Spirit

by Daniela Sacerdoti

  Sarah turned around. She was very pale, her green eyes uncannily similar to Harry’s. “Sean. I’m so glad you are here.”

  “Sarah,” Sean repeated, as if that was the only word he could say. His thoughts were a mass of questions and memories and doubts and skewed perceptions. He couldn’t even begin to unpick them.

  Harry crossed his arms. “Yup. Just the one. Sarah Midnight. I need you to kill her.”

  “You what?”

  “Sean, she’s just like our grandmother, Morag Midnight. She’s cruel and heartless, and she’ll end up killing us all. Tancredi was right. She needs to die.”

  Sarah was in the corner, doubled over, saying nothing. She wasn’t pleading, not even with her eyes. Sean saw that Sarah’s arms and hands were shackled.

  “No, it’s not like that,” Sean reassured his friend. “You are wrong, Harry. She’s good, and kind, and . . . She’s a Secret heir, Harry! Take those chains off!”

  “She’ll be the end of us all. She’s been chosen. In your heart of hearts, you know as well as I do. She is cursed.”

  “What are you talking about? Sarah.” He tried to kneel beside her, but Harry stopped him.

  “She’ll tell you herself, if you don’t believe me.”

  Sarah raised her head and for the first time, she looked him in the eye. He expected to see anger, or terror, or defiance. But he saw acceptance – even desire. “He’s right,” Sarah agreed. “I’m just like Morag Midnight. Nicholas saw the black blood in me, that is why he chose me. I can kill anyone, anything. I am the strongest Dreamer. But I need to die. No one but the King of Shadows can have that much power. You must kill me before it’s too late.”

  Harry lifted a katana off the floor, its blade glinting in the sunlight that flooded in from the windows. “Sean.”

  Sean put his hands up in front of the blade. “You are delirious! Both of you!” Or were they? That was Harry, for heaven’s sake. He always knew the right thing to do, he always had a plan. Sean had always trusted what he said. But this? Underneath all of this, he knew that as a Gamekeeper he had to obey.

  “You know what to do,” Harry said, offering him the katana.

  “No! You are crazy!”

  “You must do it. There is no other way,” Sarah said. “If you don’t kill me, I’ll destroy the world.”

  Sean ran a hand through his hair. “This can’t be happening!”

  “I must die,” she repeated. “If you don’t kill me now, millions of lives will be lost. Please listen to me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to! Kill her! Sean, kill her now! If you are a true Gamekeeper, this is what you must do!” Harry’s green eyes were glinting, his face contorted in fury.

  “Kill me, Sean.”

  Sean raised the katana. It hovered over Sarah for a moment, then he lowered it with a sharp thrust, sinking it into his own side.

  Sarah clasped her hands over her mouth, trying not to breathe in the fog. But it was no use. She had to breathe. She inhaled the white, creeping mist, and she waited – waited for her lungs to burst, or burn.

  The next thing she knew, her grandmother, Morag, was standing in front of her. Sarah blinked. What was her grandmother doing there? Was it a vision? Was it a dream, or something induced by that evil fog? Her eyes were hard blue nails. “You killed them,” Morag said.

  “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to . . .”

  “You are just like me.”

  “I’m not!”

  “It’s your turn now,” Morag said, handing her Mairead’s sgian-dubh, engraved with Celtic patterns, her name burnt into the blade.

  “No. I won’t!”

  “You must. You deserve it. Remember Leigh? And Angela? They are dead because of you. You are a monster.” Sarah’s heart tightened at the mention of her school friends, both killed by a demon belonging to the Scottish Valaya. “Your Aunt Juliet, scarred for life. Tancredi, not even decently buried. Because of you.”

  “No,” she said, more feebly this time. She took the sgian-dubh from her grandmother’s hands . . .

  And then something strange began happening to her grandmother’s face. Its left side started melting, losing its shape, and then its right side. Horrified, Sarah watched as a white, thick fog started seeping from her grandmother’s body, until it all dissolved in mist.

  A deep, growling voice came from somewhere beneath her feet. It instilled terror in her heart, a terror so strong she thought her heart would stop there and then. At once she realised that her day of reckoning had come.

