You knew all along
That we were bound to lose
Sarah’s eyes snapped open. She jumped to her feet and lost her balance just as quickly. On her knees, she dragged herself up again. There was nobody around, not that she could see. All her friends were gone.
And then she spotted something blue in the high grass, a crumpled mound of clothes – a body with golden hair, a shape she knew like the back of her hand. A silver-handled sgian-dubh was buried deep in the body’s side.
Sean.
Sarah stood silent and unmoving, contemplating Sean’s senseless body, a red flower slowly blooming on the right side of his stomach, its petals flowing down his arm and into the grass in a black puddle.
She didn’t need to see his face to know that Sean was dead.
Her heart stopped, all air leaving her lungs in an icy chill. Her body trembled at the loss of Sean. How could this be real? Sean? She wanted to scream, to fall to the ground and never get back up. She tried to calm herself, to will her eyes to open to reality, to the real world where Sean was alive. But anything she tried was no use. She had to compose herself and silence the only thought running through her mind: Sean is dead. Sean is dead.
Suddenly she felt nothing. It was as if she’d flown away, far away, and she was now looking down on a desperate girl whose whole world had crumbled. She was somewhere else, somewhere cold and dark where nothing moved, nothing stirred, where nobody could ever follow. She was dead too. There was nothing to live for, nothing left to lose.
She was free.
“Come and get me!” she shouted all of a sudden, just like she’d done before the last battle with Cathy’s Valaya. She would not wait for the King of Shadows like a harmless, powerless creature. She had no hope left. She had no fear left.
The voice she’d heard in her vision resounded again, and it seemed as if it filled both the air and the inside of her mind.
I am here, Sarah Midnight.
Another seismic shock shook everything around Sarah, throwing her down again, and with an ear-splitting roar the ground opened right in front of her feet, stone crumbling like chalk. A chasm appeared, and from it came smoke, and a terrible heat.
Sarah rose up once more, her hands scalding, the sgian-dubh in her hand, her eyes gleaming with the Midnight gaze, and an unquenchable rage. She knew she had no chance, but after all they had been through she couldn’t let Sean and her friends die in vain. Maybe there had been no chance all along. Maybe they had all been fooling themselves. It didn’t matter anyway. All that mattered was destroying the King of Shadows before she died.
“Where are you? Show yourself!” she shouted, her voice resounding above the buzzing of the lightning and the roars of splitting rock around her. And then the King of Shadows rose, as big as a hill, his shape fluid, forever changing. He was an elemental force made of earth and fire, blue flames and liquid soil boiling and whirling, a huge mass of material that seemed to be about to pour itself on Sarah, bury her alive and seal her in rock.
Sarah flinched for a moment, but she stood firm in front of the whirling mass, trying to make out its shape. She saw that the creature was a chimera of a thousand Surari welded together, a knot of limbs and heads and claws and fangs and tentacles that somehow made one being. As she watched, the mass condensed and took its final shape – an ancestral beast, somewhere between a bull, a wolf and a bear, still changing and whirling, shifting shapes like a kaleidoscope switches colours. The bull and the wolf and the bear following each other, then melting, then turning into something else, something that had no name in the human world. Never changing and steady were his eyes, red like dancing flames, fixed on her with something that looked like hunger. Sarah was reminded of Nicholas’ claim – I am fire – and there it was, the fire he had come from, that had shaped him.
Sarah looked up at the King of Shadows with the courage of despair. She knew she was about to die, but she would destroy that thing first. For Mike, for Harry, for Angela, for Leigh, for all those who’d been devoured and clawed to death and burnt and suffocated since the culling of the heirs began, for all those human beings who had died because their path had crossed a Surari’s. Most of all, for her parents.
For Sean.
She braced herself to fight, a tiny figure, her hair blowing behind her in the scalding wind, her face illuminated by the blue lightning. She remembered what Nicholas had told them, that as soon as his shape stopped changing, as soon as he took one form, they could strike. And it had to be right between his eyes, the only vulnerable point, the only small area of flesh and blood susceptible to a physical wound.
Was it true, or had Nicholas been lying all along? She was about to find out.
A thought wormed its way into the back of her mind: why had it not poured its mass of magma and melting soil on her? Why had it not hit her with blue lightning, burning her from the inside? Was that not a quick, efficient way to get rid of her?
Why was it not killing her already?
You will not die, Sarah Midnight.
“What do you want from me?” she shouted. The King of Shadows’ changing shape froze for a moment, a deep growl rising from him – and finally, it stopped changing.
Sarah Midnight and the King of Shadows stood facing each other. She wanted to run, but she knew she had to fight. She would face this monster if it was the last thing she did.
Sarah took in the deer antlers, the bull’s face, and the human torso perching on a wolf’s hind legs, and the bear’s claws, and her heart trembled. But she would not waver. With a scream that came from the bottom of her soul, she threw herself on the King of Shadows, sgian-dubh in one hand, the Blackwater burning in the other, her eyes gleaming with the Midnight gaze. She was pouring out her whole essence, the whole of herself, into one final stroke. From the night of her first hunt, when she felt the Blackwater and her powers as something terrifying and alien and somehow not belonging to her, to the duel with Cathy and Nocturne, to the battle with the Mermen on Islay, every challenge had hardened her a little more, tempered her a little more. Preparing her for this moment.
The King of Shadows didn’t move as Sarah leapt, his red eyes steady and fixed on her. He made no attempt to defend himself, Sarah noticed, sinking her blade deep between his eyes, and in a moment, Sarah knew for sure that it had all been too easy.
It didn’t hurt, at the beginning. It didn’t hurt at all. What was happening to Sarah was such a weird feeling, so unnatural, that her body and soul didn’t know how to register it. Her hand was welded to the sgian-dubh stuck between the King of Shadows’ eyes, her body extended to reach his forehead. She stood frozen on her toes. Her green eyes were fixed on the King of Shadows’ red ones, beast and Dreamer locked together.
And then it hurt like hell. Something black and nasty and painful, something ancient and merciless, had made its way inside her eyes, and down her neck, along her spine and into her heart. It filled her body and soul and stretched them to the point of ripping her apart, and it did rip her and then put her back together.
Now she knew what the plan had been for her, what they’d wanted all along.
She fell backwards, the sgian-dubh still stuck in the King of Shadows’ forehead. She lay immobile for a moment, her consciousness screaming to keep hold of her body. She looked up at the sky, grey clouds galloping in a sea of purple. Then there was no more noise, no more pain.
Tears ran down her cheeks as she felt herself being replaced by something other. An evil she couldn’t escape. She felt his spirit, his otherness, invade her body. Violate her in a way nothing human could.
Now the King of Shadows looked out from inside her body, that much she realised.
So that’s what her dream meant, the one where Cathy said to her she would be lost forever. There would be no more Sarah Midnight. She would not be the bride of Shadows.
She would be the King of Shadows himself.