“Jack.”
“Well, whatever his name, he’s not for you.” Harry’s tone was deliberately casual.
Sarah’s cheeks grew scarlet. “That is up to me, Harry.”
Harry smiled arrogantly. “I know. And I know you’ve already decided.”
“How would you know that?”
“I saw how you looked at him.”
“And how did I look at him?” She crossed her arms.
“Like you look at Aunt Juliet.” Harry opened the car.
He’s right. Still, how dare he!
They got into Harry’s car, a newly bought black Fiat Bravo. He’d said he wanted to keep the Land Rover for Sarah, that it wasn’t fair for him to use it. Sarah loved the Bravo. Its design was exquisite, both inside and outside, so much nicer than her parents’ Land Rover, big and intimidating like an army tank. Sure, it wasn’t very roomy, but her cello sat comfortably in the back, and that was enough. Harry noticed her looking around with satisfaction, and it pleased him, in a childish way.
“What do you have on today?”
Sarah was still sulking after his comment about Jack.
“Have you not checked my timetable?” she retorted.
Harry smiled placidly. “Not for today, no.”
“I’m going to spend most of the day practising with Mr Sands.”
“A good day, then.”
“Yes. What will you do? I mean, apart from following me around like a creepy stalker?”
“Ha ha. I need to speak to some friends.”
“Those mysterious friends who seem to know everything?”
“Those ones, yes.”
“And who would they be?”
“They prefer it if people don’t know about them.”
“Men or women?” asked Sarah. Harry stifled a smile.
“Men.”
“Right. Did you hunt with them?”
“Maybe.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. She didn’t like hearing about those friends of his. They reminded her of his life before her, a life she didn’t want him to go back to.
“Harry?”
“Mmmm.”
“When all this is finished, you will work as a doctor, won’t you?”
Harry looked at her quickly, before bringing his eyes back on the road. It’ll be a long time before it’s finished. A lot longer than you imagine. If it ever finishes, and if we’re alive to see its end.
“What brought this on?”
Sarah shrugged her shoulders.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll keep hunting, just because I love it.” I have no choice. It’ll be a long time before we’re free. If ever.
“No,” she whispered.
“No?”
“I mean, don’t do it. Don’t do what my parents did.”
“It’s what I’ve always done.”
“I don’t want … I don’t want you to …” she stumbled.
“You don’t need to worry about me. I can look after myself!” laughed Harry.
Sarah was upset, and she didn’t say a word for the rest of the journey. They arrived at the school in silence.
“Are you OK? You’re quiet.”
Sarah nodded, and she got out of the Bravo. She took her cello from the back seat.
“Harry …”
“Yes.” She looked like a child, her face full of worry, her cheeks flushed.
“Don’t go hunting at night. Stay with me,” she said, and walked away quickly, without giving Harry time to answer, and without looking back.
Harry was still for a while, holding onto the wheel, following the splash of her purple cello case through the car park and up the steps, until it disappeared.
“Your hands are better,” said Mr Sands.
“Yes.”
“Are they less sore?”
“Yes.” Everything is a little bit less sore, these days.
She wondered where Harry was, if he was watching her right now, if he was listening.
At the end of the school day Sarah hurried out, nearly running. She stood at the top of the stairs with Bryony, Alice and Leigh, looking around the car park, until she spotted Harry’s car.
“Bye girls!”
“Sarah, wait! Are you coming to my house tonight?” asked Bryony.
“I can’t, sorry, Mr Sands gave me lots to do. I’ve got to go, there’s Harry.”
“That’s your cousin?” exclaimed Alice, looking at the tall blond man leaning on his car with his arms crossed. Sarah rolled her eyes. Here we go again.
“Does he have a girlfriend?” Alice added, and then, as Sarah was trying to pretend she didn’t hear, “You’ve got to introduce us, Sarah.”
Sarah frowned, and stormed off. Alice could be such a pain in the neck. I’ll leave them to gossip in peace.