  “Sarah Midnight,” it said. “You shall not die.”

  All of a sudden, death seemed desirable.

  47

  The Abyss

  You knew all along

  That we were bound to lose

  Sarah’s eyes snapped open. She jumped to her feet and lost her balance just as quickly. On her knees, she dragged herself up again. There was nobody around, not that she could see. All her friends were gone.

  And then she spotted something blue in the high grass, a crumpled mound of clothes – a body with golden hair, a shape she knew like the back of her hand. A silver-handled sgian-dubh was buried deep in the body’s side.

  Sean.

  Sarah stood silent and unmoving, contemplating Sean’s senseless body, a red flower slowly blooming on the right side of his stomach, its petals flowing down his arm and into the grass in a black puddle.

  She didn’t need to see his face to know that Sean was dead.

  Her heart stopped, all air leaving her lungs in an icy chill. Her body trembled at the loss of Sean. How could this be real? Sean? She wanted to scream, to fall to the ground and never get back up. She tried to calm herself, to will her eyes to open to reality, to the real world where Sean was alive. But anything she tried was no use. She had to compose herself and silence the only thought running through her mind: Sean is dead. Sean is dead.

  Suddenly she felt nothing. It was as if she’d flown away, far away, and she was now looking down on a desperate girl whose whole world had crumbled. She was somewhere else, somewhere cold and dark where nothing moved, nothing stirred, where nobody could ever follow. She was dead too. There was nothing to live for, nothing left to lose.

  She was free.

  “Come and get me!” she shouted all of a sudden, just like she’d done before the last battle with Cathy’s Valaya. She would not wait for the King of Shadows like a harmless, powerless creature. She had no hope left. She had no fear left.

  The voice she’d heard in her vision resounded again, and it seemed as if it filled both the air and the inside of her mind.

  I am here, Sarah Midnight.

  Another seismic shock shook everything around Sarah, throwing her down again, and with an ear-splitting roar the ground opened right in front of her feet, stone crumbling like chalk. A chasm appeared, and from it came smoke, and a terrible heat.

  Sarah rose up once more, her hands scalding, the sgian-dubh in her hand, her eyes gleaming with the Midnight gaze, and an unquenchable rage. She knew she had no chance, but after all they had been through she couldn’t let Sean and her friends die in vain. Maybe there had been no chance all along. Maybe they had all been fooling themselves. It didn’t matter anyway. All that mattered was destroying the King of Shadows before she died.

  “Where are you? Show yourself!” she shouted, her voice resounding above the buzzing of the lightning and the roars of splitting rock around her. And then the King of Shadows rose, as big as a hill, his shape fluid, forever changing. He was an elemental force made of earth and fire, blue flames and liquid soil boiling and whirling, a huge mass of material that seemed to be about to pour itself on Sarah, bury her alive and seal her in rock.

  Sarah flinched for a moment, but she stood firm in front of the whirling mass, trying to make out its shape. She saw that the creature was a chimera of a thousand Surari welded together, a knot of limbs and heads and claws and fangs and tentacles that somehow made one being. As she watched, the m
ass condensed and took its final shape – an ancestral beast, somewhere between a bull, a wolf and a bear, still changing and whirling, shifting shapes like a kaleidoscope switches colours. The bull and the wolf and the bear following each other, then melting, then turning into something else, something that had no name in the human world. Never changing and steady were his eyes, red like dancing flames, fixed on her with something that looked like hunger. Sarah was reminded of Nicholas’ claim – I am fire – and there it was, the fire he had come from, that had shaped him.

  Sarah looked up at the King of Shadows with the courage of despair. She knew she was about to die, but she would destroy that thing first. For Mike, for Harry, for Angela, for Leigh, for all those who’d been devoured and clawed to death and burnt and suffocated since the culling of the heirs began, for all those human beings who had died because their path had crossed a Surari’s. Most of all, for her parents.

  For Sean.

