The hand went instinctively to Ori’s golden head, and her fur under his palm was soft.

  Sammael wrote something in the book and showed it to Danny. It read,

  I, Danny O’Neill, do freely give my sand to Sammael, in exchange for the sand of Tom Fletcher, which I shall give to Death. Also in return I shall receive sufficient time to enable me to restore Cath Carrera and Barshin the hare to a good and flourishing state of health. My endeavors on Earth shall be confined to these two acts. Signed:

  Danny shrugged and signed it.

  Sammael gave a brief nod. “I’d better go and put the fires out on Earth,” he said. “I’ll come and find you when you’re finished. Don’t bother trying to hide.”

  Danny hadn’t even considered it. He had already assumed there wouldn’t be any point. Sammael owned him now. Of course he would be able to find Danny, wherever he was.

  And then Sammael turned his back on Danny and faced his army of dreams.


  “Retreat,” he commanded them. “This world is finished. Return to Earth and quench the sun’s flames. Earth needs its dreams.”

  And the shadow army and its commander melted away, leaving only the five creatures on Danny’s half-created world of sand.

  It was only then that Danny realized the red and gold horse was his old friend Shimny. He put his head in his hands and said, through his scratched palms, “What have I done to everyone?”

  “They’re all like us,” said Cath.

  “All who?” Danny raised his eyes, squinting against the unfiltered sun.

  “All the people on Earth who got caught under the shadows. They’re all still gray. All the places, too. Even after Sammael puts the fires out, they’ll still be gray. The color’s not coming back.”

  “Of course it’ll come back,” said Danny. “Sammael will see to that. Let’s go and find Death, so I can give Tom to her. And you just need more gorse. I’ll find gorse for you, so you’re better again.”

  Cath shook her head. “The gorse wears off. It reaches my skin but not my heart. And it doesn’t work for Barshin.”

  “Good,” said Danny. “Then I can live forever, pretending I’m trying to find a cure for him, can’t I?”

  “That’s not keeping your side of the bargain, though,” said Cath. “So Sammael won’t have to keep his, will he?”

  “Well, what’ll cure you, then?” said Danny, although he had a feeling he might know the answer.

  “We’ve got to put Chromos back on Earth,” said Cath.

  “Oh, yeah? And how do we do that? Use Tom’s sand to burn it open ourselves?”

  Cath shook her head. “Sammael’s the only one who knows how to put Chromos onto sand so it can spread properly.”

  “But Sammael can’t do that anymore,” said Danny, slowly. “We saw to that—you and me. None of us can go back there either.”

  “We can,” said Cath. She touched the cloak around her shoulders. In comparison to her grayness, it was brighter than a rainbow. “We came here through Chromos. Barshin, Shimny, and me. My cloak protected us.”

  “Where did you get it?”