Spirit Read online

  It was time.

  Trying to ignore the deep, deep terror that gripped him every time he had to speak to his father, the instinct to scream and run and fight the intrusion inside his head, inside his thoughts, Nicholas called him. He felt a drop of sweat trickle down his temple, immediately freezing on his skin.

  “Father. I’m here.”

  Nicholas.

  At the sound of the King of Shadows’ voice, rage filled Nicholas’ mind. The dozens of wounds from the demon-leeches’ mouths still throbbed all over his body. “Why did you let them do that to me? I was nearly sucked dry. If I die, how are you going to get her to you in one piece?”

  We have to make them believe you’re still on their side.

  Nicholas shook his head. He didn’t believe him for a moment. That wasn’t the reason why his father had allowed the demon-leeches to cover his body and suck his blood. He had done it because he enjoyed seeing his son suffer. He enjoyed pushing Nicholas to his limits and beyond, to inflict pain onto his body and onto his soul – and Nicholas knew why: because the King of Shadows wanted complete, unlimited power over everyone around him. He wanted to dominate Nicholas just as he’d dominated his mother, and ultimately broken her.

  His mother’s face appeared behind his blind eyes – a mane of black hair, sweet black eyes, a voice that soothed him like no other. Her name was Ekaterina Krol, and she’d been young and innocent when his father had preyed on her. He mind-moulded her like Nicholas had done to Sarah, and convinced her to marry him and carry his child – Nicholas. By the time her baby was born, the King of Shadows had showed his true self and his true nature, and Ekaterina feared him and hated him with all her might. When Nicholas was just a few days old his father took him away from her and back into the Shadow World – what choice did she have but to follow? She couldn’t have borne to be away from her son. As the years went by, Ekaterina was forced to shed her body – to take on the form of rulers of the underworld. Her spirit was allowed to leave the King of Shadows’ lair every summer, and she’d wander the human world, but being unable to touch and feel and being forced to ultimately return to the darkness, Ekaterina slowly lost the will to live.

  And then came the last blow. Nicholas had met Martyna, the love of his life. Ekaterina begged him not to listen to his father, not to use mind-moulding on Martyna, to let her be, but Nicholas could not challenge his father’s will. In order to have her in their complete power, they burnt her family alive in the space of one night, and Martyna drowned herself. That day, Nicholas broke inside, and Ekaterina let her spirit dissolve – the ultimate decision to cease to exist – and be no more. Mother and son had been destroyed.

  Nicholas often thought that had he refused to help his father, maybe both his mother and Martyna would still be alive. He was responsible for their deaths. He’d killed the two people he’d loved the most.

  A new wave of anger swept over him, but he suffocated it quickly. He couldn’t let his father hear his thoughts.

  If you do as you’re meant to, my son, you’ll be allowed to come back. As if nothing had happened. You’ll be spared.

  Nicholas squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to annihilate his own mind, to shut his father out of his consciousness.

  “I’ll be grateful for that, Father,” he forced himself to say.

  “Nicholas?” A voice behind him. He jumped. It was Elodie. Her hand rested gently on his arm, like cool cloth on feverish skin.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing out here?”

  Nicholas raked his mind for an excuse. “Well, you know I don’t sleep. Hours of sitting in one place drive me crazy. How are you feeling?”

  She seemed to accept his explanation. Elodie’s psychic powers weren’t strong enough to overcome the walls around his thoughts. “Better,” she lied. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I’ve wanted to show you for a while.”

  “What is it?”

  “This,” she replied, and took a small opal out of her pocket. She’d found it inside his backpack back at Midnight Hall, on the day his father first hit him with the brain fury. Now she slipped it into Nicholas’ hand. Nicholas felt the stone with his fingers – smooth, cold. A flash of white appeared in his mind, though he couldn’t see colours any more, and he knew at once what he was holding.

  “There’s something about this stone,” Elodie continued. “I don’t know. I sense something inside it. But it’s . . . shut. It’s difficult to explain.”