  She braced herself to fight, a tiny figure, her hair blowing behind her in the scalding wind, her face illuminated by the blue lightning. She remembered what Nicholas had told them, that as soon as his shape stopped changing, as soon as he took one form, they could strike. And it had to be right between his eyes, the only vulnerable point, the only small area of flesh and blood susceptible to a physical wound.

  Was it true, or had Nicholas been lying all along? She was about to find out.

  A thought wormed its way into the back of her mind: why had it not poured its mass of magma and melting soil on her? Why had it not hit her with blue lightning, burning her from the inside? Was that not a quick, efficient way to get rid of her?

  Why was it not killing her already?

  You will not die, Sarah Midnight.

  “What do you want from me?” she shouted. The King of Shadows’ changing shape froze for a moment, a deep growl rising from him – and finally, it stopped changing.

  Sarah Midnight and the King of Shadows stood facing each other. She wanted to run, but she knew she had to fight. She would face this monster if it was the last thing she did.

  Sarah took in the deer antlers, the bull’s face, and the human torso perching on a wolf’s hind legs, and the bear’s claws, and her heart trembled. But she would not waver. With a scream that came from the bottom of her soul, she threw herself on the King of Shadows, sgian-dubh in one hand, the Blackwater burning in the other, her eyes gleaming with the Midnight gaze. She was pouring out her whole essence, the whole of herself, into one final stroke. From the night of her first hunt, when she felt the Blackwater and her powers as something terrifying and alien and somehow not belonging to her, to the duel with Cathy and Nocturne, to the battle with the Mermen on Islay, every challenge had hardened her a little more, tempered her a little more. Preparing her for this moment.

  The King of Shadows didn’t move as Sarah leapt, his red eyes steady and fixed on her. He made no attempt to defend himself, Sarah noticed, sinking her blade deep between his eyes, and in a moment, Sarah knew for sure that it had all been too easy.

  It didn’t hurt, at the beginning. It didn’t hurt at all. What was happening to Sarah was such a weird feeling, so unnatural, that her body and soul didn’t know how to register it. Her hand was welded to the sgian-dubh stuck between the King of Shadows’ eyes, her body extended to reach his forehead. She stood frozen on her toes. Her green eyes were fixed on the King of Shadows’ red ones, beast and Dreamer locked together.

  And then it hurt like hell. Something black and nasty and painful, something ancient and merciless, had made its way inside her eyes, and down her neck, along her spine and into her heart. It filled her body and soul and stretched them to the point of ripping her apart, and it did rip her and then put her back together.

  Now she knew what the plan had been for her, what they’d wanted all along.

  She fell backwards, the sgian-dubh still stuck in the King of Shadows’ forehead. She lay immobile for a moment, her consciousness screaming to keep hold of her body. She looked up at the sky, grey clouds galloping in a sea of purple. Then there was no more noise, no more pain.

  Tears ran down her cheeks as she felt herself being replaced by something other. An evil she couldn’t escape. She felt his spirit, his otherness, invade her body. Violate her in a way nothing human could.

  Now the King of Shadows looked out from inside her body, that much she realised.

  So that’s what her dream meant, the one where Cathy said to her she would be lost forever. There would be no more Sarah Midnight. She would not be the bride of Shadows.

  She would be the King of Shadows himself.

  48

  Burning Sky

  When I let go of myself

  The sky opens and we fly

  Night fell with a burning sunset so bright that people all over the city were alarmed. They had never seen anything like it. Was the sun dying, they wondered. Was this the last sunset they’d see? The fiery sky disquieted the inhabitants of Venice.

  Winter stood at Lucrezia’s window, the scarlet clouds instilling fear in her heart. She’d never seen a sunset like this, not even in the north, where skies could be so spectacular that they took your breath away. But this? This was unnatural.

  “Winter?” Conte Vendramin had walked in, back from one of his hunts.

  “Conte Vendramin! You are home. Thank goodness.”

  “You saw the sky, I take it.” He gestured towards the arched window near Winter’s bed.

  “Something is about to happen,” Winter replied, wrapping her arms around her. She was afraid.

  “I’ll sit with Lucrezia. Why don’t you go and get something to eat? Some rest?” the count offered.

