The next morning Lucas was quiet as they walked home; not companionably so, but deathly, lip-bitingly quiet. He’d insisted on leaving before anyone else got up. Rosie had to say everything twice to get his attention and then he looked through her with cloudy eyes.
“What’s up with you?” she said. “Still nursing your hangover?”
“No,” he retorted. He scowled, pushed his hands in his pockets. “I’m fine.”
“So what did you get up to with Jon?” She couldn’t quite keep the envy out of her tone. “How special d’you have to be to join his secret clique?”
“God, Rosie, are you obsessed? There are more important things than whether you can get off with Jon!” His outburst startled her. Then out of the blue he asked, “Do you think I look like him?”
“Like Jon?” she said, thrown. “Not really.”
“Do I look like Lawrence at all?”
“No. Why would you?”
“Because… last night I…” Lucas stopped in his tracks, sat down on a rock and rubbed his face with both hands. He sighed and stammered, and then the story came spilling out. Rosie absorbed it in disbelief. “I’ve got to ask Mum if it’s true,” he finished, agonized.
She was staring at him, her mind reeling. “No, it can’t possibly be.”
“Then why would Lawrence tell me such a massive lie?”
“I don’t know! But think—you can’t ask Mum if she had an affair!”
Lucas raised pained eyes to hers. “No, you’re right, I can’t. It’s too horrible.”
After a moment of heavy silence, Rosie said, “All those strange hints Sapphire was dropping last night…” They stared at each other.
“No. How could Sapphire know before me? That’s not fair. That would make it real and it’s not.”
“Come on,” she said gently. “It’s probably a misunderstanding.”
They pushed through the hawthorns into Oakholme’s garden and Jessica was there, throwing scraps to the birds in the soft morning sunshine. She was graceful and barefoot in a long skirt, her hair a messy golden veil. She waved, called them into the kitchen and poured coffee.
As they sat at the big pine table, Lucas sat close to Rosie, silent as if waiting for someone to slap an explanation out of him. Jessica looked inquiringly at her daughter, who looked back without expression. “Are you both okay?” asked Jessica. “Good party, was it? Late night?”
“It was odd,” Rosie answered when Lucas didn’t. “Which I suppose is normal for the Wilders.”
Lucas went on gazing at his fingers wrapped around his coffee mug. “Has someone upset you?” Jessica asked more firmly. She touched his wrist but he pulled away.
“No.” He chewed his lower lip, sighed and said, “I had the weirdest dream.”
Rosie’s heart lurched into her throat. She shook her head, but he took no notice. “Yeah.” He looked his mother in the eye. “I dreamed I met Lawrence Wilder and he told me that he was my father. What sort of a dream was that?”
“A completely ridiculous one,” said Rosie.
Jessica didn’t laugh. Dismay shadowed her face. “Oh, my god,” she breathed.
“It was a dream, though, wasn’t it, Mum?” Lucas focused intently on her. “Why would he lie about a thing like that?”
“Oh my god,” Jessica said again. “Tell me what happened.”
Lucas described his descent into the kitchen, a man in the darkness, a surreal conversation. Color came back to his face and he was almost gabbling with the relief of confession. “I tell you, it was like Star Wars, ‘I am your father, Luke,’ only without the costumes and heavy breathing. But why would he say that? I don’t get it.”
“Bastard,” Jessica whispered. “He had no right. This wasn’t meant to happen.”
“Mum?” said Rosie, alarmed.
“Oh, god.” Jessica pushed her chair away and stood with her back to them. She put her hand to her mouth, let it drop. She walked about, hugging herself.
Hard flakes of disbelief settled in Rosie’s heart as she watched her mother pacing and struggling. “He had no business… Lucas, I always meant to tell you, but the time was never right. This is wrong, you should have heard it from me, not him.”
Rosie and Luc stared, seeing a different person. She returned to the table and looked down at them, her face serious and intense, her eyes alight with distress. “I’m so sorry,” she said quietly.
“No,” said Lucas, his forehead creasing with angry pain. He sounded so bereft that Rosie’s heart broke. “I don’t want to be Lawrence’s son. I want to be Dad’s.”
“And you are, in every other way, but—”
“What happened?” Rosie asked in a small voice. “Did you have an affair?”
