Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) (9 page)

While Anne lived with James, while she learnt all her magical skills from Morag Midnight, I was running and running on a treadmill, getting nowhere, or at least nowhere that mattered. People standing up to clap and cheer; the prizes, the all-important gigs I got; it was all a whirl of nothing to me.

Contrary to what many people thought, it wasn’t Anne who’d lost our lifelong competition, it was me. It was
me
, the famous, rich one, who’d lost everything. Any chance of happiness I ever had was gone. My life was empty, and set to stay that way.

Word came through they’d had a daughter. I was playing in Hong Kong when I found out. I felt so ill I thought I’d pass out. Their life paraded in front of me like a trophy, tormenting me every day, every night, while I played my soulless music all around the world. I knew James pitied me for the choice he’d made, the one that left me out in the cold. Anne didn’t pity me; she didn’t hate me, she wasn’t scared of me – she simply didn’t think of me at all. I didn’t even deserve a thought; I was so far removed from their lives. I didn’t matter. I never existed.

I was in a haze for what seemed like years, sleepwalking through my life, wishing I was dead. When I came back to myself, I could see clearly: I had to be like the Midnights, I had to
become
them, in order to destroy them.

The Midnights had set fire to my life, burnt it down, and walked away – but they had left something behind, like a precious stone, intact under the ash and dust of my existence. It was a little nugget of knowledge, a black seed that I could plant, and watch while it grew, its pale roots feeding on my dreams. Secret knowledge the Midnights wouldn’t touch, waiting to be cracked, waiting to come to life. And I did it, I brought it to life.

Like Anne, I don’t come from a magical family. The blood that runs in my veins is as common and plain as hers. But she had mentors – James and Morag, who took her by the hand into the amazing, exciting, dangerous world they lived in. I was only taught briefly, so briefly. I did the rest myself.

It took ten years to learn how to open the rivers of time – ten years to learn how to slip them into our reality, the creatures that walked the earth before we came.
Demons
is one of the many names they were given through time; in fact they are
Surari
, in the ancient language of the first human tribes. Legends and myths talk about them; the folklore of every country in the world has stories about them.
Supernatural creatures
, they’re called sometimes – but there’s nothing supernatural about them; they’re creatures of nature like us, just a lot more ancient. They seem unnatural because they don’t belong to this time, because they should not be here, among us.

But they are, and they keep coming.

The Midnight motto is:
Don’t Let Them Roam
. My motto is:
Let Them Come
.

The Midnights and the other Secret Families around the world were entrusted with the duty to send the demons back where they came from, to the primeval waters that covered the Earth at the beginning of time – while it’s me, and those like me, who force the flow of time in order to get them here.

The Surari we’re allowed to call are only as powerful as the magic that summons them. Some of us, like the members of my Valaya, can only call Ferals, the animal-like demons with great strength but very limited understanding. Ferals are brutal, senseless beasts. They can also fall into our world by chance, through a fold in time and space, unknowing, unwilling, and find themselves lost and raging in a strange land. They end up living in the sewage system, in condemned buildings, in the few corners of wilderness we have left, and scavenge and kill to survive.

Some of us – like me, of course – have enough knowledge, enough power to call the Sentient ones, the strongest ones, the ones that do more, so much more than just kill without a reason. The Sentient demons
want
to be called, they long to come back and rule the earth again, and we can use this desire of theirs for our own gain. They have Slaves themselves, minions they use as we would use guard dogs.

It’s not easy to keep the Sentients in check – it takes all our skills and infinite vigilance to keep them under control and to stop them from taking over, bending the Ferals to their will. I can feel the Sentient ones planning to turn the Valaya from a coven of humans each with a demon servant, into a coven of demons each with a human servant. I can feel them conniving, waiting, biding their time. They’ll never succeed – it’s my bidding, or the dark waters of the world before time. I won’t show any mercy, for anyone. What mercy was ever shown to me?

My Valaya is not the only one. Just as there are many Secret Families around the world, there are also many more of us. Many Valaya, many Masters and Mistresses, each with their own demon, each with their own territory. And above all of us …

I can’t say. I can’t say who leads us all, the One whose orders I follow. All I know is that the Time of Demons is coming again, and it’ll be us, the Masters and Mistresses all over the world, who will rise up and rule. The Secret Families will be gone forever, and nothing, nobody will be there to stop us. It has started already. The heirs of the Secret Families have started falling all over the world, a harvest of blood.

But Sarah – Sarah is mine. It’ll be me who puts an end to her life.

James and Anne stayed in the light, the golden couple and their perfect world. I longed for the dark – what else did I have left? I wanted to be like them – I wanted to
be
them – all I could do was to become their reversed image, their negative.

You might say I
live
in a nightmare – truth is, my life turned into a nightmare the day I met the Midnights. I’ve been tied to this wheel, and I can never be free until they are all dead, every last one of them.

It was the Midnights that taught me how to lie, and I learnt well. I’m Cathy Duggan, when everyone is looking; in my heart, I am Catherine Hollow, the Mistress.

I call on my nightmares

Again and again

I am

My own destruction

Sarah was at the window with Shadow asleep in her lap, watching the first light spreading on the moors. Strange how even when our life has been broken and put back together in a way we can’t recognize, even when we want everything to look different, because
we
are different – even then, the stars don’t change their place, the wind blows like it always has done, and dawn still breaks. The world looks the same, and still nothing is the same. Like an imperceptible shift of the earth’s axis has happened: it’s invisible to the eye, but it has enormous consequences.

