Blackfin Sky (25 page)

‘What is that?’

‘Gage needed the amber skull to focus his power. I never saw him without that thing, not once.’

The little boy made a shrill sound, and Sky saw him watching Gage with his dark eyes wide in horror. But the moment Gage looked inside, the windows darkened, until they became opaque. Gage showed no sign that he noticed, and continued staring through the glass.

‘Mum, what’s happening?’ Sky whispered. She felt blindly for her mother’s hand before remembering neither of them had any substance inside the memory.

‘The house knows I don’t want you to see this part of its memory, so it has shut itself off.’

‘What is Gage doing, then?’

A moment passed before Lily spoke again. ‘Gage has a gift for making others see what he wants them to see. And whatever he was making your grandfather see inside that house sent him after his wife and daughters with a meat cleaver.’

The memory faded, and this time Sky knew she was back in her own time, in her own body. She shivered under the blanket next to her mother.

‘The house has showed you everything that happened here, though, hasn’t it?’

Lily nodded. ‘It needed to be heard. It doesn’t show me as often now as it used to when we first moved here, so I think its wounds are healing.’

‘You talk about the house like it’s a living thing.’

‘Gui’s family were happy here; it was their home. Gage destroyed that in a matter of minutes, turned it into a husk bathed in their blood. That trauma inhabits the house now, but underneath it is the happiness the Rousseaus brought to it while they lived here. It’s the reason I’ve never said anything to your father about this. If he knew what I saw, he’d insist we moved somewhere else, and he would lose his only connection to his family. I’d never take that from him, so the house and I have learned to accept one another.’

Sky smiled wryly. ‘But you still come out here a lot.’

‘We do what we have to to get over the past.’ Lily’s words were so close to what Gui had said about leading
a quiet life
that Sky’s throat clogged with tears. He might not be her father by blood, but he loved her and her mother. Lily smiled like she guessed what Sky was thinking. ‘And it helps having a happy family around you.’

Sky squeezed her mum’s hand in response. ‘So now that I know what it is you do, does that mean you’d be able to help me remember what happened to me the night I fell from the pier?’

Lily shook her head slowly. ‘If you can’t remember it, I won’t be able to see it either.’

They sat listening to the creak of the old swing for a minute or so.

‘That sucks,’ Sky said finally, and her mother nodded, her eyes looking down the hill toward the pier.

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’

21

The blackfins were out in force later that afternoon as Sky sat with her legs swinging over the edge of the pier. She’d stayed in her room until she heard her dad leave for the garage, not sure what to say to him now that she knew Severin was her biological father.
If I even need to say anything at all,
she thought. Knowing the truth hadn’t changed the man who’d raised her.

But she needed time to think things over. With her mother working a late shift at the diner, Sky had headed down to the pier to work out how she was going to shake loose the memory of what had happened on the night of her party.

And if Mum can see my memories, do I really want her to know what happened with Sean after the fight he had with Randy? That’s just way TMI.

Sky leaned her head forward onto the horizontal bar of the guardrail.

‘You look like you’re about to jump in.’

Sky jerked around at the sound of Jared’s voice, and found him striding towards her along the boardwalk.

‘Get out of my head!’

She hadn’t meant to shout it, and after the silence-that-wasn’t of Jared speaking to her, yet
not,
the noise made them both flinch. He joined her, his long legs swinging closer to the dark water than Sky’s booted feet.

‘Sorry.’

‘I didn’t mean to yell. I’m just a little sick of creepy tricks like that.’ Sky shrugged, gesturing vaguely toward his legs. ‘Are you all right, after the other night, I mean?’

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him nod. Sky kept her eyes on the blackfins breaking through the dark water in front of her, there one moment and gone the next, hidden by the reflection of a grey sky.

‘Where do you fit into all this, Jared?’

He didn’t insult her by pretending not to know what she meant. He didn’t say anything at all. Instead, he took a roll of mints from his pockets, passing one to her before taking one himself. Sky held the hard mint in her hand for a moment before she let it drop into the churning water below.

‘You could have just said you didn’t want one.’

She got to her feet, smoothing her skirt down where it had creased from sitting so long in the damp air.

‘Have you somehow been sending me back to the circus? Is it your fault I keep landing back there?’

He was so long in answering that she didn’t think he was going to.

‘I’ll see you around, then.’ She started to walk back along the pier.

‘Sky, wait.’ She heard the sound of him scrambling to follow her but didn’t turn around at first. ‘
Sky.
’ It only took him three paces to catch up. ‘The first time, yes. I guided you while you were asleep back to the circus sixteen years ago. I
had
to. But it wasn’t me after that, you went back by yourself. I just tagged along that time when you saw Madame Curio.’

