“Yeah, sort of, I think. It’s the bit of you that doesn’t belong to the earth, anyway. The bit that’s just you. It’s what Tom’s promised to give Sammael in return for that book. If I promise mine to Sammael, then he’ll be able to kill me once I’ve got all I ask for, but I’m never going to do that. Never. So it won’t ever end. Unless I kill him or something.”
“How?”
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know. Yet. I guess I’ve got to try and find out.”
Cath was silent, considering this. She could see it from Danny’s point of view. He thought Sammael was terrifying. And yet …
“Do you know what would happen if Sammael wasn’t there?” Cath asked, feeling the frown deep across her own forehead. “If he didn’t do all that stuff with Chromos?”
“No,” said Danny. “But I know what will happen, sooner or later, if things stay as they are.”
Cath closed her eyes. She thought back to that tall, thin man in Chromos with his hand on Zadoc’s neck. She hadn’t liked him. In fact, hadn’t there been something about him that reminded her of Dad?
But out here, safe from the rain in the little shelter, she could remember how Dad’s face went gentle when he looked at Sadie and the other kids, and the desperate feeling she got when she saw that and wanted—so badly it hurt—him to turn the same look on her.
She set her jaw against the night. It wasn’t simple. Only idiots thought it was simple. Idiots like those teachers at school who called her “neglected” and said she only needed a “loving family” for everything to be okay.
Cath knew where everything would be okay: in that house between the mountains and the sea, where Dad could be just a memory and not a real person she had to live with. She could imagine his face and never have to stand in front of him.
She curled herself around Barshin’s drenched body, tucked her hands up against her chest, and touched the skin that was marked with the pattern of yellow flowers.
CHAPTER 18
NIGHTMARES
The path through the dunes was scattered with small lumps of quartz that caught the sunlight and bounced diamond sparks back at her as she wandered down to the sea. She normally left the cottage door open—why not? There was no danger of anyone coming along and breaking in—but this evening she had looked up into the sky and decided to close it behind her. Clouds were gathering, purple-gray, over the sea. A wind picked up and hissed through the miserly fringe of grasses that clung to the edge of the dunes. The waves were rising, too—white horses had begun to gallop along the rolling crests, kicking up sprays of foam.
As she left the dunes behind and stepped out onto the flat beach, she saw hoofprints in the sand. That wasn’t unusual—wild horses sometimes came through here. Occasionally she thought about trying to tame one. But these prints were different. A single line of them, unevenly spaced, as though the animal had been speeding up, then slowing down.
She followed the prints until she came to the edge of the water. They came straight out of the waves.
Cath turned around and ran back along the prints, trying to match her own strides to the strides the creature had taken. It had stretched out its legs in some places, and bounced deep into the sand in others. Here and there a pair of prints were set into the beach where the animal had reared up on its hind legs and come thudding down.
The sunset and the night overtook her, but the moon shone silver along the sand. Shadows clustered inside the hoofprints so they stood out, black and solid. She followed tirelessly, knowing that the animal would be worth the chase.
Bright reddish gold, it was standing on top of the highest dune, looking down its nose at her and snorting.
“You took your time,” it said.
“So?” she said. “You weren’t going anywhere. Why are you gold?”
“I have stolen the color from the sea,” it said proudly.
“Why?” she asked, feeling a chill against her neck. But perhaps that was just the sea air.
Could things be stolen here? Could they be stolen from her?
“I wanted it,” the creature said.
“What if I want it?” said Cath.
The creature tossed its head. “You don’t want it,” it said. “Go into the waves. You’ll see that you don’t.”
Cath turned to look at the swelling sea. The waves were rolling over now, hair curlers as high as her own head. She didn’t feel like a swim.
“Will you take me in?” she asked, but the creature snorted again and stepped backward, its gold hooves marking the dune with inky prints.
