Angel's Fury (21 page)

An icy gust blew up my jacket and swirled my hair across my face. The wind had returned.

I dug my nails into Pandra’s arm and felt her stiffen. ‘Th-there’s a storm coming,’ I gasped.

‘I know.’ She pulled my hand off her arm. ‘It was on the forecast. I thought we’d be in the cave by now.’

Frantically I looked around, as if shelter would magically appear, but there was nothing to see in the rustling darkness. My voice rose to a shriek. ‘We have to get inside.’

Realising something was wrong Seth turned the light on me. Already the beam was spotted with thick drizzle and I wrapped my arms round myself, thoughts crackling with fear.

‘Cass?’

‘She doesn’t want to get wet,’ Pandra sneered.

‘That’s not it.’ Seth drew closer. ‘Are you alright?’

‘There’s a storm coming.’ I could barely force out the words. I swayed and bursts of German whirled through my head like static. ‘The Doctor said . . . flash floods . . . We could d-drown.’

‘Fear of drowning . . . that’s her trigger? I didn’t realise.’ Distantly I saw Pandra’s eyes meet Seth’s; it was the first time I’d heard her speak to him without naked hostility. ‘I’ve seen this guy take over before. He’s strong.’

‘If he decides to run, she could get lost on the moor.’ Seth grabbed my shoulders. ‘Cass, hold on in there. We’ll walk faster. The village can’t be much further.’

I shuddered as I recalled all the little outposts we’d need to pass before we reached the village. We hadn’t yet seen a single one. I shook my head frantically. ‘We’ve got to get to high ground.’

Kyle used the light on his mobile phone to illuminate the impenetrable verges. ‘There isn’t anywhere to go, man. It won’t
be safe to leave the road.’

Seth nodded and gave me another shake. ‘We’ll be alright. We have to keep walking.’

Thunder rumbled in the distance and I choked on a scream.

Seth held me so close that I could feel his heart beating through our jackets. ‘We have to keep going, Cass.’ I shook my head again, near hysterical, and he whispered in my ear. ‘Do you want to go back to the Manor?’

His words were like a bucket of ice down my back.

The Doctor will be waiting for us
.

Another roll of thunder shook the world and Seth spoke into my hair. ‘Come on, Cass. I won’t let anything happen to you.’

I forced a nod and looked at my feet. ‘I c-can’t move.’

Seth yanked me alongside him and I fell into his side. My legs swung stiffly at first then speeded up.

Lizzie and Kyle went on ahead with his phone. Abruptly Kyle ran back to us shouting to be heard over the wind. ‘There’s something here.’

Seth raised his torch and relief almost knocked me over. We had reached Hope Farm.

S
eth shouted but there was no answer.

‘It’s deserted.’ He peered into the kitchen, his hands held against the window.

I huddled beneath the lintel and clutched at a rusty drainpipe. A waterfall gushed from the spout and soaked my toes. I watched the foam until my eyes lost their focus and the world started to whirl like a fairground ride.

‘We aren’t going to get to the pub, are we?’ Belinda joined me and started to wring water out of her coat. ‘I think we should go back.’ I looked up in time to see her glare defiantly at Lizzie. ‘And I don’t think we should have to do one of your dumb forfeits.’

Seth turned to her. ‘We need to wait out the storm. We’ll talk about going back once it’s died down.’

I ducked my chin into my coat. ‘C-can we get in?’

Seth tried the door. ‘It’s locked up tight.’

Kyle stood next to him. His clothes were black as usual and his
disembodied face floated ghoulishly in the shadows. ‘We could break a window.’

Seth shook his head. ‘I’m just going to walk around the property.’ He looked at me. ‘Stay right here.’

‘Wait.’ Lizzie ran to his side. ‘Double Dares is my game. I’ll come with you.’

I leaned against the cold stone, watched the rain come down and tried to stifle the voice that urged me to run.

Nonchalantly Pandra propped herself on the wall just outside the cover, simultaneously flaunting her indifference to the rain and guarding my escape route.

Lenny huddled at Kyle’s side. The older boy glanced down crossly. ‘Get under cover, man.’

Lenny shook his head and pointed at me. ‘Not while she’s in there.’

‘It isn’t much drier under here anyway, not with this wind,’ Belinda moaned, and flicked her blonde hair.

Devoted Max swiftly undid his jacket and spread it out, sheltering her from the soaking gusts.

After a long silence, broken only by the rumbling and hissing of the storm, the door cracked open.

Lizzie peered out at us from the dark hole. ‘We found an unlocked window,’ she whispered.