  Nicholas’ eyes widened, remembering what that stone contained, but he controlled himself and nodded. “It’s just a stone I use in spells. Thank you,” he said, and slipped it into his own pocket. This will make things so much easier, he thought, when the time comes.

  At that moment, the sound of distant thunder filled the sky. Elodie looked up, and saw columns of light break up the darkness, beyond the trees.

  “Nicholas, I think I’m ill,” she whispered suddenly, her soft French accent thicker, like it always was when she was upset. A pause. Nicholas’ heart was bleeding silently, in a way he didn’t think possible any more.

  “I’ve known for a while, but I didn’t want to believe it. The blue nails . . . the fatigue . . . and when I bleed, it doesn’t stop.” Nicholas could see the wounds deeply scarred into her flesh, some still weeping blood. When she spoke again, Elodie’s voice was a whisper. “It’s the Azasti.”

  “I know.”

  Suddenly, she began to weep, silent tears streaming down her face. There in the darkness, with fireflies flying all around her, her thoughts drifted between their insect dance and death. How long do fireflies live, she asked herself confusedly. One night, and then their lights just go out forever?

  It was all so hard. So much harder to really leave your life behind, compared to just feeling you wanted to. When Harry died she was sure she wanted to end life too, but now that the end was near, Elodie longed for another chance. The hardest part was knowing the choice was out of her hands – she had no power over the decaying of her blood, and no way to stop it.

  “Nicholas. I’m scared,” she murmured.

  “I know that too,” he replied.

  When limbs freeze, they don’t hurt. It’s when they thaw that the pain begins. Nicholas’ heart had felt like that, when he met Sarah and began to believe he could rebel against his father. He’d felt like coming alive again, and it hurt like hell. He placed his hands on Elodie’s hips and drew her closer. She smelled sweet, too sweet, like flowers wilting. Again, distant thunder resounded in their ears, and a flash of lightning illuminated the scene. In the sudden light, Elodie took in Nicholas’ face, his perfect features – his eyes so black that iris and pupil were one, the perfect whiteness of his skin. A hard, powerful face, like a god from an ancient civilisation. She barely came up to his chest, she was so small. He took a step towards her and wrapped his arms around her. Elodie tensed for a moment. This was the man-demon who’d deceived them all, who’d killed so many heirs, including her husband. He was evil.

  But he’d been blinded for having rejected that evil, and he was the only one who could understand the depth of her sorrow, of her loneliness. Nobody else could. Not Niall, not Sarah. Not even Sean, tied to her by a deep friendship she had briefly, wrongly, mistaken for love – not even he could follow her where she was going.

  Nicholas brought a hand to her face, the other still holding her by her waist. She closed her eyes, raising her chin like a sunflower towards the light. “I wish I could see you,” he whispered, feeling every inch of her features – her forehead, her cheeks, her lips. His hands were hot on her skin, nearly scalding. How long had it been since somebody had touched her that way? She took a step forward too, until her face was on his chest, and in one liquid movement they were entwined.

  Elodie remembered when in a moment of absolute, black despair, she’d asked Nicholas to unleash his ravens on her, to help her forget. She shivered as she remembered how close she’d come to getting killed. That had been the fir
st time she’d felt a weird, dark bond with Nicholas.

  “Elodie,” he murmured in her ear, and she felt his lips grazing her skin.

  “I’m here. I’m here with you,” she heard herself saying.

  Suddenly, he pressed her harder. He could have crushed her, he could have taken her breath away, put an end to it all, without any more suffering. Elodie was suddenly horrified. She disentangled herself and hurried away, leaving Nicholas alone with the thunder and lightning.

  28

  In the Mirror

  Abandoned things and abandoned hearts

  Your hair still in the silver brush

  Your story in a jewel

  Your tears in a silver box

  Blue lightning kept cutting the sky, and thunder resounded from far away, but there was no rain and the sky seemed too clear for storms. There was something not quite natural in the lightning – its blue hue too vivid, too strong, something that could have never existed in the human world. Once more, Sarah considered how the Shadow World had this archaic, powerful way of presenting itself, as if the explosive energy that produced the universe itself was still running just beneath the surface. What in the human world seemed faded, domesticated, in the Shadow World was vivid and wild.

