by Alex Mae
Chapter Twenty One: Fearful Symmetry
‘Evening, Jasper.’
The cool tones drifted down the corridor towards him and Jasper felt his heart stop. He looked up to check that this was actually happening. Yes, the woman of his dreams really was walking toward him. For the first time ever, they were alone.
Unfortunately that was where the similarity to his daydreams ended. Unfortunately he was not standing triumphantly over the corpse of a Fay who had tried to hurt her, and her face was not alight with adoration and lust.
They were outside Raegan’s room and he was standing over nothing except dusty linoleum. And her face wasn’t lit with anything seductive. In fact, he realised, she was looking at him a bit strangely.
‘Leaving something for Raegan?’ she asked, leaning against the wall.
‘Huh?’
She tapped the paper in his hand with a crimson-tipped nail.
‘Oh!’ Flushing, Jasper straightened out the note, which he had managed to crumple spectacularly. ‘No. This was on her door when I got here. It’s from Declan, asking her to stop by his room.’ Trying for nonchalance, he turned away to pin the note back. ‘I guess you’re looking for her too?’
Bree nodded then frowned. ‘Declan wants to meet her? Didn’t see that one coming.’
‘Note says he needs to talk to her about something. I hope she’s okay.’ The last phrase was muttered under his breath.
‘Why wouldn’t she be?’
Not wanting to be disloyal, Jasper fidgeted with his glasses. ‘She’s been a bit... down, the last few days. Some weird things have been happening. It’s made her feel threatened. Targeted deliberately by someone. And she got very upset with me because she didn’t think I was taking it seriously enough.’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘That’s why I came. To apologise.’
About to probe Jasper about Raegan’s suspicions – Raegan had mentioned something of the sort at the start of her training but it had sounded like harmless fun - Bree was distracted by a loud buzzing sound, punctuated by a blast of what sounded like banjos.
Bending over, she hauled the backpack up and unzipped the front pouch. Inside was a small, silver Nokia which appeared to be furious, judging from the way it hopped up and down in her palm.
She was about to flip it open when her eye fell on the insignia adorning the front of the backpack. It was a huge bronze horse. Underneath was the logo ‘TroJan’.
The Trojan horse.
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Her eyes narrowed with disbelieving recognition. She thrust the phone at Jasper.
‘Answer that, would you? Find out who this phone belongs to.’
Staring at her with bewilderment but too smitten to protest, Jasper opened the phone. ‘H-hullo?’
Sukey had been trying to warn her about something, Bree realised. But what? She crouched on the floor, pulling open the main pouch of the backpack. Uneasiness filled her gut. She began to rifle through the contents.
Discarding everything average with her right hand, her left burrowed deeper and deeper. Finally her fingers closed on something tickling, flimsy and unmistakably plant-like. She pulled out a handful of pale green leaves.
She was still staring at these, sniffing, when Jasper shut the phone.
‘It was Warwick. He was trying to reach Sam, which solves the mystery of the backpack. Apparently Sam left the infirmary without the healers’ permission and they’re going nuts trying to find him.’ His voice trailed off. ‘What have you got there?’
‘Rhubarb leaves,’ Bree said grimly.
‘No, in the other hand.’ He squinted. ‘Is that- but I thought Raegan threw it away?’
Mind still fitting the puzzle pieces together, she glanced at her other hand without interest. A folded piece of paper was clenched in her fist. ‘I don’t think this is Raegan’s. I found it in Sam’s bag.’
The colour drained from his face. ‘Can I see it?’
Still none the wiser, she gave it to him. He unfolded it with unsteady hands. A second later, he was handing it back to her, his face even paler.
It was completely blank except for three words, which stood out horridly against the whiteness in viscous, dark red. ‘Blood for Blood’, it read.
Next moment, another piece of paper had appeared next to it, shaking slightly. Jasper waited for Bree to read the first few words. Soon, she turned to him, heart thudding with sinister recognition.
‘It’s the same writing, isn’t it? This note in Sam’s bag and the note asking Raegan to come to Declan’s room...’
