Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) (3 page)

“Like he lived here! As if this was
his
house! I know, I know, he’s family. I know there’s nothing I can do … OK. OK. I’ll sleep on it. See you tomorrow.”

Was she making the right decision? To let this long-lost cousin into her house, into her life? She had no choice. Her parents had left her no choice. Sarah felt a wave of anger towards them. She didn’t like to feel that way, and did her best to shake off the uncomfortable feeling, as if it had never appeared; but a distressing memory kept pushing itself to the forefront of her mind.

The spotlights in Sarah’s eyes were blinding as she walked onto the stage of the Royal Concert Hall. She couldn’t see the audience; it was just a sea of black, row after row of heads, barely discernible. Sarah had waited for that moment
forever
. It was her first proper performance.

The best music students from secondary schools in the whole country had been selected to accompany some famous artists in a Christmas concert. When her teacher told Sarah that she’d been chosen, she couldn’t believe it. She was so excited, and so proud, that even her cleaning and tidying routines had relaxed a little. For a few weeks she was un-characteristically talkative, chatting away about rehearsals, and how friendly the musical director was, and how they were supposed to wear their school uniforms, and how the BBC was going to cover the event … On and on she went, telling her parents everything, every week coming home from rehearsals with a spring in her step and a smile on her face.

The Christmas concert was on a Saturday. Aunt Juliet drove her into town, with her cello in its purple case and her ironed uniform arranged carefully on the back seat. Aunt Juliet had insisted on going with her to keep her company and help steady her nerves. Sarah had wanted her mum to go with her, but, her parents explained, it was just
not possible
. They had things to see to, and said so in a way that left no doubt as to the nature of those
things
. Of course they’d be at the concert, though. They wouldn’t miss it for the world, Sarah could be sure of that.

When the moment came to go backstage and leave friends and relatives behind, Sarah threw one last anxious glance among the little crowd, hoping to see her parents walk through the glass doors. At that moment, Aunt Juliet’s phone started beeping. Sarah’s parents were running a little bit late, but they would be there in half an hour.

Plenty of time. There was still nearly an hour to go, before the rest of the audience arrived and everyone was settled. They’d be fine.

Sarah’s hands shook with nerves and excitement as she walked on stage, the lights making her hair shine blue-black, and colour rising to her face as she sat with her cello. She couldn’t make out anything beyond the stage, but she knew that her parents would have arrived by now, and were sitting watching her. The thought was warming her heart, and filling her with pride. She couldn’t wait to show them what she could do.

The singers and fiddlers and harpists and accordionists followed one another, and Sarah felt the happiest she’d ever been. She couldn’t know how many people among the audience were admiring that beautiful girl with the long black hair, playing the cello with such passion, such precision. She flew through her parts without making a single mistake, and then it was time to stand up, and drink in the cheering and the clapping, and smile shyly when the artists turned around and gestured at them, the music students, with more clapping rising from the audience to celebrate the new talent, the boys and girls who’d played so well.

There was a flurry of congratulations, and hugs, and bouquets of flowers as everybody’s friends and families were allowed backstage. Sarah scoured the little groups, looking for her parents.

Aunt Juliet was there, and she was smiling, but her eyes looked strange.

“Well done, my love! You were amazing!”

Sarah kept looking over Aunt Juliet’s shoulder. “Where are Mum and Dad?”

Juliet looked at her for an instant, as if searching for the right words.

But by then, there was no need to say anything. Sarah knew they hadn’t come.

*   *   *

Harry and Sarah sat in the guest bedroom and talked for a while, carefully, uncertainly. Sarah wasn’t sure how much she should say, and kept the conversation formal, like a cautious dance. All the while she looked into those impossibly clear eyes, and felt afraid. Soon, exhaustion caught up with her. She wished Harry goodnight and went to bed, too tired to worry, too tired to think, but still finding the nervous energy to arrange the duvet around her the way her own private ritual demanded. She was soon out like a light, drained with grief, with the hunt, and with the relief that maybe she wasn’t going to have to leave her home.

But it was the troubled, unquiet sleep that brought her the visions.

Sarah was standing in the dark. She could make out two bodies lying on the ground, motionless, and a semi-circle of dark figures standing around them. She recognized the bodies: they were her parents’. Her stomach lurched. Beside them stood a boy not much older than her, with hair so black that it was nearly blue, and a face as pale as the moon. And someone else: a tall, blond man with something in his hand … a dagger, a silver dagger. The man’s face kept changing, his features kept blurring.

“Look at him, Sarah.”

A woman’s voice. A voice dripping with hatred.

Sarah turned round to see where the voice was coming from, and she saw a woman with a face full of sorrow. She had startling, angry blue eyes and high cheekbones, framed by wavy dark-blond hair. She was beautiful – or she would have been, had she not looked so enraged and so full of pain.

“Who are you?” Sarah asked.

“You’re alone, Sarah,” the woman replied, and smiled a menacing smile that changed her lovely features and made Sarah’s skin crawl. With the corner of her eye, she saw that the blond man had raised his dagger, and was walking towards her …

Sarah woke up soaked with sweat, and freezing. She reached out for her lamp and switched it on with trembling hands. At once she gasped, and sat up in fear.

There was someone standing beside her bed.

“It’s OK, Sarah. Whatever you saw, it was just a dream,” whispered the figure, shrouded in semi-darkness. He was tall and blond. Like the man in her dream.

Harry
.

Sarah’s heart missed a beat. She breathed in deeply, trying to keep herself calm.

