Tide (24 page)

“I’m fifty-three, yes.”

“You—oh, never mind! What happened?”

“Sean and I were on the beach,” Elodie began, and she blushed, remembering the kiss. “A demon came out of the water. It was one of those jellyfish things. It pulled me in and dragged me down.” She shivered at the memory. “I’m not a good swimmer at all. I would have died, but Niall sang the demon out of the water, and it was Winter who brought me onto the rocks.”

“The seal,” said Sean, looking at Winter with awe. “It was you!”

Winter smiled. Her hair was shimmering silver and mother-of-pearl against the stained-glass window. “Yes. Seal is my usual shape, this is just for special occasions!” She laughed, gesturing to her human body. “My father was a spirit of the water, which is why I grow old so slowly, Sarah.”

“Mr Shaw was a spirit of the water?” asked Sarah, incredulous. She’d seen pictures of him, a short, bearded man in a tweed cap, always with a shotgun strapped across his chest. He’d been the Midnight estate gamekeeper for forty years.

“No,” laughed Winter. “Hugh Shaw wasn’t my father. My father was my mother’s lover. He left his human shape forever just after I was born and went back to the sea. Hugh, my stepfather, came after. He knew all about me, how I came to be.”

Sarah was wide-eyed. “Mrs Shaw had a lover?” She thought of the black-clad, stern-looking old woman she had known as a child.

“I know it’s hard to imagine. She was very reserved, wasn’t she? But she and my father were very much in love. She loved life, in every way. And so do I.” And with that, Winter looked straight at Niall, and through him, inside him. His face turned crimson.

“Was it you who left the letters?” asked Nicholas suddenly. His tone towards Winter was harsh, almost accusing. Everybody tensed.

She nodded. “It was me, yes. Before you all arrived. My mother had taken them away from this house. She died three years ago, and when I found the letters among her things, I thought I’d wait for you to come back and hand them over.”

“That’s funny, man. This people-of-the-sea thing!” Mike chipped in. He wasn’t very interested in the mechanics of delivering letters. “Being able to turn into an animal, or something. I wish I had some really cool powers like all of you.”

“Well, in a way, we all belong to an Element,” Winter remarked. “Human beings too. I mean, Lays. Non-Secret people.”

“Do we? So what Element am I? Out of curiosity,” asked Mike.

“You’re …” Winter tipped her head to one side, studying Mike’s face. “You’re earth. Yes, earth. And so is Sean, with a touch of fire. Elodie is air and water. Sarah is air and fire.” Winter smiled at her. “And you, Nicholas …” Nicholas had been looking down, lost in thought. Upon hearing his name, he raised his head with a quick, jerky movement. “You are fire.” They held each other’s gaze for a moment, and it was Winter who looked away first.

“I’m freezing,” said Elodie. “I’ll go get changed. Come, Winter, I’ll get you some clothes.”

Niall and Mike watched in awe as the silver-haired girl walked slowly upstairs, the light from the stained-glass window making her hair shimmer like the inside of a shell.

A child who asks, “What’s happening?”

And then silence begins

Islay, May 1985

Dear Amelia,

Life has been quite complicated around here. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. The time has come. Mairead’s dreams have started. She screams throughout the night until she’s exhausted, and everybody else with her. She’s refusing to tell me anything of what she sees, or to write anything down in the dream diary we gave her, which means we can’t use her dreams at all. She’s worse than my sister was. Hamish says she’ll grow into herself. I have to believe she will.

S
he does all she can to stay awake. Last night she went for a walk down to the beach, hoping the cold would prevent her from falling asleep. I know that trick, my sister and I used it too. Her brothers followed her from a distance to make sure she was safe. She walked up and down that beach until the small hours of the morning, until she couldn’t stay upright anymore. Stewart carried her home and laid her on her bed, but she kept trying to get up, and when she realized she couldn’t stand, that her legs couldn’t carry her any longer, she started throwing herself off the bed, hoping that hitting the floor would keep her awake. We couldn’t have that. I asked Stewart to hold her down, and she struggled and thrashed, with Stewart begging her to stop, to let herself go and surrender to sleep. He hated every minute of it, my poor son. What that girl puts us through!

