Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) (8 page)

Then it opened its mouth. It was full of teeth as sharp as a dog’s.

Sarah screamed in horror and let go of her dagger, putting out her hands to use the blackwater. In an endless instant, she realized she had made a bad decision. A very,
very
bad decision. She should have stepped aside, like Harry had said. She wasn’t ready; it was going to bite her face off …

It’s all lost. Mum, Dad, I’m sorry.

She closed her eyes and waited.

It didn’t come. She heard a thud, and then silence.

She opened her eyes, cautiously.
I’m still alive. I’m whole.

The creature was on the floor, Harry’s dagger sticking out of its side.

“Now, Sarah!” he called, shaking her out of her shock.

Sarah closed her eyes, focusing on her hands burning, burning … She crouched beside the demon, and put her hands on its head. Now she could see it properly. It had the body of a dog, with hard, black hair and a long tail, and its human face looked sickeningly out of place. Sarah shivered with disgust as its fur started weeping. After a minute all that was left was blackwater, dripping from Sarah’s hands.

She couldn’t move. She was petrified, as if she had turned to stone.

Had Juliet not gone home, she would have died. Had Harry not arrived, they both would have died.
A million terrible possibilities swept through her mind. She didn’t move for a while, crouching on the floor, trembling. Harry kneeled beside her.

“Are you OK?”

Sarah looked at her wet, blackened hands. She nodded.

“This is just the beginning,” Harry whispered gently.

Sarah looked at him. “Are they coming for me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Harry hesitated. He couldn’t tell her the whole story – he couldn’t tell her how the heirs of the Secret Families were being killed one by one, all over the world, because this would have led to her asking questions. Not only would his deception be revealed, but she’d put herself in harm’s way. Someone in the Sabha had betrayed Harry and killed him – they’d do the same with her. The time would come for her to know the truth; but for now, all he could do was keep her alive. The less attention they drew to themselves, the better were their chances of survival. Italy was sheltering Elodie and Aiko, Scotland would shelter Sarah.

“Because they want to destroy the Midnights.” He resolved to answer. “With your family gone, there would be nobody left to fight them. And we can only imagine what they’d do if they could take over, roam undisturbed …”

Sarah stood up, raised her chin the way James used to do, and looked at Harry with an even, steady gaze. She was terrified, but she had no choice. Her Midnight blood dictated her fate.

“Let them come.”

It took a long time for Sarah to fall asleep that night. The day had been so strange, so full of shocks that she was still reeling with it all. She lay in her bed with the lights off, looking out of the window to the black moors and the sky above them. She had only been a hunter for two days, and already she had turned into prey, just like she had feared. Everything she had learnt that day was swirling in her mind like a crazy carousel, and she couldn’t stop it.

Harry was frightening, with those clear, sometimes cold eyes – and still, something in her responded to him in a way that she couldn’t understand. He’d saved her life, he’d opened her eyes to an even greater danger than she’d imagined. He was arrogant, he made fun of her – but he looked at her as if she were infinitely precious, something to keep, and protect. He was so full of contradictions, so difficult to decipher – she just couldn’t decide who he was.

The dream from the night before kept going round and round in her head. Another one of those strange visions she’d had since her parents had died. Usually it was straightforward: she saw terrible creatures doing terrible things, and she had to remember as many details as possible to figure out where this was happening, so that her parents could go and stop it. That was it. But everything had changed now. The dreams had become mysterious, cryptic.

She had seen the people who killed her parents – the Valaya – but who was that pale, black-haired boy? She thought she’d seen him somewhere before, but she couldn’t remember where, or when. And that woman, the beautiful, blond woman who seemed to hate her with all her might …

You’re alone
, she’d said.

Sarah shivered at the memory. Who was she? What had Sarah done to her, to be hated so? It was like a poem in a foreign language: she couldn’t understand a word, but if she found the key, she would be able to translate it.

At last, Sarah’s eyes closed without her being aware of it, and she drifted away, exhausted, into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

Frozen in the moment

Nothing moved as I died

Nobody knows that I died

Nobody

But he who killed me

It took a long, long time to turn myself into the Mistress. The rage and emptiness I felt sped up the process, the hopelessness I lived with was my fuel. Another ten years to find them, my Valaya, the ones who’d help me, and we were ready.

That day of twenty years ago, when my heart broke – that day I knew that light was lost to me forever. I was caught in the glare of the Midnight light, and burnt to a cinder. All that was left was darkness, and I learnt to live in it, while James and Anne went shining on as if nothing had happened, as if I were nothing but a memory, a painful memory to be erased as quickly as possible.

Time to move on
, he’d said.

I had been a Midnight for a short while – I had been the one chosen to carry the inheritance, to be the daughter they’d lost. Me, the motherless, fatherless child whom they took in as their own. James and I grew up together; we were each other’s world, each other’s best friend and companion. We fell in love, under Morag’s approving gaze. It was perfect. We got married.

I adored him.

And then it all fell apart.

“It’s a girl,” Morag said without the shadow of a doubt. “I can see it now.”

She was sitting beside me, as if to watch over me, a hand on my stomach, her eyes closed. She hadn’t let me out of her sight since she found out I was pregnant. She knew first, before me, before James, before any medical test could pick it up. She said she saw the spark start in me. I was so happy at that moment, I didn’t even have words to describe the feeling. Her approval was all I wanted.

