Hidden Among Us (26 page)

And just as Lissy reached out to hug Connie, before I even had time to work out if Larkspur was really on our side or not, the air filled with whirling feathers.

45

The feathers turned to dead leaves as I watched, torn away by a wind that roared wild and loud, then faded to nothing just as suddenly as it had come.

Holding onto me, Connie screamed.

My father stepped out of the darkness, white cloak trailing behind, leaves caught in his black hair. My real father.

The room filled with silver light.

He knelt down at Mum’s side. He reached out and touched her hair, her face.

“What’s he doing?” Connie gasped. “Lissy, why is Mummy just lying here like this?”

It was as if the Swan King hadn’t even noticed us.

He just crouched at Mum’s side, watching her. “How they fade,” he whispered. “She was so beautiful, and the years have gone in a heartbeat.”

He stood up, and Larkspur faced him. Joe and I stood in silence, watching.

“You betrayed me,” the Swan King said. “Time and again, Larkspur, time and again. Can’t you see they must all go?”

“The mortals betrayed you, too – and what they did to my mother was unforgivable. But give them another chance,” Larkspur said. “Please.”

The King smiled and nodded at Connie. “A pretty child,” he said. “What a shame.”

“Leave her alone!” My voice shook. “Tippy gave her life in exchange. It was fairly won.”

“Not fairly won,” the Swan King said; “only admirably cheated.” He looked from me to Larkspur. “My sister would have had me punish you both for eternity, but I find myself pleased with your wit.” He turned to Joe. “And as it is, you killed her. An act of bravery or stupidity; I can’t choose which.”

“I know I’m meant to be sorry,” Joe said. “But I was scared.”

“You will pay the price for it, oh, don’t worry,” the Swan King said. “Come home with me, Lissy. The fourteen years have passed, Larkspur. As well you know.”

“Tippy gave her life!” Larkspur cried.

The Swan King only shrugged. “You cheated
me,
all those years ago, with your disobedience. Lissy is the price.” He held out one hand. “Come with me, my Lissy. I can’t bear to watch you fade, too, as your mother has done.”

“Lissy,” Connie said. “Don’t go away. What’s the matter with Mum and Nick?”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Joe hissed.

But I was the price. Tippy’s sacrifice had saved Connie and Rafe, but the Swan King still wanted me. He always would. His blood ran in my veins.

I had no choice.

I stood up, and even as I took the hand of the Swan King I felt the unbearable stretch across my back as my hawk-wings unfolded and I was no longer a girl. I was Hidden.

The world filled with feathers, and all light was gone.

46

Dad, Miles and I climbed out of the car, our feet crunching in the gravel on the drive.

The Reach waited, alone in the moonlight, surrounded by trees. The windows glittered. Wind shifted leaves and branches, rustling, whispering. The lake shone like a sheet of foil: the Gateway.

“Why don’t we just run?” I said quietly to Dad, leaning on my crutch. “Mum’s car’s still here. We’d be lost in the lanes before they even knew we’d gone.”

If we ran, the three of us, the Gateway would still be open. We’d have time to think of a way to get Lissy home without me or Connie dying, cursed.

“The Fontevrault will know,” Dad said, grimly. “They’ll find us.”

We had to do it. We had to trap Lissy beyond the Gateway.

Miles just stood, looking up at the house. Then he turned to Dad, and said, “I’m sorry, Adam. I started all this. I can’t be without her. I can’t be without Rose. I’ve waited long enough already.”

“Don’t do anything stupid, Miles,” Dad said. “You know what’ll happen. You’ll lose track of the years. After that, you’ll never be able to come home.”

“There’s nothing here for me,” Miles said, simply. He turned and started walking towards the lake.

I moved to follow him but Dad put a hand on my arm. “Just let him go. He’s not worth it.”

We watched, and probably the guys in the car watched, too, from behind their blacked-out windows.

Miles walked across the lawn, past the yew tree, right to the overgrown shore of the lake. He parted a mess of reeds and cow parsley. The water must’ve been in his shoes by now, but he didn’t make a sound. He just carried on walking, deeper, deeper, up to the waist. Now only his head and shoulders were still above the water. Deeper.

“Miles, you idiot,” Dad said, softly, as Miles’s head went under. The last Gateward, gone.

