The Beast of Callaire

by Saruuh Kelsey

  Mavers was the only one who made me feel safe again. He was the only person who thought to comfort me, and he was never angry to be woken at all hours of the night by my screaming. I used to hold onto his chest, my fingers tangled in his necklace—a ring with an arrow through it; a symbol of his ancestor, Mars—and he’d tell me that nightmares were perfectly Pure, nothing to do with the Numina at all. I didn’t believe him for a while.

  I’d been at the Academy of The Red for five years at that point, and I had nobody. I didn’t have friends because I was too timid. I didn’t have family because my brother ignored my existence, and the rest of my half siblings lived either in the Legend Mirror or halfway across the world. But Mavers came when the nightmares woke me, and we became as close as brother and sister.

  I can still hear his voice: The Majick is yours, Yasmin. It doesn’t control you—you control it.

  I whisper it to myself now but it doesn’t help.

  There is a voice in my head.

  At first I thought I was going mad—hearing voices is the first sign of crazy. And then I tried to be logical, convincing myself it was a defect of my Psychic Majick. I wasn’t actively listening to anyone, but what else could it be?

  But my Majick only works on people I’ve met at least once, and the voice in my head belongs to nobody I know. Not Minnie, not Mavers, not Muffin. Not even Guy.

  I sit in the middle of my bed, covers pushed to the floor, cold creeping past the flimsy cotton of my pyjamas, and I can’t find an explanation. Only one thing is clear: someone is crying out to me.

  With nothing to do but try to get them out of my mind, I reach out. I listen. Noises start to knit together, becoming words.

  Please. Don’t.

  That’s not the usual cry for help. Don’t what? I think in their direction. I’m not entirely sure how to talk to someone like this. I usually just think the words at whoever I’m talking to and they hear them. How does this work with someone I’ve never met?

  Don’t hurt me, the voice, clearly female, begs. A sensation in the back of my head suggests she’s crying.

  I won’t, I say.

  Without warning, I’m dragged into her thoughts. It feels like there’s a rope around my neck, pulling me headfirst into an endless pool of water. Blackness darker than any normal shadow encloses me, and then a tiny point of orange light expands until I can see my arms. Held in front of me they look the colour of pumpkin instead of their usual brown. It unsettles me.

  I’m in a corridor hollowed out of stone, fire-lit torches lighting the path in front of me. The bricks beneath my feet are blurry, the usual sharpness of my sight gone. I recognise it for what it is. A dream.

  A girl cries out piercingly loud and I’m running before I’ve even thought to move my legs. I stagger into a chamber made of damp stone and go completely, beastly still. A child has been laid upon a slab of rock, ropes binding her arms and legs.

  It’s the child who’s screaming, but the voice in my head sounds much older, teenaged. Two men stand beside the rock, bent together in discussion. My heart lurches as they come into focus. They’re two of the robes I saw in the backroom of the Muffin Emporium. They’re younger, their skin less withered, but it’s definitely them.

  The chill that runs down my spine insists I was wrong before. It’s not a dream at all. It’s a nightmare.

  A man staggers into the chamber, his dark hair mussed. He’s trembling with outrage the beast can sense from across the room. Without fear, he stands before the robes. “You can’t do this!”

  The taller robe replies with indignation that they most definitely can.

  “If you won’t take her, what am I supposed to do with her?”

  “She belongs in your world, with creatures of mortality, not creatures of Legend,” says the second robe.

  “She doesn’t! She’s one of you.”

  “Almost. She is almost one of us. You would not listen, Malach, and the consequences of your choices fall to your daughter.”

  His daughter? Is this man—Malach—trying to get rid of his own daughter? The robes don’t look impressed. In fact they look downright disapproving.

  “But her sister! She’s not the same. She’s not one of you.” He looks around himself, his eyes skipping over his daughter, laying there like an animal offered for sacrifice. Coward, my thoughts snarl. “Take her,” he begs. “I can’t.”

  “We can do nothing for her.”

  Malach, becoming even more pathetic, pulls at his hair. “She can’t stay here. She’s an abomination. She’s started doing things.”