Jessica’s gaze fell. “I made an awful mistake,” she said.
“And that’s me, is it?” Lucas cried, rising to his feet. “An awful mistake?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant.” Then Jessica was holding his hands and protesting how much she loved him and he was trying to pull away and all three of them in tears. Horrible.
“Rosie,” Jessica said grimly, “let Lucas and me have few minutes alone.”
* * *
Shock like that made the whole world spin. Sitting on a chair at her bedroom window, Rosie cried a little and wasn’t sure why. Lucas was still her brother, no one had died. Still, it felt like the death of something.
After an hour she heard the click of her door, and Jessica’s footfalls on the carpet. “Are you all right, love?”
“Is Lucas all right?” said Rosie, turning. “That’s the real question.”
Jessica perched on the side of the bed, facing her. “Not yet, but I hope he will be. We’re still the same people.”
“Are we? Thank goodness.” Rosie wanted to be angry, but she was too bewildered.
Jessica asked softly, “Your level of boiling fury, on a scale of one to ten?”
“About a nine,” said Rosie. “It’s all right, Mum, I’m not going to yell at you.”
“You’ve every reason.”
“Yes, but we don’t do things by yelling, do we? We’re civilized. But... I can’t believe it. Dad adores you.”
“And I adore him.”
“Then how could you?”
“Sometimes it’s not enough.” Jessica looked at her bare feet, rubbing one on the other. “When things seem too perfect, you can get restless. I had a moment of insanity long ago, which only made me realize how much I loved Bron after all.”
“And this moment—without details, please—what brought it on?”
Jessica met her gaze with steady eyes. “There’s nothing I can say to excuse myself. It was impulsive and selfish, that’s all.”
Rosie was grateful for the lack of information. “Does Dad know?”
“Yes. He’s always known.”
“And he forgave you?”
“Eventually.” Jessica smiled wanly. “He’s a good man. He has a heart the size of the Earth. He decided on the spot to treat Luc as his own, and he always has.”
“And there’s no chance Luc could be his?”
“None. He was away for some weeks on business at the crucial time, so…”
“So when were you planning to tell us?”
“I don’t know. It was easier to put it off. Why make an issue of it, and make Luc feel different? Bloody Lawrence! But it’s my fault. The last thing I wanted was for you to find out like this, but it was bound to happen. Mea culpa, I’m so sorry.”
“Boiling fury now down to a six,” Rosie murmured. “Sapphire, last night—she was hinting at how alike Jon and Lucas are. Very strange. When I tried to ask what she meant, she looked all serious and gave us a lecture about communicating with our parents.”
Jessica groaned. “Oh, great, so Sapphire knows.”
“I suppose everyone in Cloudcroft knows, except Luc and me.”
“No. Only Phyll and Comyn, and they’d never tell. Whether Lawrence has told his own sons—I’ve no idea.”
“Oh god.” Rosie realized that the shock wave would go on spreading outwards. More ammunition for Sam, more reason for Jon to disdain her? “Mum, remember the advice you gave me… about our power to control our fertility? So if it wasn’t an accident—why would you decide to have a child with Lawrence?”
The question hung in the air between them.
“I can’t answer that.” Jessica’s voice went hoarse. “Yes, I let it happen but to this day I’ve no idea why. An impulse. As if Lucas insisted on being born and I had no will to prevent it. And who’d want to be without him?”
“No one,” Rosie said emphatically.
Jessica tilted her head to one side. “Can you forgive me?”
“As long as Lucas can.” She moved next to her mother and hugged her. “It’s not the end of the world.”
They held each other for a long time. “You’re a wonderful girl, Rosie. You have Auberon’s kind heart, for sure. I must phone him, and there’s still Matthew… Come on, let’s face the day.”
Rosie stood up, calmer now but shaken. “Mum… your, er, moment with Lawrence… It’s not why Ginny left, is it?”
A long pause. Eventually Jessica answered on her way to the door, “Let’s just say it didn’t help.”
* * *
Later, Rosie found Lucas by the sound of a tennis ball slamming against the garage wall. He grinned at her, turned away and went on throwing the ball harder than ever.
“Stop it,” she said, pulling at his arm. She took him to an arbor with a moss-covered sundial and a stone bench, and sat him down beside her. “How was your chat with Mum?” He sighed and looked away. “Come on, we have to talk.”
