Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) (13 page)

“I’m glad to hear that. You love cooking, don’t you?”

Sarah nodded. Her mouth was full. “I always cooked for my parents,” she answered as soon as she could.

“I love cooking too.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, believe it or not. And I’m not bad at it. I’ll bake your birthday cake. It’s the twenty-second of October, isn’t it? Your birthday?”
It was in Harry’s files
.

“Yes. Are you not worried about your street cred? Baking a cake, I mean?” she laughed.

“Not at all. Cooking is cool. I’ll make you one shaped like the moon.”

“Why the moon?”

“Because you remind me of the moon,” he said, and looked into his bowl. Sarah blushed.

“When is your birthday?” she asked quickly, moving the conversation on.

“Not long to go either. It’s the sixteenth of November.”

“You’re a Scorpio.”

“Yes. Do you know anything about star signs?”

“Not really. There’s a few books about these kind of things in my grandmother’s library in Islay, but I never really looked at them. Bryony knows about these things. I’m a Libra. I’m supposed to be balanced, but I’m as moody as anything.”

“That’s true, yes.”

“Hey, you’re supposed to say no, of course you aren’t!”

“But you
are
.”

Sarah laughed. He was looking a bit better. His skin had that very un-Scottish golden glow again, the light from the silver candles dancing on his handsome face.

“OK, then, I’m moody!”

“A nice moody, though,” he conceded.

Sarah smiled, and wished that the evening would never end.

Suddenly it seems

That nothing matters but you

Sarah lay in her bed, thinking what a strange day it had been. Half of it horrific, half of it peaceful and lovely. She couldn’t believe she’d been so suspicious of Harry, when he first arrived. It felt like he’d been there forever. She closed her eyes, listening to the soft sound of the radio coming from his room, and drifted away …

Time to slip into that strange, trance-like kind of sleep, and the vision took her. It often happened like that. Sometimes it was so quick that she’d close her eyes in her bed, and open them in a different world.

That night she didn’t find herself in that surreal, strangely-lit world her dreams had taken her to lately – those grassy plains under a purple sky. Instead she was standing in her garden, under one of the oak trees. Golden-red leaves were falling and swirling all around her, floating on little whirlpools. The sky was bright blue, clear, cloudless.

She brushed a leaf out of her hair, and turned around, checking to see if she was alone. She looked towards the oak, and back. Someone had appeared right in front of her.

“Sarah.”

She knew that voice. It was the pale, black-eyed boy again. Sarah felt a deep, sudden joy invade her, and with it came a sense of disorientation, as if a strange fog had risen in her mind, to cloud her thoughts.
There he is! He’s back!
That was all she could think, as if every other consideration had been dissolved.

“Who are you? Are you a demon?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, muffled, like sounds on snowy days.

“I’m not a demon,” he said, and he sounded … pleading. Yes, that was it. Pleading. There was sadness in his voice.
Why?

“Who are you, then?”

“I was sent to you.”

“Who sent you?”

He didn’t answer; he just stroked her face, tracing her lips gently with his finger. “I never thought you’d be so beautiful.” He said it simply, as if he’d been making small talk.

Sarah blushed, and didn’t know what to say.
Of course, I have to be as hopeless in my dreams as I am in reality
.

“The spirits of the air,” he whispered. “The ravens today. It was me who sent them.”

“You?”

“I won’t let anything happen to you, my Sarah.” He took her face in his hands. For a second, she thought he was going to kiss her. Instead, he spoke again.

“Sarah …” His voice was like velvet, like warm water. Like a spell.

“Yes.”

“I’ll be back soon.”

Don’t go
. “When?”

“Soon.” His eyes were burning into hers. Her mind clouded over. There was nothing left to say, nothing left to do but let herself float away …

“Soon,” she echoed.

Sarah opened her eyes, and she was in her room. Her head was fuzzy, as if she’d just woken up from an anaesthetic.
Oh no, I’m awake. Please, let me fall asleep again. Let me see him again.

She sighed, a sigh of regret, a sigh of joy, and closed her eyes again, savouring the moment. She wanted more of him, and then some more. A deep, deep happiness invaded her, in spite of all that was happening. As if the new world she was entering could hide some beautiful surprises, and not only misery and fear. As if she were standing at the edge of a warm sea, and all she had to do was dive.

I don’t even know his name.

She thought of the golden leaves swirling around him. She thought of how all her thoughts had left her mind, as if carried away by an invisible force.

She didn’t write that dream down. It was a secret, something only for her to know.

Sarah drifted back to sleep, a dreamless sleep, and resurfaced at dawn. The grey, cold light of the early morning was sweeping the room as she pushed the blankets off. A shower of leaves fell off the bed, red, yellow, golden, swirling around for a few seconds before landing on the floor, one by one.

It could only be
his
doing. Sarah looked at the leaves in wonder. They were so beautiful. They were dead, or dying, their bright colours one last breath before the end – but their agony was amazing to see. Sarah untangled a red one from her hair.

Leaf. In my heart, I’ll call him Leaf.

Salvation comes like fire

It’s her, then. The one my father chose for me.

I was expecting … Oh, I don’t know what I was expecting. I only know that I was dreading it, I was dreading to find out who was to share all this with me, if she’d drag me deeper, if she’d make it all even worse.