“No way,” it said. “I’m not giving the sea a chance to steal all this gold back. And the moon is rising now. Beware the moon on the sea! Beware the silver waves!”
It reared up and turned on its hindquarters, racing away, gold coat defiant against the flat moonlight.
Cath watched it go, and then watched the waves gathering for a moment. What had the creature meant? How had it stolen a color?
There was only one way to find out. She stepped forward to the edge of the sea and began wading into the water.
The sea began to shriek. Above the dry roar of the waves and the crash of the breakers rose an agonizing, dreadful shout that wailed around the air. Her ears began to sting, and she put up her hands to protect them, but the spray from the waves had become a whirling mass of banshees, salty hair trailing, wide mouths blaring out. They wailed until their faces were puce and their veins were bulging and their tongues were black with spit.
Cath tried to shout over the top of them just to hear a noise that was her own, but the effort of trying to shout brought spots dancing in front of her eyes until she couldn’t think how to breathe anymore, and somehow she was drowning in airlessness and everything was going white, and she was thinking, Is this what it meant, is this the place …
* * *
It was Danny who was screaming. Next to her in the tarpaulin shelter, his body was rigid, his legs and arms pushed out as if defending himself from an army of demons, and he was screaming with every breath of air his lungs could hold.
Cath knew in less than a second that she was awake and fine, and that she needed to wake him up because the terror inside him was so enormous that in a second it could twist around his heart and squeeze it to a stop.
She reached out a hand to shake him.
“Danny! Danny! Wake up!”
He woke up and hurled himself away from her, crashing against the tarpaulin. Two of the poles fell and the sheet flooded down onto their heads, so that for a moment the world was a choking mess of plastic.
When Cath finally got her face out into the cold air, she saw that it was almost morning. A thin light had broken through the trees and was curling around the earth.
Behind her, Danny found a way out of the crumpled tarpaulin and got to his feet, rubbing his eyes. He was very pale.
“Sorry,” he said. “I get a bit scared when people wake me up. The nightmares…”
“Where’s Barshin?” said Cath, spinning around to see if the hare was trapped in the fallen shelter. But Danny pointed to the base of a tree, and there was Barshin, crouched.
“We’ve got to get going,” said the hare. “We can’t waste time like this. Tom must already be with Sammael—Sammael will make sure he gets to the end of the book even quicker. We need to get after him.”
“Use that stick!” Cath turned on Danny. “Let’s call Zadoc, then when Kalia comes, talk to her with your stick. Tell her you’re going to return her to Sammael. I mean, if you could always do that, why didn’t you try talking to her before?”
“She had her jaws around my face,” said Danny. “It wasn’t the first thing on my mind.”
Cath tapped her foot impatiently. “Come on, Barshin. Let’s do it.”
Danny put his hand in his pocket and shook his head. “It won’t work,” he said. “Nothing works.”
Barshin called, and Zadoc came roaring out of the air. The young morning leapt back in terror as the horse pushed his way in
to the world, bigger than ever, just a little more transparent. He stood before them, a mottled mess of purples and browns and dark, oily green, as though the colors he wore were designed to refute any suggestion that he could be fading away. But fading he was. Cath saw quite clearly the outline of a tree through his rib cage. He pawed the ground for a second, head thrown up, but his mane was matted and his ears drooped.
It was too much. She wanted to run toward him and leap onto his back, ride him away into the air, leaving Danny behind fumbling with his endless problems. But something made her turn, one last time, to catch a glimpse of the boy and the hare.
Barshin was crouched on the ground watching Danny. Danny had his hands up, the stick clenched in one fist, and his eyes were shut. His face was red, as though he had forgotten to breathe. Both arms were waving desperately, but he was standing his ground, standing firm—
“Quick!” Cath said. “Get on Zadoc! He’s gotta go—”
Danny took one pace forward and then gasped. It was the sound of water rattling around a plughole, the swell of waves against a fierce sea. When he opened his mouth, Cath half expected to see a great river pouring out, flooding the earth at their feet. Instead, a mist of dragon’s breath hissed from his lungs and he opened his eyes again, and Cath realized that Zadoc had gone.
