Tide - By Daniela Sacerdoti Page 0,76

but a memory. She had only lived a few hundred years in the Shadows, a heartbeat from their point of view. Martyna’s fate had sealed his mother’s desire for freedom, and in a way, Martyna’s death set her free.

The love of his life and his mother. The two women he had loved and lost.

Nicholas went to visit their graves whenever he could. Ekaterina’s grave had been built by her human family; they thought that she’d died of heartache because of her newborn son’s death. They couldn’t know, of course, that although her body was in that grave, her spirit was alive, imprisoned and bound to the Shadows. Martyna was buried in the same graveyard. Because she’d taken her own life, she shouldn’t have been allowed to be entombed there, but the priest took pity on her and arranged for her to be buried against the stone wall, at the very edge of the cemetery, a few yards from her parents and sisters. Nobody except Nicholas ever visited Martyna, because her entire family were killed at their hands; there was nobody left. He was the only one who tended to her grave – and every time he went back it looked more abandoned, more forgotten.

Nicholas forbade himself from thinking that Sarah might follow the same path as his mother and Martyna. Sarah was stronger, wiser. More used to being alone, more used to suffering. Sarah would survive her destiny, he had to tell himself that.

Before she died, his mother had whispered her last wish, that when the time came for the King of Shadows to fade and leave his son to rule the Shadows, Nicholas would refuse. He had looked at her, desperately wanting to reassure her, but he’d said nothing.

38

Andromeda

Beneath the waves

What kills me

Is what saves me

It was nearly a relief to be in that place again. The place of dreams, with the purple sky and the endless waves of swaying grass, the heightened colours and the wind. Sarah sighed in her sleep. At last the dreams were talking to her.

She was standing alone on soft, mossy ground, shivering in her T-shirt and leggings. A salty smell invaded her nostrils, and the muted sounds of the sea came from behind her. She turned towards the sounds, and saw that she was standing on the edge of a white sandy beach dotted with Venus shells. The wind was making the sea dance, frothy and white-topped. Sarah took in the beauty of it all, the near-emerald colour of the waters, the translucent shells – a scene so enchanting it could not be real, it could only be born in a dream. Such a place was nowhere on earth.

But she didn’t let the beauty deceive her. She knew what that dreamy landscape hid. She knew what would happen, as always in her dreams. Her heart tightened in fear and anticipated rage.

Too much had happened for Sarah to be the trembling lost girl she had once been whenever a vision took her, resigned to another ordeal, frightened to her very core. Inexperienced, clueless, able only to yield to whatever came upon her.

The forces that she had encountered, and that she had survived, meant that she had now grown into herself. She was still frightened, but she had learnt how to handle it. She had embraced her Midnight blood at last. After having been deliberately shielded from her rightful inheritance of power throughout her childhood, her parents’ death meant that she had finally reclaimed it, been forced to reclaim it. All that Sarah was meant to be, she was, at last. It was a conquest made of pain and loss, like most conquests, and it gave her strength, and a belief in herself she had never felt before. Only now, standing by the seashore, drawn there by her dreams, could she fully grasp how far she’d come. Her hands were burning, her senses were awake and alert. She stood on that beach flexing her hands, waiting to find out what was in store for her.

She didn’t have to wait long.

It was Mermen who emerged from the sea, their scaly skin shimmering in an opaque rainbow, pale green and mother-of-pearl, their gills faintly throbbing in the transition between water and air, webbed hands at their side and wide mouths open to reveal row after row of thin, needle-like teeth. Two, four, six, ten of them, walking unhurriedly towards Sarah, waddling slightly from side to side, the sound of their gurgling breath coming nearer. They were close