Girl of Nightmares Read online

  We walk on in silence and my ears are tuned behind us, editing out the grumble of our suitcase wheels. There’s nothing back there. It’s the exhaustion, playing tricks with my vision, and my nerves. Only I don’t believe that. The sound of my footsteps seems heavy and too loud, like something is using the noise to hide in. Thomas has quickened his pace to walk by my side rather than behind. His radar has been tripped too, but he might just be getting it from me. We couldn’t be in a worse place than this deserted, dark side street, lined with alleys cut between buildings and black spaces between parked cars. I wish we hadn’t stopped talking, that something would break the eerie silence that amplifies every noise. The silence is getting the better of us. There’s nothing following. There’s nothing back there.

  Thomas is walking faster. The panic pulse is setting in, and given the option of fight or flight I know which way he’s leaning. But fly to where? We have no idea where we’re going. How far would we get? And how much of this is the product of a lack of sleep and an overactive imagination?

  Ten feet ahead, the sidewalk disappears into a long shadow. We’ll be in the dark for at least twenty yards. I stop and glance behind me, scanning the spaces beneath parked cars and watching for movement. There isn’t any.

  “You’re not wrong,” Thomas whispers. “Something’s back there. I think it’s been following us since we left the station.”

  “Maybe it’s just a pickpocket,” I mutter. My whole body tenses like a coil at the sound of movement ahead of us, in the shadow. Thomas pushes into me, hearing it too. It got ahead of us somehow. Or maybe there’s more than one. I pull the athame out of my back pocket, out of its sheath, and let the streetlight shine on the blade. It’s sort of silly, but maybe it’ll scare them off. Exhausted as I am, I don’t have the energy to deal with more than one alley cat, let alone anything else.

  “What do we do?” Thomas asks. Why’s he asking me? All I know is we can’t stay under the streetlight until sunrise. No choice but to go ahead, into the shadow.

  When I’m shoved onto one knee I think it’s Thomas at first, until he shouts, “Watch out!” about three seconds too late. My knuckles skid against the concrete and I push myself back up. Tired eyes blink in the dark as I slide the athame back into my pocket. Whatever it was that hit me wasn’t dead, and the knife can’t be used on the living. A round object flies my way; I duck and it clatters off the building behind me.

  “What is it?” Thomas asks, and then he’s knocked back, or I think he is. The street is so dark and the quarters are close. Thomas is thrown out into the lamplight, where he bounces off a parked car by the curb and reels back to hit the bricks of the wall like he’s in a pinball machine. A figure spins into my adjusting vision and plants a foot solidly against my chest. My ass hits the pavement. He strikes again and I get my arm up to defend, but all I manage is a rough shove. It’s disorienting, the way he’s moving; in fast and slow spurts. It throws off my equilibrium.

  Snap out of it. It’s exhaustion; it’s not a drug. Focus and recover. When he strikes again, I duck and block, and land a shot to his head that sends him spinning.

  “Get out of here,” I shout, and barely avoid a clumsy attempt at a leg sweep. For a second I think he’ll just bug out and run. Instead he stands straight and grows a foot taller. Words hit my ears, spoken in what I think is Gaelic, and the air around me presses in tight.

  It’s a curse. To do what, I don’t know, but pressure builds in my ears ten times worse than on the plane.

  “Thomas, what is he doing?” I shout. It’s a mistake. I shouldn’t have let the air go. My lungs are too tight to take any more in. The chant takes over everything. My eyes are burning. I can’t breathe. I can’t exhale, or inhale. Everything’s frozen. The sidewalk is pressing against my knees. I’ve fallen.

  My mind screams out for Thomas, for help, but I can already hear him, whispering a chant to counteract the other. The attacker’s is all lyric and glottal stop; Thomas’s is deep and full of melody. Thomas grows gradually louder, his voice pushing over the top of the other voice until the other voice falters and gasps. My lungs let loose. The sudden rush of air to my throat and blood to my brain makes me shake.

  Thomas doesn’t quit, even though the figure that attacked us is doubled over. An arm waves a feeble defense, and the sound of air being dragged into his lungs is sharp and thin.

  “Stop!”