  Winter shook her head. “I’d rather stay.”

  “Very well,” said the man. “We will sit together.”

  They sat near Lucrezia’s bed, the sky casting strange lights over their faces and on the sleeping girl. Twilight was supposed to be seeping in, but there was no sign of the sky fading.

  The longer she sat, the harder it was to resist falling asleep. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, and Lucrezia’s low whispering was now lulling Winter to sleep. Her thoughts drifted to Niall, to her seal companions, the years spent in the water, her mother. She had neared the edge of sleep when suddenly, the sleeping girl began to twitch. Winter looked to Lucrezia’s father. His eyes were brooding, brow furrowed with worry.

  Under their frightened gaze Lucrezia sat up, her eyes closed, and she spoke. Her childlike voice was strong, determined. “Sarah Midnight. You are Sarah Midnight. Don’t lose yourself. Remember. Remember,” she said in English, and then she fell against the pillows, as if the effort of speaking those words had drained all the energy from her. Her constant murmuring began again.

  “I think the time has come,” Winter whispered. “The moment she said she’d look for Sarah again.”

  Conte Vendramin nodded. He looked exhausted, Winter noticed, like he’d been burdened by a huge weight for so long. She didn’t know how much longer he would be able to bear it.

  Lucrezia’s murmuring turned into moans of pain. She tossed and turned, as though fighting a cruel battle somewhere far away. They watched in horror as her inner strife intensified until she was foaming at the mouth, her eyes rolling back into her head.

  “They’re hurting her! They’re killing her!” the count cried out. He didn’t know who was doing this to his daughter, and he was going crazy with frustration.

  “Sarah!” Lucrezia called again, and then she raised her arms, her hands reaching for someone they couldn’t see. “Sarah!”

  A final, anguished moan, and then Lucrezia fell back and was still once more. Her chest rose and fell frantically, and a thin film of sweat shimmered on her forehead. Instinctively, Conte Vendramin’s and Winter’s hands entwined, seeking mutual comfort. Lucrezia was whispering again, and every once in a while they could make out Sarah’s name.

  “Help me, seal!” Lucrezia said all of a sudden. “Help me reach her!” Winter let
go of the count’s hand and held Lucrezia’s.

  “How? How can I help you?” She stared into Lucrezia’s sleeping face, eyes searching for a sign to guide her.

  “Help me find her,” the Italian girl said. For a moment, Winter’s heart sank. She had no idea what Lucrezia was asking her to do, or how to help her find Sarah. She looked to Lucrezia again, but all she saw was her stony face.

  Instinctively, Winter closed her eyes, and to her wonder, thousands of images began to twirl before her eyes. People. Places. Among them, somewhere, was Sarah.

  Winter took a deep breath and looked for a memory of the girl. She had never seen Sarah as a small child, because of the years spent in exile, but she’d seen pictures inside Midnight Hall. One in particular, of Sarah and Morag on the beach when Sarah was about ten. Sarah’s long black hair flew in the wind, her neck snuggled into a scarf. Her jeans were wet at the hems, like she’d been in the sea. She had a serious, thoughtful look in her startlingly green eyes.

  As Winter pictured the photograph in her mind, the twirling images stopped and settled on the girl. All she could see was Sarah as a child, standing on the beach with her grandmother. All of a sudden, Winter heard Lucrezia’s voice calling Sarah’s name – and she joined her. They called together, until a terrible scene filled Winter’s mind. It was Sarah, and yet it wasn’t. Her body had changed and took on terrible shapes. And then she heard Lucrezia talk: Sarah Midnight. This is who you are. Remember!

  Fire burnt Winter’s mind. She gasped in pain, but she couldn’t let herself stop. Don’t let go, Sarah. Remember who you are. Remember! Lucrezia kept saying.

  A new burst of pain made Winter cry out, and broke the silver thread that kept them tethered to Sarah. She saw black, and then she opened her eyes.

  To her horror, she saw that Lucrezia’s face was covered in blood, streaming in two red rivulets from her nose. She felt her face was wet, and when she touched it and looked at her fingers, she realised that she, too, was covered in blood.