I keep my soul
Where I know you’ll never find it
They wanted to drive on through the night, but none of them had slept for more than three hours in two days. They were all near delirious with exhaustion. One more stop only, Nicholas had promised, and then they would be there. They would leave in the small hours and be at the Gate before dawn. They saw to each other’s wounds, ate a cold dinner of bread, ham, cheese and biscuits, and then they settled in for the night. Going against every human instinct, the primal urge to create light and warmth, they wouldn’t light a fire, even in the freezing winter night in the forest. They couldn’t afford to attract attention. Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t felt cold.
She was curled up in the front seat of Sean’s car, Niall and Winter entwined in the back. She had reluctantly agreed to sleep inside the car, cocooned in one of the sleeping bags they had taken from Midnight Hall, though the arrangement made her feel claustrophobic and squeezed the air out of her lungs. Sean would not allow her to sleep outside, and as much as she didn’t take orders from him or anyone else, she had to admit he had a point.
She whimpered in her sleep and jerked suddenly, hitting her hand on the glove compartment and waking with a jolt. Her shoulder hurt. Once again her dreams had been meaningless, confused, a carousel of frightening images and swirling colours and lights – and then the deepest darkness, as if she’d turned blind like Nicholas. Reality seemed to mirror her dream, as everything was black around her.
She pulled the sleeping bag up to her throat, the silky waterfall of her hair tucked inside it to keep her warm. It was impossible to sleep. Not with all that was going on, not with the dreams tormenting her with their bloody, blurry pictures, not with the ache throbbing in her battered body.
She knew that if she opened the door and slipped outside she’d find Sean, sleepless like her. He was an insomniac at the best of times. Sarah couldn’t remember any occasion when she’d seen him deeply asleep. Even when he’d first turned up at her house, pretending to be her cousin Harry Midnight but really bound by a promise to him to protect the last of the Midnights – Sarah. Even in those days, she could hear the soft sound of the radio coming from his room until the small hours.
Sarah blinked again as little flickers of red light danced in the darkness, briefly illuminating Sean’s arms and hands as he composed his runes in the air. She sat upright. She’d never seen Sean’s runes shining red before. What was going on?
Sarah let herself fall back, contemplating the total, utter darkness that surrounded the car. The flickers of red light had gone. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine Sean’s arms around her, her head on his chest and his hands caressing her hair . . . until her body, exhausted, forced her into an unquiet sleep.
The blink of an eye, a heartbeat, was as much as it took before the dream possessed her, like it couldn’t wait, like the lack of sleep had stopped the visions from coming and made them even hungrier for her. She was in that place again, under a purple sky and standing in a sea of dancing grass, the colours heightened and unreal. She was alone, the wind blowing strong in her hair. All of a sudden, she realised that she was wearing the same clothes she’d worn during the last battle with the Scottish Valaya, the King of Shadows’ worshippers who had hunted her parents down, and then her. A smell of smoke and burning demon flesh clung to those clothes.
Two things happened at once: she felt a terrible pain stab her in her ribs and fold her in two, and she saw swings, a roundabout, benches, a climbing cage – all the trappings of a playground – rise from the grass around her. She was home, back in Edinburgh, or a mirror dream image of it. She was where everything had begun. Where Nicholas had taken hold of her and stolen her trust, by saving her life; where Sean’s lies had come to light and temporarily separated them.
Where she’d seen Cathy, her father’s jilted first wife, pecked to death by Nicholas’ ravens.
Do I have to go through it all again?
Is Nocturne going to come for me again?
What is this dream going to tell me?
Whatever it was, she was ready. Let them come. Her hands were itching with the Blackwater, all her senses heightened and ready. She turned around in a circle, eyes narrowed, waiting, trying to ignore the bite from her cracked ribs. Every injury or pain she suffered in her dreams felt real. Death felt real, too, and she had died so many times . . .
She waited, listening to her breath and her pounding heart, surveying the swings and the benches and the roundabout that she knew so well, paint peeling from years of use and children’s scuffing and scratching, incongruous and absurd in the sea of swaying grass. She waited, but no demons came.
She took a deep breath, her eyes shimmering with the Midnight gaze. “I am here! Come and get me!” she screamed, her voice frayed and weakened by the roaring wind. “Come and get me!” she repeated.
And they did.