  I put my hand out and Thomas pauses his chant. It wasn’t me who spoke.

  “Stop, stop!” The figure cries, and waves for us to get away. “You win, right? You win.”

  “Win what?” I bark. “What were you trying to do?”

  The figure backs away slowly, down the sidewalk. In between the gasps for breath is what sounds like shreds of laughter. The figure backs into the streetlight, clutching his chest, and pulls down the hood of his sweatshirt.

  “It’s a girl,” Thomas blurts, and I sort of elbow him. But he’s right. It’s a girl, standing in front of us in a plaid cap and looking innocent enough. She’s even smiling.

  “This is the wrong street,” she says. Her accent sounds like Gideon’s, but looser and less precise. “If you’re looking for Gideon Palmer, you’d better follow me.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The girl turns on her heel and promptly walks off. Just walks off, like two minutes ago she hadn’t ambushed us on the street and tried to kill me. She expects us to follow, figures that we have to, if we want to make it to Gideon’s before our legs give out underneath us. And we do follow, with reservation. This behavior, plus the attack, probably qualifies her as ballsy, or cheeky at the very least. Isn’t that what Gideon would say?

  “You were only off by two streets,” she says. “But around here, two streets can make quite a bit of difference.” Her hand points right and we turn together. “These are real proper houses this way.”

  I stare into her back. Beneath the plaid cap, blond hair trails down in a tight braid. There’s a confidence in her strides and in the way she’s not paying any attention to us, right behind her. Back on the sidewalk, beneath the streetlamp, she hadn’t apologized. She hadn’t been embarrassed in the slightest. Not about attacking us, not even about losing.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Gideon sent me to collect you from the station.” Not exactly an answer. Half of one. Something I might say.

  “My mom told him we were coming.”

  She shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not. Wouldn’t have mattered. Gideon would’ve known. He has a way of knowing just about everything. Don’t you think so?”

  “Why did you attack us?” Thomas asks. The question comes through clenched teeth. He keeps shooting me these dagger eyes. He doesn’t think we should trust her. I don’t trust her. I’m just following her because we’re lost.

  She laughs; the sound is lilting and girlish but not high. “I wasn’t going to. But then you brandished that knife, all Crocodile Dundee. I couldn’t resist a little tangle.” She half turns, flashes an imp’s grin. “I wanted to see what the ghost killer was made of.”

  Ridiculously, part of me wants to explain, to say I had jet lag and was running on an hour’s sleep. But I shouldn’t care about impressing her. I don’t. It’s just her cocky smile that makes me think so.

  The street we’re on now is more familiar than the others. We’re passing by houses with brick fences and low, iron gates, well-pruned shrub borders and nice cars parked in the driveway. White and yellow light sneaks out from between drawn curtains, and around the foundations are flower beds, the petals not yet pulled closed for the night.

  “Here we are,” she says, stopping so abruptly that I almost run up against her back. The curve of her cheek tells me she did it on purpose. This girl is quickly wearing on my last nerve. But when she smiles at me, I have to force the corners of my mouth down. She unlatches the gate and holds it open with an exaggerated gesture of welcome. I pause for a second, just long enough to register that Gideon’s house has barely changed, or maybe it
hasn’t changed at all. Then the girl jogs around to the front to get the door. She opens it and goes through without knocking.

  We squeeze into Gideon’s entryway, making enough noise to make water buffalo blush, our suitcases knocking into the walls and our shoes squeaking against the wood floor. Ahead of us, through a narrow passage, is the kitchen. I catch a glimpse of a kettle on the stove, spewing steam. He’s been waiting. His voice reaches me before I see his face.

  “Finally found them, my dear? I was about to call down to Heathrow to inquire about the flight.”

  “They got a bit turned around,” the girl replies. “But they’re in one piece.”

  No thanks to you, I think, but Gideon comes around the corner and the sight of him, in the flesh for the first time in something like ten years, stops me cold.

  “Theseus Cassio Lowood.”

  “Gideon.”

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  I swallow. His advancing years haven’t taken any of the gravity out of his voice, or any of the steel out of his spine.

  “How did you know that I was?” I ask.

  “The same way I know everything,” he replies. “I have spies everywhere. Didn’t you see the eyes moving in the paintings around your house?”

