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  Sometimes when she went to keep Lucrezia company, Alvise was already there, sitting on her bed, holding Lucrezia’s hand. It was the only time when Alvise’s expression seemed to soften and his flinty eyes harboured any emotion other than rage.

  One day, as she perched on the windowsill in Lucrezia’s room, she heard Alvise’s voice down the corridor. He was shouting something or other to their long-suffering housekeeper. She could hear his voice and his footsteps getting closer. He was coming.

  She tensed. Alvise didn’t like finding her there with his sister. He was always suspicious of her somehow, as if she had some malicious plan. She thought the Vendramin were paranoid, and constantly scheming or fearing schemes. Usually she would have stood and stared him down in challenge, leaving the room in her own time, but the day before they’d had a terrible fight after she’d broken a few hexes around the palazzo and had wandered on the canals for hours, and he’d threatened her in a way she’d rather forget.

  Alvise’s powers had vanished when his mother had died, but this hadn’t made him any less dangerous. There was a fury inside him, a rage that, even if she hated to admit it, frightened her. Sometimes she sensed that so much of Alvise’s fury was directed towards himself – a self-hatred she didn’t understand.

  Instinctively, Micol jumped into Lucrezia’s wardrobe, closing the door as much as she could from the inside. She stood, still and silent, watching the scene from the keyhole.

  Alvise stepped in, a bouquet of white roses in his hands, and stood on the doorstep for a moment. His posture – coiled, as if ready to spring – and his slanted eyes reminded Micol of a cat. She remembered the balls and parties of her childhood, when the Secret Families used to get together in each other’s villas and palaces, how her girlfriends had giggled and blushed whenever he was around and tried to steal a dance with him. Of all the young heirs, Alvise had been the most handsome, the most sought after.

  But then the terrible news that Alvise had seen his mother’s death at the hands of a demon, right there in the palazzo, and lost his powers swarmed. No Secret Family would now want to mix their blood with his, in case his children would be suddenly powerless too. In an instant, Alvise went from object of admiration and desire to a young man deserving only pity. Micol remembered Ranieri being dismissive of him. Her heart had gone out to him, thinking how it must have felt to lose his mother. She didn’t have to wonder for long. Three years later, the same thing had happened to her. Her beautiful mother had died at the hands of a soil demon.

  Now, however, Micol didn’t have any sympathy left for Alvise, after having been at the receiving end of his white-hot anger too many times. But he didn’t look angry now. He just seemed infinitely sad as he arranged the flowers in one of the many vases on Lucrezia’s dressing table and sat on her bed. He placed a kiss on her white forehead. Lucrezia was murmuring as she always did.

  All of a sudden, the grip on her brother’s hand tightened, and her voice started rising.

  It all happened too fast. Lucrezia’s murmurs grew louder until Micol could make out the occasional words interjecting the nonsensical ones – and then she spoke perfectly intelligible sentences in the Ancient language. Micol’s basic understanding picked out something about underwater demons. Alvise seemed to understand perfectly, and the two carried on what seemed to be a conversation, hushed and tense. After a time, Alvise called for his father.

  It didn’t take long for Guglielmo Vendramin to thunder into the room, a case of arrows and a great bow slung over one shoulder. He had his hunting robes on.

  Then Lucrezia’s arm twitched and began rising slowly. It was the first time Micol had seen anything but her mouth move. Was she awake? But her eyes were closed, her eyelids fluttering as they always did, day and night, and her lips kept forming words, some in the Ancient language, some in their native Italian. Micol caught a glimpse of something on Lucrezia’s extended palm. A golden spiral burnt into the upturned skin. Suddenly, Micol felt a strange, hot breeze caress the side of her face and a swishing sound rose beside her. She dared opening the wardrobe door ever so slightly so that her gaze could reach the source of the noise. She tried not to gasp as she saw a golden ribbon forming in the air, and a sphere of molten gold forming within the spiral on Lucrezia’s hand. The orb on her hand then took to the air, expanding before her eyes, away from Lucrezia to suspend itself before Alvise and Vendramin. Micol’s heart started beating even faster as she heard Vendramin’s voice echo in the high-ceilinged room.

