A shadow of pain passed over Alvise’s handsome face. “My sister’s powers are a mystery. If only she didn’t have to pay such a terrible price for them.”
“I’d heard about Lucrezia’s power. How old is she now?”
“Sixteen. My age,” Micol replied for Alvise, frowning. Lucrezia’s predicament made her angry, furious, really. She didn’t know who to be angry with exactly, so she used the Vendramin family as her own personal whipping boy for everything that had happened.
“You are fifteen,” Alvise said. “A child. A reckless child.”
“I’ll be sixteen in two days!”
Alvise ignored her. His face was dark. “Lucrezia is very unwell. She hasn’t been awake for years. All she does is dream. Since the Sabha did what they did to her . . .”
Micol’s eyes studied Alvise closely. “What do you mean? How . . . What did the Sabha do? Did they hurt her?”
“It’s my family’s business.”
“But . . .”
“Micol. I said it’s my family’s business.”
“You keep her in the palace. You keep her asleep, a prisoner!” Micol hissed. “Just like you keep me prisoner!”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” Alvise snapped. “My sister would die if she saw the light. As for you, we are just trying to save your bloody life!”
“Yes, right. You need her! You keep her inside because you need her to dream for you!”
“I’m not even going to reply to that, Micol,” said Alvise. “You know nothing of me, nothing of us.”
For once, Micol was quiet. The pain in Alvise’s eyes was palpable. She knew she’d gone too far. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but he cut her short.
“Tell me, Niall. What about the others? Who are they?”
“That’s Sarah Midnight, from the Midnight family. They’re Scottish. They keep themselves to themselves . . .”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Have you? I thought hardly anybody on the continent knew of their existence.”
Alvise studied Sarah as she walked ahead. She was striking, with that endless raven hair and her slender body, aloof and silent, like someone who has many secrets and a lot on her mind. “Somebody mentioned her to me once. What are her powers?”
“She’s a Dreamer. She can dissolve demons with her hands . . . the Blackwater, she calls it. Also, her eyes are deadly, if she wants them to be.”
“Better stay on her good side, then,” Alvise jested, but there was an edge of truth in his joke. “The blonde girl?”
“That’s Elodie Brun, heir to the Brun family. Her powers are pretty incredible,” Niall said with genuine admiration. “She’s psychic, she feels things before they happen, and kills demons with the poison in her breath. Once I was at the receiving end of her kiss, and it wasn’t fun, I can tell you. I suppose you are an heir too,” he continued, nodding towards Micol.
“Yes. I’m heir to the Falco family. My brother and I are the last of the Falcos.”
Niall did his best to hide his surprise and horror in hearing Micol’s second name. He kept walking, trying to keep his face expressionless. Sean and Sarah hadn’t heard her, thankfully – they were striding on.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was another branch of the same family. “What’s your brother’s name?”
“Tancredi Falco,” she replied, and Niall felt queasy. No coincidence. No other branch of the same family. Micol’s brother was the man they’d just killed. The man who wanted to murder Sarah.
“I had another brother, Ranieri, but he’s dead now. The Azasti killed him. Tancredi wasn’t in Venice with me when it happened. He’d left. He said he couldn’t tell me where he was going, that he didn’t want me to know. He didn’t want me to follow him and get killed.”
“He told me where he was going,” said Alvise, his expression hard.
“What? He told you, and you never told me?” Micol looked pained. “He’s my brother!”
“The Azasti had gone to his head. He was crazy. What he said made no sense.”
“My brother isn’t crazy!” Micol shouted, multi-coloured lights appearing on her fingertips and around her cropped head. Micol kept talking about her brother in the present tense, Niall noticed miserably. Of course she would.
“Whatever this is about, can you save it for later?” called Sean. “We need to keep moving. Niall, did you fill them in?”
“Yes. Sean, I need a word with you.”
But it was too late. Alvise’s voice resounded clear, for everyone to hear.
“Look, Tancredi said he had to find and kill Sarah Midnight. He’s the one who mentioned her to me. She was going to destroy the world, or whatever. A lot of nonsense.”
They all stopped in their tracks.
“My brother wanted to kill Sarah?” Micol exclaimed. “Why?”
Sarah felt her heart sinking. Now she’d have to face what she’d done. Her guilt. She’d have to look her remorse in the eye.
What were the odds?
“You are Tancredi’s sister?” Sarah stood square in front of Micol.
“Yes. Where is he? Did you see him?”
“I killed him,” said Sarah. It was surprisingly easy to say. And quickly met with a fantasy about taking a knife to her own skin, to punish herself for what she’d done.
A pause, a sharp intake of breath. “What?” whispered Micol.
“I killed him. I’m sorry.”
Micol was in shock, eerily calm. “Tancredi is dead,” she said, as if trying to wrap her head around that terrible truth. “Why did you kill my brother?”
Anger burnt inside Sarah again. “Because he wanted to cut my throat, Micol. And he tried and nearly succeeded. What would you have done?”
“Why? Why did he want to kill you?”
“He was convinced I would help the Surari. The King of Shadows.”
