The Color of Darkness (19 page)

“Go on,” she said. “Spill. Tell me everything. We're doing this together, ain't we?”

“Are we?” said Danny.

“Yeah.”

“Until you go over to
his
side, you mean?”

Cath knew that he meant Sammael. But it didn't matter who he meant, really. The answer was the same.

“I ain't on no one's side,” she said. “Never. Only mine. But we've gotta find Tom, ain't we? So for now, I guess, I'm on yours too. So tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“How you got them rats to chew down my door. How you got them deer to bring us here. It ain't Chromos, is it? Because you said you didn't know what that was.”

“It isn't Chromos,” said Danny.

“Go on,” said Cath, shifting around so she could curl up on the earth. She was suddenly very tired.

“I've told you most of it,” said Danny. “But the other bit…” He trailed off.

“You still reckon I'll go back to school and tell everyone?” said Cath. “Don't be stupid. They hate me more than they hate you.”

“They never used to hate me,” said Danny. “All I did was tell Paul some of the stuff that happened. I mean, it was weird stuff, but it did happen. And he just went all mental, saying I was a freak and making fun of me every time he saw me. Every day. Every stupid minute.”

“Paul,” said Cath succinctly, “is boring. He's a boring person and he's going to be boring all his life, him and all the rest of 'em.”

“It doesn't make any difference,” said Danny. “He's horrible to me now.”

“Well, I won't be,” said Cath.

“Swear?”

“I swear. I'll swear on my blood, if you want.”

“No,” said Danny, but Cath was picking at one of the scabs on her knees.

“Here.” She trailed her finger through the blood and held it out to him. “I swear on this, I'll never tell anyone what you tell me. Not even Paul.”

She was serious but Danny laughed, just a little bit.

“Okay,” he said. “Can you see this?”

He moved, but the darkness was clambering too thickly around Cath's eyes.

“See what?”

“It's a stick. It's got a bit of storm inside it. When I hold it, I can talk to everything that's alive. I can hear them all, too, if I listen in the right way.”

Okay. Cath could see why Paul had thought this was weird. It
was
weird.

“What, like, animals?” she asked.

“Everything. Animals. Trees. Plants. Storms, even.”

“Storms? Then how come you're scared of them?”

“Because I know what they are. I know what they can do. What they can be made to do. We think they're natural and they don't mean all the bad stuff they do. But they do mean it! They know they're hurting us! And they still do it.”

So? Cath wanted to say, but she didn't want to annoy him now that he'd started talking. Because she believed him. Danny O'Neill wasn't exactly normal, but he wasn't making things up to make himself look great. Or at least if he was, it had gone pretty badly wrong.

“Okay,” she said. “So you can talk to things. Can I try it?”

“No!” There was a sudden scraping sound as he moved away from her. “No, you can't touch it! It's mine!”

“I won't nick it,” she said. “But if you want people to believe you, why don't you prove it?”

“Because you'll die,” said Danny flatly. “This old man tried it, right in front of me. He just … burned up. I'd have made Tom use it, if I could, to show him I wasn't lying. But I couldn't.”

“So why don't you die, then?”

Danny sighed. “It's a mistake. It was all a mistake. I picked it up before Sammael could get it, and then it was mine. And Sammael knows that the only way I can not have it anymore is if I'm dead. He can't kill me—he can't kill anyone who doesn't belong to him—so he's doing all he can to make me go mad, or make me give up my sand to him. That's it, I guess.”

“Your sand? That's your soul, ain't it? That's what you said to Tom.”

“Yeah, sort of, I think. It's the bit of you that doesn't belong to the earth, anyway. The bit that's just you. It's what Tom's promised to give Sammael in return for that book. If I promise mine to Sammael, then he'll be able to kill me once I've got all I ask for, but I'm never going to do that. Never. So it won't ever end. Unless I kill him or something.”

“How?”

Danny shrugged. “I don't know. Yet. I guess I've got to try and find out.”

Cath was silent, considering this. She could see it from Danny's point of view. He thought Sammael was terrifying. And yet …

“Do you know what would happen if Sammael wasn't there?” Cath asked, feeling the frown deep across her own forehead. “If he didn't do all that stuff with Chromos?”

“No,” said Danny. “But I know what will happen, sooner or later, if things stay as they are.”

Cath closed her eyes. She thought back to that tall, thin man in Chromos with his hand on Zadoc's neck. She hadn't liked him. In fact, hadn't there been something about him that reminded her of Dad?

But out here, safe from the rain in the little shelter, she could remember how Dad's face went gentle when he looked at Sadie and the other kids, and the desperate feeling she got when she saw that and wanted—so badly it hurt—him to turn the same look on her.

She set her jaw against the night. It wasn't simple. Only idiots thought it was simple. Idiots like those teachers at school who called her “neglected” and said she only needed a “loving family” for everything to be okay.

Cath knew where everything would be okay: in that house between the mountains and the sea, where Dad could be just a memory and not a real person she had to live with. She could imagine his face and never have to stand in front of him.

She curled herself around Barshin's drenched body, tucked her hands up against her chest, and touched the skin that was marked with the pattern of yellow flowers.

 

CHAPTER 18

NIGHTMARES

The path through the dunes was scattered with small lumps of quartz that caught the sunlight and bounced diamond sparks back at her as she wandered down to the sea. She normally left the cottage door open—why not? There was no danger of anyone coming along and breaking in—but this evening she had looked up into the sky and decided to close it behind her. Clouds were gathering, purple-gray, over the sea. A wind picked up and hissed through the miserly fringe of grasses that clung to the edge of the dunes. The waves were rising, too—white horses had begun to gallop along the rolling crests, kicking up sprays of foam.