But she won’t. She’s my salvation. I burn, she’s water; I suffocate, she’s air – I can just imagine, when I am one with her, how light will flood my eyes, how the night will part and let me out into the day. When I break her, the light she has inside will come out, like a seal breaks to reveal the hidden message – and she’ll have to share that light with me. I’ll be saved, and she’ll be the one who falls. I’ll burn her down; I’ll kill her and give her life again. I’ll be true to her. I’ll never leave her, never.

She smells of light and life, she smells of wind. I can see her, sitting in the darkness with a crown of fire, surrounded by spirits, her skin as white as my mother’s.

I wish I could just take her, but that’s not how it works. She has to come willingly. She has to need me as much as I need her, and there’s a long way to go, before I win her trust. To make her want me was a good start. I could feel her fear dissolving into desire – it makes it all so much easier, that the one he chose for me is not only ready for the taking, she’s also longing to be taken. She’s
asking
to be taken away from all this. My influence works a lot better this way; it sinks deeper.

Before anything else, though, I have to keep her alive. I could stop her enemies right now. I could destroy them all. But I won’t. They’ll attack, and I’ll be there to save her. I’ll be her protector, her guardian angel. She’ll fall for me, and when the time comes, she’ll follow me.

I used to dread my new life, now I long for it. My father made the right choice. There can be nobody else but her.

Why did you let me love you

If you had to go?

Castelmonte, Italy

Harry and I were like a two-star constellation. Eternal, unmoveable.

Meant to be.

Now that his star has been taken from me, I’m wandering through this black, infinitely lonely universe, half of something, half of nothing.

I was sixteen when I met Harry. He had come to Lyon to speak to my father, Arnaut Brun, the chief of the Brun family, the most powerful Secret Family in France. My father now lies in the cemetery of Saint Michel, our family chapel, having died in the terrible knowledge that his wife and daughter were to follow the same fate, at the hands of the same faceless enemy.

He was right about my mother, although not the way he thought. They didn’t come for her. She just lost the will to live when my father died, and withered day after day until one night sleep turned into death. As for me, I was far away already. I had followed Harry Midnight, the mesmerising heir of the Midnight family, to Japan, and then to London.

My life turned out so different from what my parents had planned for me. I was supposed to marry some heir from a Secret Family, maybe Vincent Didier, the eldest of the Didier sons. That would have been a perfect match, a perfect alliance, and our children would have carried incredible powers in their blood.

But Harry came along, and as soon as I looked into his eyes, I knew I could never marry Vincent. I knew there could be nobody else but Harry. I also knew that my parents would never, ever accept him as their son-in-law. The Midnight legacy was strong but tainted by its divide, and because of that Harry would never sit in the Sabha, among the chiefs of the most prestigious Secret Families. He was not one a Brun heir could ever marry. He was not
one of our kind
, my father cruelly said.

I’ll never forget the day my mother turned her back to me, as if I wasn’t her daughter any more. I’ll never forget the day my father took my ring away, the ancient heirloom of the Brun family, given to the firstborn of each generation.

I never regretted it. I could lose my family, my inheritance, the world I’d known as a child – it was all worth it, to be with Harry Midnight.

But the day Sean arrived in London, I knew it was the last time I’d ever see Harry.

To leave him was like having my heart torn out.

When I was a child my parents and I used to spend every summer in Lac Blanc, in our country house – that was before the woods became too dangerous, before too many things started to seep through. We used to take long walks along the lakeshore, watching the water dance and shimmer.

One day, during one of our walks, my father stopped suddenly. He turned around, arms outstretched to block our way.

“Better to go back, Marcelle,” he said, and gestured at something lying on the road. My mother led me away in a hurry, and we double-backed towards our house, away from whatever had stopped my father in his tracks.

But it’d been too late. I had seen already. It was a swan, lying open and bloodied on the pebbles, its feathers stained with red, its head thrown back at a strange angle, its chest half-eaten.

At the time I thought it was an omen. I thought that one day that would be me.

To leave Harry that day made me feel as if I were that swan, slaughtered, lying opened and naked for everyone to see. My heart eaten away by something sharp-toothed, something strong and merciless.

I accepted I had to go because I have a duty. We all have to fight, regardless of whether we want to keep on living or not.

And I don’t. Because there’s no life for me without Harry.

I’ll do all I can to protect Aiko, the only heir left in the whole of Japan, and to help our brave, selfless Gamekeepers, the Frison family. This little corner of Italy is the only safe haven left, as far as we know. The Sabha have been infiltrated, and there’s nobody we can trust. What’s happening beyond this village in the mountains, what’s happening beyond the Alps, is a mystery to us. Nobody will contact us in any way, because anything could give us away.

We’re safe, for now. Until they find us. And when they do, I must be here to protect Aiko at all costs.

“It’s not the first time there’s been an enemy at the door,” Leandro Frison had said, remembering the War. “I was a young boy, but we all had to fight. There was no hiding away; you had to choose a side. And that’s what we’re doing now.”

I know what Harry had to ask Sean. He asked him to protect his cousin, Sarah Midnight, the last heir of the secluded, mysterious Midnight family. The only family in Europe – or the only one we know of – who refused to be part of the Sabha, and adhere to its rulings. The only family – a clan, they call themselves – who remained a mystery even to my father and the greatest, most prestigious Secret Families. I can only imagine how precious, how unique their powers must be. I caught a glimpse of them as Harry told me about his uncle, his fearsome grandmother, Morag Midnight, and their mansion on a Scottish island. I imagine it to be somewhere windy and wild; I imagine salt-encrusted rocks and grey waves, and the cry of seagulls above.