Don’t hurt me again, she says
I’m sorry, he cries and throws her heart away
It was still dark when they took off again, driving as fast as the icy roads allowed, following the black cloud of ravens ahead of them. The night was waning, but there was no sign of dawn yet in the inky sky. They trailed the ravens into a side road that led them deep into the forest, immense snowy trees at either side of them, and not a light in sight. Sarah wondered what hid among those trees. She could feel eyes watching everywhere, waiting. Their car felt like a small fort in the middle of enemy territory. Should they stop, should they step into the forest, it might all be over.
But that was exactly what they were going to do, she thought.
The word “suicide” sprang to mind.
Nicholas stirred in the back seat. “We should be there already . . . Sean, is there a building in front of us?” he asked, his chin slightly raised, as if he were trying to somehow sense what he couldn’t see.
Sean found his black, blind eyes in the mirror. “Nothing. Just trees. Oh, wait . . . yes. Yes, there it is. It’s brown, and flat . . .”
Nicholas nodded. “We’re nearly there. Drive up to it.”
Sean frowned as he gazed at the mysterious structure. The same questions he’d been asking himself since they left Islay whirled in his mind. If they had been fools to listen to Nicholas, and if they were just being led willingly to their deaths. He clasped the steering wheel harder.
The strange building seemed to have sprouted out of the ground itself, like an oversized mushroom. Brown paint peeled from the wooden sidings, and ivy climbed its walls, snaking inside the cracks of broken windows. Nicholas’ ravens were already waiting for him, perched on the snow-covered roof like black music notes on a page. It was a weird sight – the remains of civilisation in a wild place, nature swallowing it bit by bit.
Sean stopped the car. There was a sign over the building’s door, blackened and strewn with mould: Bialoweza – Centrum dla Odwie . . . He gave up trying to make sense of the series of consonants. Centre for something, he thought.
“What is this place?” Sarah asked Nicholas quietly.
“A visitors’ centre for tourists coming to see the forest. Don’t worry, there’s nobody around. It was abandoned years ago. Accidents happened here . . . you know, wild animals. People died. They closed it.”
Right. Wild animals, thought Sarah with disgust.
She wondered what had happened to the Secret Families there, so close to the opening of the Shadow World. The Polish Secret Families had probably been the first to be exterminated. She didn’t imagine that any of them would have survived the culling of the heirs. She didn’t want to think of how the slaughter might have happened, of how many innocent people must have been killed alongside the ones the demons had come to kill. The many different ways people had died there – dragged underground by soil demons, drained of blood by a demon leech, strangled by demon snakes. In her dreams, Sarah had seen so many deaths, and she had experienced more than she wanted to remember. That was where they all crept in from, the Surari that her parents had hunted – there, where the Shadow World and the human world met, right on the seam between the two dimensions. She imagined it probably wasn’t long before tourists had grown few and far between and then stopped altogether.
They got out of the car and took their backpacks out of the boot, full of the disparate equipment they grabbed from Midnight Hall before leaving in haste. It had occurred to Sarah many times that if the demons didn’t kill them, cold and hunger might. Once inside the forest, they could only rely on their own skills, weapons and whatever they’d brought with them to keep them warm.
They got ready in silence, zipping up jackets, checking weapons, balancing backpacks. They were all wearing heavy coats – though some of them had been torn and slashed in the encounter with the white demon – and fur-lined boots to protect them from the bitter cold. Only Winter, whose seal skin made her nearly invulnerable to the cold, wore a zipped-up black sweatshirt.
Sarah looked around her as they prepared to step into the Shadow World, however it could be done. Sean’s handsome face was as tight as a fist, determined and fearless as if his whole life had taken him to this moment. Niall and Winter were standing beside each other, Winter’s eyes full of a terror that she was trying to hide. Niall had a protective arm around her waist, and the frown lines on his forehead betrayed his worry. Elodie was holding Nicholas’ arm. How could she bear to touch him, Sarah asked herself. She was still pale after the injuries the white demon had inflicted on her and which Sarah had bandaged the best she could. She looked tiny beside Nicholas’ huge, strong frame, but it was she who was sustaining and guiding him.
“Nicholas,” she called. Her voice was full of steel and ice. “How are we going to step through? What’s going to happen now?”
