The Hidden Princess (18 page)

I was really having to force my way through the crowd now, and there were a lot of faces I didn’t even recognize – kids had come out here from a hell of a lot further than Hopesay Edge. Just how far had the news about this party spread?

The further away I got from the main crowd, the more Hidden I saw – not many, hardly more than five or six, but enough that my heart rate shot up and cold, slick sweat spread across my back. They were so indistinct, hard at first to pick out from among the rest of the crowd: tall, slender interlopers. There was just something different about the poised way they held themselves, how they stood with the coiled-up strength of cats:
Hidden
. A good few minutes passed before I realized the handful of Hidden weren’t just moving at random through the crowd.

They were herding us
.

The Hidden were silently moving everyone in the woods closer together, gently urging the crowd into the clearing and no one except me had even noticed. I felt like the blood had just drained out of my body, right through my feet: we were in the presence of a higher intelligence. Maybe even a higher predator. Panicking, I turned to the first group of people I could see – I didn’t even recognize them, and they looked way too old to be at school.

“The party’s over.” My voice was harsh with panic, and I knew I sounded crazy. “Look, we’ve all got to get out of here.”

They stared at me like I’d just fallen out of the sky. One of the girls was wearing glasses with heavy black frames. “Right!” she laughed. “Thanks, hon, but we’re fine.”

“Look, I’m serious. It’s time to go.” I turned away, shouting at everyone I could see. “Time to go home, people. Come on, get out of here.”

No one paid me the slightest bit of attention – all I got were a couple of weird looks, and then everyone turned back to whatever they were doing, tilting a bottle of red wine to drink the last dregs, leaning over to light someone else’s cigarette, whispering into the ear of a friend.

One of the other girls smiled, a little more sympathetic than her buddy with the glasses. “Are you the kid whose party this is? I heard it was just some teenager. The best thing you can do now is just go with it and deal with the fallout later. Call the police and people are just going to get hurt, OK?”

I stared at her, breathing hard. I felt light-headed: terrified that I was going to pass out. “You don’t understand. It’s not safe here any more. There’s – there’s dangerous people here.” I knew how paranoid that had to sound. No one was going to take me seriously spouting that kind of talk.

The girls exchanged glances, worried and obviously finding me hugely irritating at the same time. “Look, hon – where are your friends? Do you want us to help you find them?”

Helplessness washed over me. “Just go,” I begged. “Just get out of here.” I started running then, pelting through the woods towards the Reach, desperate to find Joe, knowing that the girls wouldn’t run, that they hadn’t listened. I’d led everyone into a huge trap.

I ran and ran through a gradually thinning crowd of teenagers all heading for the woods, for the trees, for the Hidden, without the smallest clue that they were being herded together like sheep – and for what purpose? I finally hurled myself down the path, ready to take the last stretch down to the Reach at a full-on sprint. When I reached that corner ahead, I’d be able to see the lights from the house, kitchen windows glowing like slabs of gold against the night.

But before I rounded the corner, a tall, slender shadow melted away from the trees at the edge of the path, and my escape route was blocked. A Hidden boy stood before me, so beautiful in his ragged clothes: a moth-eaten fur pelt, torn white shirt, knee-high leather boots with jangling buckles.
Briar
. It was Briar – the one Lissy had torn away from me just hours earlier.

He smiled, so terrible and so beautiful. “Where are you going in such a rush, little girl? Lissy’s not here now.” And Briar stepped towards me slowly, deliberately, because now he had all the time in the world.

And I’m running down the lane, high hedges on either side, no way out, no escape. They’re chasing me; I hear the heavy thud of their footfalls on tarmac
, Fontevrault
– the Fontevrault want me because I know too much about the Hidden. I’ve seen too much, heard too much. I know the truth, just like David Creed knew the truth a hundred years ago, and they shot him
—

The dream shifts with a sudden jerk, and now my hands are tethered behind my back and everything is dark, rough fabric bound across my eyes: I’m blindfolded. I lean back against splintered wood. I’m tied to a post driven into the ground. I can’t move. All I can do is wait for the bullet
—