“What for?” he said. “Mum thinks she can make it all better, but she can’t. I thought I knew who I was, and now… I feel sick.”
“It was unbelievably cruel of Lawrence to tell you like that. Why did he do it?”
Lucas shrugged. “First time he’d ever met me alone, and he’d had a few drinks. At least he was honest. It’s the deceit I can’t get my head round.” He sat with his hands braced on the edge of the bench, dark hair dangling forward. He did resemble Lawrence in a way, she thought, long-limbed and skinny like him. “I don’t want to think about how it happened.”
“Me neither,” she said, and they fell quiet, determinedly not thinking about it. “Only Mum knows, and she’s not saying.”
Lucas chewed at a thumbnail. “You want to know what I was doing with Jon last night? We were trying to get through the locked Gates to the Otherworld.”
Her jaw dropped, even as Jon’s name sent an electric pang through her. “What? How?”
“Not literally.” He gave an uneasy laugh. “Through a sort of… trance.”
“And did you?”
“No. I think he expected me to have incredible visions, being of the old blood and that.” Luc’s head drooped lower. “D’you think he knows we’re…? God, I can’t say it. Brothers. Is that why he expected more of me? I wanted to please him. I don’t know why. There’s something about him…”
“Yes,” Rosie said helplessly. “I know.”
“But if no one’s told him… Will he be angry? Will he still want to be friends with me?”
Rosie grabbed his hand. “There’s no one who wouldn’t want to be friends with you, Luc. If he doesn’t, that’s his loss.”
He grinned, looking briefly like his old self. “Thanks. I bet you’ve forgiven Mum already, haven’t you?”
“Pretty much,” said Rosie. “Why?”
“Because that’s how you are. A bleeding angel.”
“Can you forgive her?”
“Don’t know. She and Dad let me spend my life thinking I’m one thing, then I find I’m something else entirely.” He looked as she’d never seen him before; desolate, lost, and suddenly older. “What the hell am I supposed to feel or do about any of it? What do I say to Dad tonight?”
“Dad will be fine,” she said firmly.
“He might, but will I?”
* * *
Jessica paced the familiar rooms of Oakholme, thinking of everything that she could have told Rosie, and hadn’t. In the bedroom, she opened the box that contained her albinite bracelet and draped the chain of sparkling gems across her palm. Lawrence had given her the bracelet after Lucas was born.
Auberon knew she had it. He’d never demanded she give it back; in return, she never wore it. It wasn’t a gift given in affection—that wasn’t Lawrence’s style—but a sort of respectful goodbye. Typical of Lawrence; no words, just cold jewels—but an acknowledgment of Lucas, all the same.
Music had been Jess’s lifeblood, her home the stage, her life the passion of her songs. At home with two young children, she’d missed it. Sometimes she felt that she’d lost her real self. It wasn’t that Auberon took her for granted; rather, he loved her too much, protecting her like some rare egg wrapped in silk tissue. Her bird spirit had rebelled. She’d wanted someone not to protect her, but to admire her with raw lust.
It had been during an icy stretch of Lawrence and Virginia’s volatile marriage… An Elysian ritual to celebrate the luscious spring, with dancing and too much honeyed wine… Jessica had happened to dance with Lawrence, and the dance had left them both hotly aroused in a way they dared not admit.
Couples would often slip away into the forest, not always with their usual partners. Auberon, however, wasn’t wild like that; he liked to stay in the center of things. That night, Jessica had rebelled against his decorum. Instead of returning to his side she wandered into the woodland and there she met Lawrence again, alone by a tree as if he’d been waiting for her.
To claim she’d been bewitched sounded lame. She’d certainly been drunk. No words; just a look of reckless, mutual heat. And away into the woods, with the peaty earth, the fragrant bracken and springy grass, clouds sailing across the stars, tree branches trembling and owls haunting the night as they devoured each other.
It had been incredible.
The one thing she’d never spelled out to Auberon because he hadn’t asked—although he obviously knew—was that it had happened more than once. Gods, many times that summer. The coincidence of Auberon’s long business trip had made it all too easy. So exciting, to see Lawrence’s stone-cold exterior thaw for her. Delirious, she’d opened herself completely to him, opened every last gate within herself until conception was inevitable, as if to keep him inside her forever. She still felt a guilty throb of heat, remembering.