  The storm felt like a warning. Like a message.

  “Time to go,” Nicholas called.

  Easy for him to say, thought Niall, ill with tiredness, dragging himself up. He doesn’t need to sleep. The loss of blood from the leeches’ attack had taken a toll on him. Every time he moved his head the whole world danced in front of his eyes. Images and thoughts of Winter had come to him while he slept, half torturing, half comforting him.

  “Are you okay?” Alvise asked, offering him a hand and helping him up.

  “Aye, never been better!” he replied, but his voice sounded weary. “And how are you on this fine morning, Micol?” he asked the dark-eyed girl.

  Micol shrugged, running a hand through her hair. “Freezing. But this is better than being stuck in Palazzo Vendramin, anyway.”

  “Fair enough. Good to see someone who thinks the glass is half full, I always say!” Niall replied. “God, I wish we had some whiskey . . .”

  “For breakfast?” Sarah couldn’t help smiling. If anyone ever brought a smile to her face, it was Niall.

  The Irishman shrugged apologetically. “It’s good for warmth.”

  “I’m afraid this is all we have,” said Sean, and threw him a packet of dry biscuits. Their provisions were thinning at a worrying rate; thankfully there were many wells and little ponds in the forest they could draw water from, though Sean constantly worried about what hid in them. And what they might be drinking with the water.

  They began packing up their sleeping bags, the pink light of a dawn that promised to be spectacular bleeding through the jigsaw of branches.

  “In a few hours we should reach a stream,” Nicholas interrupted. “Just beyond it, there’s my castle.”

  “Your castle?” Sean enquired. “How can that be? You have a castle in the Shadow World?”

  “This is the first we’ve heard of this place,” Sarah added, crossing her arms.

  “I lived there a long time ago. Not any more,” he said, and there was a bitter, pained note to his voice. She wondered if Nicholas had built the castle for Martyna, or if he’d lived there with her – and she did so with no emotion. She had no sympathy for Nicholas, in spite of all that he’d been through. Nothing was left in her heart for him except anger.

  “I built two castles, one in each world, so it exists in both,” Nicholas explained. “The castle in the human world and the one in the Shadow World are mirror images of each other. The one in the human world was destroyed a few centuries ago, but the one here has lasted. I haven’t been there since . . . In a long time. We can find shelter there for a few hours.”

  He turned his face towards Elodie, who was standing beside him, a light hand on his arm as ever. She was always at his side, always guiding him, protecting him from obstacles and threats he couldn’t see in his blindness. Sarah’s gaze rested on Elodie’s white, slender fingers touching Nicholas’s arm, and a thought made its way in her head, a thought too uncomfortable to be borne.

  No. Elodie was a Secret heir, and she was on a mission – to destroy the King of Shadows, the man who murdered Harry. Nicholas was a tool in her mission; Elodie was doing what she had to do. Was he really looking for somewhere Elodie could have some respite, Sarah wondered. Was there any room in his black soul for thinking of others?

  Sean’s eyes met Sarah’s, and she saw that his thoughts were going along the same lines. “Have you heard of this place before, Elodie?” he asked. He was shocked at how worn the French girl looked after the leeches’ attack. Her skin was almost translucent, and her soft chocolate eyes were lined with blue. Her willpower was the only thing that kept her going, as her body was failing. No one could ignore that fact any more.

  “Not until now,” she replied.

  “What do you think?”

  Elodie shot a glance at Nicholas. A few times before Sean had noticed how she looked at him. Yes, there was still hatred in her eyes sometimes – but something else also. A weird bond that made Sean afraid for her once more.

  “I think if Nicholas had wanted to lead us into a trap he would have done so by now,” she said simply.

  “Fine. But who knows what has taken residence in your castle, Nicholas. The place must be swarming with Surari,” Sean observed.

