Tide (26 page)

Sarah shook her head.

He stood up. “We must be ready then.”

“Sean. They killed you.” An abyss was opening slowly in her heart. All her strength, all her courage leaked away in the face of a world without Sean, and she was horrified to realize how much she needed him, how much she … 
loved
him.

He stood there, looking at her, then once again knelt in front of her and took her hand. His striking blue eyes were full of longing, his face open and strong, his hair shone golden in the light of the fire. Sarah reached forward slowly and took hold of the red velvet pouch around his neck, the protection charm she’d made for him.

“I never took it off.”

“I know.”

They both felt at once what was to follow. Arms and lips looking for each other, irresistible as gravity, but almost immediately the sinking feeling in Sarah’s stomach that she was betraying Nicholas, betraying her boyfriend, that she really ought to stop it now …

“Sean! Can I come in?” A voice at the door. Elodie.

Sean and Sarah looked at each other, shocked, the moment shattered.

“Come in,” answered Sean, jumping to open the door. “Come in.”

Elodie entered, pale and troubled. “Sean. I dreamt.”

“You too.”

“Oh,” she gasped, her face tightening when she saw a pale-faced Sarah standing beside Sean’s fireplace. “I didn’t realize.”

Sarah took in Elodie’s graceful figure in her white cotton slip trimmed with lace, her slender legs, her arms like willow branches, her silky blonde hair cascading down her back. She was delicate, and perfect, and Sarah’s heart sank. “I dreamt tonight too,” she said quietly.

“Mermen?” Sean asked Elodie.

“Yes. It was horrible,” Elodie replied, her accent made thicker by distress. “So what are we going to do? Wait until they come to get us?”

“All we can do is prepare ourselves as best we can. Elodie.”

“Mmmm?” she replied, biting her lip.

“In Sarah’s dream we were all killed, except Nicholas and Sarah.”

“Yes. In mine too.” Elodie’s face was hard as she glanced over at Sarah. “What can this mean?”

“Nicholas was trying to stop them.” Sarah assured her. “Trying to halt the attack. You must have heard that.”

“Yes, I heard that too. And saw him. Just like he tried to stop the ravens from attacking me on the beach yesterday,” pondered Elodie.

There was a gentle knock at the door and before they could answer, it swung open. “Hello. A pyjama party, and nobody told me?” Niall walked in, pushing a hand through his hair, his eyes sleepy and his feet bare.

“You dreamt too?” asked Sean.

“Yes. And judging by the colour of your faces, it was the same dream. I dreamt we were fish food. It wasn’t pretty.”

“The revenge of the clam?” chipped in Mike, appearing from behind Niall now. “After all the shellfish we ate in Louisiana?”

“More than likely,” teased Sean briefly, but his face became deadly serious and a silence fell over the room.

Suddenly, Elodie gasped.

“You OK?” asked Sean.

“Yes, yes. It was just a shadow.”

Sarah noticed that Sean’s eyes rested on Elodie for a long time after that, but the French girl didn’t offer any further explanation. Sean brought his hands to his temples, massaging them. “I need to think this through.”

“When’s the first ferry?” asked Mike hopefully.

“To go where? They’d just follow us,” Sarah replied. “At least here we’re on familiar territory.”

Sarah was interrupted by Elodie in a voice so frail yet firm that they all turned to her with concern. “No more running away,” she whispered.

Sean nodded his agreement. “Elodie’s right,” he said.

“I think we need a drink,” Mike concluded after a short pause.

The whole house instantly came alive with lights and footsteps and conversations as Mike and Niall took Elodie downstairs to steady their nerves. Sarah and Sean stayed behind.

“I don’t want to be alone,” Sarah whispered.

“Go to Nicholas then,” replied Sean immediately, his voice harsh.

Sarah wasn’t expecting that. It was as if she’d just been punched in the stomach, the air knocked out of her. Sean had turned away from her.

“OK. I will. Yes.” She walked towards the door, reeling from Sean’s response.