Sarah was dressed already: black leggings, a blouse and short black skirt, and her ever-present boots. Her hair was tied back in her usual perfect ponytail. She had only slept for four hours, but her sleep had been heavy. She felt rested, in a strange, charged kind of way. Like a coil ready to spring.

She thought of what happened the night before, of the demon-dog that had attacked her in her own home. Never, never before had a creature dared to attack the Midnight home. But with her parents gone …

One thing is for sure: I’m not going to sit here and wait to be killed.

The Valaya. Human beings, not demons. People like her, like her friends, her teachers, her neighbours, her classmates. People who looked into the abyss and decided they liked it, that that’s where they belonged; who formed an alliance with the ancient forces of the land, to claim it back for themselves. She never thought that anyone would ever willingly ally themselves with demons. Not after all she’d seen.

For the thousandth time, she went through the list of names she had copied from her parents’ files the night before.

        
Michael Sheridan

        
Sheila Douglas

        
John Burton

        
Katy McHarg

        
Simon Knowles

        
Mary Brennan

        
Catherine Hollow

Sarah took her head in her hands.
I’ve never hurt a human being before. I don’t want to, I can’t
…

A knock on the door.

“Sarah, are you awake?” It was Harry.

“Yes, come in.”

He looked terrible, with purple shadows under his eyes, a faded T-shirt and the same jeans as the day before.

“Did you sleep OK?” he asked.

“Not much, but OK. How did you … not sleep?”

Harry smiled. “Exactly. Would you like some coffee?”

“I’ll make it.” Even in the most dramatic of circumstances, Sarah wasn’t going to relinquish her perfect cappuccino.

On her way downstairs, she stood at the mirror and looked at herself. She couldn’t help a warm feeling spreading through her veins, somehow, even in the midst of all that fear, all that grief. Because Harry was there, and she wasn’t alone.

Sitting at the breakfast table, Harry and Sarah were sipping their cappuccinos in silence. Suddenly the phone rang. They both jumped, as if they’d received an electric shock.

“It’s just the phone,” laughed Harry. “Talk about nerves!”

No wonder.

Sarah went to answer it, and in a few minutes, she was back.

“It was Aunt Juliet. They wanted me to spend the day with them. I managed to convince her I’m too busy.”

“You are. Today we begin.”

Sarah felt a knot of fear in her stomach.
What do we begin?

“What’s the first name on the list?” Harry’s clear eyes were shining. Sarah could see how excited he was.
He loves hunting, just like my parents did
.

The realization came at once:
I’m not like them. I hate all this. It’s my duty, but I’d never choose it
.

“Michael Sheridan,” Sarah read. “Harry …”

“Great. Let’s go get the daggers.”

“How do you know where to find him?”

Harry lifted his iPhone. “I’ve got … people. Friends who find out things for me.”

“Right.”
Dodgy
. “Harry, I can’t …”

“You can’t what? You don’t want to just sit here waiting for the next attack, do you?”

“No. But I can’t hunt human beings.”

“We won’t be hunting
them
, the people on the list. We’re after the Surari they called to their service. It took the Valaya years to gain enough knowledge to summon them. They’d need years to summon others. In the meantime, they’ll be helpless, or as good as.”

Sarah closed her eyes. So many things to learn, so much knowledge to make hers. A whole new world, a new life. A terrifying one, worse than the one she had before. And that one was bad enough.

How much I hate all this
, she thought, and immediately she felt breathless, anxiety weighing on her lungs and stopping them from filling up with air.

“Harry, if we go around looking for demons in the middle of the day, someone will see us and there’ll be panic!”

“Let’s say that today we go for a lookaround. Just to see how the land lies. Let’s go get the daggers. By the way, do you mind if I use your father’s? I have a dagger of my own, but his feels great in the hand. So light. A real treat.”

“The
sgian-dubh
? Of course. You can have it. But if it’s just a
lookaround
, why the daggers?”

“You can’t go wrong with a dagger. I learnt that in Japan … The hard way.” Harry raised his left arm. There was a deep, white scar from his elbow to his wrist. He smiled, that arrogant smile again. With a dimple on his left cheek, she noticed. “Also, there’s quite a few things I can do with a blade.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.”

“You take the dagger, then. I’ve got the blackwater,” said Sarah stubbornly.

“Take the dagger. Trust me.”

“I don’t.” Her expression was so mutinous, so childish, that he couldn’t help smiling. “OK then. Let’s say you do this as a favour. For your long-lost cousin.”

Sarah gave in. She rolled her eyes, and walked towards the spiral staircase to get to the basement.

“Your dagger is not in the basement. It’s under your pillow.”

“Under my pillow? How did it get there?”

Harry smiled, and didn’t answer. Sarah felt her stomach tighten.
He’d done it again. He sent me to sleep. How creepy is this? He can put me to sleep, and I won’t remember a thing
.

She walked upstairs to her room, and took out the dagger from under her pillow. Upsetting her perfect bed made her skin crawl. She made her bed again, carefully. Then she tore the duvet away and made it once more, from scratch. She took a deep breath.
Better
.

She went back downstairs, holding the dagger with two fingers, as if it was something vaguely revolting.

“Are you wearing socks?” asked Harry.

“What?”

Harry lifted up his jeans around his right ankle, to reveal the
sgian-dubh
tied to it with a leather strap.