  I don’t know whether or not to smile. It was a joke but it didn’t sound like one. I haven’t been here in more than ten years, and it feels like I’m going to be kicked out.

  “Uh, I’m Thomas Sabin,” Thomas says. Good thinking. Gideon can only stand in the kitchen for a few seconds before his English manners overtake him. He walks over to shake hands.

  “That’s a dangerous one, there,” the girl says from the kitchen, where she stands with her arms crossed over her chest. Now that the light is better I can see that she’s about our age or slightly younger. Her eyes are quick and dark green. “Thought he was going to explode my heart. I thought you said he didn’t hold with black mages.”

  “I’m no black mage, or whatever,” Thomas says. He blushes, but at least he doesn’t shuffle his feet.

  Gideon finally looks at me again, and I can’t keep my eyes from flicking to the ground. After what feels like hours and a tired sigh, he pulls me into a hug. The years haven’t taken any strength out of his grip, either. But it’s weird, being tall enough so that my head is over his shoulder rather than pressed into his stomach. It’s sad, but I don’t quite know why. Maybe because so much time has passed.

  When he lets go, there’s fondness in his eyes that the hard set of his jaw can’t quite mask. But it tries.

  “You look just the same,” he says. “Only stretched a bit. You’ll have to forgive Jessy.” He half turns and gestures for the girl to come over. “She has a tendency to run in fists first.” When Gideon holds his arm out, she moves lightly into the embrace. “Since I imagine she was far too rude to do so herself, I’ll introduce her. Theseus, this is Jestine Rearden. My niece.”

  The only thing I can think to say is, “I didn’t even know you had a niece.”

  “We haven’t been close.” Jestine shrugs. “Until recently.” Gideon smiles at her, but the smile is like an ice pick. It’s real but it’s not real, and the thought crosses my mind that this Jestine person isn’t Gideon’s niece at all, but his girlfriend or something. But that’s not right. That actually makes me want to throw up a little.

  “Give us a minute, won’t you, my dear? I’m sure Thomas and Theseus are in need of some rest.”

  Jestine nods and smiles without showing her teeth. Her eyes linger on me, amused and appraising. What is she looking at? Everybody looks this crappy after an international flight. When she leaves without saying good-bye, Thomas says, “Good night,” very loudly in her wake, and rolls his eyes. Whoever she is, she’s successfully made it on his shit list.

  After Thomas and I take a few minutes to call Morfran and my mom to reassure them we made it safely, Gideon leads us upstairs, toward the guest room where I stayed when I was a kid and Mom and Dad and I spent the summer with him.

  “That’s it?” I ask. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m here?”

  “I know why you’re here,” Gideon says darkly. “You can sleep in the guest room. And in the morning, you’re going home.”

  * * *

  “Some goddamn welcome wagon,” Thomas grumbles after we’ve hauled our suitcases to the second-floor guest room, and I stifle a grin. When he’s upset, he sounds just like Morfran. “I didn’t even know he had a niece.”

  “I didn’t know either,” I reply.

  “Well, she’s a real ball of sunshine.” He’s placed his suitcase at the foot of the better bed. The guest room, oddly enough, seems like it was outfitted just for us, with two twin beds rather than one double like one might expect in a guest room. But then, Gideon did know we were coming. Thomas pulls the quilt back and sits down, prying his shoes off with the opposing set of toes.

  “What was that, anyway, that she was doing to me?” I ask.

  “Some kind of curse. I don’t know. You don’t see it very often.”

  “Would it have killed me?”

  He wants to say yes, but he’s honest even when he’s cranky. “Not as long as she stopped after you blacked out,” he says finally. “But who knows if she would have stopped.”

  She would have stopped. Something in the way she jumped us, the way she threw her punches; it was all just practice, just a test. It was there in the tone of her voice and the way she gave up. It amused her to have lost.

  “We’ll get our answers in the morning,” I say, pulling back my quilt.

  “I just don’t like it. And I don’t feel safe in this house. I’m not going to be able to get any sleep. Maybe we should sleep in shifts.”

