The Last Knight (Pendragon Book 1)

by Nicola S. Dorrington

  “Hello, Caronwyn.” I was pleasantly surprised, not many people managed to say my name right first time. She came forward to shake my hand, her grasp warm and friendly. “Why don’t you take a seat and we can get started.”

  I sat on the very edge of the couch, fidgeting uncontrollably, as she took the armchair opposite. She leant forward, rifling through the notepad balanced on her knees.

  “Now, according to my notes here, it’s nightmares that have been bothering you.”

  And voices in my head, I thought, although it had been quiet since that morning. Out loud I said, “Yeah.”

  Her smile was kind. “Almost every night I see.”

  I nodded.

  She made a little note on her pad. “Are they always the same? These dreams?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Do they have a common theme or element?”

  They come true. Again I shook my head.

  “All right.” She didn’t seem annoyed by my short answers, but she put the notepad aside and looked at me with much more intensity. “Let me tell you a little about what I do. Research shows that cases like yours are often triggered by some traumatic past experience, and by confronting and dealing with that experience, we can get rid of the nightmares.”

  “But I don’t know what that experience is,” I said with a frown. Even as I said it though, I remembered the day an ambulance had come to take my mother to Snedham. That had been more than traumatic. I remembered her crying and pleading with Dad, and the pain in his eyes as he stood and did nothing, even when I added my pleading to hers.

  “That’s quite often the case,” Dr Winston said, seeming not to notice my sudden discomfort. “That’s why I use hypnotherapy. It allows me to delve into your subconscious and discover what’s really bothering you.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. My subconscious wasn’t a place I wanted anyone delving into. The fact was there was probably a lot in my subconscious I didn’t want anyone to know about. I wanted to tell her that, but the words lodged in my throat.

  “Let’s get started,” she said before I could speak.

  Hypnotism wasn’t something I really believed in, it seemed a bit hokey and new-agey to me, but I didn’t feel like I had any other option. So I lay back on the couch as instructed, and tried to obey Dr Winston’s instructions to think of nothing but the sound of her voice, and my own breathing. I concentrated on each breath, feeling it filling my lungs, oxygen speeding through my body.

  My mind started to drift, the sound of her voice lulling me. When she told me I was in a safe place it felt like the truth. My body felt unresponsive and I wasn’t sure I could open my eyes even if I wanted to, but it was peaceful – no fears, no worries. It was comforting after the stress of the last few days.

  “I need you to open your mind, Cara.” Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. “Think back. Think back as far as you can. Try and find your first memory. What’s the very first thing you can remember?”

  At first there was nothing, just darkness behind my eyes, and silence in my head. Slowly the memories began to trickle in. They were obvious memories, memories of a childhood that had seemed normal to me at the time, but now looking back I knew wasn’t. Mum had always been different from other mothers. She would talk to people who weren’t there, and drift into trances that could last for hours.

  I shied away from those memories and tried to push deeper, urged on by Dr. Winston’s voice.

  I hit a brick wall. Something was blocking me, holding me back from memories I wanted, that I needed to see. My mind wouldn’t work. Dr. Winston’s insistent instructions made me push harder and it began to crumble. As the wall came down my head exploded with pain. I think I screamed, although it may just have been in my own head.

  To begin with I saw just light and colour, blindingly bright behind my eyes, then the colours began to solidify, forming images that weren’t my memories.

  High castle walls, the flash of a bright, steel blade, a crown in my hand, the face of an old man with ancient eyes, and a man on horseback, riding away and leaving an ache in my heart.

  The images began to speed up, changing so fast I could barely make sense of them. A lifetime of memories in a single instant. A battle raging, horses charging, fires burning, screaming, and death.

  Another scream ripped through me, but I was locked inside my head. My eyes wouldn’t open; I couldn’t hear or feel anything. And the images just kept coming. Men throwing themselves into battle, dying on the ground as lightening crackled through the air. But it wasn’t lightening; it was something else, something different. Something more terrifying than I could imagine.

  Enough. The voice roared in my head. It was him, the voice from my dreams. The images stopped and I was alone in darkness. No, not alone. I could feel the voice there, like a living presence in the back of my mind.

  Cara, the voice said, softly this time. It’s time to wake up. I promise you everything is going to be ok, but you need to open your eyes.

  Sense and feeling flooded back into my body. My heart was hammering as though I’d just run a marathon. Inch by inch I forced my eyes open.

  The first thing I saw was Dad’s profile. He leant over me, but was looking back towards Dr Winston, so that his greying hair fell forward into his eyes. She stood, pale and shaking, against the wall.

  “What did you do to her? What happened?”

  She shook her head so hard her earrings jangled. “I don’t know. That’s never happened before. She slipped too deep, I couldn’t get her back.”

  “Dad?”

  My voice was weak and shaky, but his head whipped round.

  “Cara? Oh honey.” He crushed me in his arms and I clung to the smooth fabric of his shirt, his heart beating under my hand.

  Even as my father comforted me, the voice in my mind spoke. It was louder now, stronger, no longer a weak whisper. It was like the wall had crumbled and set him free.

  It will be all right, Cara. Go home and rest. Things will make sense soon.