But it was only lust. Lawrence had no tenderness in him. In the end it burned itself out with its own arctic chill. Finally she understood what she truly wanted, and Auberon had waited patiently for her to come back.
She still questioned the flood of madness that had led her to conceive Luc—and led Lawrence to collude, because he had. Vanity? Look how beautiful we are, we should have a child? Or some shadowy manipulation by unseen Aetheric powers of which they weren’t even aware? No, that was evading responsibility. The fact was, Lucas was here and she wouldn’t change a thing.
Dignified to the last, Virginia had never said a word to Jessica, but the frigid hauteur of her eyes said it all. Another seven years had passed before she actually left Lawrence, but it must have added unbearable strain to their fragile relationship.
No, nothing Jess said to her children could possibly make it sound acceptable.
* * *
Strangely, it was Matthew, returning home that afternoon, who took it hardest. He blanched as his parents haltingly explained. They were all stiff, measured dignity, while he looked close to tears. Rosie, curled next to Lucas on the sitting room sofa, looked out at the summer evening and longed to escape.
“You know what? I sort of knew,” Matthew said tightly.
Lucas gasped, “What do you mean?”
“You look like Lawrence. Can no one else see it? And I always knew there was something going on, some secret buried. Being Aetherial, nothing’s ever straightforward, there always have to be layers underneath. Why can’t we be normal?”
“Whatever normal means,” Jessica replied, eyelids lowered and arms clasped across her waist. “I can’t justify what happened… things happen in the Otherworld that sometimes shouldn’t.”
“Good job the blasted Gates are shut, then!” Matthew turned on Auberon. “And what about you, Dad? Don’t you want to knock Lawrence’s teeth out?”
Auberon stayed deadly calm, but Rosie saw the color rising in his face. “It’s not the way we do things.”
“Who’s we? The noble Vaethyr? We behave no better than humans! Why didn’t you kill him?”
“We make free choices,” said Auberon. “We don’t own each other. Do you not realize that your mother and I made peace on this issue years ago?”
“I’m not talking about Mum! I’m talking about Lawrence Wilder springing it on poor Luc in the middle of the night! Are you going to let him get away with it?” Rosie felt tension in the air like wire about to snap.
Jessica took a step towards him, saying shakily, “Matt, I know you’re upset—”
“I’m upset? What about Luc? You’ve just told us something that’s destroyed everything I thought we were supposed to be! So much for the perfect family! Lawrence must be in stitches! Jesus!”
There was a split second of awful silence. The whole room trembled.
Then, an explosion of glass. Auberon hadn’t moved, but a Tiffany lamp on a table four feet from him burst into fragments, showering the room in rainbow shards. The lightbulb exploded. The heavy stem of the lamp hit the carpet.
They all flinched. Matt gave a sharp cry of pain and sat down heavily beside Lucas, one hand flying to his face. Rosie saw blood spill between his fingers. A piece of glass had struck his lip. Wincing, he probed the wound and looked at the blood on his fingertips. Jessica was there at once, solicitous, but Auberon fixed him with a firm stare.
“And there you’ve exactly hit the point. Lawrence attacks my family because he’s jealous of us. He cannot hold his own house hold together so he seeks to disrupt mine. If ever I stormed up there to confront him, he would read it as victory. That’s why I don’t retaliate. Jess came back to me, and I have his son, and I will never let him see that he’s hurt us. That is my revenge.”
“Well, you’re a bigger man than me, Dad,” Matt said, muffled. “Me, I’d want to knock seven shades out of him.”
Lucas groaned. “Matt, shut up, will you? Don’t make it worse.”
Shaken, Rosie got up and began picking bits of glass out of the carpet. When she heard a quiet knock at the front door, she rushed into the hallway to open it. Matthew’s friend Alastair was on the doorstep, looking startled when she answered. “Oh, Matt didn’t tell us you were coming,” she said.
“He didn’t know,” said Alastair. “I only dropped in to see if he fancied a pint.” He glanced curiously at the glass fragments in her hand, inclined his head at the raised voices behind the half-open door. “Have I chosen a bad moment?”