‘And the note Raegan found pinned to her door last night. The note which accompanied a viciously mutilated bird.’
‘What was the message?’ Bree asked slowly.
‘Soon.’
They stared at each other with slowly mounting horror.
‘We need to find Raegan. Now.’ Pulling out her phone, Bree began to dial.
***
The blackness was choking. Twisted, broken visions clawed at the corners of her mind. An hourglass, shattering. A sky full of flames. Her mother, weeping. A knife glittering silver in the air.
Vaguely, she was conscious of movements; an unpleasant jostling of her limbs and warm air rushing over her face. But these were like insignificant fleas nipping at her heels. She surrendered to the dark.
It was a long time before she knew anything else.
Sweet. This was her first thought. She wondered groggily what it meant. Her eyes were still closed; could she open them? Everything was strange, swollen; her head felt big and lumpy, wobbling about heavily on its stump.
There was the sweetness again. Her nostrils were filled with the cloying, sickly scent of fresh blood. She retched.
She couldn’t tell how long she stayed like that, out of her head, heaving; but eventually there was a sense of coming back to herself. And then she remembered. Declan’s room. The fight. The knife! Her eyes flew open.
Her brain, uncoiling slowly like a slug from sleep, took a moment to figure out why it was so dark. She was staring into the night.
With painful slowness her pupils became accustomed to the gloom. She began to make out other shapes. It was not pitch darkness, but dark green; in front of her was a thicket of shadowy trees, tall, with branches outstretched to form a tent of leaves. Clumsily, she tried to stand.
She couldn’t.
Her first, terrifying thought was that she was paralysed. Her brain was slow, but her body was slower; it wouldn’t respond to her pleas for investigation. Like sleepwalking through some dense nightmare, her eyes eventually tracked down her body.
Ropes. Everywhere. Crisscrossing up and down her legs and disappearing around her middle. She tried her hands. Nothing. But then with some relief, she realised that she could feel her shoulders, which were yanked painfully behind her. At the same time she was aware of an unpleasant prickle biting into the tender skin of her back; craning her neck, she saw that she was against a rough stump of wood. Testing her range of movement, she grimaced. She wasn’t just leaning against the wood; she was tied to it. But even if she could move, her body had been so numbed by the ropes that she didn’t think she would get very far.
The knot in her stomach shrivelled with foreboding. Nothing – not the loss of her mother and Marie, not her training, not her own attempts to catch her tormentor – could have prepared her for this feeling of total helplessness. A lion reduced to a lamb waiting for slaughter.
Just then, still peering over her shoulder, she detected a slight movement. Heart in mouth, she waited. She could not stop her breath from bursting out in ragged gasps; if only she could clamp a hand over her lips...
‘Raegan?’ a hoarse male voice whispered. ‘Is that- are you-‘ he broke off in a fit of coughing, before finally managing to choke out, ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Identifying the speaker, she felt a momentary relief. ‘My head aches. Are you? Where are we?’
‘Don’t know.’ His disemb
odied voice floated back. ‘Is that... a lake? We might still be in the grounds, then. In the Labyrinth.’
Hope surged within her. ‘If we are, we will be found, surely? The Skippers will have seen us-‘
The stump vibrated. She realised he was shaking his head. ‘Sam killed the cameras. That, I remember. He never could resist boasting. He loaded us onto a truck. Some Skipper took a bribe to lend it to him and cut the surveillance.’
‘Oh.’ The word was tiny, anguished.
‘You’ve been out for a long time. I was scared you wouldn’t wake up.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. Gone. Probably to get more supplies. He pumped us full of some shit to knock us out- but I think he panicked and gave you too much . You sure surprised him with that tackle.’ He chuckled then gave a sudden groan.
‘What’s the matter? Are you hurt?’ She tried to see, twisting round, then fell against the stump in frustration. ‘These bloody ropes are too tight!’