  It only made me cling to my father more and sob harder. I knew now what it felt like to be my mother, to be trapped with memories and thoughts that didn’t belong to me. I had felt myself slipping away, my identity fading, submerged in memories of another time and place.

  I understood what had happened to her, and my fears were becoming reality -the same thing was happening to me.

  Chapter Five

  The ride home was a confused blur. Dad tried to talk to me a couple of times, but I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t focus on the words. I couldn’t get my brain to work, it was just a confused jumble of thoughts and images, and it was impossible to untangle what was mine and what wasn’t.

  In my head the voice tried to soothe me, to calm me, but I didn’t want to listen to it. It was a symptom of the madness, and I didn’t want to be crazy.

  Dad sent me to bed as soon as we got to the house, without objection from me, but I lay under the covers with my eyes wide open. I was terrified of closing them, terrified if I did the images would come flooding back. But it wasn’t just the images that frightened me; it was the sense of losing myself.

  A few hours after I’d gone to bed there was the creak of the stairs as Dad made his own way up to his room. No doubt the whiskey bottle he kept hidden in the back of the TV cabinet would be empty. Dad suffered more than anyone else, having to watch and being able to do nothing. I pictured him sitting in his armchair, the whisky glass clenched in a trembling hand. I wondered if he cried when I wasn’t there to see it.

  The glowing numbers on my alarm clock ticked over as I lay there. The night slipping into the early hours of the morning as I kept the images at bay.

  A thud echoed up the stairs. I frowned into the darkness. Had Dad gotten up without me realising? I listened for a few minutes but the house was silent again.

  My thoughts started to drift when the floorboards just outside my bedroom door creaked. The thick curtains on my window blocked out even th
e faintest glimmer of light, but the bright LED display on my clock shed just enough light for me to see my bedroom door move. I knew it wasn’t Dad; he’d have turned a light on. Did the shadows move? Or was it just my mind playing tricks? A shoe scuffed across the floor.

  Sucking in a deep breath, my mouth opened to scream. A hand clamped down, muffling any noise.

  “Please don’t scream. Screaming really sets my teeth on edge.”

  I stared up at the shadowy shape leaning over me, my heart lodged somewhere in my throat. The hand on my mouth loosened.

  “Lance?”

  His teeth glimmered as he smiled.

  “What. The. Hell…” My voice rose with each word and he covered my mouth again.

  “Shush. You’ll wake your father.”

  That was the last straw. It had been a really bad day. My mind was at breaking point, and now a guy I barely knew had broken into my house in the middle of the night. He might have had a perfectly reasonable explanation, though I couldn’t imagine what it would be, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  Clenching my hand into a fist, I swung at the dark shape above me. I swore as it connected, feeling my knuckles crunch, and he grunted too. Ignoring the pain, I tried to punch him again, but he was quicker, grabbing my hand. I moved the other one and he grabbed that too.

  “Cara, please. You’re going to hurt…”

  He grunted and the air whooshed out of his lungs as I twisted and drove both feet into his stomach. As he moved back, I scrambled to get off the bed, my feet tangling in the covers, but he recovered quicker than I expected. I was only two steps from the bed when one of his arms locked around my waist. He hauled me backwards and I thumped into his chest.

  I drove my elbow back and he grunted, but his grip didn’t loosen. Instead he twisted around, throwing me down onto the bed. His weight settled on my thighs, pinning me down. He grabbed both hands, holding them above my head.

  His breath was hot on my cheek, his body heavy on mine. A boy I barely knew was in my room in the middle of the night, pinning me to the bed. The anger drained away to be replaced by icy fear.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath from above me and Lance shifted. The bedside light clicked on and I looked up into his eyes.

  “Cara, I would never hurt you.”

  I gulped back a sob. “Please.”

  He frowned. “Why would you think I’d hurt you?”

  Something in his voice broke through my panic. He sounded, and looked, utterly confused. His eyes travelled over me, lingering on my upper thighs where my oversized nightshirt had ridden up. A look of horrified understanding dawned and he shifted backwards, freeing me.

  “I’m sorry.” He held up his hands and I noticed absently he was wearing leather gloves. “I just didn’t want you hurting yourself in the dark.” He pressed his fingers to the shadow of a bruise forming on his jaw. “Or me for that matter. You’ve got a mean right hook.”

  I pulled my legs up under me, tugging my shirt back down and pressing my back against the headboard.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to check you were all right.”

  I blinked at him. “Most people call. They don’t break into people’s houses and attack them in their bedrooms.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have your phone number. Besides, I couldn’t risk your dad not letting me speak to you.” Moving too quickly for me to react he grabbed my face in both hands, tipping my head back so he could look me in the eyes. He stared down at me, as through trying to read something in my gaze. Whatever he saw there clearly wasn’t good. He swore under his breath.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  He released my face and drummed his fingers on his thighs. “I can’t really explain, but I’m sorry about today.”

  “Today? About what?”

  He scrubbed his face with his hand. “When you said about a therapist – I should have come back to school as soon as I realised…”

  “You knew? You knew something would happen?”