Rosie let out a breath and gave a half-smile. It was a relief to see a different and friendly face. She didn’t know Alastair well but he always seemed cheerful, and he was antithesis of Jon; reddish-fair, his face broad, freckled and smiling, with hazel eyes and fair lashes. Not bad-looking, really, in a generic, sporty way. She liked his Aberdeen accent.
“We’re having a family crisis, that’s all,” she said, embarrassed. “We’re not normally like this.”
“I know.”
“I’m sure it’ll blow over, but…”
“I’ll go. Tell him I came by.” He stood looking at her. “Rosie, you look upset.”
“It’s unbelievable,” she said, her throat suddenly aching, “how a handful of words can tear up your life, spin you round and drop you into a world entirely different from the one you thought you were living in. What are you supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, bewildered. “Whoever’s upset you, hurt them back, only worse. Really hit them where it hurts. Me, I usually punch a wall so I only harm myself, but…” He trailed off with an uncertain half-grin. “Are you all right?”
“Not really,” she said. “D’you mind taking me to the pub instead?”
* * *
After two large vodka-tonics, she told Alastair what the quarrel was about and watched his reaction. He was plainly surprised and went quiet, his eyes unfocused. Then he shook his head, took a drink of beer and said, “Your father’s amazing.”
“Forgiving Mum, you mean? Couldn’t you?”
“Oh, I suppose I could. It hurts, like being stabbed; I know that. An ex of mine, once, she…” His hesitation woke a pang of empathy in Rosie. “Anyway, she wasn’t worth forgiving. But someone like your mother, how could a man not forgive her?”
Rosie sighed with relief, feeling on safe ground again. “I wish Matt had taken it that well. He blames anything that goes wrong on us being… different.”
“I don’t get it. You’re a great family.”
“I know.” The admiration in his tone amused and warmed her. “And Matt knows it. He has our best interests at heart, but he can’t resist telling us all how to behave, even our parents, even though he’s out of line and knows it.” She paused while Alastair bought her another drink, then went on, “I’ll tell you what he’s like. Matthew is like a boy from an arty, eccentric bunch of bohemians, who’s embarrassed by them because he wants to be a city slicker in a suit.”
They laughed together at the image.
“Your parents seem normal to me,” said Alastair. “At least they’re together.”
“Yours not?”
He had that quiet look again; sorrow under the cheerful exterior. “Father’s dead now. Mother’s long gone with some bloke or other. It’s history. Matthew and your folks are more family to me than they ever were.”
“Oh, Alastair, that’s so sweet.”
“So, your parents used to be hippies, then?”
“Undoubtedly,” Rosie giggled, “but that’s not what I meant by ‘different.’ Suppose we were from another country, and even though we’ve been British for centuries, we still practice the old traditions. Matt finds it tedious and backward, that’s all.”
“Yes, so he says, but I’m not sure what he means.” Alastair leaned forward, looking intrigued. “So, what’s your mysterious background, then? Irish, Romanian, Viking? Are you Russian émigrés or something even more romantic?”
“Better, we’re the faerie folk,” said Rosie, laughing even harder. “Oh dear—Matt really hasn’t told you, hasn’t he?” And suddenly she stopped laughing.
* * *
Later, Lucas slipped through the gap in the hedge and Jon was on the other side, waiting for him. He was a soft silhouette in the twilight, hands in pockets, hair blowing around his shoulders. “Hey,” Lucas greeted him.
“Hey,” said Jon. “You okay?”
“Had to get out of there. I, er… found out some stuff.”
“Me too.” They looked at each other. “About my father and your mother?”
“Um, yeah, that,” Lucas said awkwardly.
“Let’s walk,” said Jon. They took the thin footpath along Oakholme’s boundary, making for the village. “They told me when I got up. Which was at lunchtime. I don’t think Dad would ever have admitted it if Sapphire hadn’t made him. She’s known for ages, apparently. I bet he’ll put off telling Sam too, but he needn’t think I’m doing it for him.”
“Are you angry?” Lucas’s greatest fear was that Jon would reject him.
“No. Annoyed with my father, that’s all.”
“It’s horrible,” Lucas stated. “I can’t imagine my mother…”
“Why not? She’s incredibly pretty.” There was a touch of mischief in Jon’s remark. “Father says my mother knew, but he swears it’s not why she left. He said he’s not proud of what happened, but not ashamed either. Shame is for humans.”
