Mary Hades (22 page)

“Mary, watch ou
t!” Seth shouts.

But I don’t hear his warning in time.
The ground disappears beneath me for one horrifying second. Then I’m tumbling. I’m rolling and rolling, tossed from one mound to the next, dirt finding my ears and nostrils, my mouth, my fingernails. Stones graze and bump my cheeks.

I’m falling… falling… with my eyes tightly closed.

Somewhere I hear my name called.

Somewhere… it seems so far.

And then nothing.

I wake up to the sound of wind howling in my ears. The squall continues to engulf the moors and chill me to the bone. I have to spit mud, and when I stand up, a stab of pain runs through my ankle. My face is sore, grazed and bruised from the fall. The Athamé is no longer in my hand. I check my mobile phone, but there is no signal.

“Seth?”

I doubt he can even hear my call over the wind. I squint into the darkness, but it’s impossible to tell how far I fell. There’s a long, sloping hill to the left, but it is too dark to see the crest. Behind me, it is all flatland. There are no lights in the distance. There is nothing.

Unarmed and alone, I drop to my knees, patting the grass for signs of the
Athamé. Without it, I can’t defeat Amy. As I scramble through the moor grass, something crawls over my hand and I snap back, screaming. My blood thunders along with the wind in my ears. It was probably a spider, or a mouse. I shouldn’t panic. I shouldn’t…

“Seth!” I yell into the nothingness. “Seth!”

He could be hurt. He could have lost me in the dark. He’s probably wandering around the moors right now, as alone as I am… or worse… killed by Amy, cold and stiff on the ground.

How long was I unconscious for?

“Seth!”

My heart pounds as hard as the wind buffets my jacket. The last time I was filled with so much fear, I almost burned in a fire. The scars on my neck seem to heat
, as though I am right there again.

The image of
Gethen with the knife in his hand…

“Stop it. Stop it.” I whisper it aloud
, as though it will prevent my mind from conjuring any more frightening images. Maybe it will.

I fall back to my knees, searching for the knife as fast as I can, trying to work in a sequence, but finding myself going over the same patches of grass each time. As my hand works, my mind wanders, thoughts twisted by the
loneliness of the dark and the stretching of the moors. What if Seth is the murderer? He’s out there somewhere, waiting to kill me. But, no, he can’t be. I saw his heart. I saw his mum in that hospital bed… the friendly nurse…

It could be a ruse. He could have them all fooled. The quiet, thoughtful boy with the trag
ic past, the sort of young man always loved by middle-aged women and anyone else who longs to mother him. How do I know his father died in a car accident? How do I know he wasn’t the cause of his father’s death and his mother’s coma? I trusted him blindly, relying on the warm gooey feelings in my stomach instead of the cold hard facts. I let lust control me.

There is no one to turn to
. No one at all. How can I trust a vengeful ghost, a known killer? I know ghosts to be tricksters, driven to invent problems out of boredom. Lacey is sympathetic to Amy because they share a desire. Neither of them want to move on to the next plane of existence. Amy stays for revenge, while Lacey stays for… me?

She could be motivated by
jealousy, annoyed that Seth has taken a place in my life so abruptly, warped by her new ghost form. She is unable to feel human contact ever again. She will never be able to love again.

Because
Gethen took her away from me, leaving me with an echo of what she was.

No, I mustn’t think like that.
Lacey is different to Amy; she is still the same Lacey I met in Magdelena, the same girl who came to help me, even though she knew she could die.

Tears
fall down my nose as I continue to crawl through the mud with my hands outstretched. Once or twice I mistake cool stone for the cold metal of a dagger, and both times it seems like a cruel trick, played on me by the moors.

I hate the moors. They are a hateful, spiteful place. They are the
crime scene of the world, witness to our bloody history, lying silent and placid as humans empty their black hearts onto their carpet of heather. A scourge.

I let out a scream
, but this time it is just for me.

If I don’t find this dagger, I may as well give up. Perhaps I should go to Amy right now, exposing my neck
—my pitiful, scarred neck—so she can have her way. At least then Lacey will have company in the afterlife. At least then we will be equal again. My parents would adjust. I imagine the attention is quite nice for a daughterless mother. In time she will enjoy the consoling looks and sympathetic touches.

The moors have me now. They are controlling me. With each trembling shuffle through the grass, I lose a little piece of my sanity.
Bitterness creeps in. I imagine it running through my veins, making its way to my heart.

“I can’t keep going,” I sob. Every part of me is cold and battered by the wind. I’ve searched and searched
, but there is nothing.

Then it comes to me.

The Thing.

A zombie-looking monster of a thing
could never be a comfort to anyone, except me at that moment. It beckons me forward, and I shuffle on my knees, following its call. Its skull shines from its face like an x-ray, like moonlight on exposed bone. A piece of flesh falls from its finger.

As I’m about to
give up and get to my feet, a sharp blade pierces my fingertip. I cry out, but the sound of my pain is mixed with joy. I found it! I found the Athamé. My fingers wrap around the hilt, never so grateful to feel anything within their grasp. And as I stand up, the laughter bubbles out of me. I forget all of my dark thoughts, putting them down to the moors getting to me, the cold perverting my mind. It’s okay. Seth isn’t a killer; Lacey isn’t bitter; everything is going to be all right. I look up, and the Thing is gone.

“Thank you,” I say to the darkness.

With the Athamé, I have at least some protection. Now I need to find the others, so we can complete our mission together.

“Seth!
Lacey!”