And then the tears came, flowing hot out of Micol’s eyes, her chest heaving. Suddenly, she looked like the abandoned child she was, and Sarah’s heart bled.
All of a sudden, though, the girl’s features twisted in anger. “He must have been right! My brother must have been right! He was a good man, a wise man,” she protested, her voice interrupted by hiccupping sobs.
“Tancredi was right, in a way. That guy,” Sarah pointed at Nicholas, “did try to lure me into marrying him. Because he’s a sick bastard. But I was lucky. Nicholas saw the light,” she added sarcastically. Nicholas was close, his blind eyes staring where the voices were coming from, his expression unmoved. “I told Tancredi, but he didn’t believe me.”
“This is crazy.” Alvise touched his head briefly. “Tancredi was ill. He was mad.”
“He was mad if he thought I was going to marry a demon,” Sarah snarled. “Like I said, he tried to kill me three times. The last time, I cut his throat.”
Silence.
“He was all I had left!” Micol cried out, and the sparks coming off her fingers increased in intensity until they wrapped around her like a cloak of lighting. Her cropped hair stood on end.
“Oh, here we go. Another Falco trying to kill me!” Sarah said, trying to hide her guilt, and failing. She’d killed that girl’s brother, for God’s sake. She had. Not a demon. Not Nicholas. She had. She could have given him one more chance, had she not given in to her fury, her fear.
But she’d killed him.
“Micol, listen to me. Sarah defended herself,” Niall began.
“She did what she had to do. Get over it,” Sean intervened, his cruel words shaking them all to the core. Sean wasn’t heartless, but any threat to Sarah, in his eyes, was to be destroyed without second chances.
“You killed all that was left of my family!” Micol screamed again.
“Duck!” Alvise shouted.
All of a sudden there was a blinding flash and the forest exploded in a rainbow of colours, deadly lightning coming from Micol’s hands. “There’s nobody left,” Micol sobbed. More charges left her as her body tensed and arch
ed to release its power. The charges hit all around Micol like a deadly fan.
Sarah dived behind a tree, her body telling her what to do before her mind could register what was happening. A burnt smell hit her nostrils as she lay on the undergrowth, shaking with terror. She glimpsed from behind the tree, trying to gauge if she could get up or if she’d be hit again by Micol’s lightning. Then she saw Alvise holding Micol in his arms. Micol was unconscious, and a bright-red flower of blood bloomed on her collarbone and soaked her scarf red. She’d lost her ballerina slippers, and her small feet looked like those of a child.
Please, let her be alive, Sarah prayed, and sprang to her feet, frenziedly checking to see if her friends were hurt. Nicholas and Elodie stood unharmed, but Sean was holding his arm, a gash on his black jacket. Niall’s face was bleeding. Only then she spotted burnt tracks on the grass and in the trees around her.
“Is she breathing?” she asked Alvise. Her voice trembled.
“Yes. She’ll come to in a little bit.”
“I suppose I have you to thank.”
“Don’t thank me. I did it because I trust Niall, and Niall trusts you,” Alvise replied. “Micol has to accept what happened. Her power is pretty strong, but she loses it quickly. You would have ended up killing her.”
Micol whimpered.
“How did you stop her?” Sean asked, grimacing. Sarah was at his side at once, holding his arm. His wound was just a graze, but it looked sore.
Alvise gestured to an arrow, lying discarded and bloody on the ground. Only then they noticed that Micol’s shoulder was bloodied. “I only nicked her,” he said.
“Can you carry her?” said Sean, grimacing. “We need to—”
But he never finished the sentence.
“They are coming.” Elodie’s voice rose clear and strong.
“Surari?” Sean’s sgian-dubh ready at once.
The French girl nodded.
“When?”
“Now.”
“In a circle! Micol in the middle!” Sean managed to shout, and then they heard the roar.
17
On the Other Side
A new world and I pray
My old world will be there
When I wake up from this dream
Winter’s world went black. One minute her eyes were on Niall, locked together like they were one. The next, she was spinning somewhere dark and viscous, not knowing up from down. Maybe they’d hit her over the head. Maybe the stranger with the bow and arrow who’d come out of that strange twirling golden spiral had killed her and this was heaven. But no, it had been Niall pushing her inside the golden door. She remembered. It had been Niall sending her away.
Why was everything black? Was she unconscious? Maybe she was asleep and inside a nightmare. She was turning and turning and turning inside a tunnel, her body carried by a force stronger than herself.
And then a golden light appeared from somewhere.
She heard a thud, but she didn’t immediately realise that the noise she’d heard had been her skull hitting something hard. A terrible pain exploded on the side of her head, and she could feel her body again, stiff and throbbing. A wave of nausea hit her, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to regain some composure.
When she finally opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was her silver hair and a hand – her hand – covered in blood. A golden glow was reflected on her fingers, and her face felt cold and sore, leaning on something tough and slightly uneven. A confusion of voices made its way into her ears, in her mind – words she didn’t understand, the voice of a woman, then a man, and footsteps – and arms around her shoulders, around her body.
