I keep you in a box
Inside my heart
And nobody needs to know
“Let’s stay together,” Alvise whispered to Micol as they prowled the first floor at the light of the torches, his pugnale in hand. Micol’s fingers were shimmering and crackling more and more as they advanced.
“I’m not going anywhere on my own. This place gives me the creeps – even more than Palazzo Vendramin!” Micol exclaimed, and a brighter spark left her hands. A strong smell of cloistered air, like air trapped in an airplane, spread around them.
“My hair just stood up, Micol. Can you turn it down a notch?” asked Niall kindly.
“Okay. Sorry. It’s so weird that the beds are all made,” said Micol, running a sparking hand along a dusty silk duvet, decorated with green and yellow patterns. “Like they all left so suddenly. Didn’t even carry their stuff somewhere else . . .”
Every room was the same. Four-poster beds, dark wooden furniture, heavy hangings and rugs. In every room there was no noise, no sign of life, the air perfectly still.
“Nicholas didn’t live here on his own, that’s for sure,” Alvise observed as they reached the end of the corridor. “I wonder if he had a family. Do half-demons have families?”
“I know I had one. Before him and his father decided to kill us all,” said Micol bitterly.
There was one room left to check. It had a double door, different from the others – the wood was lighter and carved in gentle patterns, leaves and flowers. Niall stepped in first. The room was panelled in light wood, the same shade as its door. Yet another four-poster bed stood in the middle, perfectly made in white linen sheets and white draping, though dust had turned them grey. Against the small window there was a dressing table with a vase of long-dead, blackened roses. They checked every nook and cranny – and when they turned to go, Micol threw one last look inside. And there it was, a small orange light, flickering beside the dressing table, and then floating past them out of the room. Micol gasped.
“Something wrong?” asked Alvise.
“No . . . No. Everything fine.” She didn’t know how to explain what she’d just seen. “I just saw a . . . light.”
“Niall’s torch, maybe?”
“Yes, it must have been.”
“Are you sure?” said Niall, studying her face.
“I don’t know. It didn’t look like a Surari, at least. Just a light. That’s all.”
The last two rooms looked completely different. They were both covered in what seemed to be glass tiles, deep amber in colour, and in the middle of them stood two copper baths, dull with time and neglect but still a beautiful, deep-red colour. There were piles of linen towels folded on the dark wood cupboards, left ready for use like everything else, but covered in dust. One room was grander than the other, probably used by the master and mistress of the castle, while the other was a bit smaller.
“I suppose this must have been quite luxurious, at the time,” said Alvise.
“I wonder when he lived here last. A hundred years ago? Two? There’s no electricity, obviously,” Micol mused.
“I don’t intend to ask him,” said Alvise.
Micol frowned. “No. I’d rather stay away from him. As far as I can.”
“Nobody around, it seems. Let’s go,” said Niall, treading out into the corridor again. “All clear up here!” he called on his way down.
“Same here,” Sean cried out as they strode back into the entrance hall. Night had fallen outside, the darkness occasionally broken by flashes of blue lightning from the rainless storm. He didn’t like the place. It felt dead. He hated to be on Nicholas’ territory. Like being in the Shadow World wasn’t enough, they had to be guests in his bloody haunted castle.
“I told you,” Nicholas shrugged. Sarah threw him a dirty look. The king of liars, asking to be trusted. How ironic, she thought darkly.
“There’s wood and kindling in the fireplaces. We can light a few fires, warm the water, have a wash in the tin baths . . .” Sarah had to stop herself from running back into the kitchen to get some water.
“Tin baths . . . Height of comfort,” whispered Micol to Alvise.
“A lot better than nothing. We smell,” Alvise replied.
“Speak for yourself,” she said, and gave a soft laugh.
Nicholas turned towards the sound, and fixed his unseeing eyes on Micol’s. Once again, Micol saw his black aura around him like a stormy cloud, but there was something else. There. A warm, orange light, like a little sun, hovering beside him. It was the light she’d seen upstairs. An aura without a body?
“Let’s go,” said Alvise nervously, taking her by the elbow, and she followed gladly upstairs.
Sarah looked around on the first floor. There were rows of heavy wooden doors, dark and carved with intimidating animals’ heads, all open after their reconnoitre; and at the end of the gloomy corridor, she saw a double door carved with roses and leaf motifs. It looked nearly . . . pretty. Different from the other doors.