“Right, he’s so ‘not ashamed’ that he had to get drunk first and tell me in the dark,” Lucas sighed.
“At least he did, finally.” Jon smiled. “He and Sapphire are dying to get to know you. How scary is that?”
“It’s weird.”
“The point is, when they told me, I wasn’t surprised,” Jon went on. “It was as if I’d always known. I feel a link with you. We’re brothers.”
Lucas laughed. “Yes, we are.”
“I’m glad, aren’t you? I’ve acquired a brother I can actually get on with. When I go back to college, you should come with me.”
Their walk brought them to high ground above Cloudcroft, the ridge called High Warrens. Below them lay the undulations of Charnwood landscape with outcrops standing rough against a wild sky. Across the valley, they could see the roof of Stonegate Manor, with the crag of Freya’s Crown to its left.
Lucas thought about his parents; a mother he didn’t know anymore, a father who wasn’t really his. He put his head back, feeling that a gust of wind would take him into the sky, weightless. “I feel strange,” he said. “It’s as if I don’t belong anywhere. Except for Rosie, I could walk away from the lot of them.”
“They don’t matter anymore,” said Jon. “There’s just you and me now. We have far more important things to do.”
Jon took his hand, pulling him bodily into the Dusklands. In the oceanic light, they entered a glade of birches with a wide tree stump in the center and a steep slope curved like a horse shoe to one side. The trees moved fluidly, like underwater corals. Jon began to climb, bending now and then to investigate wild plants in the grass. Lucas followed him in a dream, thinking, We’re brothers, linked by seed.
Jon’s ghostly, graceful figure cast a gradual spell over him. Suddenly he saw why Rosie was in thrall to him, albeit in a different way. With his slim form, long legs and rippling fall of hair, he seemed the mysterious essence of an Otherworld that was tantalizingly out of reach.
“Did you know that plants gathered in the Dusklands have different properties from those in the surface world?” Jon turned to him, displaying a domed black toadstool. The surface was as velvety-delicate as moleskin, with a ragged hem drooping over purple gills.
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’ve experimented with all sorts.” Jon leaned on a tree, one foot up on a mossy stone. “Ever wondered why I was so popular at school? I always had the best drugs.” He grinned, teeth white in the gloom. “If we can’t break through the Gates physically, we should at least be able to send our mind and essence through.”
“Lawrence ever caught you?”
“Not yet. Sam did and went nuts, but he can’t stop me. It’s our birthright, Luc. My father doesn’t own the inner realms. We’re shamans and we can find our own way in.” He tore off a piece of fungus and held it out teasingly. “So, are you up for trying again?”
Lucas looked at him and said nothing. Fear snaked through him.
“Humans are useless visionaries, and I’m not much better,” Jon went on, “but you’re special. I know you can break through, given the right substance, the right guidance. I believe in you. Our secret?”
Luc took a deep breath. Then he peeled off fear like a cape and threw it away. He wanted this. He wanted his new brother to accept him, wanted to prove to Jon that he was courageous and would not let him down. The nascent secret between them was the most wonderful thing he’d ever known. The world trembled with magic.
Looking straight into Jon’s eyes, he accepted the purple-black flesh from him. “Dream agaric?”
“This one’s called devil’s nightcap,” Jon answered with a smile as Lucas tried the spongy bitterness on his tongue and, without flinching, slowly chewed and swallowed.
* * *
After the storm, nothing was the same again. It passed, but the truth had pressed their world into a different, spikier shape.
Jessica loved Auberon, and yet she’d slept with someone else. While Rosie was still a toddler, her mother, for reasons only she understood, had turned away from Auberon and twined herself around cold, mad Lawrence. Lawrence and Jessica naked, gleaming like marble in a wash of iced moonlight, joined and thrusting… Rosie cringed in embarrassment at her own imagination. Why, why?
All was peaceful again, but the buried tension was like a physical force that wanted to push her out. So Rosie would take long walks around the village at twilight, climbing until she stood shivering on High Warrens, hunched against the wind. From here she could see all of Cloudcroft, a sprawl of houses strung along lanes that wound in all directions up into the Charnwood hills. The village was an inky blur with flecks of light; the woods and hills indistinct blue-grey masses. Tonight the sky hung low, painted orange by the lights of Leicester, Loughborough and Ashvale around the horizon.