At the doorway, he took her arm and turned her until he was looking straight into her eyes. “Nicholas is your boyfriend, after all.”

“Yes.”

“Because if he weren’t, I’d ask you to stay here with me.”

Sarah froze.

Too much.

Too much, too confusing. Too complicated.

The dreams coming back, the choices she was faced with. The danger. The one choice she didn’t know how to make.

“You can’t ask me to choose now, Sean. Can you not see?” she whispered, her mind somewhere between being angry and imploring him for a reprieve.

“If not now, when, Sarah? It’s not likely to get better, is it?” He took her by the shoulders firmly. “Do you love Nicholas?”

There was nothing she could do but to tell Sean the truth for once – to reveal herself, and reveal her heart.

“I don’t know what love is,” she said, with a clear, steady gaze.

Sean’s eyes were solemn, unsmiling, when he replied. “Yes you do. And when you decide to admit it, I’ll be there.”

It’s a promise, Sarah.

Rules of the heart

Before rules of the mind

Be ready then to face

The time to fall

Nicholas had been in his room, standing in front of the open window. All he could see was darkness, except for the intermittent lighthouse beam shining from beyond the hill. His whole body was alert, and a film of sweat coated his forehead. His nails sank into the palms of his hands.

Earlier that evening he had lifted the fog that had enveloped Sarah and the other Dreamers for weeks. Now he would wait for her to dream and for her to tell the others what she had seen, what she’d been finally allowed to discover. Nicholas knew what would happen next and he had stood there waiting for them to come and challenge him. Or hunt him down, probably. He was ready to defend himself.

To be human is to be afraid. Tonight, I’m wholly human.

Any time now.

When Nicholas felt Sarah’s dream starting, he had forced his mind into hers. He made himself witness it, and he couldn’t believe what he saw. He was still shattered by what had happened.

In Sarah’s dream, he had seen himself trying to stop the Mermen, trying to protect Elodie, Mike, Niall. Even Sean. Sarah had read his heart before he could read it properly himself. In her dream, for the first time in a long time, his mind and his heart had acted in harmony.

The cold air crept over his moist skin, making him shiver. He couldn’t bring himself to move. For some time his gaze remained fixed on the black sea, as waves of shock at his own behaviour swept over him.

I have chosen. Or destiny has chosen for me.

Suddenly there were noises and lights going on in the house, shining out into the garden, and people coming and going outside his door.
They must know by now.

Nicholas closed the window and let himself fall backwards onto his bed, his eyes staring up towards the ceiling. He didn’t have long to wait. The brain fury hit him almost immediately – his father’s wrath was merciless. Right at that moment he heard rapid tapping at the glass. Turning as best he could within the pain, he caught a glimpse of sharp beaks and beady black eyes, and then came the voices from the Shadow World screaming, screaming, using every possible argument and threat to get him back.

It was worse than he could have possibly imagined. He lay in agony, knowing that finally the die was cast and that there would be no salvation. Not for him. He felt Sarah coming into the room, but he wasn’t ready for her. He lay still, calm, pretending to be in a deep sleep, using the last of his self-control not to cry out with the pain that exploded in his head. He was aware of her standing by his bed for a few seconds, then walking out as quietly as she had come in – a ray of moonshine sweeping the room and disappearing.

No salvation for me, but I’ll keep you safe. And I’ll keep you with me, Sarah Midnight.

Is it written, is it chance?

The way we move and the way we go

The way it will all end

Something is not right. Everything is not right.

All Niall’s radars were roused in alarm, but he couldn’t figure out where the threat was coming from, he couldn’t figure out who was with them and who was against. He was just relieved that Winter hadn’t been in his dream, that she wasn’t among those killed. It didn’t mean she’d come to no harm at all, but he clung to the little hope he had that she’d survive.

He’d heard Elodie gasp in the gloom, and somehow he knew, as surely as he knew his own name, that she’d had a vision. As they were making their way slowly downstairs for a drink, he caught her elbow and gently made her stop.

“Tell me,” he whispered.

“What?” Immediately she looked away, defensive.