‘It was you I saw that night outside my house!’ Sky remembered all too clearly the outline reflected in the darkened TV screen, how she’d thought she was imagining things after her bizarre encounter at the circus. She looked up into his dark eyes, and recognised the pained look in them. ‘You’re the little boy from the circus, aren’t you? You play mind tricks, make people do things they don’t want to.’ She pointed her finger at him for emphasis. ‘You’re working with Gage!’

His expression morphed from shock to anger in an instant. ‘You think I want to? You think I have any say in it? He never lets me … GAH!’

Jared raked his hands back through his electric blue-streaked hair.

‘I thought we were friends. I thought you liked my dad, that you were trying to help me figure out all this weirdness. But you weren’t trying to help me – you’ve been pushing me further and further into it all along!’

Even if he was telling the truth, and he’d only started the process, he’d still had no right to turn her life upside down like that.

‘Sky, I am your friend. I…’

She took a step away from him as he reached for her arm. ‘Jared, just … just stay the hell away from me!’

He looked stunned. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he marched past her with his shoulders hunched high against the cold breeze, and stopped.

‘Believe it or not, I
was
trying to help you. As much as he’d let me, anyway.’

Then he was gone.

Sky sank down against a wooden guard post, drawing her knees up to her chin. The wind would have been enough of an excuse for her tears, but she still refused to cry.

It wasn’t just Jared. It wasn’t that her dad wasn’t actually her father, and that she didn’t know how to talk to him about it. It wasn’t just the Swivellers. It wasn’t what her mother had shown her or the creepiness of living in a house where her grandfather had murdered his entire family. It was
everything.

Sean had become the only one she felt sure of, and at the same time, the least sure. She knew her feelings for him were real – even before this storm of craziness had swept her up, she had been drawn to him. But not like now, like some magnetic pull kept bringing her back to him.

And he felt it too, she was sure of it. The way he held her hand, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. She was caught on an elasticated line between Sean and the circus, and she had no idea what either of them wanted from her.

That’s not fair.

Sean had never asked anything of her. He never kept things from her, never pushed her in one direction or another. Just thinking about Sean made her want to see him, to be near him.

‘Well you might,’ the old woman said from her left, and Sky jerked her head up to look at Madame Curio. She was impeccably dressed in a tweed suit with neat brown brogues on her feet, which was in itself as shocking as the sudden appearance of the old gypsy woman. ‘He anchors you here, and you him. Better to love the one you are tied to than feel him weighing you down like … well, like an anchor.’

Sky smiled thinly. ‘How wonderfully cryptic.’

One toe of a brown brogue jabbed Sky in the shin.

‘Hey!’

‘That remark sounded more like your friend with all the eyeliner. It’s not time for self-pity now, child. There are things to be done before he arrives.’

‘Before
who
arrives?’

‘Gage, of course. The boy was given a task, but allowed his feelings for you to get in the way. Now he comes to deal with matters himself, and wherever he goes, evil follows.’

Sky drew her legs further from the offending brogues before she answered. ‘What does Gage want?’

The old woman looked exasperated for a second, but then her features softened. ‘He wants an anchor, but he needs you to get it for him.’

Anchor.
That was what she had called Sean a few minutes earlier.
What would Gage want with Sean?

‘You will discover the rest soon enough. I must be going now.’

‘Going? Where?’

But that addled look had settled over Madame Curio’s face again as she turned to look at the distant forms of the whales cutting the waves.

‘He took my mind, you know. Made me see too much.’

With brisk steps she walked to the end of the pier, and Sky watched in fascination as the old woman bent to re-tie her shoelace before climbing up onto the guardrail.

‘Hey! Madame Curio, it’s not safe!’

‘If you want any more answers, child, you’ll know where to find me.’

Madame Curio lifted one foot from the guardrail, and fell backwards.

‘No!’ Sky lunged forward to catch her, but the spot where Madame Curio had been was already empty, and Sky crashed into the guardrail. With a crack like a whip it splintered under her hands, and Sky had a second to take in the circle of bubbles where the woman had hit the water before she plunged in after her.

Cold swallowed her like a suit of needles. Darkness swallowed everything else.

Sky struggled frantically, kicking at the long skirt which wrapped around her legs like the groping hands of a hundred Swivellers. She couldn’t see Madame Curio, couldn’t see anything. Her lungs burned after only a few seconds, demanding that she return to the surface for air or be consumed by fire from within.

But the surface was too far away, the movement of the tide much stronger than it had looked from the pier. Another few seconds, and she could no longer feel the needles cutting into her hands. She could no longer feel her hands at all, and that was much worse.

Sean.

The thought had no focus. Still, it was enough to keep her fighting for the surface even as the feeling completely left her arms, then her legs.

Sean.

The blackness that had swallowed her was in her now, bleeding in through her mouth, her nose, her skin. Now she could feel nothing, knew nothing, but…

Sean.

Bells. She knew that sound, knew where she was.

Sky struggled to open her eyes, but it was too much effort. Instead she lay with grass and sawdust sticking to her numb flesh. Only her throat burned where she must have retched up the salty water.