I woke with a jerk, curtains whipped by a wind that died down just seconds later. My heart was racing like I’d been running, and I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I’d never meant to fall asleep. Always the same bloody dream – me in the place of David Creed the morning he was shot for desertion. I couldn’t ever seem to shake it off. It’d been easy enough for the Fontevrault to have him falsely accused of desertion in 1917 just because he’d found out about the Hidden, easy enough for them to have him shot in the head. What the hell were the Fontevrault going to do now, to me and Connie a hundred years later, when they realized that the Gateway was open again? David Creed had been just one person. For all I knew, the Hidden were swarming all over Hopesay Edge. Everyone in the village might’ve seen them. Adam and Rafe might’ve thrown them a red herring with that story about one of the Hidden being spotted in India, but the Fontevrault didn’t even trust Adam to begin with: he’d hidden the truth about Lissy, not his real daughter, for fourteen years.

They’ll come to Hopesay. The Fontevrault will come
. I squeezed my eyes shut, jolted back to the day they hunted us down six years ago, me and Rafe. Rafe’s car screeching to a halt on a rain-sodden country lane just a few miles short of the Reach, a whisper short of smacking head-on into the van coming the other way. The Fontevrault men tumbling out, looking so ordinary, so boring, like a pair of estate agents in cheap suits. Knowing that Rafe couldn’t run with his ankle smashed up. The way he’d looked at me.
Run, Joe
. They took him. They just took him—

I glanced up, drenched with sweat – my bedside clock shone red numbers at the ceiling: three thirty in the morning. I must have sat up so late, trying so hard not to bloody fall asleep that I’d never even got undressed. In the distance, sirens wailed – police – louder as their car got closer and closer – no their
cars
: plural.
Shit
. The Hidden? We were never going to keep this off the Fontevrault’s radar. Not now. Then I heard music – the dull, low thud of a heavy bass line. Music up in the woods and police. This had Connie’s name all over it.

Idiot
! I thought.
Idiot, idiot, idiot. You should’ve checked on her earlier
.

Swearing softly to myself, I got out of bed and pushed open the door, stepping out onto the landing, hitting the light switch. Ancient floorboards creaked beneath my feet and Miles’s oil-painted ancestors stared at me from the walls, looking down their aristocratic noses like I was a thief.

“
Connie?
” I hissed outside her bedroom door. No answer. I pushed open the door, pausing on the threshold, trying to avoid setting foot inside Connie’s private domain. “Con?”

I stepped over a heap of clothes spewing out of a chest of drawers, closer to the bed, a heap of duvets and blankets. Her bedroom window was jammed open with a book, curtains fluttering. And the bed was empty. A jolt of fear shot through me. I’d been in this place before years earlier – with Rafe. Breaking into Lissy’s room to find her gone, nothing there but a pile of dead winter leaves, the calling card of the Hidden.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Adam’s voice was rough with anger as he stepped into the room. He must’ve been woken by the noise, too.

I turned around to face him, avoiding the temptation to point out I wasn’t interested in violating his precious daughter. “She’s not here.” The words stuck in my throat.

Adam said nothing but just pushed past me tearing the heap of duvets and eiderdowns away from the mattress. There was nothing but the faint, warm scent of Connie herself.

“God,” Adam said, as if he’d forgotten that I was even there. “Not again. Not again. Oh, please – not again.” And I knew he was remembering Lissy disappearing as a baby, stolen by Larkspur on their father’s command.

“There’s no leaves,” I pointed out. “No dead leaves. It’s not the Hidden – not this time. She’s gone off her own back. Can’t you hear the music? It’s some kind of party, way out of control—”

“Yes, with the Hidden everywhere. Damned idiots.” Adam, already pale in the moonlight, lost all colour at that moment, and just looked dead. I wondered if he was remembering Connie’s mother, Miriam – that party at the Reach, long ago when they weren’t much older than me. Miriam came face to face with the Swan King, unable ever quite to leave him behind from that day on, her life chewed up and destroyed just as I’d wrecked my own obsessing over Lissy. Mortals and the Hidden just don’t mix. Adam and me ran for the door.

Briar laughed, smiling at me, and I couldn’t understand how someone so beautiful could also be so creepy and disgusting. I turned and hurled myself up the path back the way I’d come, sprinting uphill as fast as I could, screaming Joe’s name and then Lissy’s over and over again in the hope that one of them might hear me. I didn’t once call for Dad.
Traitor. Liar. Liar
.

