Blackfin Sky (24 page)

‘What are you hiding from…’ Sky stopped. Something had been bothering her ever since she’d first spoken to Severin, and now she realised what it was.

It was Severin himself. Severin, with the blond hair and blue eyes just like hers.

‘Dad’s not my real dad, is he?’ Again, her mother shook her head, and Sky’s heart broke. Her father had always been her rock, the one she could turn to when anything was bothering her, the one who could make her day brighter with a smile and hot chocolate.

‘Is Severin my real father?’ Of course it had to be Severin. She had seen her pregnant mother at the circus, and Severin himself had said he’d never met another Pathfinder except for his own parents.

‘You know about Severin too?’ Sky nodded. ‘And Gage’s circus, where we all met?’ Sky nodded again, and her mother sighed. ‘Our secrets are never our own in this town. Who told you?’

That was not so easy for Sky to explain. Especially not when she wanted answers from her mother. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Her lips formed a tight, straight line, but a faint tremor in her chin gave Lily away. She rubbed her eyes again, still looking like she would try to out-glare her own tears. ‘It was all such a long time ago, I thought it was behind us. When I found out I was pregnant, I begged Severin to leave the circus with me. But Severin refused to leave Gage, so I couldn’t tell him about the baby – about you. Gui and I had been friends for years, ever since I’d joined the circus. He promised to help me escape, to get away from Gage. He was a terrible man, Skylar. He did shocking, awful things, things I’ve tried so hard to forget. He kidnapped so many children, babies even, and forced them to perform in the circus just to line his pockets, gathering more and more gifted people into the troupe as we travelled from town to town. And after the fire, after we got away from that life, your father and I stayed together. We’ve been happy.’

Sky had to swallow hard before asking her next question. ‘Do you love him?’

Her mother looked up at her, shocked. ‘Of course I do! I love that man more than anything in this world, except for you. He makes me feel safe, protected. Loved.’

Sky’s scepticism must have showed in her face.

‘It means a lot when it’s not something you’ve been raised with. I’m glad you don’t know what it’s like to live without that feeling.’

Lily met her daughter’s stare unfalteringly.

‘Then why did he move out while I was … in that other place?’ Swallowing didn’t help this time, and a hot tear fell from Sky’s eye. Her mother unwrapped one side of the blanket and pulled it around Sky.

‘Things were just … Gui was angry with me for not finding out what happened to you that night.’

‘What do you mean?’

Lily freed one of her hands from the blanket, holding it out in front of her like she was catching snowflakes.

‘When I touch someone, I see things about them. The important things that mark a person – meeting your first love, being afraid of the dark as a child, seeing your own child being born – that’s what I see when I touch someone. It happens sometimes with places, as well. Churches can be overwhelming, filled with people’s memories of the happiest days and the saddest days of their lives.’ Lily paused. ‘Or like this house, with what happened to your father’s family.’ There was a groan of wood behind them, and the back door creaked inward.

‘What happened here?’

Lily flexed the fingers on her still-outstretched hand. ‘How about I show you?’ Sky must have looked dubious, as Lily smiled. ‘If you knew what happened, how your father and I ended up here, it might help you to understand.’ She held her hand out to Sky, and the look she gave her daughter was almost pleading. ‘Understand
me.
’

Seeing the past through Lily’s eyes was not at all like pathfinding. There were no flashes of light, no sense of being pulled from her core into the vastness of the pathways.

Sky was sitting next to her mother on the porch swing one moment, and the next she was hovering outside a caravan like the one Severin had been living in at the circus. Except the rear section of the caravan looked fuzzy and out of focus, as though someone had drawn a picture of it but forgotten to add in lines.

Sky scanned the field around her, and noticed the grass had an odd grey tinge to it. The colour leached more and more from her surroundings the further she looked from where she now hovered.

Her mother’s voice spoke from right next to her, but Sky couldn’t see her.

‘This is the portrait of memory. Some parts fade over time, or weren’t remembered correctly to begin with, so you have to make sense of this kind of patchwork of truth and things forgotten. Come on, it’ll make more sense as we go along.’

Sky flailed as the scene around her changed again, and she now hovered on the opposite side of the caravan, next to two teenagers who
looked
like her parents.

Sky’s arm passed through the wooden siding of the caravan as she tried to steady herself. At least, her arm
would
have passed through it. Looking down at where her body should have been, Sky saw nothing.

‘We aren’t really here, Skylar,’ her mum’s voice said in her ear, startling her. ‘None of this is real any more, it’s just a memory.’

The teenage versions of her parents were talking very quickly to one another, like someone had accidentally hit fast-forward on the playback.

‘I can’t understand what they’re saying,’ Sky whispered.

‘Of course you can. You’re just not
used
to using your brain at this speed.’

Sky concentrated. Gradually, the conversation slowed to a speed where she could understand it.

‘What am I seeing?’

‘This is the first time I met your father. He’d already been in the circus seven years with Severin and Gage. Gage took him from his hometown in France – a little village called Belle Dame du Pont – when he was eleven years old.’

Sky remembered what she’d read up in the attic. ‘I think I read about that in a newspaper cutting, but I couldn’t really understand it since it was in French.’

Her mother laughed next to her. ‘I wondered when the house would start pointing you in the right direction.’

Sky continued watching the couple as her mother’s voice narrated. It was kind of obvious to her now that the pair really didn’t know each other, but it was just as clear that the teenage Gui didn’t like Lily.