  “Good luck, my son,” he said, and threw his bow and arrows to him. Alvise caught them and adjusted the pouch of arrows on his back. He extended his arm and took hold of his sister’s raised hand, wincing for a second as they touched. Then he stepped into the gold orb and disappeared, like he’d never been there.

  Micol watched until the twirling golden ribbons faded and vanished, her hands shaking uncontrollably, trying to quieten her ragged breath. She heard Lucrezia’s voice hushing until it was just a murmur again, and Vendramin’s footsteps disappear in the distance. Alvise was gone.

  As she tried to steady herself enough to slip out of the room, she heard the tapping of heels that signalled the housekeeper Cosima’s presence. Micol knew she’d have to wait a little longer to retreat.

  Her mind whirled. She couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. Was it some kind of dream, or a vision brought on by the heavy, ill atmosphere in Lucrezia’s room? Or by the onset of the Azasti? The thought made her tremble.

  And then she remembered.

  Sentences unfinished, innuendos she couldn’t decipher, conversation interrupted by one recurrent word: iris. So that’s what it was. The word she’d heard whispered, passed from one to the other as they discussed things she wasn’t supposed to hear. She’d seen the iris, some kind of portal that had somehow . . . disintegrated Alvise the moment he stepped into it.

  Where had it taken him? Wherever he’d vanished to, it was somewhere else.

  A place that wasn’t Palazzo Vendramin.

  As she sat on the mosaic floor, waiting for Cosima to finish seeing to Lucrezia so that she could step out of the room, Micol Falco hatched a plan.

  8

  Children of the Sea

  I am and I will be

  Always where my love is

  Finally, Sarah was asleep, tucked inside Sean’s sleeping bag. The only two left awake, Niall allowed himself to kiss Winter’s soft lips. It seemed so incongruous, so reckless, to be kissing when the world was crumbling around them. There was never time, never enough solitude, to do anything more than steal a few moments together and wrap their arms around each other, before they’d be interrupted.

  What are the chances of meeting the love of your life when you’re about to die? Niall wondered.

  Winter was the most vulnerable in the group. As the daughter of a water Elemental and a human, her only real power was turning into a seal at will. She was not a fighter, and Niall was worried sick about her. He’d tried to convince her not to go with them on what seemed like a truly suicidal journey, but she’d refused. She couldn’t bear to be away from him.

  Niall Flynn was the heir of the Irish Flynn family. He was a shape-shifter and master of a powerful song that could control the weather and even kill living creatures. All Secret heirs were trained to fight – but he had never thought, growing up in a windy, wild place in the north-east of Ireland, that one day he’d be somewhere in the heart of Europe trying to save the world as they knew it from annihilation. His family were still in Ireland – his parents in the Flynn homeland of Donegal, and his sisters hiding somewhere in Dublin. Or so he hoped. He had no way of knowing whether they were alive or dead. The voices of his little sisters, Cara and Bridin, always filled his dreams.

  It was too painful to think of them now. He had to concentrate on what was in front of him, the people he was with and the mission they’d vowed to complete. Because if they failed, there was no hope for anyone, including his family.

  “We’re like a bunch
of superheroes. X-Men or Avengers,” he whispered in the darkness with his Irish lilt. Niall always found a way to make light of things, even in the darkest of situations. Sean had found it bizarre at first, but he’d grown to rely on Niall’s constant good humour.

  Winter laughed. “Absolutely. Nicholas is Magneto. Sarah is Wonder Woman—”

  “Can I be Thor? I like the hammer thing.”

  Winter placed another kiss on his lips. And then another, and another . . .

  They both had a weird feeling like they were dancing at the edge of a cliff. Yes, that was exactly what they were doing. They were all about to fall.

  “I wish you could go home,” Niall murmured, suddenly serious. He looked into her eyes, so like his own. They both had eyes grey like the sea in winter. Both of them were “of the water”, like she’d said when they first met.

  “Home is with you,” she murmured, entwining her fingers with his – and in spite of the danger, in spite of the fear, a wave of happiness swept over them both.

  9

  Bialoweza

  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.