“See you tomorrow, Sarah!” she heard Leigh calling.
“See you, Leigh!” Sarah called back, feeling a bit guilty for having walked away so abruptly. Leigh was a sweetheart.
“Hello. So, the red-haired one is Bryony, then?”
“Yes, why?” answered Sarah irritably.
“Nothing, just that I’ve heard so much about her. The blond one is very pretty. Who would that be?” he added. Sarah knew he was winding her up, but she couldn’t help rising to the bait.
“Alice,” she said crossly. “She’s too young for you!”
“I’m only twenty-two,” he retorted, putting Sarah’s cello in the back, carefully.
“Harry!”
“I’m just teasing you. I’m not looking for a girlfriend.” He laughed, and got into the car.
“Did you not have one in New Zealand?” asked Sarah, trying to keep her tone casual.
“I did. Mary Anne. She wasn’t the one.”
Mary Anne. The one who carried a knife in her bra. Ugh.
“Did you tell her that?”
“She sort of knew. Especially when she read my note. That made it pretty clear.”
“Your note? You left her with a note?” Sarah was horrified.
“The plane to London was about to leave. I didn’t have time to call her.”
“Right.” What a gentleman. Poor Mary Anne, thought Sarah, but she didn’t say anything.
“It was one of those things.”
“A girlfriend is not just ‘one of those things’, Harry!”
“Yes, well, I’m still to find the right one.” His words echoed between them like ripples of sound.
The right one.
Sarah looked away.
“Anyway, four days, and still nothing. I think they’ll attack soon.” Harry quickly changed the subject.
I think so too, I think they’ll be on us again very, very soon. And I know that tonight I’ll dream. I feel it in my bones.
Just thinking of another vision made Sarah shiver. But there was no way to avoid it. There was nowhere to hide, her dreams always found her. If they had something to tell her, they would, mercilessly.
“I read of a spell, yesterday, in my mother’s diary. I want to try it as soon as we get home.”
“What is it?”
“My mum calls it the sapphire’s song. It should tell us if someone is trying to get into the house.”
Harry nodded. “It sounds good.”
“Yes, hopefully I can make it work. Harry, I was wondering … why did my grandmother not teach my dad and Uncle Stewart her spells, but she taught my mum?”
“Traditionally, in the Midnight family it’s the women taking care of the witchcraft sort of thing, if you want to call it that.” Or so Harry told me.
“But she didn’t have any daughters, so had my dad or Uncle Stewart not married the knowledge would have been lost.”
“She did have a daughter. Your father’s sister. Our aunt,” he corrected himself quickly. Sarah looked blank. “Did you not know?”
“What? I have an aunt?” Sarah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There’s aunts and cousins sprouting all around me, she thought, flabbergasted.
“Her na
me was Mairead. She was killed when she was thirteen. She had barely started having her dreams. I can’t believe you didn’t know!”
Sarah felt her eyes well up. “I can’t believe nobody ever told me. Are there any pictures of her?”
“I don’t have any pictures of her, I’m sorry.” The picture that Harry showed me is still in his house in London.
“I never knew.”
“The Midnights seem to be very good at keeping secrets,” said Harry, and he meant it.
“How did it happen? How did she die?”
“I don’t know. I was very young. They never told me the details. I only know that it wasn’t an accident. She was killed.”
“It’s terrible. She was just a child … They must have been distraught.”
“Yes.” Harry talked about it with great sadness. “I’m surprised that James never told you.”
“And my mum didn’t either. There were three of them, then? Are there other aunts and uncles I should know about?”
“Just them.”
“Mairead … That’s why my name is Sarah Mairead.”
“She was called Mairead Elizabeth Midnight.”
“What did she look like?”
“She was blond, but her face was so much like yours, the same eyes, the same expression.”
Mairead Elizabeth Midnight. And she looked like me. Another lost girl.