‘Come inside, quick.’ Seth appeared behind her and held his hand out to me. I grabbed it like a lifeline and just as lightning turned the abandoned farm into a photo negative I ducked through the door.

Seth guided us through a narrow kitchen. I held my head as I walked behind him. The quivering torchlight made the walls seem to spin and I felt as if I was about to fall into the greasy range.

‘Why don’t we just switch on a light?’ Belinda wanted to know.

Lizzie answered her. ‘We’re breaking and entering, dummy.’

Seth whispered over the sound of Belinda’s indignant inhalation. ‘We can put a light on at the back of the house. We just don’t want anyone to see it from the road.’

Outside the kitchen we found ourselves corralled by doors warped with age and damp.

Seth aimed the torch and we ducked through the sagging corridor into a sitting room where the worn carpet barely absorbed the sound of our feet.

Immediately my eyes went to the window and Seth pulled the
curtains, hiding my view of the pounding rain. As he did so, Belinda found the light switch.

Under the electric glow I immediately felt less disorientated. The single unforgiving bulb showed a blue cord sofa that oozed stuffing and, in front of the grate, a red rug thick with patches of dog hair. It wasn’t exactly homely, but it was safe.

Exhaustion anchored me in place and I watched, uncaring, as Belinda claimed the couch. She looked pointedly at Max and he laid his coat, wet side down, on the cushions. Max perched on the arm, as close to her as possible and with a creaking of springs Lizzie took the other spot on the sofa.

Bonelessly I folded on to the floor where I stood, too weary even to remove my wet coat. Seth knelt next to me and wrapped his arm round my shoulders. I looked up, surprised, then relaxed into the crook of his elbow.

‘Well, this
is
nice,’ Belinda said sarcastically

‘Any chance of lighting the fire, do you think?’ Kyle dropped on to the rug next to Lenny and looked wistfully at the soot-blackened grate.

Seth shook his head. ‘Now we’re here, Cass and I have something to show you.’

Curious faces turned to me as I fumbled my rucksack open and removed the book.

‘What is it?’ Belinda leaned forward. Then she screamed as if I’d shoved a box of tarantulas in her face.

‘What the
hell
?’ Max grabbed her, but his own cheeks were ice white. ‘Where did you get that?’

Lizzie and Kyle wore matching expressions of horror. Lenny crawled forward to see better and his mouth fell open. ‘I-it’s
the book
,’ he whispered.

I let Seth answer. ‘We found it in the Doctor’s office. It belongs to her.’

Only Pandra didn’t react.

‘Pandra?’ I whispered.

She ignored me. ‘Are you going to read it, or what?’

Seth opened the book at the retelling of the legend. He hesitated then offered it to Pandra.

She half dropped it on the floor in front of her, wiped her fingers on her jeans and began to read out loud.

The words of the book, once spoken, seemed to crowd into the air around the room, and made the space feel more cramped by the moment. The storm drew nearer as the paragraphs soaked
into the air around me, turning the room from a cosy bolt-hole to a lamp-lit pit.

Eventually Pandra’s voice started to hoarsen. When she reached the pages of notes she flicked through as confused as I had been, then slammed the book shut and kicked it across the floor. The ancient text bounced once and landed face up on the rug like a broken bird. Then she turned on me. ‘You don’t believe any of this, do you?’

Outside, the storm had settled into a heavy rain. It battered the windows like a besieging sea. ‘I don’t think it matters,’ I muttered. ‘What matters is – does the Doctor believe it?’

Lizzie’s hands covered her mouth. ‘You mean . . . the Doctor wants us to try and free some trapped angel?’ Her brown eyes were wide over the smudges of exhaustion that marked us all like brands. ‘Can she make us do . . . those terrible things?’

Seth nodded. ‘We think so.’

Finally Lenny spoke. ‘I’m not an evil spirit,’ he whispered. His voice could barely be heard over the cackling of the rain.

Lizzie leaned towards him. ‘Of course you aren’t. None of us are!’ She glared around, defying anyone to disagree.

Kyle rubbed his hair into wet black spikes. ‘The point, man, is
that the
Doctor
thinks some of us might be. She’s using the treatment to turn us into . . . killing machines.’

‘So, she’s a fraud.’ Max’s shoulders slumped and his voice dropped so low I could barely hear him. ‘Do you know what I gave up back home to come here?’

Kyle blinked. ‘If she’s a fake . . . does that mean we don’t have past lives?’