She was worried she’d said too much to Alastair. Three large vodkas and she’d begun to let slip words like Aetherial. Alastair had been an attentive listener; the attention was flattering, when she got so little from Jon. Her concern was that Matthew would tear her to shreds for saying too much.
She took a breath. The air tasted harsh, like metal, the night cold, wild and brooding. She could feel the closed Gates. Couldn’t define how she felt it exactly, but it was like a pressure, a blind spot in the vision, nothingness where something rich and solid should have been.
The great festivals that her parents had enjoyed were no more. Small groups of Aetherials still gathered to mark those occasions, and at the annual Cloudcroft Show each May, they still held a carnival-style dance called the Beast Parade—but the climax, the ceremonial entry to the Spiral, was missing. These events were no more than wistful tributes to what had been. What they felt like, Rosie thought, was arriving at a party with gifts but never being let through the closed door.
Fear blew through her. We need Elysion, her mother had said. Brewster the bull had starved for lack of it; it broke her heart to think she’d never see it… and then she remembered the darkness in her father’s eyes when he said that he believed Lawrence. The Great Gates had become their barricade against some hideous, unspeakable threat. Oh, but to step into the Otherworld, to face the danger regardless…
The wind grew stronger and she tasted rain. Double-wrapping her scarf and pulling on gloves, she began to descend. Trees lashed around her. As she reached the first of the houses and the sanctuary of streetlight, there was a blackout. The world turned to swirling rain and darkness.
Rosie swore and hurried on, barely able to make out the footpath beneath her feet. She felt spooked, disoriented. She couldn’t tell if she was walking in the surface world or Dusklands, and there was some creature snarling in the storm…
Right by her ear.
She froze. All around her was boiling cloud with lightning flickering inside. Then the cloud split like a fruit and out fell two demonic, spiny-tailed beasts, screaming and growling and tearing into each other with fangs and claws. Yellow fires flickered around them.
Rosie scrambled up a grassy bank that ran between the footpath and the houses. There was an ash tree there and she pressed behind the trunk, staring as the creatures wrestled. She saw rain and blood glistening on their scales. They were fighting, with yellow-eyed hatred, to the death.
All right, she told herself. I’m definitely in the Dusklands. Just have to step sideways into the surface world… She couldn’t do it.
Surely the creatures’ battle must rouse the whole village. Their screeches were deafening. One demon fell and the other crouched over it, piercing the armored throat of its enemy with curved claws. The screeching ceased. The victor’s tail lashed, scraping the gravel of the footpath and gouging the turf.
The eerie fires vanished. Now Rosie couldn’t see a thing and she daren’t move. Was the demon still there in the dark, raging and hungry? She saw the faintest hint of light sliding over rain-wet, scaly haunches as the victor sloped away from the body of its rival.
Streetlights and house lights flicked back on, making Rosie jump. She looked down at the scene of the fight. There was nothing there.
“Fine,” Rosie murmured under her breath, head down into the rain as she ran the rest of the way home. “All right. This must be what Matthew means. Walk in the Dusklands and we start seeing things we shouldn’t. We start to go mad. So he’s turning his face against the Otherworld and living on the surface, to save himself from insanity. Fine. I get it.”
Even their own garden seemed threatening tonight and she hurried along the front path as if specters were waiting in the greenery to ambush her. The warm lights of Oakholme spilled out. As she put her key in the lock, a pale hand came out of the night and grabbed her arm.
Rosie let out a short, heartfelt yell.
“Rosie, I’m sorry,” a small voice whispered. “It’s only me.” A pallid face moved into the porch light. It was Faith. She was soaking wet, hair plastered down, rain trickling down her thin face.
“Oh, shit,” Rosie gasped. “Wait until my heart starts beating again. God.” She took a breath. “What’s up, mate? Are you okay?”
Faith was plainly not okay. Her eyes were wide with trauma, a thousand years past crying. “My parents,” she whispered. “They had a fight, the worst ever… The police and ambulance came and… I think my father’s dead.” Faith stumbled forward and Rosie caught her. “I can’t go back there, Rosie. Can I stay with you, just for tonight? I’m so sorry to be a nuisance. Only tonight.”