They were silent for a while.
“Can I help you with your spell, or do you want to be alone?”
Sarah thought about it for a minute. “Stay,” she said finally.
“Very well. Let’s go. I’ll get us a cup of tea.”
“You’re like an old woman, with your cups of tea!” said Sarah, and Harry laughed, trying to lighten the mood.
He couldn’t believe they had never told her. Why did they keep Mairead’s existence from Sarah? Were they trying to spare her the sadness of Mairead’s death? Sarah’s parents didn’t have a good track record in trying to spare her suffering, or protect her from painful things.
It was a mystery. Another one.
They made some tea, and went upstairs to Sarah’s room to get Anne’s diary. The room was freezing, as the window had been open since that morning. The curtains were flowing in the breeze, and the silvery-grey walls were glimmering subtly. The wooden floor looked as if on fire, strewn with the light from the setting sun.
Sarah took her mum’s diary from the little drawer in her bedside table, and sat on the bed. Shadow had jumped on her lap, deliberately ignoring Harry. Since he had sent her to sleep, Shadow didn’t trust him.
“Let me see … There it is, the sapphire’s song.
My Sarah, if you fear an attack in your own home, do this: take my sapphires, there’s two of them in the wooden box. Pulverize some rosemary, some garlic and some dulse in the little mortar. Coat the sapphire in the pulverized plants. Then say:
Sing if the seal is broken.
Lick your finger and touch the sapphires. After you’ve recited the invocation, don’t speak any more, don’t say a word, for all the time you’ll want the sapphire to keep guard. If you speak, the sapphires will be silenced. Put a gem in the attic, right in the middle of it, and keep one for yourself. If someone tries to get in, the sapphire will tell you. Remember, don’t say a word, or the sapphires won’t sing.
“That’s it.”
“It seems pretty clear,” said Harry. They went back down into the basement, and Sarah started putting some dried leaves into her mother’s stone mortar.
And then: “Sarah.” A tense, sudden whisper that made her look up in alarm. “Did you hear anything?”
“No, nothing.” Her heart had started racing. She tried to take a breath that didn’t come.
“I think I heard a noise. Stay here.”
Harry took out the sgian-dubh.
“I’m coming with you.”
“No, stay here and lock the door.”
“You might need me.”
“Don’t contradict me, Sarah.”
‘Don’t contradict me’? Did he really just say that?
Sarah looked him in the eye, defiantly, and walked to the spiral staircase. Harry threw his hands in the air. Of course she’d do that.
“At least get your dagger!”
Sarah turned her back to him and lifted her shirt quickly, to show him the sgian-dubh.
Harry nodded. “Good call.”
Slowly, carefully, they went through the whole house, the kitchen, the living rooms, the dining room, the library, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, James’s study. This house is endless! thought Harry.
Nothing. Nobody there, human or otherwise.
“It was your imagination.”
“Maybe.” Harry wasn’t convinced.
They went back into the basement, and Sarah started again from where she had stopped. She took out the sapphires, and arranged them carefully in front of her. She had already put some dried rosemary and some garlic into the mortar; she added the dried dulse, and pulverized the whole lot. She coated the sapphires in the mixture.
“I’m saying goodbye now. I won’t be allowed to speak any more.”
Harry nodded.
“Sing if the seal is broken,” Sarah invoked. She licked her index finger, and touched the sapphires, one by one.
And now it’s silence.
She didn’t mind. She found the idea of not talking for a while strangely attractive. Holding the sapphires with great care, she went up the spiral staircase and up to the second floor, followed by Harry. They walked down the corridor, past their rooms, and to the landing in between the guest bedrooms. Sarah opened a door on her left, and took out a long stick with a hook at the top. She used it to open a trapdoor just above their heads, and as she did that, a steel ladder came down too. They climbed up the ladder, and into the attic.
Sarah placed a sapphire right in the middle of the floor, and kept one close to her heart. They exchanged a glance.
