beats per minute (34 page)

‘Ow,’ she muttered, putting her hand up behind her skull.
Her fingers came back wet with blood. There was no need for Sam to shove her so
hard.

‘Stop,’ she croaked, as the two wrestled on the floor. They
sprang apart but showed no signs of giving up. Instead they began to circle
each other with deadly intensity.

‘You can’t trust him, Raegan,’ Declan growled.

With a sneer Sam tightened the circle. ‘She already does.
How
d’you
like that?’

‘Why don’t you tell her, Sam, about all those nights you sat
outside her window? Why don’t you tell her about her necklace?’

‘It’s not going to work, Declan,’ Sam said softly. ‘You
haven’t got a clay foot to stand on.’

‘You stole my necklace, Declan,’ Raegan managed, her head
throbbing with such intensity that her vision blurred in and out of focus. ‘I
found it here.’

‘That’s not true.’ His eyes were pleading. ‘Don’t you see –
he’s been out to screw us up from the start. He doesn’t care about you. He’s
trying to get back at me by hurting you and putting me in the frame for it.’

Declan’s distraction was all Sam needed. Closing the circle,
he lunged; and it was only then that Raegan saw the silver blade flashing
through the air.

‘No!’ she screamed. Pure instinct drove her forward and she
cannoned into Sam. They wrestled for a few moments before he pinned her. His
face, looming above hers, was unrecognisable: twisted in a vicious snarl she
had never seen.

Then everything went black.

‘Evening, Jasper.’

The cool tones drifted down the corridor towards him and
Jasper felt his heart stop. He looked up to check that this was actually
happening. Yes, the woman of his dreams really was walking toward him. For the first
time ever, they were alone.

Unfortunately that was where the similarity to his daydreams
ended. Unfortunately he was not standing triumphantly over the corpse of a Fay
who had tried to hurt her, and her face was not alight with adoration and lust.

They were outside Raegan’s room and he was standing over
nothing except dusty linoleum. And her face wasn’t lit with anything seductive.
In fact, he realised, she was looking at him a bit strangely.

‘Leaving something for Raegan?’ she asked, leaning against
the wall.

‘Huh?’

She tapped the paper in his hand with a crimson-tipped nail.

‘Oh!’ Flushing, Jasper straightened out the note, which he
had managed to crumple spectacularly. ‘No. This was on her door when I got
here. It’s from Declan, asking her to stop by his room.’ Trying for
nonchalance, he turned away to pin the note back. ‘I guess you’re looking for
her too?’

Bree nodded then frowned. ‘Declan wants to meet her?
Didn’t see that one coming.’

‘Note says he needs to talk to her about something. I hope she’s
okay.’ The last phrase was muttered under his breath.

‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

Not wanting to be disloyal, Jasper fidgeted with his
glasses. ‘She’s been a bit... down, the last few days.  Some weird things
have been happening. It’s made her feel threatened.
Targeted
deliberately by someone.
And she got very upset with me because she
didn’t think I was taking it seriously enough.’ He cleared his throat
awkwardly. ‘That’s why I came.
To apologise.’

About to probe Jasper about Raegan’s suspicions – Raegan had
mentioned something of the sort at the start of her training but it had sounded
like harmless fun - Bree was distracted by a loud buzzing sound, punctuated by
a blast of what sounded like banjos.

Bending over, she hauled the backpack up and unzipped the
front pouch. Inside was
a small
, silver Nokia which
appeared to be furious, judging from the way it hopped up and down in her palm.

She was about to flip it open when her eye fell on the
insignia adorning the front of the backpack. It was a huge bronze horse.
Underneath was the logo ‘TroJan’.

The Trojan horse.

Timeo Danaos
et
dona ferentes
.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Her eyes narrowed with disbelieving recognition. She thrust the phone at
Jasper.

‘Answer that, would you? Find out
who
this phone belongs to.’

Staring at her with bewilderment but too smitten to protest,
Jasper opened the phone.
‘H-hullo?’

Sukey had been trying to warn her about something, Bree
realised.
But what?
She crouched on the floor, pulling
open the main pouch of the backpack. Uneasiness filled her gut. She began to
rifle through the contents.

Discarding everything average with her right hand,
her
left burrowed deeper and deeper. Finally her fingers
closed on something tickling, flimsy and unmistakably plant-like. She pulled
out a handful of pale green leaves.

She was still staring at these, sniffing, when Jasper shut
the phone.