A voice came from behind her. “Hi, Sarah. How are you, my dear?” Sarah’s body whirled in the direction of her name, and there she was, Cathy, her blonde hair and her skin covered in blood from a thousand little wounds – ravens’ pecks. And the most horrifying thing of all . . . where once her eyes had been, there were only bloody and empty sockets. The ravens had pecked her eyes out, too. Weeds hung from her hands, and her clothes were dripping. All of these were little reminders of when the ravens had attacked and thrown her corpse into the river. “Come and sit, let’s have a chat. I can only stay a wee while. Then I’ll leave you to Nocturne.”
Sarah’s blood ran cold. She remembered those words. They were exactly the same words that Cathy had said to her before breaking her bones.
A deadly heat spread across her shoulders, the smell of smoke intensified, together with the sickening scent of burnt flesh. And something with red eyes and gleaming teeth rose from the grass beside Cathy. Nocturne. Except his body was black and burnt, smoke rising from his blistered skin. They were dead, both Cathy and Nocturne. They were both dead and they had come back to haunt her.
A wave of rage overwhelmed her, drowned her. She ran to the dead woman and her demon and raised her scalding hands, but all of a sudden, they were cold. There was no Blackwater. Instead Sarah went white, and stood frozen, looking at her shaking hands. They weren’t burning any more, they were icy cold. Empty. Her power was gone.
The Blackwater was gone.
It was exactly what had happened during the last battle. She’d lost the Blackwater back then. It couldn’t be happening again. She was defenceless, her eyes opaque, the Midnight gaze gone, too. She was empty.
Cathy laughed. “There is no Sarah any more.”
“What do you mean? Tell me! What do you mean?”
And then she saw it, something white and milky and opaque, a little sphere, twirling in front of her, a few inches from her forehead – a terrible pull originated from the sphere, as if it was stealing her energy, stealing herself.
She watched in dismay as the sphere flew into the sky.
“There is no Sarah. Your body is here, but you are gone,” Cathy shrieked, and suddenly everything disappeared. Cathy, Nocturne, the play park. She was no more.
She woke up panting. A strangled sob took the place of the scream she’d felt rising in her throat. She forced herself to remain silent as she shivered violently on the car seat, covered in sweat, her wet skin freezing slowly.
What did it mean? What had they done to her?
The horror of Cathy’s eyeless face and Nocturne’s burnt, blistered skin kept dancing in front of her eyes. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks, the helpless tears of powerlessness; she’d faced something she simply couldn’t fight. Something invisible, something that had turned her into nothing. An empty shell.
She turned around. Niall and Winter were asleep. Sarah felt for the handle with a trembling hand, and opened the door. The freezing night air hit her like a bucket of icy water.
I need to find Sean. I need Sean, was all she could think. There were no more red flickers in the air, and she didn’t know where he was.
“Sean!” she whispered to the darkness. “Sean!”
He materialised out of the night and held her in his arms. She clung to him. For a moment, she allowed herself to let him sustain her. Sean’s scent enveloped her once more – coffee, and something else, salty, manly, somewhere between the ocean and a unique Sean scent. He smelled of home and comfort. He smelled of strength. Being back in his arms was like being home. How could they keep denying themselves?
But soon, too soon, Sean disentangled himself from her embrace, leaving her bereft.
“Come here. Come on,” he murmured, and led her away from the car to the oak tree he’d been sitting under. “You’re freezing. There.” He lifted his sleeping bag and covered her with it. He sat beside her, close but not too close.
“What happened?”
Sarah closed her eyes tightly. She took a deep breath and forced herself to find the words. “I dreamt. Cathy was there. But she was dead. And Nocturne too, all burnt up. I was in the play park back home.”
Sean frowned. He hated to remember when Cathy revealed the truth about him, the lie he’d been telling about his identity. That night Sarah rejected him and sent him away. That night Sean would have let her kill him, had she not lost the Blackwater suddenly.
She braced herself to tell the last part of the story. “I tried to use my powers against them, but they were all gone . . . I was gone. The whole of me. I can’t explain it. It was like my body was there, but I didn’t exist any more. There was something in front of me. A stone. A white stone. It was hovering in the air. It took everything away from me, and then it flew away. I kept asking myself: who am I? Who am I? I couldn’t remember.”
“A white stone?”
“Yes. White, with some bright-red edges,” she recalled suddenly. “I have no idea what it meant.”
“Whatever is coming, we’ll face it together, Sarah. Try to sleep now, if you can.”
Sarah knew that sleep wouldn’t come, but she silently revelled in Sean’s closeness. She allowed herself to believe that he would protect her, that he would save her from whatever was coming.
But she knew, deep down, that nobody could.