  My head is as foggy as my vision. Is the girl a Legendary? And if she is, why can’t they take her to the Legend Mirror, like this man clearly wants?

  The robes are getting pissed. “And the responsibility falls on you to teach her control, not to us.”

  Something in my head clicks, gears and cogs moving until they slot into place and my mind moves as one connected machine. I think the robes are the Shadow Ministry. I really—really—hope they’re not, because I heard them talking about me, but I think they are. Who else would a man go to about a little girl with Majick? Who else would have the authority to grant or deny a child life in the Legend Mirror? They have to be the Shadow Ministry, the council of the Numina. They can’t be anyone else.

  The little girl closes her eyes so tight that wrinkles form in her pink skin. How does she feel, hearing her dad beg these men to take her away? She has a family, a sister at least, and probably a mother. How can Malach do this to her?

  “So you will do nothing?” he asks one last time. When the robes don’t speak, he hauls his daughter from the rock and takes her away.

  I glower at the back of his head as he disappears, wishing I had Fire Majick so I could burn the hair from his head, the clothes from his body. What kind of heartless person does that to a child?

  The chamber falls silent when Malach is gone. In the next blink the dream has released me.

  My eyes open on my bedroom, tracking the floorboards, the patterns of my ceiling, until I calm down. The voice in my head has faded—all I can hear are the whimpers of someone crying without words. Whoever she is, the girl in the dream, she’s scared and alone. And she doesn’t know I can hear her, doesn’t know I was in her dream.

  I wait for the presence to disappear, for the girl to stop crying, but I fall into a fitful sleep hours later with her cries still in the back of my skull.

  EIGHT

  THE HARBINGER

  Five days pass without consequence, and at the end of them I get my first pay check. I stare at the money, grinning from ear to ear. I’ve never had my own money before. Until I was sixteen, Mavers paid for all my expenses. He wouldn’t accept money, no matter how much I complained that I could get a job or how much my father insisted he could provide for me—until he died four years ago, anyway.

  Since I left the Academy, I’ve been living off a trust fund my father, the Manticore, set up for me, but I hate relying on it.

  The money is something Majickal. It promises freedom and self-sufficiency. With a last satisfied look, I put it away and shrug my arms into my coat. With a cheerful goodbye to Muffin—“You make sure you eat well over the weekend, Yasmin Wikke. I don’t want you coming in on Monday looking like a starved skeleton. Here, you take this cake, it’s going spare anyway. And you might as well have those tea cakes, they’d only go stale.”—I step over the threshold and come face to face with a sly grin.

  “Kang Soo-Min!” I scowl, crossing my arms. “How did you find me?”

  “Tracked you with a reading,” she announces proudly. Usually Minnie glares at people who use her full name, but her glee at stalking me doesn’t waver at all. She turns to Amity and says, “See. I told you it’d work.”

  Amity’s smile is rueful. “I said we should invite you out for tea, and Minnie took matters into her own hands.”

  “Yeah.” I purse my lips at the impish girl. “She does that.”

  Amity smiles, Minnie cackle
s, and I’m dragged along the high street towards the Lazy Latte. When I’m pushed inside I stop resisting. The scent of coffee beans roasting is seductive enough to smother my embarrassment.

  “I know why you’re doing this,” I say as I sink into a toffee coloured tub chair. “You feel sorry for me.”

  “That’s not why at all.” Amity’s bottom lip sticks out in a pout that has icy guilt flashing through me. “We were worried about you being alone.”

  “I wasn’t,” Minnie adds.

  I close my hands around the heat of a mug and inhale the dark fragrance. “No, you’re just wicked.”

  “Actually, I know you can take care of yourself.” She rips five packets of sugar and dumps them in her coffee along with enough honey to make me sick. I must make a face because she says, “I don’t question how you take your coffee.”

  Am’s near-black eyes shine with amusement. “Didn’t you say, just minutes ago, that coffee without sugar is disgusting? And you feel sorry for Yasmin drinking it plain?”

  Minnie looks out of the window. “Oh, it’s raining. Would you look at that?”

  I smirk, thawing out now I know they’re not here to pity me. Something’s not right, though. They keep exchanging meaningful looks when they think I’m not paying attention.