If the rest of the Hidden had gatecrashed my party, then where
was
Lissy? She was one of them.
Not-human, not-human, not-human
. And Briar was closer all the time as I crashed on through the trees – I heard snatches of laughter, even of song, and once I even felt the chilly jolt of a cold fingertip brushing the back of one arm, so teasing. He was letting me run, enjoying the chase.

I stopped and whirled around to look behind me, breathless with the effort of the run but mostly with sheer terror. I couldn’t see Briar anywhere and I couldn’t hear his footsteps behind me, but I could hear him laughing, his voice carried on a wind that was now picking up every second, shaking the branches above our heads, whipping at my long skirt, although the sound of his laughter seemed now to be coming from up ahead rather than the path curling back through the trees towards the Reach.

That was when I first heard the screaming – a girl’s voice, high and ragged with panic and fear until her screams coalesced into one long sobbing wail, and I followed the sound, everyone else too wasted to take much notice, until the crowd thinned out completely and I was running alone through the trees. I should have known it was a huge mistake, just running towards the scream.

I could see her now – a girl pinned to the ground beneath one of the Hidden. With a horrible, dead-cold shock I realized it was Briar: that somehow he was ahead of me instead of behind, laughing and trying to tear off the girl’s clothes, skirt up around her waist, white legs pale in the darkness, and it was clear what he wanted, what he was going to take. With one scream of pure rage, I lunged forwards and threw myself onto his back. Briar hissed with fury, whipping around with frightening, breathtaking strength, pinning me to the ground beside his victim –
Tia
, Tia who I sat next to in maths. She was frozen with terror and could only turn to look at me with wide, frightened eyes, her face stained with mud and tears, her lips forming soundless words.

“Leave. Her. Alone.” I spat into the creature’s catwalk-model face, but Briar only laughed and held me down with one hand, his cold fingers digging into my flesh once more.

“Two to enjoy now,” he whispered, smiling. “So sweet.”

I reached out with my free hand and scratched his eyes, yelling at Tia to run as he roared. I rolled over again to claw at his face. “Run!” I shrieked, and at last, at last I heard rapid footsteps, more voices crying out. Wrenching my head to one side, I saw a crowd of girls I recognized from Year Eleven snatching Tia away, their arms around her shoulders as she sobbed and sobbed, even as Briar pinned me to the ground once more. I’d bought Tia a few seconds to escape his grip but it was too late for me. I could hear the girls shouting, but Briar paid them no attention at all, nor the odd, silvery blood oozing from the scratch I’d torn into his eyelid. It was like he knew that there was absolutely nothing that they could do to help me, and so it was all just a joke to him.

“It’s your turn now.” Briar smiled, his face so close to mine I could feel the chill of his breath on my face. I spat at him, but he only laughed. “That’s a pretty robe you’re wearing, little maiden. Shall I take it off?”

With inhuman strength, he forced me onto my front, my face held down into the dirt, small twigs and stones pressing hard into my cheek. I could hear voices, someone shouting, people running – but all in the distance, all too far away. Had the girls who ran off with Tia gone to get help? Or was I on my own?

“
Connie! Connie!
” I heard a familiar voice calling my name, as if from a great distance, but I was so afraid that I couldn’t make out who it was, or whether I was just so desperate for help my mind was playing tricks on me.

Briar didn’t seem to notice a thing. I could just hear him breathing so slowly, feel his cold hands pressing down on my back, feel his fingers scrabbling for a way into my clothes. I heard the fabric of my skirt rip as he tore it away from my waist like a child ripping into her presents on Christmas Day, his gasp of fury as he realized I was wearing leggings as well. A sudden shock of cold shot through me as he pressed one hand against the small of my back, freezing fingers grappling inside the waistband of my leggings, my underwear, and I writhed away from his touch, mouth wide open in a silent scream, my face jammed hard against dirt and stones, dry dead leaves in my mouth, in my eyes. The woodland burst with the sound of my screaming; black tree trunks like spears against the moonlit sky, black leaves shaking in the wind, high above me but out of reach.