She was too sore, too confused to do anything but whimper. And then she saw the blades pointed at her face, and she froze.
“Chi sei? Da dove vieni?” said a voice. To Winter it was gibberish. She had no idea what language it was. She had no idea where she was. She had no idea who was at the other end of the blades pointing at her face, her chest. She raised her gaze and saw two dark-skinned men. The expression on their faces said that they would not hesitate to pierce her there and then.
“Where am I?” she managed to whisper, her instinct telling her that it was best if she spoke, if she at least told them that she was human and not demon.
“Parla inglese,” one of the men said.
“Who are you?” said another voice, in English. It was neither of the two men. Winter moved upwards an inch, hoping that the blades would move and let her sit up – and they did, but the daggers remained unsheathed and pointed as she replied.
She looked around her. The question in English had come from an older man with grey hair and a white beard, immaculately dressed in what looked like a black fighting suit. His eyes were fearsome, and Winter’s heart skipped a beat. “My name is Winter Shaw. I’m from Scotland.”
“Surari?”
Winter shook her head. It was probably too early in their acquaintance to tell them about her real nature, half human and half water Elemental. After her experience with the Midnights and their horror of what they called half-breeds, she was not keen to reveal her origins.
“Secret heir?” the man asked again. She shook her head once more.
“Human.”
“You came out of the iris. Nothing like this has happened before. Only Alvise comes back to us from the iris.”
Winter shifted uncomfortably on the hard floor. Her head hurt. A sudden noise, like a wave of the sea, rose behind her. She turned backwards to see that the golden iris twirling behind her had gone. She was alone and she had no way to get back. Niall had pushed her in without a word of explanation. He’d sent her away.
To her dismay, tears prickled behind her eyes. She didn’t want to appear weak to these strangers, but she couldn’t help it. Frightened tears began rolling down her cheeks as the realisation that she and Niall were apart rose inside her.
“Are you hurt?” asked the older man.
Winter was too choked to speak. She shook her head again, miserably.
The silver-haired man raised a hand, and the blades pointed towards her receded, but they were not put away.
“Can you stand? And please don’t just shake your head,” the man continued. His English was surprisingly good, though heavily accented. He rolled his “r” like a Scotsman. Who was this man?
“Yes. I can stand,” Winter replied, and climbed to her feet. As she did so, she swayed a little. One of the men came to sustain her, and she saw the admiration in his gaze as he took in her long, silvery hair and the pure grey of her eyes.
“Where am I?”
“You are in Venice. In Palazzo Vendramin. My name is Guglielmo Vendramin. I am the head of this family. Do you know how you got here? And why?”
“I was in the Shadow World . . .”
Vendramin gasped, a deep gasp that seemed to steal all the air in the room. “You were in the world of the Surari?” His eyes were suddenly menacing. Winter froze in fear, and then she remembered what Niall had told her to say. “Onoir, clan agus farraige.” She struggled with the words in the unknown language, and hoped with all her heart she’d made herself understood.
“The Flynn motto. Did the Flynns send you? From the Shadow World? It makes no sense!”
“Niall Flynn sent me here to keep me safe. He told me to say that to you, so you would know I’m not an enemy.”
At that moment, a stream of whispers and sounds and nonsensical words filled the air, coming from somewhere behind her. Winter turned towards the source of the noise, and for the first time since she’d landed on the mosaic floor she took in her surroundings. She was in a huge room, half empty of furniture, with gilded ceilings and long, silky gold and green drapes at the windows. And in the middle of the room, lying on an immaculate bed, was a girl, still, her eyes closed, but whispering, her lips moving incessantly. All of a sudden, the flow of whispers turned into words, in English.
“She belongs to a place of sea and wind and she was in the Shadow World with
Alvise,” the girl said, and then started whispering again.
Vendramin staggered. His face lost all colour. “Lucrezia . . . You sent your brother to the Shadow World?” he exclaimed.
The whispering stopped and the girl in the bed spoke, again in English. “I sent him there to fight alongside Sarah Midnight and the brave ones. The seal will help us here.”
“The seal? Who is the seal?” Vendramin asked, but Lucrezia did not answer.
Instead, Winter looked at the old man with her sea-grey eyes. “I am the seal,” she said.
18
My Brother
Only you know what it was like
Back there, back then
When we were safe
As she looked at the stony mound before her, Micol remembered the men she’d once called her brothers.
Micol, the girl who climbed trees and roamed the countryside, the girl who had jumped fences and ridden horses since the age of eight, was scared of water. The sun shone on her hair as she sat on the shore, watching her brothers dive and swim. Ranieri swam like a fish. His tanned, strong body glistened in the sunshine, his black hair wet and swept back. He was in his early twenties, tall and strong and her sister’s idol. Micol was desperate to impress him.
“Micol! Vieni, dai!” he said once again. “It’s beautiful!” Ranieri couldn’t believe his fearless sister had such a phobia, not when all of them had been swimming in the lake since they were babies. She knew that later he’d tease her around the dinner table. And it hurt.
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