“Get him back!” she said to Barshin. “We was nearly there. He’s getting it!”
But Barshin looked at Danny, and Danny shook his head.
“I couldn’t talk to her,” he said. “It didn’t work.”
“What d’you mean? You wasn’t screaming. You wasn’t scared.”
“No. I pushed her back, but I couldn’t get past. She was standing her ground, just like me. Stalemate.”
“Well, how’d you push her back? Do it more. Stronger.”
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know. Every time I thought words at her, with the stick, I just saw…”
He trailed off, and Cath grabbed a tree branch so that she could fix her hands around something that wasn’t his scrawny little neck.
“Saw what?”
“I saw the sea,” Danny said, tasting the words carefully. “I saw this beach, and the sea, and a line of footprints going into the sea. No, not footprints—”
Cath’s heart froze and then seemed to coat itself with something hard, something that shone—
“Hoofprints?” she asked.
Danny looked at her and nodded. His hair stuck out from his head, like the feathers of a windblown bird. “Did you see it too?”
Cath shrugged. “I dreamed it. Last night.”
Danny shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself, holding tightly to his sweater. “It was Sammael, then. He’s brought sand here. It’s in both of us. He must know what we’re trying to do … it’s no use against him. He can read minds.”
“No, he can’t!” Barshin took a couple of lopes toward them. “You can hear me now, can’t you, Danny? Sammael can’t read your minds. And he doesn’t plant every dream you have in there either. He puts in the grains of sand to begin with, but it’s your mind that grows them into ideas. It’s like planting a seed—if you plant a seed in the ground, the flower that grows is always the same kind of flower, for sure. But the way it grows is different, depending on if it has good soil, or strong sunlight, or too much rain. The same is true of Sammael’s sand. You shape the ideas that come from his sand. And this time, both your ideas are the same shape. You both know what you need to do. You know where you need to go. You need to look down inside yourselves and read your own knowledge.”
Danny looked down at his sweater. Cath looked at hers. Neither spoke for a long time, and the nearby birds began to chatter again, gossiping sharply about the unwelcome intruders in their quiet morning woods.
“Is there—”
“The water—”
Cath broke off as soon as she heard Danny speak. If he was finally getting to the point, she didn’t want to hold him up.
He was still staring down at his belly. His dark blue sweater was covered in bits of twig and leaf, which he picked at slowly.
“I think…,” he said, “I think it’s the sea. That’s what we both saw. I nearly died, once. And when I came back, I thought I was swimming up through this water, a really long way. And I felt I could breathe in there. I was strong. I wasn’t afraid of anything. I knew I was coming back to life, and that whatever happened, I’d face it, I’d fight it … and I did. I think if I went into the water again, I might feel like that again. I might not think about being afraid.”
Because I am afraid. The admission hung between them, unspoken, and Cath understood that, although Danny had admitted to being a coward before, he was finally saying that his fears ruled him, and he couldn’t overcome them by himself. She wondered how on earth it was possible to be like that. And when he looked up at her, he was shaking his head.
“It’s normal,” he said, shrugging helplessly. “That’s what Sammael was telling you, wasn’t it? We’re all like this, us humans. It’s only you who’s different.”
Cath stared at him, and bit back the “Idiot!” that was on her lips. It didn’t matter. What mattered was to find some water. If he thought that drowning himself was going to make him feel brave, then good luck to him.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s find some water, then. Best make it deep.”
“It’s crazy,” said Danny. “But this is all crazy. Insane.”
“Sometimes—” said Barshin.
“None of that wise-hare stuff!” snapped Danny, turning on him. “I’m not as stupid as you all seem to think, you know.”