And James’s love. I’d made him proud. I was eighteen, and I had everything. Out of our window, the sea was breaking against the Islay shore time and time again, a sound that was sweet to me, the sound of home.

I was home.

“You’ll train her. And she’ll be a Dreamer.” James was beaming, looking at his mother.

“Yes. We’ll look after her.” Morag’s face was pained for a moment. I knew she was thinking of Mairead, her lost daughter. Another reason why I could help her, why I could help them all. To soften the pain for the loss of Mairead.

That night I went to sleep with Morag’s words dancing in my memory: it’s a
girl
. My daughter. Faith Midnight.

The next morning I woke up in a soaking bed. Four months too soon, my daughter was ready to come into the world.

Her body wasn’t, of course.

I held her like a doll, very white, very still. I was too shocked to cry. James was crying by my bed; Morag was standing beside the window, looking on like the thirteenth fairy, the one who curses Sleeping Beauty at her christening. I know now that she could see what was ahead, what the doctor was going to find out.

The next day I was taken to hospital because of complications, and there we were told. They said it’d been a miracle that I carried Faith as long as I did. It was a miracle she’d stayed five months inside me, because I wasn’t meant to have any children at all, ever.

“There are ways. It’s very soon to think of all that now, but you can look into adoption …” As the doctor said that, his hand kindly holding mine, Morag laughed.

She
laughed
.

Of course, adoption doesn’t bestow the Midnight talents. Witchcraft can be learnt, but not the Dreaming, nor the black-water, or the deadly Midnight gaze. They can only be carried with the blood. Morag laughed her bitter laugh, and I cried and cried, because I had lost my daughter and because I knew what was coming. I knew what Morag would say next.

I knew what Morag would say, but I never, ever thought that James would take her side.
James loves me
, I said to myself over and over again.

After a week I was home. We watched from the window the little white coffin being carried away – I was too ill to go with her; I could barely stand. That’s the time they chose to tell me.

“Cathy, darling. Do take your time. Take as long as you need. We’ll find you somewhere to stay, wherever you like.”

Morag’s words didn’t sink in for a few minutes. Blood was ringing in my ears and the room was spinning. Already. Already, she was sending me away!

“James …” I pleaded.

He was distraught, I could see it. He sat on the bed and held me close, stroking my hair, letting me cry on his shoulder. His own tears wetted my nightgown.

“My love …”

Surely he wouldn’t let me go? Surely he’d say no to Morag; he’d say that he wanted me no matter what?

“Cathy …” He held me so tight, I was
sure
he wouldn’t let me go. He loved me truly, he loved me too much to do that.

And then he took me by the shoulders, and looked into my eyes. His face was so handsome, as ever, with those incredible green eyes, eyes like a wood in spring.

“Take all the time that you need,” he said.

My heart broke at that moment, and was never whole again. James, my one and only love, my husband, was sending me away too.

I tried to leave quietly. I tried to hold my head high as I stepped into the car. I hated myself when, instead, I ran into James’s arms and begged him not to let me go.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t go against my family …”

It was the final humiliation as Morag took my arm and led me back into the car. I looked into her face, searching for the love she used to feel for me, searching for some compassion. I found none.

I was broken, alone. Useless. Mourning my daughter, mourning my lost love, mourning the family that had been mine.

Mourning the mother I would never be.

Anne slithered in among the Midnights, in my place. Maybe she had been waiting, hoping, I don’t know. I remember where I was when I found out. Cruelly enough, I read it in a
magazine
. You see, Anne and I had been studying music together. She was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, heading for a great career. She was already making a name for herself, even though she was so young. I had followed her success with joy, and a sense of pride, because she was my
friend
. We’d always been in competition, but once I had become James’s wife, my career was of no importance to me any more, so I didn’t begrudge Anne at all.

James and Anne had met through me, in passing. Barely exchanged a word. She was so different from me, with her black hair, small, shy, always trying to hide away. I really didn’t think that James would give her a second glance.

And now they had got married. The magazine had printed page after page of their wedding on Islay, Anne standing in white against the backdrop of the sea, James with smiling eyes, so handsome in his kilt. And Morag. Tall, proud, unsmiling, photographed as she’s looking over at her son and his wife, looking at them like she owned them.

I remember feeling ill with jealousy, and stumbling towards the river, thinking there was only one way left for me to take. I sat on a stone bench and watched the swirling waters, trying to find the courage to dive. I wanted the water to close over my head. I wanted not to see any more, or hear any more, or
be
any more. I wanted the pain to stop.

I couldn’t. My limbs would not respond. I couldn’t switch off the instinct to exist. I couldn’t wish myself dead hard enough.

So I went on and I lived. I did what Anne used to do before she was married, and it was now me in the magazines, me on TV and in concert halls over the world. I was barren but I had a talent that I didn’t even know I possessed, until then. My fingers flew on the piano as quick as fluttering birds. I put all my sorrow into my music, and people responded.

But it was a cold, joyless path I’d taken.

Nothing was left of me. From the outside it looked as if I’d built a wonderful life for myself: Cathy, the young musical talent, the concert pianist, the composer that swept up all prizes. But like it often happens, things are not what they seem. Anne was fulfilling the only dream that mattered to her – James and his mission, the mission that had been mine, and that she had now made hers. I knew how happy she was, because I knew how happy I would have been, in her place. I would have given it all away, my music, my work, my life, to be a Midnight again, to be with James.