‘It was Warwick. He was trying to reach Sam, which solves
the mystery of the backpack. Apparently Sam left the infirmary without the
healers’ permission and they’re going nuts trying to find him.’ His voice
trailed off. ‘What have you got there?’

‘Rhubarb leaves,’ Bree said grimly.

‘No, in the other hand.’
He
squinted. ‘Is that- but I thought Raegan threw it away?’

Mind still fitting the puzzle pieces together, she glanced
at her other hand without interest. A folded piece of paper was clenched in her
fist. ‘I don’t think this is Raegan’s. I found it in Sam’s bag.’

The colour drained from his face. ‘Can I see it?’

Still none the wiser, she gave it to him. He unfolded it
with unsteady hands. A second later, he was handing it back to her, his face
even paler.

It was completely blank except for three words, which stood
out horridly against the whiteness in viscous, dark red. ‘Blood for Blood’, it
read.

Next moment, another piece of paper had appeared next to it,
shaking slightly. Jasper waited for Bree to read the first few words. Soon, she
turned to him, heart thudding with sinister recognition.

‘It’s the same writing, isn’t it? This note in Sam’s bag and
the note asking Raegan to come to Declan’s room...’

‘And the note Raegan found pinned to her door last night.
The note which accompanied a viciously mutilated bird.’

‘What was the message?’ Bree asked slowly.

‘Soon.’

They stared at each other with slowly mounting horror.

‘We need to find Raegan.
Now.’
Pulling out her phone, Bree began to dial.

***

The blackness was choking. Twisted, broken visions clawed at
the corners of her mind.
An hourglass, shattering.
A sky full of flames.
Her mother, weeping.
A knife
glittering silver in the air.

Vaguely, she was conscious of movements; an unpleasant
jostling of her limbs and warm air rushing over her face. But these were like
insignificant fleas nipping at her heels. She surrendered to the dark.

It was a long time before she knew anything else.

Sweet.
This was her first thought.
She wondered groggily what it meant. Her eyes were still closed; could she open
them? Everything was strange, swollen; her head felt big and lumpy, wobbling
about heavily on its stump.

There was the sweetness again. Her nostrils were filled with
the cloying, sickly scent of fresh blood. She retched.

She couldn’t tell how long she stayed like that, out of her
head, heaving; but eventually there was a sense of coming back to
herself
. And then she remembered. Declan’s room.
The fight.
The knife! Her eyes flew open.

Her brain, uncoiling slowly like a slug from sleep, took a
moment to figure out why it was so dark. She was staring into the night.

With painful slowness her pupils became accustomed to the
gloom. She began to make out other shapes. It was not pitch darkness, but dark
green; in front of her was a thicket of shadowy trees, tall, with branches
outstretched to form a tent of leaves. Clumsily, she tried to stand.

She couldn’t.

Her first, terrifying thought was that she was paralysed.
Her brain was slow, but her body was slower; it wouldn’t respond to her pleas
for investigation. Like sleepwalking through some dense nightmare, her eyes
eventually tracked down her body.

Ropes.
Everywhere.
Crisscrossing up and down her legs and disappearing around her middle. She
tried her hands.
Nothing.
But then with some relief,
she realised that she could feel her shoulders, which were yanked painfully
behind her. At the same time she was aware of an unpleasant prickle biting into
the tender skin of her back; craning her neck, she saw that she was against a
rough stump of wood. Testing her range of movement, she grimaced. She wasn’t
just leaning against the wood; she was tied to it. But even if she could move,
her body had been so numbed by the ropes that she didn’t think she would get
very far.

The knot in her stomach shrivelled with foreboding. Nothing
– not the loss of her mother and Marie, not her training, not her own attempts
to catch her tormentor – could have prepared her for this feeling of total
helplessness. A lion reduced to a lamb waiting for slaughter.

Just then, still peering over her shoulder, she detected a
slight movement. Heart in mouth, she waited. She could not stop her breath from
bursting out in ragged gasps; if only she could clamp a hand over her lips...

‘Raegan?’ a hoarse male voice whispered. ‘Is that- are you-
‘ he
broke off in a fit of coughing, before finally managing
to choke out, ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Identifying the speaker, she felt a
momentary relief. ‘My head aches. Are you? Where are we?’

‘Don’t know.’ His disembodied voice floated back. ‘Is
that... a lake? We might still be in the grounds, then.
In
the Labyrinth.’

Hope surged within her. ‘If we are, we will be found,
surely? The Skippers will have seen us-‘

The stump vibrated. She realised he was shaking his head.
‘Sam killed the cameras. That, I remember. He never could resist boasting. He
loaded us onto a truck. Some Skipper took a bribe to lend it to him and cut the
surveillance.’