“What’s in there?” she whispered to Niall, gesturing to the carved doors.
Niall shrugged. “Just another room. Very grand.”
“That was my bedroom,” answered Nicholas, his tone flat, like it didn’t matter, like there were no memories tied to it. “Nobody will sleep there. Not me either,” he added.
“He’ll sleep in a coffin full of soil,” Alvise whispered to Micol. She felt the corners of her mouth curling up, but stopped herself. She was too scared of Nicholas, even if she couldn’t have seen her smirking.
“Nicholas, who lived here with you?” Elodie asked him in a whisper, so nobody else could hear.
“People from long ago. They are all gone now,” he replied curtly. But Elodie was not to be deterred.
“Did your father live here? Your mother?” Nicholas flinched. He frowned, and Elodie thought he’d cut the conversation short. She was surprised when he replied.
“My father would not live between four walls. My mother . . . she was in the shadows with him, but I saw her often. It was my fiancée who lived here with me.”
“The shadows?” Elodie had much to learn about Nicholas and the workings of this place.
“Where my father lives.”
“I see.” She didn’t press further. “You were engaged?”
Nicholas had mentioned the girl once, in one of those strange moments in which Elodie had felt so close to him, so close to her worst enemy and Harry’s killer. They had just stepped onto dry land after leaving Islay, and he was still ill after his father’s punishment. He had been burning with fever, struggling to stay upright, and he’d called a woman’s name in his delirium. When he’d come to his senses, Elodie had asked him about her. She had wanted to know as much about him as possible, anything that would help them bring down the King of Shadows.
“For a short while. She died,” he said now, coldly, like it didn’t matter, but Elodie could see the pain etched in every line of his face. “Her name was Martyna.”
Yes, that’d been the name. Martyna. “Was she to be . . . the bride of Shadows? Like you wanted Sarah to be?”
He nodded. “Our line needs to keep going. The King of Shadows needs a wife to join him in the darkness where he lives, and an heir. A son or a daughter.”
“What happened to your mother?”
Nicholas took a deep breath and turned his face away. Elodie cursed herself for having asked, for having cared. She should not speak to him unless it was to gather information. She prepared to go, pulling his arm just a bit, enough for him to know she was ready to end the conversation. But to her surprise, he spoke.
“She let herself dissolve. She couldn’t stand life in the shadows any more. You see, my mother didn’t know who my father was when she fell for him. He deceived her.”
“Like you deceived Sarah,” Elodie couldn’t help saying.
Nicholas nodded. “It’s the way of things. What human girl would choose that life otherwise? My father took me away from her when I was just a baby. She couldn’t bear to be away from me, so she followed. She shed her body – something that all rulers of the Underworld do. It’s like . . . adopting a different body while keeping your soul. It’s hard to explain unless you see it. Once she was here, my mother then became the bride of Shadows. But she hated the darkness, she hated being a spirit when she wanted so badly to be human, and touch and feel and live.” Nicholas’ voice trailed off for a moment.
“What was her name?” murmured Elodie. She didn’t even know why she’d asked. Somehow, it felt important to her.
“Ekaterina Krol. Her family called her Kati. She was beautiful.”
“And your father never remarried?”
“He has his heir. There is no need.”
“What happened to your fiancée? Did she let herself . . . dissolve too?”
“She was never a spirit, she never shed her body. She was still human when she . . . When she decided to end it. We destroyed her, my father and I. I can never forgive myself.”
“And still you planned the same for Sarah.”
“I thought I had no choice, but I was wrong. I’ll never force another woman to go through what Martyna went through. I’ll never be the King of Shadows. It ends with my father.”
Elodie felt him shaking. His unseeing eyes burned with anguish, and regret. Guilt. And that was exactly what he should feel, for all the evil he and his father did. Even if he thought he had no choice, Elodie said to herself. And still, a spark of compassion had been kindled in her heart, and her hand squeezed Nicholas’ arm lightly as they joined the group once more.
They chose their rooms and lit the fires – real, warm flames, not Nicholas’ cold ones – and tried their best to clean up the sheets, but they were so dusty and mouldy that they gave up. They stripped the beds and spread the sleeping bags on them instead. They wrapped their jackets around the pillows. It felt like a luxury hotel, after days of sleeping in a cramped car or on the hard ground in the cold. The heat and light couldn’t fully dispel the gloom, but they made everything less spooky.