‘Keep your voice down,’ he murmured, voice flat with pain. ‘I was working on our bindings before you woke up. I think I’m nearly done with yours; I managed to snag it against a nail. Let me try again.’
He began to shuffle around, grunting slightly. But Raegan couldn’t stay quiet for long.
‘Does it hurt when you breathe?’
‘Only when I’ve been talking for too long. I think my ribs are broken.’
‘And the knife?’
Silence.
‘No- no! Did he? Did- he?’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Her throat felt strangled.
‘It’s ok. He always did have lousy aim. I think he missed any vital organs.’
‘But the blood. It’s yours. You’re bleeding...’
‘Not so much. Now.’
The wrongness of it all hit Raegan like a thunderclap. A huge lump rose in her throat. ‘I’m so sorry, Declan.’
The stump shook again, more violently this time. ‘You have nothing to apologise for. It’s me who should be saying sorry - I’m the one who got you into this mess.’
‘But I fell for it all. Even after Carrigaline... how he treated me, and how you and I worked together... He played me. I was such a mug.’
‘But he never would have bothered you if it wasn’t for me, don’t you see? He blames me for what happened to Sebastian. Blames me because his brother loved me, because his brother saved me. He wanted to hurt me the way I hurt him.’
‘But then- why me? Why choose me?’ She repeated stupidly. ‘You’ve never liked me.’
‘You’re the only person in the world who thinks that, Raegan.’
It was all too confusing. Was Declan saying he cared about her, now? Really cared about her? Aware that she was mouthing like an idiot, she cranked her jaw shut, staring unseeingly into the trees.
‘He wanted to hurt me the way I hurt him,’ Declan said again, softly. ‘Almost exactly.’
It was as though she was just waking up. Her heart began to thud insistently. Overcome with a familiar, teetering feeling, she was once more on the edge of an abyss, and in a moment there would be no turning back. Like a character from a script, she knew her line – though she had no idea how.
Her teeth were chattering badly. ‘But Sebastian was his brother.’
‘Not just his brother.’ Declan whispered. ‘His twin.’
The world seemed to splinter, splitting down the middle. Two halves of the hourglass.
She barely even registered the relief flooding through her poor, numb wrists when their bindings suddenly loosened.
‘In my pocket,’ Declan was saying now, urgently. ‘Reach into my back pocket, the rope gave way so you should be able to work your hands free. Just stretch out behind you.’
It just couldn’t be true. Maybe it was some lingering after-effect of the drugs, or maybe it was just all too much, but her vision was blighted by sudden tremors; the sky was caving in, the trees swooping down to snatch her away. She wanted so badly to move, to break the spell, surely this was nothing more than another torment cooked up by Sam- and then her frantically moving eyes fell on the lake.
The water was low, despite the rain, and they were a good few feet from the edge. But still, at this angle, bathed in moonlight, the two reflections were clearly visible. She had never seen them in profile before; now she couldn’t drag her gaze away.
She was reflected in him. There was the straight line of her jaw and the tilt of her cheek. The nose was different; his was beaky, hers was long: but the freckled complexion and wide, full mouth were unmistakeable. Even the narrow ears were mirrored. Identical.
A sob forced its way from her lips, and then another, hiccupping into the darkness.
Dimly she recalled Declan asking her to check his pocket. It was awkward but eventually she managed to slide her index finger and thumb in between the patches of material. There was nothing inside apart from a thin piece of paper. Carefully, she prised it out. Declan, in an uncharacteristic display of patience, did not make a sound.
It wasn’t a piece of paper. It was a picture. Crumpled and tattered as if pulled out and thumbed on countless occasions, and so faded it was hard to make out in this dim light. But Raegan would recognise her mother’s smile anywhere. Even beaming out of a picture she had never seen before.
Salty wetness tickled her lips as the tears cascaded down. She recognised the sandy beach setting and even the red collar of her mother’s dress. It had been a daytrip to Brighton, or was it Blackpool? She wasn’t sure. But she had seen other photos like this; photos of a little red-headed toddler, wandering chubbily with her mum through the waves, picking up rocks, building sandcastles. These pictures had been taken by her father just a few weeks before his death. The proximity of this happy day to that awful one was the main reason so many of these particular photos had survived: they were still waiting at the chemists to be picked up for a month after he died. They had escaped the fire.