He disappeared without a sound. He’d gone through the Gateway. Now we had to close it. Now he could never come back, and neither could Lissy.

Dad just turned and started walking towards the house with his bag of iron crosses. If we protected every window, every door of the Reach, the Hidden couldn’t pass. Once more, the Reach would be sealed, bound by ancient prayers locking forces with iron. Words of strength, of power. The Hidden would be trapped again.

Lissy was down there somewhere. My sister. I should have known all along what she was. Maybe I did, but couldn’t admit it to myself—

We were going to trap her with them. For ever.

“Rafe,” Dad said. “Come on.”

I couldn’t believe we were doing this: that we were actually going to imprison Lissy somewhere beneath that glittering lake till the end of time. There had to be another way.

We both swung round as another car turned in at the driveway. Mum’s. Whoever was driving stopped suddenly, then stalled. Badly.

“Who’s that?” Dad demanded. “Who else knows we’re here?” He glanced towards the black SUV where the Fontevrault Group’s heavies waited for any trouble, ready in case Dad and I needed any encouragement to do what the Fontevrault had asked of us.

For the sake of the human race. It’s a matter of survival
—

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it. The door of Mum’s car flew open and Joe stumbled out. I couldn’t help smiling, even through my despair. Against all the odds, he’d survived.

“Rafe.” He just stood there, staring at me. “You’re all right. I thought you were dead. Listen—”

“Bad luck, mate,” I said. “This is my dad. You’ve arrived just in time to give us a hand.”

Dad barely even glanced at Joe. I wondered what he thought of Nick. “Come on.” He jerked his head at the Fontevrault car. “I don’t want you in any more danger, Rafe. It’s time to close the Gateway.”

“You can’t!” Joe hissed. “The Swan King and Lissy are here.”

“This is it!” I said. “Dad, we can shut the Gateway and trap them on
this
side! Surely we can deal with just one of the Hidden, the Swan King on his own without any back-up. We can kill him. Joe, have you still got my knife?”

“No!” Joe was clearly panicking – the first time I’d seen him really do that since all this mess had begun. “Listen, please just listen: I don’t know what to do. The Swan King is making a disease – a sickness – from Lissy’s blood. He cut her. He’ll do it again. It’ll spread everywhere, this immortal virus that’ll never die out. In days, he told us. Days. We’ll all be dead.” Joe stared at us. “Even if you killed him, you might not be quick enough. He might spread the disease first.”

Dad and I glanced at each other. I couldn’t believe what we’d almost done, the mistake Joe had only just stopped us making. Trapping the Swan King on the
wrong
side of the Gateway with an immortal pandemic.

“This changes things.” Dad reached for his phone, but just as his hand moved, a wild, vicious wind blew up from nowhere, stirring the shining waters of the lake.

“He’s coming,” Joe said. Instinctively, we all moved closer together, Dad and Joe and I – like cornered prey. And the air filled with whirling dead leaves, even though it was only May, and feathers, so many feathers, white and brown, all twisting and turning, whipped up by that godawful wind.

And they came.

Lissy and her father the Swan King, immensely tall, his hair blacker than tar, a gold band glittering at his throat. He looked scarcely older than her, but he was her real father. It was impossible. But there they were, stepping out from nowhere into the long grass, just like Larkspur had done the first time I’d seen him. Lissy’s hair had come down and was torn about in the wind, wild and red. All I could see was how like the Swan King she was, trying and failing to pinpoint the moment I’d guessed the truth. How like her father she was. Those subtle differences that marked her out as alien, now I knew what to look for. Inhuman, a monster. My sister. I’d failed to save her again.

“Lissy!” I shouted, and she turned to face us. The Swan King took hold of her arm, watching us with calm amusement.

“Don’t take her!” Dad’s face blazed with hatred, but his expression changed the minute he focused on Lissy. “Oh, God, don’t take her.”

They hadn’t even spoken much since the thing with Elena, a year ago now.

Lissy tried to pull away but the Swan King held onto her with no obvious effort.

I heard her cry out for Dad, shouting, “
I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”
but she turned with the Swan King. She walked with him to the water.

“Lissy!” Dad yelled, again and again. So did I. So did Joe.