  “Alright. What’s wrong?”

  “I said you wouldn’t have heard,” Amity murmurs.

  “What is it, Am? Has someone else been hurt?”

  “No.” She pats my hand. “It’s not the hunters.”

  “It’s something else.” Minnie leans over the table until we’re a close-knit triangle. “Something’s going on in America, along the East Coast. The police are calling it ‘a wave of murderous destruction’ but no one really knows what’s happening.”

  “Legendaries are waking up with amnesia,” Amity continues. “And without their Majick.”

  I stand abruptly, drawing the eye of the three other people in the café. I sit back down just as quickly and look at my friends for explanation. Legendaries are losing their Majick?

  “How?” One word but with the beast’s dread and violence thrown into it. It emerges as a dark, twisted drawl.

  “We don’t know. Mavers is …” Am takes a deep breath. “He’s appealing for an audience with the Shadow Ministry. Someone in America could do it, to represent their own country, but of course they won’t. They’re too solitary, too content with being removed from Legendary politics. They’ll never request an audience, and they don’t have anyone like Mavers to guide them.”

  She’s right. No one will come out of their isolation. They’ll just keep quiet and hidden. It’s how they stay safe. It’s how I stayed safe for two years.

  The Red is a rare thing among Legendaries. Most of us stay alone, blending in with Pures so we aren’t hunted. Others live in twos or threes but with never more than four in one group. Banding together like we do in the Red is unheard of, but necessary. For some reason Yorkshire has more Legendaries than anywhere else in the country. Mavers thinks it’s to do with the wealth of countryside, but if that was the case Wales and Scotland would have as much Legend as we do. I think it’s to do with Almery Wood, but I can’t prove that.

  “When’s he meeting them?” I ask.

  Minnie shrugs. “Sometime this week if he gets approved. Never if he doesn’t.”

  Amity sets her mug on the table a little too heavily. She stands and says, “If the Shadow Ministry refuses to intervene or help us investigate … we’re on our own.”

  “And what if it’s drawn to all of us—the thing that’s taking Majick?”

  Minnie puts her coat on slowly, not looking at either of us. “Then I guess we’ll lose our Majick. We won’t be Legendary anymore.”

  *

  The snow of the past week has given way to a sheet of rain and a darkness caused by low clouds. Snow-broth soaks my boots as I trudge to the bus stop, shivering with the fear of having my Majick drained.

  I don’t use my Majick often—it’s not as if I’d die without it. It would be like losing a kidney, not a lung. But my Majick is personal. To be without it would be losing something intrinsic to me. I’ve grown with my Majick, become so used to its presence that exercising my ability to communicate mentally is second nature. The Earth Majick I inherited from my father is becoming something more as well.

  Developing Legendarily, Mavers calls it.

  Some people’s latent Majick doesn’t develop. And some Crea are never affected by the moon. We don’t know why. It’s just a glitch in the Legendary system. I’m sure if we had a biologist in the Red, they’d study whatever genetic defect sets each Legendary apart.

  The bus skids to the curb, splattering water on the three people waiting for it. I clench my jaw to hold in a curse and shake out my legs to get the slush off. Grumbling, I get on the bus without a word, flashing my ticket as I pass the driver.

  The pale landscape passes, the bus jolting at imperfections in the narrow country lanes, and my mind wanders to the dream I had a few days ago. It was the same as before: a girl strapped to a rock, her father begging the robes to take her. I keep being sucked into some girl’s recurring nightmare, which shouldn’t be possible.

  I think my Physic Majick makes me a beacon for distressed thoughts, but I’ve no way of knowing for sure. There’s no one with the same Majick in the Red, and I don’t really feel like canvassing the country, and maybe even the world, for someone who might have answers.

  As if thinking about the voice draws it to me, I hear her again. The girl who showed signs of Majick before she should have developed it. A thought strikes into my mind and my body tenses in response to it. What if the girl is reaching out to me subconsciously because she has Psychic Majick too? What if the reason her coward father took her to the Shadow Ministry was because she could hear his thoughts? What if she’s powerful, more powerful than me, and she knows things I don’t about being Psychic?

