Somewhere we can be
Just you and me and let the rest
Be memories
Sean
I try not to touch her, not to get too close. But I long to brush her fingers with mine, to hold her when nobody can see us. I call her name in my dreams. I dream of the day it will be only us: no demons, no mad suicidal missions, just us. To live our love, to even flaunt it, in that careless way Niall and Winter do. Their smiles, their whispers, the times they disappear and come back flushed and happy, all this can never be Sarah and me. How can we be together, knowing that children of a Lay man and a Secret woman won’t carry Secret powers? How could we risk making the Midnight powers – so precious for this world, for all of us – disappear entirely? There are no other heirs to the Midnights. Sarah is the last one. If she marries me, it’s all over.
And anyway, let’s look at the facts here: what are the chances we’ll survive our little trip into the Shadow World?
Probably zero.
Everyone is sleeping now, except for our very own Prince of Darkness, who’s wandering around in little circles, leaning on whatever is at hand, like a drunken man, as always. He’s worse than me when it comes to insomnia. I slip out of the car and sit with my back against a tree. I’ll practise the runes a bit, to try to channel the thoughts gnawing at me tonight, like every night.
A while into tracing runes with my sgian-dubh, red sparks start to appear in front of me, and then they turn into red ribbons dancing and twirling in shapes and patterns. Suddenly, I can see the runes I’m tracing, burning bright red in the air. This only happened to me once before, when the soil demons attacked Elodie and me on the way to Sarah’s house. I wondered why it hadn’t happened today when I needed it, when the demon at the petrol station was on its rampage. But for whatever reason, it is happening now. The sparks are mesmerising, rivers of fire popping in the air around me like fireflies.
I stop at once, in case the lights attract unwanted attention. Something is awakening inside me, something that scares me and excites me at the same time. But it’s still not fully awake. Not yet.
Not long ago, in the ancestral Midnight mansion on Islay, Sarah found a letter among her grandmother’s things. A letter from my mother. Not my adoptive mother, but my birth one, Amelia Campbell, the one I was taken from. In the letter, my mother asked Stewart Midnight, Sarah’s uncle, to look out for me, because I too have Secret blood. I thought I was a Gamekeeper, someone trained by the Secret Families to guard and help them, someone with skills but no powers as such – and I was proud of it, it was all I knew and all I wanted – but it turned out that my mother was a Secret heir. Her love for my father, a Lay, was forbidden for the same reason that Sarah and I can’t be together: children born from such a union don’t inherit any powers.
My mother was banished from her family, the Campbells, and sent to New Zealand. She died young, but the letter she left for Stewart was her last wish. It was Stewart’s son, Harry Midnight, who took up the task of fulfilling her request. Without telling me the truth about my birth, just like she’d instructed his father, Harry trained me as a Gamekeeper. For years I’d thought that our encounter late at night at my university campus had been a fluke of fate. Now I know better. Harry Midnight, the man who’d asked me as his dying wish to take his identity and watch over his cousin Sarah Midnight, had had me pegged from the beginning.
And I fell in love with the girl he’d wanted me to save.
So here I am, Sean Hannay of Campbell blood. As a child of a Secret woman and a Lay man, I’m not supposed to have inherited powers.
Then what about these red lights flowing from my runes, the surge of strength I’ve been feeling recently, as if there was something asleep inside me waiting to awaken and be unleashed? Can I dare hope? Because I’m not that good with hope. I’m not good at thinking things will work out for me the way I want them to. And what are the Campbell powers? The family seems to have been swept away by the Surari surge, like so many Secret Families. Sarah, Elodie and Niall don’t seem to know what gifts the Campbells carried, and we left the Midnight mansion in such a hurry that I had no time to research in its library.
In a way, my blood is still a mystery. Yes, I can put a name to it now, but that’s about it. If I had powers, would I kill people with a look like Sarah, or with a kiss like Elodie? Or maybe this seed of power inside me will just wither without ever sprouting. Barren, like I’d felt for a long time. Before meeting Sarah.
Before falling for her.
If it’s so, if this little hope born inside me proves to be nothing, Sarah must marry a Secret man.
She must marry someone who’s not me.
Just thinking about it makes me want to stick my sgian-dubh through my hand – it’d be less painful than contemplating the idea of Sarah with someone else, making love with someone else, another man running his hand through her hair . . .
Suddenly, I hear Sarah calling in the dark, calling my name. I lead her back to my sleeping place, beneath the oak tree. I wrap her in my sleeping bag. She’s trembling. She’s dreamt again, and this time it seems to be bearing a message. I would do anything to stop her pain and suffering and keep her safe. I can only dream of holding her through the night and stroking her hair slowly, cradling her like a child, just like I used to.
Since Sarah gave me my mother’s letter, I don’t know who I am. But I still live my life to the same rules. I’m still a Gamekeeper.
And I’m still in love with Sarah Midnight.