“You follow me, and I’ll open the Gate for you.”
That was too cryptic for Sean’s liking. “Is there a physical gate or something?” he enquired.
“You’ll see.”
Sarah’s forehead creased in frustration. They were forced to trust the man. They were forced to trust the son of the King of Shadows. It was infuriating.
They began following him into the forest, untouched snow crunching beneath their feet. He seemed to be sure of the way, despite his lack of sight. Sarah looked overhead. Through the canopy of trees she could see a hint of a grey, gloomy dawn spreading in the sky. It was so cold that their breath condensed in white puffs. They’d be frozen to the bone, thought Sarah, and then she smiled a bitter smile to herself. She was worrying about being cold when they were about to step into a world where demons were the masters, where her death and that of her friends could come in a thousand different guises. The irony of dying of hypothermia, after all this, she said to herself, and laughed aloud. Great. I’m hysterical.
“What’s so funny?” snapped Elodie, sweeping her blonde hair away from her face with one hand, the other resting on Nicholas’ arm. In spite of the cold, a thin film of sweat was glistening on her forehead, Sarah noticed. Her skin looked clammy.
“Just worried about ending up frozen somewhere,” said Sarah with a smirk. Elodie looked at her like she’d gone crazy.
“Nicholas. Will there be guards there, at the Gate?” Sean asked.
“No need for guards. Nothing can come in, unless I allow it.”
“Will your father sense our presence? Will he know we’ve stepped into the Shadow World?”
“He always knows of my presence. He can feel it. And he’ll know about you as soon as the forest tells him,” said Nicholas. He was walking unsteadily, an arm in front of him to watch for obstacles in the darkness that surrounded him.
Sarah felt sick. Nothing, nothing could ever convince her that Nicholas was trustworthy. Not after he’d moulded her will and fogged up her mind to make her do what he wanted, for weeks. Not after he’d called that love.
Suddenly, Elodie stopped in her tracks. “Someone is here. Someone is waiting for us,” she said, gazing around her. Sarah felt her hands flooding with heat at once – gone were the days when she had to struggle to call her power, when any distraction could suck the heat out of her hands. She had mastered the Blackwater now, just like her father had.
Sean’s knuckles tightened around his dagger. “A demon?”
Elodie closed her eyes briefly, and shook her head. “Human.”
“Maybe a hunter,” Nicholas offered. “Not that they last long, around here.”
Human or demon, Sean’s grip around his sgian-dubh didn’t slacken.
“We can’t wait, anyway,” Nicholas continued. “I can feel our presence being announced. We’ll be sitting ducks if we stay here . . . We need to hurry.”
The light of a muted dawn spread over their faces, through the branches and on the mantle of snow on the ground. Morning was breaking at last – the last morning they’d spend in the human world for a while, thought Sarah. Or forever.
They walked on, alert, until they reached a small clearing. Opaque sunlight funnelled inside it, the snow glimmering on the ground. Two mighty oak trees stood in the middle of the space, their ancient roots thick and gnarled like old hands clasped together, their branches reaching high into the sky. They reminded Sarah of the beautiful oaks in her garden, back home in Edinburgh.
“Ready?” asked Nicholas, and without further warning he lifted his right arm, his palm open for them to see. Sarah’s eyes widened. Something was taking shape on Nicholas’ palm, something glowing silver on his white skin – a pattern . . . a spiral, shimmering an opaque silver and grey, darkening as they watched in silence.
Winter gasped and pointed to the space between the oaks. There, the air was vibrating, rippling like water. Weak at first, then more and more visible, a silvery spiral took shape in between the tree trunks, whirling faster and faster.
“Put your palm on my palm and walk through,” Nicholas commanded. Sean was the first, grimacing as he touched Nicholas’ skin, as if it hurt him. Sarah hastened to do the same. Whatever was going to happen next, even if it was a trap, she wouldn’t let Sean fall into it alone. They stepped into the spiral and disappeared among the silver ribbons tumbling and turning. Niall and Winter followed suit, Winter’s silvery hair twirling for a moment like one of those otherworldly ribbons. Finally, Nicholas took Elodie’s hand, burning the spiral pattern into her hand, and together they entered the Shadow World.