  “Thomas, nobody’s going to hurt us here,” I say, pulling off my own shoes and getting into bed. “Besides, I’m sure you could stop her if she tried. Where did you learn that spell, anyway?”

  He shrugs into his pillow. “Morfran’s taught me my share of the black.” His mouth sets in a firm line. “But I don’t like to use it. It makes me feel pissed off and slimy.” He looks at me accusingly. “But she didn’t seem to have a problem with it.”

  “Let’s talk about it in the morning, Thomas,” I say. He grumbles a bit more, but regardless of what he said about not feeling safe, he starts to snore thirty seconds after the lights go out. Quietly, I slide the athame under my pillow and try to do the same thing.

  * * *

  Jestine is in the kitchen the next morning when I go downstairs. Her back is to me as she washes dishes and she doesn’t turn, but she senses I’m here. She doesn’t have her cap on today, and about two feet of dark gold hair falls down her back. Streaks of red cut through it like ribbons.

  “Can I make you something for breakfast?” she asks.

  “No, thanks,” I say. There are croissants in a basket on the table. I take one and tear off a corner.

  “Would you like some butter?” she asks, and turns around. There’s a large, dark bruise shadowing her jaw. I did that. I remember doing it, doubling her over. When it happened I didn’t know who she was. Now the bruise is staring at me like an accusation. But what do I have to feel bad about? She attacked me, and she got what she got.

  She walks to the cupboard and gets a saucer and butter knife, then sets a pot of butter on the table before ducking into the refrigerator for jam.

  “Sorry about your face,” I say, and motion vaguely toward the bruise.

  She smiles. “No you’re not. Not any more than I’m sorry about pulling the air out of your lungs. I had to test you. And frankly, I wasn’t that impressed.”

  “I was jet-lagged.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” She leans on the counter and slides a finger through the loop of her jeans. “I’ve been hearing stories about you since I was old enough to listen. Theseus Cassio, the great ghost hunter. Theseus Cassio, the wielder of the weapon. And the moment I meet you, I kick your ass in an alley.” She smiles. “But I suppose if I was dead it’d be an
other story.”

  “Who told you the stories?” I ask.

  “The Order of the Biodag Dubh,” she says, her eyes flashing green. “Of course, of all the current members, Gideon has the best stories.”

  She tears off a piece of croissant and pushes it into her cheek like a squirrel. The Order of the Biodag Dubh. Until a few days ago I’d never heard of it. Now here it is again, and pronounced correctly. It’s a struggle to keep my voice from rattling.

  “The order of the what?” I say, reaching for the butter. “The Beedak Dube?”

  She smirks. “Are you making fun of my accent?”

  “A little.”

  “Oh. Or are you just playing dumb?”

  “A little of that too.” Giving away too much would be a mistake. Especially since what I’d be giving away is that I know approximately jack squat.

  Jestine turns back to the sink and plunges her hands into the water, finishing off the last of the plates. “Gideon’s gone out for some things for lunch. He wanted to be back before you woke.” She drains the sink and dries her hands on a towel. “Listen, I’m sorry if I gave your friend a scare. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be able to get one over on you.” She shrugs. “It’s like Gideon says. I’m always running in with my fists first.”

  I nod, but Thomas is going to need more of an apology than that.

  “Who taught you magic?” I ask. “Was it the Order?”

  “Yes. And my parents.”

  “Who taught you to fight?”

  She lifts her chin. “Didn’t need much teaching. Some people just have a knack for it, isn’t that right?”

  There’s a knot in my gut about this girl, pulling in different directions. One side tells me that she’s Gideon’s niece, and that I can trust her for that reason alone. The other side takes one look at her and tells me that niece or not, Gideon couldn’t control her. No one could. She’s got agenda written over every inch of her body.

  Thomas is moving around on the second floor. His footsteps creak and we hear the rush of water as the shower turns on. It feels strange, being here. Almost like an out-of-body experience, or a waking dream. Most of the things are just how I remember them, right down to the organization of the furniture. But others are glaringly different. The presence of Jestine, for instance. She moves through the kitchen, cleaning up, wiping things down with a cloth. She looks at home; she looks like Gideon’s family. I don’t know why, but that essence of belonging makes me miss my father in a way that I haven’t missed him in years.