In the end, she couldn’t resist anymore. She’s still a child, after all. She started nodding off and waking up with a jolt, over and over again, until sleep finally took her just as dawn was breaking. I stayed in her room. I knew I had to watch her, lest she tried to throw herself out of the window, like my sister tried to do when her dreams started. Mairead woke again two hours later, screaming and crying, begging me to make it stop. But how can I? What am I supposed to do? There is no way to stop the dreams, and we need her to dream. The family requires her to dream. But will she listen? Of course not.

So here I am, writing to you while she plays the piano downstairs, a terrible, haunting song she wrote herself. At least she has her music to keep her busy.

This morning, as she was washing, I caught a glimpse of her arms. They’re purple with little bruises. She’s even been pinching herself in the effort to stay awake.

Sarah couldn’t read any more. She walked to the window, her arms folded, and looked out to the sea. It seemed to her that the salty waters were the tears that Mairead must have cried in that very room.

Low, ghostly music had started seeping up from downstairs. Sarah knew it was Niall playing, but to Sarah those were Mairead’s trembling fingers touching the keys in a song of sorrow.

“What happened to you, Mairead?” she whispered, closing her eyes.

And then she gasped, forcing herself not to jump, not to move, not to scream, as she felt a hand run down her hair, lift a lock of it, gently, and then another, and small, cold fingertips caressing her cheeks with infinite tenderness.

As quickly as she appeared, she was gone, leaving Sarah wondering if she’d dreamt it after all.

A short while later, Nicholas came looking for her. “I think Mairead was in my room,” Sarah whispered in his ear as they lay entangled on her bed.

“Was she?”

Sarah raised her eyebrows. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“Of course not. When the body goes, the spirit remains. For a while.”

“She touched my cheeks, and my hair,” murmured Sarah.

“Oh yes, I can see it. Look. She braided it.” Nicholas lifted a plaited lock from the back of Sarah’s head.

Sarah held the loose black braid in her hand, bewildered.

Come back, Mairead. Come back and speak to me
.

“Who’s Martyna?” Sarah asked suddenly. The question had been whirling in her mind since Nicholas’s nightmare. She had to know. But she hadn’t planned to ask him quite so abruptly.

Nicholas’s face fell, and she could see a host of painful memories shaping his features into a mask of regret. “How do you know about her?”

“You said her name in your dreams last night. Is it … another girl?”

Nicholas resumed his usual calm demeanour, stroking Sarah’s cheek, and then her hair. He was back in control. “Yes. A girl I loved once. But she died.”

“She died? Oh, I’m so sorry.” Then a lingering question. She had to ask. “Was it the Surari?”

“Yes.” He looked at her intently. “It was the Surari.”

It was me.

“I’m so sorry,” repeated Sarah.

I’m so sorry, Martyna.

In death is freedom

Alone in his room, his eyes once more on the sea and the sky, Nicholas listened to the whispers and screams in his mind. He knew another attack was imminent, and he knew it would be the deadliest yet. He couldn’t even trust his ravens anymore. The Elementals didn’t show him any loyalty now. He knew that any decision about the fate of Sarah’s friends was out of his hands, and that it was only a matter of time before the King of Shadows demonstrated the terrible extent of his powers. Juliet had been just the beginning – only Nicholas and Sarah were supposed to come back from Islay.

Even though everything he knew and understood was shifting, Nicholas was sure about what would happen in the next few days – he knew how his father worked. The Surari would be instructed to spare him and Sarah, and to kill everyone else, as was the original plan. Then he would be punished for having strayed, a punishment much worse than having his face pecked and scratched by his Elementals. So much worse – his thundering headache told him that. A taste of the brain fury. Enough of a warning.

But he would not be killed.

Not unless he betrayed his father’s trust.

Nicholas had never believed that there could be any other option for him but to obey his father. But after all that had happened, he could see it now. There had been a choice all along. He could decide that he didn’t want to be his father’s puppet anymore. He could lift the fog that was still blocking Sarah’s gift and allow her and the other Dreamers with her to dream again. Then they’d all know what was about to happen.