“What did you see?”

“In my dream? We all had the same dream. You know what I saw.”

“No.” Niall shook his head. “Afterwards. In Sean’s room. You saw something there, I’m sure of it. And you were horrified. I saw the look on your face. What did you see?”

Elodie pleaded with him. “Don’t make me tell you, Niall. Please.”

“I need to know.”

“I …” She turned away.

Niall grabbed Elodie’s wrist, a gesture so weird for him, so out of character, that Elodie was alarmed. “I need to know,” he told her in a measured staccato.

Elodie took a deep breath. “I saw one of us …”

Niall’s eyes narrowed. “One of us?”

“It’s difficult to explain. One of us …wasn’t there. There were five of us in that room. And then suddenly, there were four.”

“Which one of us?” asked Niall calmly.

“I don’t know.”

“If it was me you can tell me, Elodie. I’m not afraid.”

Elodie looked him straight in the eyes. “Believe me. I don’t know! The vision only lasted a second. I didn’t see who it was. I swear to you. Now let’s go downstairs.”

Niall studied her face. She was telling the truth. He eased his grasp on her wrist, and Elodie continued down the stairs, flushed with anger.

Which one of us?

Your voice across the years

Told me why they said

You never smiled

Sarah waited until she heard Sean’s rapid footsteps on the stairs. Then she crept along the hall and let herself into Nicholas’s room. He was fast asleep, immobile, his breathing heavy and regular.
Strange
, she thought.
How can he sleep when the whole house is awake?

A tapping at the window made her jump. Through the glass she saw a beak tapping, and a confusion of wings and black, shiny bodies – the ravens, crowding Nicholas’s windowsill. The sight of them pressing and pushing against the glass as if they wanted to come in made her shiver.

She tiptoed back to her room. There she was alone once more in a daze of sleeplessness, still reeling from the horror of the dream, but also from Sean’s words.

If these are the last days of my life, who do I want to spend them with?

She took a moment to steady herself. Her entire body and soul screamed for her to be back in Sean’s embrace.

She lit the fire – the room was so cold that she could see her breath coming out in little white clouds – and opened the box she’d stored the letters in. All that was left, as far as she could see, was one last letter in the same creamy paper as the others, and a few loose pages torn from notebooks, lists and receipts and various bits of paperwork. One last letter left to read, and the dreams had started again. She felt the chill breeze from the storm to come, and she was suddenly sure that her time to leave Islay would be soon.

One last letter.

She wrapped herself in her duvet and started reading.

Midnight Hall, Islay

November 1987

Dear Amelia,

I have to tell someone. It all weighs in my heart so. I need to take it out before it rips me inside. I just don’t know how it happened. It feels as if someone else had planned it, and I carried it out. But it was me who planned it, though I struggle to believe it. I always believed that we are all here for a reason – us Secrets, I mean. If we don’t fulfil our purpose, what’s the point of our existence? I never thought I, out of all of us, could give birth to a useless heir, someone who doesn’t rise to her mission. Someone like my sister could have given birth to a failure, but not me. Not me.

The letter continued along the same lines. Sarah frowned. The tone was all wrong. Was this Morag? So emotional. Out of control, even. But yes, the handwriting was the same. Sarah’s eyes travelled to the bottom of the page to check the signature, but there was none. The letter finished abruptly in the middle of a sentence:

I know it’s all over now, and it’s for the best, but

That was it. No more. Sarah checked the box again. No more creamy paper, no more letters. Just a bunch of crinkled scraps remained.

She tidied the letters away, and sat looking at the flames, losing herself in the dancing shapes. She ended up falling asleep in the armchair in front of the fire as a grey winter dawn broke over the sea.

No dreams came to haunt her sleep, but when she woke up and went to the bathroom, she saw that her hair was dotted with tiny braids again, made by fingers so light that she hadn’t felt a thing.

Where’s the rest of the letter, Mairead?
Sarah asked her reflection, stroking the braids softly, as if it had been Mairead’s hair she was caressing.