Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) (30 page)

Harry and Sarah climbed up three floors – Sarah was panting by the end of it, Harry had ran all the way and wasn’t even out of breath – and knocked on a faded, scratched blue door. The steel number had been ripped off, and only a pale silhouette of it remained, a greyish little number nine.

A tired-looking woman opened the door. She had striking brown eyes, and a worn-out face. She looked older than her years, deep lines etched on her forehead and around her mouth.

“My name is Harry Midnight. I’m looking for John Burton.”

“He’s not here.”The woman sounded like she smoked a few packets a day.

“We can wait.”

“He won’t be back. He moved.”

Harry knew she was lying. Mike had checked the CCTV cameras dotted around the place. John was there earlier that morning. Right at that moment they heard the entrance door slam. They looked down the three flights of stairs. A man was coming up.

“Laura?” he had caught a glimpse of her standing in the dirty landing.

“John, go! They’re here!” shouted the woman.

The man froze, and started running down the stairs again. Harry threw himself down after him, leaving Sarah standing in the landing beside the white-faced woman.

“We have nothing, OK? We can’t pay!” the woman shouted at Sarah, her face contorted with distress.

“We’re not … we don’t want any money,” Sarah said quickly. She felt desperately sorry for her, but she had no time to explain. She ran after Harry, down the three flights of stairs. As she got out of the building, she immediately saw John lying on the ground, with Harry sitting on his chest. A rivulet of blood was running out of John’s nose. Sarah felt sick.

“Where is it? Where the hell is your demon?”

“I’ve worked on this for years. You won’t talk me out of it.”

Sarah noticed how thin he was, how sallow his skin looked in the light of day.

“Oh, I’m not going to
talk
, John. I’m going to move on to something else in a minute.”

“Harry! Someone will call the police! Look around you!” Sarah gestured at the hundreds of windows in the high towers around them, looking down like hollow eyes. Harry grabbed John by the chest, grudgingly, and lifted him up.

“You don’t understand. I needed a way out of this rut.”

“Right. You’ve been learning black magic and evoking demons as a way out of here. Very sensible,” Harry spat.

“I had no choice.”

“No choice but to become part of the Valaya? Are you crazy?” Harry exclaimed. And then he stopped, abruptly.

He’d noticed his bloodshot eyes, his restless hands, the skin stretched on his cheekbones. The bruises on his arms, the face strangely elongated.

Heroin had shaped his face, and claimed John for her own.

That’s what he’s trying to pay for. Something as deadly as the Surari, but that takes a lot longer to kill you.

Sarah looked at John’s troubled eyes. She could see it too, how he had chosen a slow, painful death for himself – and a life not worth living.
But there is a way out, for him. Unlike me, he has a choice.

“I’m sorry,” she said, unexpectedly. “You don’t have to live like this.” Sarah put a hand on his arm. Harry had to stop himself from seizing her arm and dragging her away from John. He hated her touching that pathetic, broken man. He thought that John didn’t deserve her sympathy. He thought he’d brought all that on himself. He could not imagine how skilled, how sharp the people who had preyed on John were, who gave him the curse – they’d bite you once, turn you into one of them, and you were lost. Harry couldn’t know how easy, how quick it had been for John to fall into the abyss – and how painful it had been trying to climb out, over and over again, and never succeeding. One day he was a young man with a job and a girlfriend – the next day he was one of the walking dead. He had managed to keep his job and his flat by turning his addiction into a routine – by conquering the pain he was in, constantly. But not for much longer. Heroin was taking over. He’d thought that Catherine Hollow had offered him salvation – he hadn’t realized it meant becoming a murderer. And wrong choice after wrong choice, he realized he had sold his soul.

John Burton wasn’t like the rest of the Valaya. Not in his heart.

He looked Sarah in the eye, for the first time. For a second he looked like a little boy. “It’s too late. I can’t control the demon. I can’t call it back.”

Sarah nodded slowly, her hope of not having to face another fight shattered.

“I’m sorry,” it was his turn to say.

“If I survive I’ll look for you, I promise. I’ll help you,” she whispered.

John shook his head. “You won’t survive.” Despair took him, and left nothing of him. He knew his soul was lost.

Sarah and Harry walked towards the car in silence. His demons would claim him soon enough.

“Poor man. And his girlfriend too.”

“Yes, sure. And what about poor us?” Harry’s voice was steely.

“At least we didn’t do it to ourselves. We didn’t destroy our own lives.”

Harry stopped suddenly. He’d seen something out of the corner of his eye. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Sarah.”

“Yes?”

“I think the demon is here.”

“Where?”

Harry took her by the hand and turned her around, gently, towards one of the grey buildings around them.

“Up there,” he whispered. Sarah squeezed Harry’s hand. She could feel his heart thumping, the blood flowing beneath the thin skin in his wrist. She followed his gaze up to a building beside them – first floor, a balcony with a broken chair; second floor, some washing left out in the drizzle; third floor, an empty balcony, but for a shadow against the whitewashed wall.

A shadow without a body.

Sarah swallowed and squeezed Harry’s hand tighter. They both froze, not sure what to do. How do you kill a shadow?

Right at that moment a young man passed by, wearing a tracksuit and a baseball cap. He was walking fast, swaggering, trying to be cocky. He was thin and pale, like John.

The shadow leaped off the balcony, and landed right in front of him.

“What the hell …?”

“Run!” Harry tried to call, but the guy was rooted to the spot, overwhelmed by horror and surprise. Harry and Sarah were only a few yards from him, but they couldn’t reach him in time.

The shadow walked into him, and he was no more.

It was just like that. As quick and undramatic as that. No pleading, no blood, no dying screams. Not even a sigh.

The shadow had taken him, and there was nothing left.