  “I was afraid it would. When I researched Dr Winston, I found out she used hypnotism, and once I’d figured out what that meant I realised how dangerous it might be for someone to tinker around in your memories.”

  “Why?” I blurted. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Wrong with you?” Lance laughed and shook his head. “Nothing is wrong with you, Cara. You are exactly as you should be.”

  “But the dreams? Those things I saw? You! When I touched you earlier…”

  His expression changed and he flexed his fingers making the leather gloves creak.

  “Look, I’m not the one to explain it. It’s all so complicated and I only understand pieces of it.”

  Wrapping my arms around my knees I hugged myself. “So, I’m not going crazy? If…if you saw something earlier.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “But I know what you probably saw. Listen, there is only one person who can explain this to you.” He paused, staring down at his hands. When he looked up he’d clearly come to some decision. “I can take you to him.”

  The voice in my head had been silent for so long I’d almost forgotten about it. But it stirred in the back of my mind as I looked up at Lance.

  Trust him, Cara. He will guide and protect you.

  Then something happened that nearly stopped my heart. My mouth opened and someone else used my voice. I was just a passenger in my own head, shoved to the back as something else took control.

  “Do your duty. Protect her. Do not fail me.”

  Lance stopped breathing, his eyes locked on mine. He’d gone white and his hands were shaking. He slipped from the bed, kneeling on the ground in front of me.

  “Never again.” His voice trembled.

  The presence released my mind and I gasped for breath. I sat, stunned and overwhelmed as Lance burst into action.

  He flew around the room, snatching a bag from the bottom of the wardrobe and filling it with clothes. I watched, somewhat dazed, as he yanked open my underwear drawer and started trying to transfer things to the bag without looking at them.

  Slowly the shock receded enough for me to react, to think.

  “What are you doing?”

  He barely glanced at me. “Packing. We need to get moving.”

  “Get moving where?”

  “You wanted answers didn’t you? I never planned on this. I wanted to take things slow, but that damn hypnotist has woken up things that should have been left for longer.”

  “You never planned on this? Did you know all along…that something like this was going to happen?”

  Dropping the bag, Lance crossed the room to the bed. He knelt on the edge and his fingers twisted into mine, the leather gloves cold against my skin. He tugged my hands against his chest and I could feel the hammering of his heart through the thin t-shirt.

  “Cara, you have to trust me. I know you must be so confused and frightened, but you have to trust me.”

  In the back of my mind the voice was speaking, but I ignored it. Instead I looked up at Lance’s face. His jaw was set, his eyes hard with cold determination.

  “Don’t ask me why, but yes. I trust you.”

  Chapter Six

  “I can’t just leave,” I hissed ten minutes later. Lance stood with his hand on the handle of the front door, looking back at me. I glanced back up the stairs towards my dad’s closed bedroom door. “Not without saying goodbye.” Truth was, it was an excuse. I simply had no idea if I was doing the right thing. I was running away from home in the middle of the night with a strange boy. It wasn’t normal behaviour. Then again, I was starting to realise that nothing about me was normal.

  With my bag in one hand he reached forward and gripped my fingers. “Would he understand? Would he understand any of this?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  He frowned. Still lo
oking down at me he lifted the fingers he was holding, pressing my fingertips against his cheek.

  The house faded away and I gasped, but this time Lance didn’t pull away. I was stood in a sunny glade in the middle of a forest. Oak trees rose on all sides, towering and majestic. There was no human noise, no traffic, just the rustling of the leaves, the calls of the birds in the trees, and the snorting of a horse tethered to the branch of a nearby tree. It was summer, a warm breeze ruffling through my hair. Everything was so vivid. I knew somehow that it was just like my dreams. It was a real moment. At some point in my life I had stood, or would stand, on that spot, in that moment.

  Lance was in front of me, my fingers still against his cheek. He looked weary and somehow older. I looked up into his eyes and saw an expression there that almost took my breath away.

  Then the image faded, and the walls of the house closed back in around us as Lance moved his cheek away from my hand.

  “What was that?”

  “A kind of memory.”

  “Yours?”

  He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “In a way.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure why he’d shown me it, but it worked. I knew I had to get answers. I had to understand what was happening to me. I allowed him to tug me towards the front door.

  Sometime in the night a little dusting of snow had fallen and the ground crunched under our feet as we left the house, my breath steaming in front of me. Across the road a familiar jeep idled against the curb, the rumbling of the engine sounding loud in the quiet night. Crystals of frost sparkled on the roof in the orange glow of the streetlights.

  Both back doors were open and the little light at the front illuminated two familiar faces.

  “They’re not really your brothers are they?” I asked, knowing I was right.

  Lance glanced up at Wyn and Percy. “It depends on your definition of ‘brother’. Let’s just say I would trust them both with my life. More importantly, I’d trust them with yours.”

  I knew he was telling the truth, about trusting them and about valuing my life more than his own. He took my elbow, steering me across the road. I hesitated in the middle of the street; there was a strange smell on the wind. The shadows between the streetlights seemed darker – more threatening. Lance’s body tensed beside me and then he hauled me towards the jeep, boosting me up into the back seat. As soon as I reached the light and warmth of the car the feeling seemed to vanish.