  Excitement hits me—maybe the answers have found me—but it wanes abruptly when I sense the direction of the girl’s thoughts. They bombard me so fast my head aches with pressure. She’s frustrated with the hunters in Almery Wood. I search her mind for clues to her Legendary lineage, but find none. There’s no indication that she even knows about us. But why else would she be annoyed at the hunters?

  She’s able to hide her thoughts—which makes her talented. I find myself smiling, the bus window cold against my curving lips. She knows Psychic Majick better than I could ever hope to.

  Her voice spikes in volume. Why can’t they just stay out of the woods? It’s stupid. They’re going to get themselves killed and for nothing! The beast might not even hurt anyone else.

  I hold back the urge to reply, instead dissecting her thoughts. She’s not Crea—she wouldn’t have thought ‘the beast’. Which means she’s descended from a God. She’s a Dei. My heart expands with hope. I wonder if the girl has one Numina parent or two, if she’s Cross- or Legend-Blood. I don’t suppose it matters.

  I skim her mind for a location, an address where I can find her, and I remember her thoughts of the woods. I listen harder, not really needing confirmation but seeking it anyway. I glimpse a familiar line of service trees. She lives close, in Callaire.

  My breathing races. I could go to her. Soon.

  Without warning, a hundred worries crash over me and drag me deeper into her mind, swallowing me in the ebb and flow of her thoughts. The foreign anxiety is so heavy and suffocating that I struggle to breathe for a vast moment. I see nothing but white trees, white ground, white sky. I pull my Majick as hard as I can until I’m back in my seat on the bus, firmly inside my own mind, with my own emotions.

  I close my eyes, not caring that I’ve missed my stop, not caring that I’ll have to walk home in the snow. My hope shrivels up—these answers come at too high a price. I’ve never felt someone else’s emotions before and I never want to again. The feeling is horrible, and worst still is the knowledge that it isn’t fading any time soon.

&nb
sp; My heart beats with someone else’s fear.

  I stumble to my feet and push the stop bell.

  NINE

  THE DARK DREAM

  My plan is to ignore everything and it’s been working fine for six days. If I ignore the people hunting my kin, they’ll go away. If I ignore the dream that keeps consuming me, it’ll go away. If I ignore the voice of the girl, increasingly distraught, she’ll go away. If I ignore Minnie’s thrice-a-day phone calls she’ll … probably track me down again.

  “What?” I snap. I hold the phone to my ear as I lock up the Muffin Emporium and make my way into the heart of Callaire.

  “She lives!”

  I sigh loud enough that Minnie will hear it.

  “Oh, alright. I’m sorry for phoning you.”

  “Incessantly!”

  “I just thought you’d want to know the hunters have gone. The Hannam sisters Persuaded them to move to Henacre.”

  “But what about—”

  “The Crea who Change there? Don’t worry, they’ve been warned. They’ll Change in Almery from now on.”

  “Like it’s not crowded enough already,” I mutter. There might only be six Crea in Almery—the others being inclined to the sea—but the Manticore has been in more than one fight in the past. It’ll be even worse if there are creatures we don’t know. Someone’s gonna lose an ear or a finger, I can feel it.

  “Stop whining,” Minnie chastises, sounding more like a frustrated mother than a teenager.

  I purse my lips, stepping carefully around a man in a grey suit. He’s stood in the middle of the street like an idiot. “Sorry. Thanks for telling me.”

  “No problem. Listen …”

  I open my mouth to tell her I am listening, when I realise she’s in the middle of a rant. From the sound of it, she’s been speaking for a while. I must have zoned out. I step around another businessman, this one too busy talking on his phone to get out of the way, and cut down a side street to the X45, my bus home.

  I try to focus on Minnie’s voice but can’t distinguish the words, and another suited moron obstructs my path. The beast’s awareness is clawing at the back of my mind, willing me to see. It takes a minute for me to place what’s wrong.

  I haven’t moved. I’m not walking at all, not stepping around grey suits or hearing Minnie’s words. I’m rooted in place, a businessman hissing into his phone three paces away. I’m an unmoving statue in the middle of the square. My hand is empty, my phone nowhere near.