Nearly
nothing. A little black puddle was left on the pavement. A puddle that started to move, and take shape. The puddle quivered and then stood up. It wasn’t liquid, Sarah realized. It was the shadow itself. The man in the baseball cap.

Like in a grotesque mime, the newly created shadow looked at its arms, then down at its legs, and seemed contorted with despair. It started running around, as if asking for help, and disappeared from view. Harry and Sarah looked on in horror.

“Well, that was something else.” Harry murmured. Sarah clamped her hand on her mouth. She thought she’d never been so shocked in her whole life.

The demon-shadow walked towards them. It was as if it had decided to show them what it could do, and now it would be their turn. Sarah raised her hands, and felt them burning. Harry took out his
sgian-dubh
, and started whispering.

The shadow took a sprint towards them. Sarah flexed her hands, readying herself. Suddenly she felt something grab her shoulders and throw her on the ground. A wiry woman, punching her face and chest, holding her down.
John’s girlfriend?

Sarah had been taken by surprise, and she was trying to free herself, when Harry went for the woman with his
sgian-dubh
.

“Harry, no!” pleaded Sarah, trying in vain to get back on her feet.
We can’t kill human beings
. But that wasn’t what Harry had in mind. He raised the
sgian-dubh
, and started tracing signs in the air … Laura fell, unconscious, and buried Sarah under her weight.

The shadow had reached them by then, and Sarah could see its black shape right in front of her. She was still lying on the pavement, Laura’s unconscious body heavy on her. Harry grabbed Laura and threw her roughly aside, and Sarah managed to slip from under her, taking Harry’s hands to get up as quickly as she could.

It was nearly too late.

The shadow was right there before them, its arms out to touch them both. In a fraction of a second Sarah and Harry would become shadows themselves, condemned to a grey half-life forever … but just as the shadow was about to touch them something distracted it and made it turn around. Someone had called its attention. It was John. He was standing behind them, and was tracing signs in the air with both his hands. It was some kind of call, and they could see that the shadow had answered. But it wasn’t an order to attack Sarah, like they’d thought – it was something else entirely.

John let his arms fall by his sides, and the shadow walked towards him. He stood there, eyes closed, wanting it, wanting it desperately. He sighed as the shadow swallowed him too, and it was a sigh of relief.

John asked it to do that
, thought Sarah in horror.

The demon shadow turned around again, but Sarah was ready. Her hands were burning so hard they were sore – all she had to do was put them out, towards the immaterial being, and watch the black silhouette become liquid and fall on the ground with a swoosh. Beside it, another black puddle: John’s shadow, slowly taking shape. Sarah’s eyes filled with tears as she watched John’s shadow stand up and look at itself.

What was left of John stood briefly in front of them, and then he went to crouch down beside his girlfriend. But she was slowly opening her eyes, and John didn’t want to be seen. He ran away, before she could see what had become of him.

Sarah watched the shadow without a body disappear across the threadbare grass, over the motorway bridge, and on to the road, where car after car went through it without hurting it, without touching it.

He’ll never die
, thought Sarah, and shuddered.

“What happened? Where’s John? Why are you still alive?” Laura struggled to get up.

Sarah couldn’t reply. How could she tell her what had happened to John? Before Sarah could gather her thoughts, Harry was on Laura like a flash. He threw her down again with a brutality that shocked Sarah. He kneeled beside the woman, holding her down by the shoulders.

“Harry, let’s go,” pleaded Sarah.

“Not before I’m finished.”

“Harry, what …? No!”

She couldn’t stop him. He’d taken the knife to Laura’s face. The woman screamed and held her left cheek, blood trickling through her hands.

“Stay away from Sarah. Never, never touch her again,” hissed Harry. He walked away from her, as if she were nothing – as if she weren’t a desperate woman lying hurt on the ground. Drained by poverty, defeated by addiction, her heart and soul emptied bit by bit, since the day she last was happy, she last had pride. Sarah wanted to help her up – she took a step towards her – but the look in her eyes made Sarah stop and freeze. It was hatred, deep, absolute hatred, well beyond Sarah, well beyond John and his demons, reaching all the way back to a little girl who grew up too fast, who was made to grow up when she shouldn’t have. Sarah felt a knot in her throat as their eyes met.
I suffered too
, she wanted to say, but she would not put herself in harm’s way a second time.

Sarah was ready to walk away, when her mind registered something, something that wasn’t right. The whole scene wasn’t right. She surveyed the ground around them. No black-water anywhere. The pavement was bone dry. Still, her hands were wet …

Goosebumps covered Sarah’s arms, and the hair at the back of her neck stood up.
Something is very, very wrong
. But she couldn’t figure out what.

After what he’d done to John’s girlfriend, Sarah couldn’t look Harry in the eye throughout the journey back. He’d cut her face.
What kind of a man is he? Who is he?

Harry was looking resolutely at the road. To ease the silence, heavy on them like rain clouds, he switched on the radio. They sat in deep thought, listening idly to the flow of chatting and music. A few minutes later, an announcement caught their attention.

“The victim of yesterday’s crash on the M11 has been named. Ms Sheila Douglas, a well known plastic surgeon from Aberdeen, with a thriving clinic in Edinburgh, died last night as a result of the collision of her car, a Mini, with a truck. The truck driver, Manuel Alvarado, from Madrid, was unharmed.”

Sarah gasped. She couldn’t believe what she’d just heard.

“You killed her.” Both her hands were on her chest, as she was trying to take a breath that just wouldn’t come.

“Looks like it,” answered Harry, his voice even.

Sarah felt like she was swallowing nails.

“I’m going to practise for a bit,” she said as soon as they got home, and ran upstairs. She didn’t want to see Harry for a while.