But she had never seen this picture before; had never seen the picture where two little faces crowded into the frame from their mother’s lap, where two fat fists clutched onto her larger hands. Wonderingly, she traced their cheeks. They all looked so happy.
‘I miss her so much,’ she said quietly.
Declan didn’t answer.
‘Declan?’
Her own voice echoed back at her. Turning as far as possible, she thought she could see the outline of his head, flopping sideways. It was ominously motionless. Suddenly, all doubts and questions flew out of her mind; there would be time for talking later. She scrabbled for the ropes binding her feet. Like in Declan’s room when she had seen the knife, instinct – stronger than uncertainty, thicker than blood – adrenalized her into action.
Finally, lying on her side like a fish, she managed to squeeze out of the body-bind. Gasping for breath, she crawled on her hands and knees round to Declan. The wetness had seeped through his shirt; even in the darkness she could see the black patch that had spread all across his middle. He had lost so much blood. He was also clearly unconscious.
She pressed her lips together tightly to keep from crying out. Think, Raegan, think. She tried to dredge up the crumbs of first aid she’d learnt at school. First, the airways. Leaning over him gently, barely breathing, she listened; at the same time, she grasped for his wrist. She nearly collapsed with relief when the warm air tickled her face and a pulse jumped under her finger. Both were faint, but were undeniably there.
Next, to stem the blood flow. Her hands were shaking so much that it was difficult to slip out of her shirt, let alone tear it down the centre. Eventually she managed it; pulling on the arms, she wrapped it tightly around Declan’s wound, under his own top. She tried to avoid looking at the stab mark but couldn’t help noticing the darkly glimmering blood, slowed to an ooze now.
As she tightened the makeshift bandage, he stirred. ‘Hey.’
‘Did I hurt you?’ She scrambled up until she could see his face.
‘No,’ he said faintly. ‘I didn’t
feel anything. Must’ve dozed off.’
She tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Declan, we need to get out of here. You’ve lost a lot of blood and I think you might be going into some kind of shock.’
Declan tried to sit up and failed. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead in sweat-drenched tendrils. ‘I can’t,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t move. You have to leave me.’
‘No!’ Raegan started to work at the knots by his feet.
‘He could come back any minute. You have to run... before it’s too late...’
His voice was growing weaker and weaker. She sat up, grabbing him by the shoulders and staring into his half-closed eyes. ‘Don’t give up! Stay awake!’
‘I’m trying.’
‘Well – try harder!’ She was close to tears again. ‘Don’t make me do all the work!’
‘You don’t need to feel bad. You wouldn’t be abandoning me. If you left. You could get help.’
His eyes were almost completely closed; hers softened at the sight. ‘I’m not leaving. I’ll carry you if I have to.’
The cold sting on her bare right arm was the first sign that they were not alone. At first, Raegan thought it was an insect; a mosquito, maybe, or a gnat. Then she heard Sam’s voice.
‘How touching.’
She couldn’t turn. Try as she might, she could not turn her head to look at him; couldn’t leap in front of Declan, or do any of the other things her brain was screaming to. She could only stare at her brother in horror as the paralysis spread through her body.
She barely felt the damp rubber touch of his shoe but the impact sent her crashing facedown to the ground. Trapped in her prison of flesh and bone, her terrified eyes remained resolutely open, boring frantically into the earth.
‘Dolvorex,’ Sam said casually. There was a tapping sound; the syringe against his belt, she guessed. ‘The infirmary staff should really be more careful. If I’d known poisons were going to be so easy to steal, I wouldn’t have bothered picking rhubarb leaves. No matter; they did the trick perfectly.’
‘What have you done? You haven’t given her more of that junk from earlier?’ Raegan could hear the horror in Declan’s voice, muffled and weak as it was.