‘Oh.’ The word was tiny, anguished.

‘You’ve been out for a long time. I was scared you wouldn’t
wake up.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.
Gone.
Probably to get more supplies.
He pumped us full of some
shit to knock us out- but I think he panicked and gave you too
much .
You sure surprised him with that tackle.’ He chuckled
then gave a sudden groan.

‘What’s the matter? Are you hurt?’ She tried to see,
twisting round
,
then fell against the stump in
frustration. ‘These bloody ropes are too tight!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ he murmured, voice flat with pain.
‘I was working on our bindings before you woke up. I think I’m nearly done with
yours; I managed to snag it against a nail. Let me try again.’

He began to shuffle around, grunting slightly. But Raegan
couldn’t stay quiet for long.

‘Does it hurt when you breathe?’

‘Only when I’ve been talking for too long.
I think my ribs are broken.’

‘And the knife?’

Silence.

‘No- no! Did he? Did- he?’ She couldn’t finish the sentence.
Her throat felt strangled.

‘It’s ok. He always did have lousy aim. I think he missed
any vital organs.’

‘But the blood.
It’s yours. You’re
bleeding...’

‘Not so much.
Now.’

The wrongness of it all hit Raegan like a thunderclap. A
huge lump rose in her throat. ‘I’m so sorry, Declan.’

The stump shook again, more violently this time. ‘You have
nothing to apologise for. It’s me who should be saying sorry - I’m the one who
got you into this mess.’

‘But I fell for it all. Even after Carrigaline... how he
treated me, and how you and I worked together... He played me. I was such a
mug.’

‘But he never would have bothered you if it wasn’t for me,
don’t you see? He blames me for what happened to Sebastian.
Blames
me because his brother loved me, because his brother saved me.
He wanted
to hurt me the way I hurt him.’

‘But then- why me?
Why choose me?’
She repeated stupidly. ‘You’ve never liked me.’

‘You’re the only person in the world who thinks that,
Raegan.’

It was all too confusing. Was Declan saying he cared about
her, now? Really cared about her? Aware that she was mouthing like an idiot,
she cranked her jaw shut, staring unseeingly into the trees.

‘He wanted to hurt me the way I hurt him,’ Declan said
again, softly.
‘Almost exactly.’

It was as though she was just waking up. Her heart began to
thud insistently.  Overcome with a familiar, teetering feeling, she was
once more on the edge of an abyss, and in a moment there would be no turning
back. Like a character from a script, she knew her line – though she had no
idea how.

Her teeth were chattering badly. ‘But Sebastian was his
brother.’

‘Not just his brother.’ Declan whispered.
‘His
twin.’

The world seemed to splinter, splitting down the middle.
Two halves of the hourglass.

She barely even registered the relief flooding through her
poor, numb wrists when their bindings suddenly loosened.

‘In my pocket,’ Declan was saying now, urgently. ‘Reach into
my back pocket, the rope gave way so you should be able to work your hands
free. Just stretch out behind you.’

 It just couldn’t be true. Maybe it was some lingering
after-effect of the drugs, or maybe it was just all too much, but her vision
was blighted by sudden tremors; the sky was caving in, the trees swooping down
to snatch her away. She wanted so badly to move, to break the spell, surely
this was nothing more than another torment cooked up by Sam- and then her
frantically moving eyes fell on the lake.

The water was low, despite the rain, and they were a good
few feet from the edge. But still, at this angle, bathed in moonlight, the two
reflections were clearly visible. She had never seen them in profile before;
now she couldn’t drag her gaze away.

She was reflected in him. There was the straight line of her
jaw and the tilt of her cheek. The nose was different; his was beaky, hers was
long: but the freckled complexion and wide, full mouth were unmistakeable. Even
the narrow ears were mirrored.
Identical.

A sob forced its way from her lips, and then another,
hiccupping into the darkness.

Dimly she recalled Declan asking her to check his pocket. It
was awkward but eventually she managed to slide her index finger and thumb in
between the patches of material. There was nothing inside apart from a thin
piece of paper. Carefully, she prised it out. Declan, in an uncharacteristic
display of patience, did not make a sound.

It wasn’t a piece of paper. It was a picture. Crumpled and
tattered as if pulled out and thumbed on countless occasions, and so faded it
was hard to make out in this dim light. But Raegan would recognise her mother’s
smile anywhere. Even beaming out of a picture she had never seen before.