My first real spell.
14
Music
No more words between us
Just a song
Grand Isle, Louisiana
“He doesn’t have a clue, Sean. But he’s a great fisherman.” Mike was surfing the Net while talking to Sean. Niall was on the beach, as usual.
“What?”
“He goes out fishing every night. Takes the boat out himself. Without a rod, a net, nothing. Comes back with more fish than we can eat.”
“Right. Have you heard him singing?”
Mike rolled his eyes. “All the bloody time. I’m now familiar with every single Irish song ever written, past, present and a few future ones, too. But no, he hasn’t been singing the way you mean. Thankfully he didn’t need to.”
“Yeah. It means you’re still in the clear.”
“Hopefully it’ll stay that way. How are things with you?”
“Not much weirder than usual. The heron … she’s fine.”
Mike’s eyes widened. The way he’d said Sarah’s code name, heron – the tenderness in his voice. It all sounded very, very personal.
Has he fallen for her? That’d make things pretty complicated.
“Anyway, I’ll turn in. Will send you the Signal.” The Signal was the text they sent each other every morning and night, to make sure they were OK. To make sure they were still alive.
“Yeah. Here comes Niall. God spare me.”
Mike could hear Sean laughing as he pressed the ‘end call’ button.
“There. Our dinner.” Niall threw a wet bag on the shack’s uneven wooden floor. His brown hair was dripping.
“Crayfish.” Mike’s face fell.
“And clams,” Niall added cheerfully.
“Great. I mean, I love shellfish but we’re eating nothing else. I’m turning into a seal.”
The shadow of a smile flickered over Niall’s lips, so quick that you might have thought it never really happened. A moth was dancing around the gaslight, projecting strange shadows on the walls and on their faces
.
A pause, with Niall inspecting the peeling paint on the window frame, lost in thought.
“I wonder when we can go home,” he said. He looked very young, very pale. He’s only seventeen, Mike pondered. And his life was pretty complicated already, before all this started.
“Soon. We’ll find a way.”
“We don’t even know who’s after us. Who’s behind all this.”
“Not yet. But we will. And we’ll sort it. Now, why don’t you sing something for me? That will cheer you up.”
“Seriously?”
“No.”
“Thought so. Going to light the fire.” Niall shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly. He was impossible to irritate. He was so mellow.
“You do that.”
“By the way, I’m going out tonight.”
“You are what?”
“Going out. Looking for a party.”
“You’re not.”
“I am.”
“Niall, you can’t go out. It’s dangerous. We can’t bring attention to ourselves, you know that.”
“Try and stop me.”
“I will!”
“You can’t.”
“Jesus, Niall …”
“Come with me.”
“No way. I’m not going, and neither are you.”
“We are going out. You don’t want me to stun you with my magical voice and stuff, do you?”
“Go away, Niall.”
“Just one night. One night. You’ll come, won’t you?”
Mike sighed. “Fine, fine. I’ll show you a Louisiana night out. Brace yourself.”
An hour later they were standing right in the centre of a blaze of accordions and fiddles, dancing clumsily with a glass in their hand. When the tune came to an end, Niall’s grey eyes were shining with the drinking and the happiness of that stolen night.
“That was amazing!”
“That was Cajun, my friend!” exclaimed Mike, his arm around a pretty French-speaking girl. “That was our music!”
Niall gave Mike his glass to hold. He stepped just under the little wooden stage, and whispered something to one of the fiddlers. The fiddler nodded and handed his instrument to Niall. A crowd of expectant eyes turned onto him.
“This is for the heron.” Niall’s voice was clear and foreign-sounding in the awaiting silence.
He began to play. It was a haunting, melancholic tune that spoke of misty hills, of wind and of the grey Atlantic. It spoke of his home far away, of regret, and fear of the future. The room had fallen silent; they were mesmerized.
Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) Page 12