“What are you doing in my room?”

“I heard you screaming.”

“You weren’t sleeping?” Her voice was shaking. She swallowed.

“There won’t be much sleeping for a while. I’m watching over you.”

“Am I in danger?” Sarah knew the answer already.

Harry leaned over her, and brushed a lock of damp hair away from her face. She realized she was trembling all over, like a leaf in the wind.

“Sarah, I wish I could reassure you and say that everything will be fine, and that there are no monsters under your bed. But you are a Midnight. I know you’re brave and strong, and I have to tell you the truth. You’re in terrible danger, and you can’t trust anyone.”

No, I can’t trust anyone
, thought Sarah, remembering the man in her dream walking towards her with his dagger raised.

I can’t trust anyone, including you.

Finding each other

Among a million possibilities

Always wondering

Was it meant to be

I knew that sooner or later they’d get to him, and all my efforts to protect him would have been for nothing. His destiny had been decided. I knew it by the way he spoke to me the last day of his life: as if he was dead already.

Harry. My brother.

I’ve been alone all my life. As my parents died while I was still quite young, I’ve always resisted making relationships with other people. My grandparents looked after me because they felt it was their duty, but they never made their way into my heart. Friends and acquaintances were just for company. Girlfriends … well, girlfriends were a different story, more of a quest, really, a never-satisfied quest for somewhere to be, somewhere to belong.

Then I met Harry Midnight, and he changed my life forever. He changed
me
forever. He showed me how it feels to care for someone more than you care for yourself; he showed me what it means to have a family.

He took me into the secret world behind this one, the terrible, beautiful, dangerous world where the things we see with the corner of our eye, the things we fear are lurking in the shadows, dwell and thrive. Where the imprinted memories of long-ago predators are more than just memories: they come alive.

Thanks to him I became a hunter, I became the person I was always meant to be.

I had just started university in my hometown of Christchurch, New Zealand. Medicine. I had no great passion for it; I just did it because I could, because I didn’t know what else to do, and because it seemed like a good way to get myself the life I wanted. Harry was there to follow a family tradition – both his father and his uncle were doctors. I soon got to know a few of his other family traditions, most of them involving danger and death in various degrees.

He was an orphan. His parents were killed when he was a teenager. They had fallen out with their own families in Scotland, and had moved to New Zealand when Harry was a baby. After their death, Harry found himself alone, and ended up being cared for by relatives, just like me.

The first time I saw him was on a freezing winter night. He was standing in a flowerbed not far from the university dormitories, muttering to himself. I was walking back from somebody’s room – I can’t remember her name; there were a few girls in my life at the time. I thought he must have been drunk, standing in the cold like that, talking to himself. I’m no Samaritan, but I didn’t want anyone collapsing outside and ending up getting hypothermia, so I walked up to him.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw his face, because I swear, his eyes were the wildest thing I had ever seen. Green, a bright green that was nearly unnatural, with a look in them that would have stopped anyone in his tracks – anyone, or any
thing
. He looked like he was deep in conversation, as if he were discussing something crucial – his face was tight, like a fist. He was waving his hands in the air, tracing invisible symbols with his fingers.

Looking back, I should have known from his eyes how dangerous he was, and how that night I ran the risk of ending up under a bush with a broken neck. The first of many times when Harry and danger would go hand in hand.

When he saw me he stopped talking at once, and his serious expression broke into a smile. He had chosen the ‘nothing to see here’ approach, as opposed to twisting my neck.

“Lovely night,” he said cheerfully.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, fine, just having a wander.”

I saw at once that he wasn’t drunk – no danger of him falling asleep outside then, and no reason for me to be there.

“Right, mate, see you later,” I said, walking away.

But fate had other plans.

I often wondered what would have happened had I not seen him that night. What would have happened if I had decided to stay with whatever girl I had at the time, if I’d taken another route to go back to my room, if I had chosen not to speak to him …

If I’d legged it when the creature came out of the earth.

“Watch out!” the strange man shouted all of a sudden, when my back was already turned to walk away. I felt something landing on me, something heavy. I fell on the cold, hard ground. I was shocked, enraged – was the man with the crazy eyes looking for a fight? I scrambled to my feet, only to be pushed down again. Someone, or something, was sitting on my back, and wasn’t letting me get up again.

It took all my strength to turn around, throw the man on the ground, and sit on top of him. I thought a pair of green eyes would meet mine – but what I saw was something else entirely. A naked, white-faced creature with unseeing eyes. Its skin was like the inside of mushrooms, white and sickly-looking – like something that lived underground, like some monstrous larva. Its features were human, though. As if it had been human once, long ago, and then somehow took another evolutionary route, and became something quite different. Its mouth was open, showing a row of blackened but sharp teeth – and it was trying to snap at me, biting the air, seeking flesh.

I don’t panic when I’m afraid; fear makes me sharper, colder, more controlled. My brain geared for survival, and I couldn’t see anything else. I pushed my fingers in the creature’s eyes and made it howl, a sound that came from beneath the earth, somewhere dark and primeval. Its arms were searching; its mouth was open and snapping. It kept shrieking as I pushed my fingers into its eyes.

I had no time to think that what was happening to me was
impossible
. I had no time to think that such creatures don’t exist, that you can only see them at the cinema, or read of them in books. I had no time to consider any of that, because the creature that wasn’t supposed to exist was sinking its claws into my arms, into my back, drawing blood, and it was my time to roar in pain and rage.