We ran to the lake, all three of us, ankle deep in water. Dad would have gone in after her if we hadn’t held onto him. I knew now what had really happened to Philippa de Conway’s father. He wasn’t a murderer in hiding. He’d gone through the Gateway to find her and had never come back.

It was Joe who finally stopped it all. “The plague,” he shouted. “We’ve got to close the Gateway
now
before he releases it. This is our only chance of stopping him.”

Dad dropped to his knees in the water. “Lissy,” he said, quietly. “Oh, Lissy.”

Joe and I turned to look back at the Reach. It watched us quietly from among the trees, an ancient house: a place older than recorded history. So dangerous.

And in that moment, Joe whipped away and I realized he’d been trying to put me off guard. He ran into the water. He was going after Lissy.

“DAD!” I yelled, dragging at his arm. “Stop him. He’s just a kid. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s trying to go after her.”

Dad swore and struggled to his feet, but I was the one who caught Joe. Murder on my destroyed leg, dragging it along like that, agony every time my foot touched the soft mud beneath the water, sucked down, horrifying having to yank it out each time. But I caught him. The stupid, idiotic little fool.

Joe turned on me, like I’d known he would, shoving me away from him, spitting in my face, but Dad was there too by that point. Together we wrestled him to the water’s edge, where he sat in the mud.

“Why did you do that?” he yelled. “Why did you do that to me? It was my choice, not yours.”

“We’ve got to close the Gateway.” Dad sounded exhausted. There were pale tracks in the grime on his face. He’d been crying, letting her go, watching her go, without even having made things up between them. I think that was worse than anything. My own father in a state like that. He turned to Joe, then to me. “We’ve got no choice, Rafe.”

It was time to imprison Lissy.

47

Three days later

So she’s gone.

Lissy, down in that underground nightmare. Miles too, so Rafe and his dad say. I wonder how she’s being treated. If she’s kept as a prisoner in one of those miserable caves, or sitting at the Swan King’s side in that frozen white chamber.

Bastards. They wouldn’t let me go after her. Now there’s no one to make sure she’s all right, see she’s treated OK. I would’ve done that for her. For Lissy, and don’t ask me why but I would have. That’s all.

Connie is home from hospital, spending most of her time lying on the sofa covered with a duvet, resting her head in Miriam’s lap. The rest of us move about the house like ghosts, unable to leave the last place Lissy was.

It’s like we’re closer to her here than we could ever be anywhere else. So we’ve stayed.

Miriam didn’t even speak to anyone except Connie till tonight. She found Lissy’s top in the tumble dryer, and at last she cried till Adam opened a bottle of wine, then another. Even Dad joined in, and he’s not normally a big drinker. They all got pissed, like it was letting off steam, all finally talking about what had happened. The Hidden. Lissy.

I couldn’t say a word.

“I knew she’d been abducted,”
Dad kept saying, like a stuck record,
“But I never expected this.”

“How could you have?”
Miriam said, and laughed. And then she just cried, on and on.

It was bad. I got up and left.

I sat on my bed, staring at the iron crosses nailed haphazardly above the window, beside the door. School started a few days ago but no one’s mentioned going home.

What if the Hidden find a way of lifting the protection from their side? We’ve all checked every opening in the house, time and time again, to the point of obsession.
But what if they find a way? What if they get in, with the plague?

What if all that stuff about old prayers combining with the iron was just a load of crap? Maybe we weren’t protected from the Hidden at all. And the Fontevrault. They’d be back for Adam, surely? Rafe and Connie’s dad. He was part of the Fontevrault, and he’d betrayed them, hiding Lissy all those years as part of his own family. A human girl with Hidden blood. A hybrid. The Fontevrault’s worst nightmare. They’d be back for Adam all right. The question was when. Any day. Any how.

The door swung open, and I couldn’t help jumping. It was Rafe. Still limping.

He sat down on my bed, and for a few moments neither of us spoke. Too much had happened. We’d witnessed it all.

“We’ve got to find a way of getting her out of there,” I said at last.

But Rafe just shook his head. “Not you,” he said. “You need to back off. Forget about all this. Look what happened to Miles. It’s like a disease. You’re infected.”

“Piss off,” I said. I’m not scared of him any more. Well, maybe a bit. He’s still a mad bastard. Unpredictable and potentially violent, despite looking like butter wouldn’t melt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”