a shower of rain. She shivered. Long lost voices from the past were calling her. She clutched the stack of letters to her chest.
Sean kept looking around, checking all the dark corners in the room. “Someone left them here. That is pretty obvious. The question is, human or demon?”
“Whoever it was, why did they leave my grandmother’s letters? Why did they have them in the first place?”
“Maybe they’d taken them from the house, and now they’ve returned them,” guessed Elodie.
Sean shrugged his shoulders. “Why? And why now?”
“Because they knew I was coming,” said Sarah, and looked at him, eyes large with fear.
“Watch Sarah. I won’t be long,” Nicholas said suddenly, and before his words could register, he had raced across the room and jumped out of the window.
“Not on your own! Nicholas!” shouted Sarah. But he was already running down the grassy slope that led to the beach.
“I’ll go with him,” said Sean, and poised himself to jump.
“Stay with Sarah,” Elodie overtook him and easily coaxed her agile, supple body out of the window and onto the grass below, giving Sean no time to stop her.
28
An Infinite Horizon
Dark and light
In an infinite dance
Blessing all the shadows
That come my way
The sand was wet under Nicholas’s feet as he ran. He needed to call to his Elementals, to his father, and he didn’t dare do so from the house, in case someone picked up on it – particularly Elodie. She puzzled him. It was as if she could read some kind of subtext in everything that happened, a hidden story that no one else could sense.
Who could have left those letters? Was it a demon’s doing, once again without his knowledge?
The beach was vast, endless, a stretch of pale sand, damp with rain, and a whirl of sky and sea and wind all mixed together. Nicholas could barely see as dusk spread into the sky, slowly turning the short December day into night.
When Nicholas felt far enough from the house to open his mind to his father he stopped and stood, eyes closed, calling – letting his thoughts calm and then dissolve, to make room for the invocation.
And then he felt it.
A vague, shapeless form inside his head, weak in comparison to the shadow voices and yet strong enough to enter his mind. He stopped the invocation at once, forcing himself to come back to the here and now, frozen by the intrusion. Who was it? He turned round, his eyes narrowed, searching, until finally he saw her, standing on a grassy dune. Elodie was a spot of white against the stormy sky, her long, blonde hair blowing in the wind. She was completely still, her arms at her sides, looking back at him, silent.
She must know enough, he thought. Enough to harm him. He had to show her that nothing good could come from spying on him. He had to show her what happened to the Secret heirs in the new world created by him and his father.
Nicholas’s ravens started dancing above their heads, endlessly circling the skies.
Ignoring Sean’s protests, Elodie had run as fast as she could. Nicholas’s long strides were hard to keep up with, but she was fast and kept pace – at a distance. It felt strange to go against Sean’s will. He was a Gamekeeper, and she a Secret heir, but he’d always taken the lead in their small group – Harry was so often busy with the Sabha or on solo missions, and she and Mary Anne, Sean’s former girlfriend and fellow Gamekeeper, respected his authority. That wasn’t the natural order of things. It was uncommon for a Secret heir to defer as she did to Sean – but it seemed to have worked out that way between them.
Since Harry had died, though, since their whole world had changed, she had felt a new strength, a new self-belief. Italy had made her tougher, she would make her own choices. Also, Sean’s judgement about Nicholas was clouded by his feelings for Sarah – of that Elodie was certain. But perhaps there was some truth in them too. She had to figure it out for herself.
She kept to the dunes, out of sight, trying to let her mind reach out to the lone figure as he ran through the gathering gloom, trying to make out where he was going, and why. And where he had come from.
Elodie ran on, keeping Nicholas in her sights, her face and hands moist with drizzle and sea mist. Suddenly, Nicholas stopped,