As she left the dunes behind and stepped out onto the flat beach, she saw hoofprints in the sand. That wasn't unusual—wild horses sometimes came through here. Occasionally she thought about trying to tame one. But these prints were different. A single line of them, unevenly spaced, as though the animal had been speeding up, then slowing down.

She followed the prints until she came to the edge of the water. They came straight out of the waves.

Cath turned around and ran back along the prints, trying to match her own strides to the strides the creature had taken. It had stretched out its legs in some places, and bounced deep into the sand in others. Here and there a pair of prints were set into the beach where the animal had reared up on its hind legs and come thudding down.

The sunset and the night overtook her, but the moon shone silver along the sand. Shadows clustered inside the hoofprints so they stood out, black and solid. She followed tirelessly, knowing that the animal would be worth the chase.

Bright reddish gold, it was standing on top of the highest dune, looking down its nose at her and snorting.

“You took your time,” it said.

“So?” she said. “You weren't going anywhere. Why are you gold?”

“I have stolen the color from the sea,” it said proudly.

“Why?” she asked, feeling a chill against her neck. But perhaps that was just the sea air.

Could things be stolen here? Could they be stolen from her?

“I wanted it,” the creature said.

“What if I want it?” said Cath.

The creature tossed its head. “You don't want it,” it said. “Go into the waves. You'll see that you don't.”

Cath turned to look at the swelling sea. The waves were rolling over now, hair curlers as high as her own head. She didn't feel like a swim.

“Will you take me in?” she asked, but the creature snorted again and stepped backward, its gold hooves marking the dune with inky prints.

“No way,” it said. “I'm not giving the sea a chance to steal all this gold back. And the moon is rising now. Beware the moon on the sea! Beware the silver waves!”

It reared up and turned on its hindquarters, racing away, gold coat defiant against the flat moonlight.

Cath watched it go, and then watched the waves gathering for a moment. What had the creature meant? How had it stolen a color?

There was only one way to find out. She stepped forward to the edge of the sea and began wading into the water.

The sea began to shriek. Above the dry roar of the waves and the crash of the breakers rose an agonizing, dreadful shout that wailed around the air. Her ears began to sting, and she put up her hands to protect them, but the spray from the waves had become a whirling mass of banshees, salty hair trailing, wide mouths blaring out. They wailed until their faces were puce and their veins were bulging and their tongues were black with spit.

Cath tried to shout over the top of them just to hear a noise that was her own, but the effort of trying to shout brought spots dancing in front of her eyes until she couldn't think how to breathe anymore, and somehow she was drowning in airlessness and everything was going white, and she was thinking, Is this what it meant, is this the place …

*   *   *

It was Danny who was screaming. Next to her in the tarpaulin shelter, his body was rigid, his legs and arms pushed out as if defending himself from an army of demons, and he was screaming with every breath of air his lungs could hold.

Cath knew in less than a second that she was awake and fine, and that she needed to wake him up because the terror inside him was so enormous that in a second it could twist around his heart and squeeze it to a stop.

She reached out a hand to shake him.

“Danny! Danny! Wake up!”

He woke up and hurled himself away from her, crashing against the tarpaulin. Two of the poles fell and the sheet flooded down onto their heads, so that for a moment the world was a choking mess of plastic.

When Cath finally got her face out into the cold air, she saw that it was almost morning. A thin light had broken through the trees and was curling around the earth.

Behind her, Danny found a way out of the crumpled tarpaulin and got to his feet, rubbing his eyes. He was very pale.

“Sorry,” he said. “I get a bit scared when people wake me up. The nightmares…”

“Where's Barshin?” said Cath, spinning around to see if the hare was trapped in the fallen shelter. But Danny pointed to the base of a tree, and there was Barshin, crouched.

“We've got to get going,” said the hare. “We can't waste time like this. Tom must already be with Sammael—Sammael will make sure he gets to the end of the book even quicker. We need to get after him.”

“Use that stick!” Cath turned on Danny. “Let's call Zadoc, then when Kalia comes, talk to her with your stick. Tell her you're going to return her to Sammael. I mean, if you could always do that, why didn't you try talking to her before?”

“She had her jaws around my face,” said Danny. “It wasn't the first thing on my mind.”

Cath tapped her foot impatiently. “Come on, Barshin. Let's do it.”

Danny put his hand in his pocket and shook his head. “It won't work,” he said. “Nothing works.”

Barshin called, and Zadoc came roaring out of the air. The young morning leapt back in terror as the horse pushed his way into the world, bigger than ever, just a little more transparent. He stood before them, a mottled mess of purples and browns and dark, oily green, as though the colors he wore were designed to refute any suggestion that he could be fading away. But fading he was. Cath saw quite clearly the outline of a tree through his rib cage. He pawed the ground for a second, head thrown up, but his mane was matted and his ears drooped.

It was too much. She wanted to run toward him and leap onto his back, ride him away into the air, leaving Danny behind fumbling with his endless problems. But something made her turn, one last time, to catch a glimpse of the boy and the hare.

Barshin was crouched on the ground watching Danny. Danny had his hands up, the stick clenched in one fist, and his eyes were shut. His face was red, as though he had forgotten to breathe. Both arms were waving desperately, but he was standing his ground, standing firm—