  “It’s sealed shut. Magically. Nothing can get inside. There are spells all over the place. Everything was left like the last time I was there, before I left for Scotland.”

  To look for me, thought Sarah, feeling sick to her bones. To come to Scotland to try to snatch me away from everything and everybody I knew, and make me yours. I hate you, she thought with an intensity that frightened her.

  “If this is a trap, Nicholas, I swear I’ll gouge your eyes out,” said Sarah coldly. He believed her.

  They took off, the darkness around them thinning slowly, like ink mixed with water.

  “Alvise. Look,” Micol whispered, turning her face up. The sky was on fire, burning with the rising sun, bright-pink rays drenching the canopy of trees. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

  Alvise shook his head. “It’s amazing,” he said. “Shame we don’t get much chance to see the sights,” he smirked.

  “This place exists alongside our world, and we never knew.”

  “I wonder who else knows,” Alvise replied. “The Sabha do, for sure.”

  “They must do. My nonna used to tell us a story . . . to me and my brothers. It was about a Secret heir, long ago, who rebelled against his family. His father had no heart to kill him, but he sent him away to the Other World. I used to wonder what this ‘other world’ was . . .”

  “I suppose all the Secret heirs used to know about the Shadow World and the King of Shadows, but the memory got lost in time.”

  “The King of Shadows wanted us to forget,” Micol murmured, gazing at the tall, white-skinned half-man half-demon who walked in front of them, his black aura swirling around him like a curse. She tried to keep going with her eyes turned upwards, drunk with beauty. Everything in the Shadow World seemed heightened, sharper, more vivid – it was a world untamed, ancestral, raw, as enchanting as it was frightening.

  “You’ll end up banging your face on a tree,” said Alvise, smiling. “Come on,” he said, and took her by the arm.

  Their boots were making barely any noise on the soft, mossy undergrowth. The calls of birds and beasts waking up were the only sound. Some of those calls were Surari’s, Sean thought, tightening his hand around his sgian-dubh. He never let it go, day or night. The dagger that had belonged to James Midnight, Sarah’s father, had become an extension of his body.

  He surveyed his small company of friends: Alvise looked strong, unafraid, walking ahead with a single-mindedness that amazed Sean, considering the Italian man had been thrown into the Shadow
World with no warning or indication of what was about to happen. Micol looked so young, walking with her face towards the pink rays of the sun like a bewitched little girl. He couldn’t believe she was really sixteen, with her small, slender body and childish face. And still, he’d seen the power hidden inside her. Silently, Sean thanked his lucky stars that they’d been sent to help, even if Micol’s arrival had been so fraught.

  Sean’s eyes moved to Niall. He seemed to have recovered a little from the demon-leeches’ attack, as there was some colour in his cheeks and he was walking steadily. Sean suspected that the idea of having to cross a stream had put a spring in his step.

  And beside him, silent, determined, her hair in a long braid and her face alight with the dawn, was Sarah.

  Sarah.

  Why does love always have to go hand in hand with terror? In his life, at least, it seemed that way. Every time he looked at Sarah, Sean felt sick with fear.

  I love her too much.

  It’s not good to love someone – anyone – as much as I love her, he couldn’t help thinking, as if his feelings for her were a jinx. Because everyone he’d loved before, he’d lost.

  Sarah caught him looking at her. “You okay?”

  “Yes. Yes, fine,” he replied. It was time to snap out of his thoughts. “The stream we’re going to. Is it deep?” he asked Nicholas abruptly. “Can we walk around it?”

  “Yes, it’s deep, and no, we can’t walk. Can everybody swim?”

  “A bit,” said Niall cheerily. The idea of being anywhere near water again made his heart soar.

  “I don’t like to swim, but I can walk on water,” said Micol matter-of-factly.

  “Good for you, lassie!” Niall exclaimed, and Micol frowned, thinking he was making fun of her. Would anyone ever take her seriously? But Niall was being sincere in his admiration. As a child of the sea, he felt a bond with anyone who had a power relating to water.