My happiness is premature.
I have to find the others first.

“Igor?
Lemarr? Neil?”

Nothing.

The wind goes:
Shhhwooooo-zhoooooo-vrooooooooo.

Shhwooooo-zhoooooo-vroooooooooo
.

I have no torch and no way to see through the dark.
All I can do is begin to climb the long ascent I tumbled down.

I start with a step.

It’s steep. My feet slide and slip in the mud. It’s the moor grass that keeps me going, jutting out in soft ridges, tough enough to hook my feet onto and push myself up. Sometimes I use the Athamé to help.

I’m almost vertical, and it’s a long climb, with some parts steeper than others. At times I walk almost upright, with sweat pouring down my temples.
My ankle is hurt but I can walk on it, and that’s all that matters. I hope that I can still run, if it comes to it.

On and on in a relentless plod.
My breathing is loud and laboured, but barely audible, even to me, over the wind. My bruised muscles ache. Every few steps I stop and call uselessly.

Seth. Igor. Neil.
Lemarr.

Lacey
.

Seth. Igor. Neil.
Lemarr.

Lacey
.

Both ghosts should be able to sense me. Neither of them come anywhere near me.

Where is Amy? What is she doing to Seth?

Lacey
is refusing to answer my call. Is she so angry that she has left me for dead? Does she want me to suffer that much?

They are wearing me down again. I don’t know which of the five moors I am in right no
w, but it is chipping away at my resolve. Step by step, slip by slip, tread by tread. Not long ago, I felt the cold fear as something crawled across the back of my hand. I think about it now, and each time, it gets bigger. What if it was a snake? They are rare, but venomous snakes exist in England. Worse still, it could be some creature escaped from whatever exotic place it came from. You hear of deadly spiders transported in crates of bananas, or dangerous snakes flushed down the toilet.

I wipe the sweat from my forehead onto the back of my jacket. The ground is beginning to level out
, now. I can’t be far from the summit. Surely, surely this is the end. This is it.

And what happens when you get there? What are you going to do next?

When I finally find level ground, my trembling fingers pull my phone from my shoulder bag. Still no signal.

“Seth?”

The wind is my one reply. I close my eyes in frustration.

When I open them, I’m not alone.

“Amy, you don’t have to do this. You can stop now, I’ll help you find peace. I’ll help all of your…” I search for a word to describe the strange shadows, “friends find peace and
move on
.”

She advances. Her tongue snakes out of her mouth.

At first, my muscles tense with the longing to run, to turn around and sprint into the darkness. But what good will that do me? What is the point in running when I don’t know what I’m running to?

The
Athamé is in my hand.

“Amy, I’m going to free you. Don’t you understand?”

I step towards her and lift the blade. Her eyes flicker for a moment, and she backs away from me, unused to her victims standing up for themselves.

“Okay,” I say aloud. “The first symbol, what is it?” I think back to the night in the graveyard when Igor showed us how to create the circle of protection.
“A sweep to the left, arc underneath, two strokes right…” The symbol begins to take shape, burning brightly through the air. Amy’s eyes follow the movements of the knife like a cat watching a spider crawl across the wall. When it’s done, she stands still, quiet and observant.

This isn’t the murderous ghost I’m used to.

I take a sidestep to the right and begin the second symbol.
Three strokes left, up and down, to the right…
It burns in the air, suspended by nothing. Amy is still.

It’s
working and I don’t want to jinx it. I don’t want to spook her, so I step slowly to the right again, ready to draw the symbol behind her back, but this time, my mind draws a blank. Whenever I think back to Igor’s teaching, I can’t remember the third symbol. Why can’t I remember?
Because Seth paused to kiss your nose and you lost concentration.

Stupid Mary, stupid, stupid.
Think. Your life depends on it, think. I close my eyes.

Cold fingers grip my throat and I open my mouth to scream. As my eyes begin to flutter open, a horrible thought pops into my head. During that split second when my eyes had been closed, I’d imagined Seth with his hands around my neck, his face twisted into an animalistic grimace.
It made me hesitate, for a fraction of a moment, frightened by what I might see, frightened that someone I care about could hurt me, and frightened to see Amy with her small wrists under my chin.

I open my eyes.

Amy
.

Should I be relieved?

She presses her forehead against mine, and I feel her like she’s flesh and blood.

“Don’t…” I croak.
“You don’t have to…”

The
air crackles with energy before another shape appears. At first the shape is shadowed in dark, and I think that one of Amy’s strange shadows has come to finish me off, but then it steps forward and the moonlight catches yellow hair.

Lacey
.

“Get off my friend, you silly cow
!” Lacey grabs a handful of Amy’s hair and pulls her back. “I gave you a chance and you blew it. I wanted to help you.”

Amy lets out a noise like a yelp as
Lacey drags her backwards. Her hands release my throat and I rub the life back into the bruised skin. I find myself staring at the two ghosts, gormless and in shock. It takes me a moment to realise I still have the Athamé in my hand.

“
Lacey, hold her still, I’ll perform the ritual.”

But Amy twists from
Lacey’s grip and yanks herself away. Stunned by the confrontation, she gawps at us both, and her blackened eyes humanise with amazement. Her mouth opens and closes as though she is trying to speak.

“I wanted to help you,”
Lacey says.

Amy drops to the ground. Her bare toes are no longer floating inches from the grass, and it tugs on my heart to see her at her natural height. She’s tiny.

“I wanted you to trust me,” Lacey continues in a small voice.