And, giving Cath a crooked half-smile that suggested he was in no way certain of whether what he was doing was right or not, he walked off toward the middle of the forest to fetch the deer.
CHAPTER 19
TO THE SEA
The following night, they slept in a copse of trees. The night after that, they crept behind a deserted house and curled themselves up behind some bales of straw, which at least were warm. By the fourth day, they’d grown so used to being filthy and hungry that they couldn’t think of doing anything else apart from scurrying from place to place, keeping their heads down, and spending long minutes crouched behind hedges and walls and fallen trees, waiting for people to disappear from the way ahead. Cath stole food—she was light and small and ran faster than the shop alarms.
Every night Cath dreamed about the sea. And every night they had to make sure they found a place to sleep that wasn’t close to people because Danny would have nightmares and Cath would wake up to hear him screaming. But once he’d woken, he’d find something to laugh about, and then everything was okay for a while.
On the evening of the fourth day, Cath came back from a food raid with a newspaper. She handed it to Danny. He read the headline: “‘Fears Grow for Missing Children’? That’s it, then. They’ll be out looking for us. Everyone will. We’ll never get to the sea. Maybe I should just call my parents—they’ll be worried.”
“Don’t be daft,” said Cath. “’Course we’ll get there. We’re miles away from home now. No one’ll look here.”
“Yeah, they will. It says the search has gone nationwide. Your dad’s even made a TV appeal.”
Cath’s heart seized up. She clenched her fist so hard that the corner of her chocolate bar dug painfully into the corner of her hand.
“Yeah,” she snarled. “He likes talking. Everyone always believes him.”
“But he’s horrible.” Danny turned his wide-eyed face on her. “What he did to you at the farm—that was horrible. People must know he’s like that.”
Cath stared at him. But, really, why should Danny have any idea about it? He was another kind of person.
She shook her head and kept her mouth shut.
Danny persisted. “Why don’t you tell them? Or go to the police, or Social Services, or something?”
Cath unclenched her fist from around the chocolate bar and tore open the wrapper to get the last bit. It was starting to m
elt.
“Because I’m not a stupid little coward who gets everyone else to do everything for me,” she said, and she put the chocolate in her mouth. Then she got up and started walking again, her eyes fixed on the horizon.
“It isn’t cowardly to ask for help!” shouted Danny after her, scrambling to his feet. “It’s what normal people do!”
But Cath kept on walking and didn’t turn around.
* * *
Isbjin al-Orr, who had taken to roaming ahead on his own and reporting back as to the lay of the land, came trotting over the crest of a hill toward them through the fading dusk. Danny’s hand shot to the stick in his pocket and Teilin scooted backward a few feet as though she’d been deafened.
Danny and Isbjin al-Orr stood in silent conference for a few moments, and then Danny turned to Cath. His face was wide with a rare smile, his teeth white against the growing darkness.
“He says it’s close! Only one or two miles. Let’s go!”
Cath thought, How didn’t we notice before? There was a sharpness in the air that, now that she knew what it was, tasted like salt.
Her heart began to race. Down there on the beach, was she going to find her house? No, of course not. There weren’t any mountains here. The whole point of her house was that no one could get to it. There wasn’t room for Danny O’Neill. But still—she’d see the sea and be a little closer somehow.
* * *
And Cath couldn’t believe the sea. Whatever she’d expected, it had been nothing like this—nothing so strong and dark and vast. She’d never dreamed of the angry wrench of the waves, or the roaring growl of the endless swell, or the way the silver moonlight would dance in a ceaseless frenzy as it shimmered over the water. She’d never dreamed it would look like the edge of the world, and that she’d know for certain as she stood before the sweeping tide that this was entirely real, entirely beyond her imagining.
It was like staring Dad in the face. It was like seeing him appear in the doorway, taking his belt off. It was like seeing him walk toward her, his fist raised, and his eyes full of hate. The sea was too big and too fierce, and she wanted to hide away from it.
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