Nicholas put his head in his hands. The King of Shadows had terrible ways to kill his enemies. Would he be pecked to death by Spirits of the Air, drowned by Spirits of the Water, suffocated by Spirits of the Earth, consumed by Spirits of Fire? If all those failed – and they might because Nicholas was, after all, very powerful, and he would fight for his life – the Surari would intervene. And if by some weird occurrence the Surari failed to kill him, his father would simply use the full force of the brain fury. There was no escape from that; nobody ever survived once his father decided to unleash the whole of the brain fury.

If he did his father’s bidding, though, he would survive, and live the life he was meant to. Fulfil his destiny as the heir of Shadows, and come the time when finally his father’s life force faded, he would take his place.

When a spirit dissolves, there’s nothing left; the body has gone long before, the soul is all that survives. And then the soul is gone too, leaving nothing but a memory.

Sometimes death seemed a better option.

Death was the way Martyna had chosen. Another black-haired girl ensnared in the King of the Shadows’ plans, chewed up and spat out.
Martyna
. The name was like a curse in Nicholas’s memory, the curse of the woman he had loved and helped destroy.

Martyna had been beautiful in a strong, insolent way, the kind of girl who would always get noticed wherever she went. It seemed as if light shone from inside her. She was a Dreamer, of course, and a powerful one. Over the years Nicholas had found ways to prevent himself from remembering, but memories have a way of ambushing you when you least expect it.

Nicholas was the one who’d chosen Martyna, not his father – and his biggest mistake, as the King of Shadows was so fond of reminding him, was falling in love with her. Nicholas asked his father not to start working on her mind straight away, to give him a chance to do things differently. And his father agreed.

Things went well, for a time. Or at least Nicholas thought they did. He succeeded in pretending there would be no mind-moulding needed, no deceit, that they could step out like any other man and woman in love. It was the best time of his life.

It didn’t last long. The King of Shadows ended up taking control, as he always did in every matter concerning his son. Nicholas’s mother cried and begged Nicholas to stop, to leave Martyna alone. Not to do to Martyna what had been done to her. But Nicholas was resigned. Deep down, he’d always known that their enchanted time, their time to love freely, had to stop sooner or later. It was fantasy, a useless masquerade, to pretend to be a mortal man with the chance to live a normal life. Martyna would never accept shedding her body and entering the Shadows forever, not unless they mind-moulded her. And slowly but surely his father made Nicholas see reason. He proved to him that to destroy a woman in body and mind was the only way she could ever be convinced to come and live in the Shadow World. Nicholas was made to see that his pretence that things for Martyna and him could be different was just a pathetic dream.

The King of Shadows decimated Martyna’s whole family in the space of one night. Between sunset and sunrise her parents and her sisters died, one by one, leaving only the ashes of burnt bodies. The sun rose on a world she couldn’t recognize, a world she couldn’t live in. It was too sudden and too traumatizing for her to accept. And she never did.

The day Martyna died was the worst day of Nicholas’s life. He found her trapped among the reeds, her body floating face up, her hair covering her face, a face that used to be beautiful and that was now a blue mask of pain.

For a while after Nicholas wished he’d been with her when she drowned herself, and that he’d done the same. Her life was over because of him. She wasn’t going to be anybody’s wife now. Nicholas hadn’t given a second thought to her parents or her sisters, just as he hadn’t given a second thought to anyone they had caused death or despair to, but Martyna’s destruction stayed with him, haunted him. He couldn’t stop thinking about what had been done.

Maybe it was also because his mother had watched him do to Martyna what his father had done to her.

After that, Nicholas’s mother was never the same. She refused to be kept prisoner anymore, and she took the only way she knew to be free again. Spirits live a long time, but they aren’t eternal; they will, in time, fade away. Ekaterina let go of her will to live, and allowed herself to fade slowly, leaving nothing but a memory. She had only lived a few hundred years in the Shadows, a heartbeat from their point of view. Martyna’s fate had sealed his mother’s desire for freedom, and in a way, Martyna’s death set her free.