They were nearly cheerful as they carried basins of water upstairs to the bathrooms. The girls went into the main one, and the men into the smaller one. They relished the first chance of washing they’d had in days, the water draining away tiredness and dried blood from the wounds they all had.
Sarah couldn’t believe she could finally feel water coursing over her skin again, and she relished every moment. She thought of her own bathroom back home, of how safe and comfortable it was . . . well, it had been, before it all went wrong. The head of the Scottish Valaya, Cathy – her astral drop, really – had materialised in her bathroom once. So much for safe.
For a moment, she wondered if she’d ever see her home again – her room with the silver walls and the floating white curtains, and her purple cello leaning against the wall; her garden, wide and beautifully kept . . .
The water was getting cold as she dreamt of home, and a long shiver travelled down her spine. She shook herself. “Want some help?” she asked Elodie. The French girl had removed the bandages around her middle, and the wounds were still bleeding even though they were days old.
“Thank you,” she said, and Sarah began washing her carefully. She had scars all over – her forearms in particular were covered with little ones, from where Nicholas’ Elemental ravens had pecked her. Sarah shivered once more, remembering how the ravens had attacked Elodie and nearly killed her when they still didn’t know about Nicholas’ true identity. But then her own body had many scars, Sarah thought. It was not unblemished like it used to be. It now told the story of many battles, just like Elodie’s. Sarah was shocked at how fragile her friend looked and felt under her touch, like a little bird.
Elodie saw the pity in Sarah’s eyes, and she wanted to hide herself, but the feeling of warm water on her skin was so blissful, she wanted it to last forever. She wanted to feel fresh and sweet-smelling again and lie in a clean bed, and sleep for a long time.
She wanted to wake up and find Harry beside her.
She wanted to be healthy and strong again.
But none of that would happen, she thought as she let Sarah pour warm water over her shoulders.
“Like a princess in a fairy tale,” Micol whispered. Elodie looked up and saw the Italian girl gazing at her from under her eyelashes.
“What did you say?” Elodie asked.
Micol blushed. “Nothing . . . that you look like a princess from a fairy tale.”
Elodie smiled wanly. She carried the book of Polish fairy tales in her bag, the one Harry had left to her before he died, having hidden a message inside it. On the cover there was a grim illustration, a girl in a long dress, wandering in a wood at night. The girl held a stick with a skull perched on top of it, blue rays of light coming out of the skull’s eyes. A bit like the blue lightning that had been following them, Elodie thought. The words hidden in the book, Harry’s secret message, came back to her. Watch over Sarah, she’s the key.
How? How is she the key? Elodie asked herself. Because of her unblemished blood? And now that Nicholas had relinquished her, now that he had refused his own destiny as the future King of Shadows, with Sarah as his bride, was she not the key any more?
Then why are the demons not touching her, she wondered. They hurt her – but refrained from killing her. Twice. What do they need her for?
“There you are. Get dressed now. You’ll catch a cold,” said Sarah, smoothing her friend’s wet hair one last time.
Sarah could be hard, cold, unreachable – and then she surprised you with a kindness you could have never imagined. At first, Elodie had been resentful of Sarah’s closeness to Sean, and irritated by her aloofness. But with time they’d grown to know each other better, and now Elodie couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to that brave girl who was fighting so hard for the Secret Families. Elodie would always watch out for her, whatever or whoever wanted to hurt her. Surari or humans.
Or Nicholas.
She felt so close to him, unexpectedly, maddeningly, she thought as she slipped her T-shirt over her head. It was like they were cut from the same sorrowful cloth. But her eyes were open. She would not let Nicholas stray; she would not let him betray them. Sean was worried they were getting too close, Nicholas and her, but Sean didn’t really know her any more. He didn’t know the hard core that she’d developed since Harry had died. The realisation that in that new world they’d all found themselves in, a world of continuous danger, she could never, never let her guard down. And she never would. For all the time she had left. Which wasn’t much, she was sure now.
The Falco girl had said she looked like a fairy-tale princess. One with blue nails and wounds that don’t stop bleeding . . . And then she remembered the Polish fairy tale she’d read in Harry’s book, the one about a princess prisoner in a white tower, and a prince saving her and taking her to freedom on the wings of a raven.
I don’t believe in happy endings any more, she said to herself.