Belinda rubbed her eyes, acting more like a normal little girl than I’d ever seen her. ‘If we aren’t reincarnating . . . then what’s wrong with us? Why do we have the nightmares?’

‘We are reincarnating.’ I slid abruptly out of Seth’s arms. ‘I know you don’t believe the legend, but that part at least is true.’ I folded my legs under me. ‘Let me tell you how I ended up in Mount Hermon.’

When I’d finished the others seemed to be holding their breath. Even the sound of the rain had faded. Then Kyle spoke. ‘They really found the bodies where you said they’d be?’

I nodded. ‘That’s why my parents brought me here.’

Pandra edged away from me. ‘You were Jewish?’

I raised my hand to her then let it fall.

‘No.’ Seth spoke up and his voice sounded strange. He leaned away from me and stared as though I’d grown horns. ‘She wasn’t Jewish.’

I frowned. ‘I was. I was the little girl, Zillah. She was killed in the massacre.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? Quote me something from the Torah.’ He looked at me and his eyes contained none of their usual warmth. ‘Anything. Go on.’

I stuttered, my mind a blank. ‘I-I can’t.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘That’s because you weren’t Zillah.’

‘Just because I can’t quote some stupid religious book!’

His head came up as if I’d jerked him with a string. ‘It isn’t a stupid book.’ His voice held a warning and I blinked. ‘I know you weren’t Zillah, Cassie.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’ Anger raged into me.

Why is he doing this?

‘I know.’ He leaned forward. ‘Because
I
was Zillah.’

For a moment I couldn’t respond. He might as well have kicked me in the chest. The others looked back and forth between us.

I had to speak. ‘
Y-you
think
you
were . . . Zillah?’

‘I can tell you everything you’d want to know about her life.’ Seth spoke bitterly. ‘I’ve been making pretty good progress, apparently.’

‘. . . Then who was I?’

Pandra slithered closer to me, like a straying cat returning home for its dinner. ‘Don’t you see, Cassie?’

Confusion fogged my thoughts. ‘See what?’

‘You were at the massacre, but you weren’t one of the Jews.’

I shook my head, trying to stop the words that were marching towards her mouth.

‘You were a Nazi, Cassie. You were one of the murderers.’ Teeth showed on Pandra’s bottom lip.

I reeled to my feet as rejections smashed across my tongue. ‘No!’ The initials on the sweet-shop window came back to me. ‘K-Kurt.’ My hands went to my throat. ‘I was K-Kurt Faber.’

A Nazi killer
.

Seth’s mouth twisted as if he’d sunk his teeth into a lemon. ‘All the things you dreamed from Zillah’s point of view were things that Kurt saw, weren’t they?’

I blinked, recalling Kurt’s face in every single vision.

He’s . . . right. Everything I dreamed about Zillah was witnessed
by Kurt. It’s . . . guilt. I’m experiencing her death over and over because of Kurt’s guilt
.

Hatred surged into Seth’s mismatched eyes. ‘That’s why you aren’t afraid of loud bangs and gunshots.’ He grimaced. ‘Well, I am.’ The words ‘
because of you
’ hovered in the air between us, unspoken.

Belinda turned back to me. ‘You’re afraid of drowning, aren’t you? Do you know why?’

I curled my hands into the rug. ‘If my dreams are about K-Kurt . . . if that’s true . . . I-I think I’ve seen his death. I didn’t know it was him . . . I thought I was Zillah in my last life, but it must have been him, mustn’t it?’ I choked on a sob. ‘He fell down a hill and got caught in barbed wire. H-he drowned in a puddle.’

Seth’s legs jerked. ‘The man who shot –’ he paused and I knew he was about to say ‘me’ – ‘Zillah, drowned in a puddle?’

My mouth filled with the taste of dirty rainwater and I nodded.

‘Good.’

I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood and my next words tumbled out unintentionally. ‘He knew the Doctor.’

There was a stunned silence and then Pandra’s laugh rang out like a series of rifle shots. ‘That’s stupid.’

‘No.’ I gestured at the book, which sat between us like a toad on a stone. ‘I-I remember . . . Leaza Ashworth was in Kurt’s life . . . as Frau Asche. Who knows how many of our other past lives too. I’m sure of it now – she
is
Azael.’

I was surrounded by disbelieving faces.

Finally Lizzie broke the ice-rimmed silence. ‘I’ve dreamed about the Doctor before but I thought it was just real dreaming, you know,
not
memory.’ She thrust her drying hair out of her face. ‘If it was a memory . . . then she was in Ireland during the troubles.’