‘It took a while for you two to become friends, then?’

‘I wasn’t a very nice girl when I met him. He made me want to be better.’

No sooner had she spoken than the scene shifted. Her parents were still before her, only this time her mother was tied to a slowly spinning target as the teenage Gui wound up his throwing arm. Sky almost screamed when the hatchet left his hand, went whistling past her not-there body, and sank harmlessly into the wooden board next to Lily’s cheek.

‘A while, yes.’ Her mother’s voice held laughter as she spoke in Sky’s ear. ‘He didn’t want me to join the circus, but he’d had no choice in the matter himself. I left home because I was terribly unhappy there. I didn’t find the happiness I’d been looking for here, either.’

The scene shifted again, and Sky felt nauseous as she settled into a hover next to the striped tarpaulin of the Big Top.

Gui barged past, towards where Lily’s past self stood talking with an upset-looking young couple.

‘I recognise this one,’ Sky confessed. ‘I’ve been here before.’

‘Then you know that I was expecting you by this time,’ her mother confirmed. ‘Gui and I had been working together on our act for almost two years by this point, but when he found out I was pregnant, he refused to let me take any part in the shows. Gage didn’t know about the baby – you – but he made Gui suffer for our refusal.’

Her mother’s voice had dropped, become flat and lifeless. Sky never wanted to know what punishment someone could have inflicted on her dad if it made her mother sound that way.

‘But you got away, right? Before the fire?’

Their surroundings melted away until they hovered near one of the largest caravans, darkness surrounding them. Raised voices carried from inside the caravan, and Lily’s past self peeked through the lit window. Inside, Sky could see the enormous figure of her father towering over the man she had only previously glimpsed: Gage. His hair was slicked back against his head, his face blanched white like a ghoul. And between him and Gui was Severin.

‘Well, this all came before that.’

The voices inside the caravan rose. Only Gage was silent.

‘If you let us leave, I can convince them not to go to the police! You could even get out of town before they have the chance!’ Sky recognised Gui’s voice.

‘And lose one of our acts? And what could possibly compel us to let Lily go with you, hmm?’

Hearing Severin arguing with her father made Sky’s heart race. There was something about his voice, something which didn’t sound right, as though it wasn’t his at all. It was the voice of a serpent, the creaking of a floorboard when you were alone in the house. Well, any house other than the Blood House. It was the hand reaching up through dark water to grab your ankle and pull you down.

‘She wants to leave with me!’ From where she hovered, Sky could see the tension in Gui’s muscles.

Severin raised an eyebrow as he looked up at the giant standing next to him, and he sounded like himself again. ‘She does?’

Gui nodded tightly, still staring at Gage.

‘They saw me, Gage. They
recognised
me. Do you think they’ll just forget about it? You know your tricks don’t work forever. They’ll remember, and they’ll report you.
Unless you let us go
.’

Gui had taken a step forward during this speech, shoving Severin over against the wall until he was crowding over Gage. But Gage seemed undaunted, playing with a glass paperweight like he was about to start juggling with it, the white cast of his face making him look like a waxwork.

‘We will consider it,’ Severin said finally, as though he spoke for them both.

‘Why doesn’t Gage say anything?’ Sky whispered to her mother.

‘He never spoke. He used others to speak for him.’

It made sense now, the way Gui shouted at the man when it was only Severin who answered.

‘You don’t have time to cook up some new scheme to wriggle out of the situation, Gage. They saw me. If I don’t go to them and convince them not to go to the police right now, it will be too late. Even you can’t escape if they get the police involved, which they will. It’s a kidnapping case.’

The way Gage puckered his mouth made his face appear even more pointed. Still, it was Severin who spoke for him, and his voice was quicksilver.

‘You will have my answer by morning.’

It was possible the conversation continued, but the young Lily ran from the window, and the memory faded before them.

Sky thought for a moment that she was back in the real world with her mum on the back porch, but then noticed the sky was too dark, the early spring flowers open too soon for it to be the present. Even in Blackfin, where sunset chose its own time to fall, it took more than a few minutes to darken completely.

‘Mum?’ she whispered into the darkness. A light flickered on inside the Blood House as her mother’s voice answered.

‘This was the same night as the argument we just saw. But this – this is the memory the Blood House has given me.’

Sky was about to question her further when footsteps approached from behind them.

Gage strode up the path, a wide-brimmed hat set low over his face. Sky hovered around the side of the house to follow him, assuming he was on his way to knock on the front door.

Is he here to try to bribe my grandparents not to go to the police?

But then she remembered how this would end, how it had already ended. The real reason her home was called the Blood House.

And then she noticed that Gage was not alone. Perched on his hip, his face shadowed by the brim of Gage’s hat, was the small boy Sky had seen at the circus. The boy with those piercing grey eyes that seemed to know too much for a child so young.

The slippery way Gage smiled at the child turned Sky’s stomach. Instead of climbing the steps to the front door, he continued around to the far side of the house, where the picture window looked in on the family room. Still hovering silently, Sky and Lily followed. By the time they reached Gage, he was grinning at the boy again, cocking his head to one side as though they were having some silent conversation.

‘Gage was really mute?’

‘Yes,’ Lily whispered next to Sky, as though even the memory of him frightened her. ‘But he never needed to speak to make himself heard.’

Gage leaned away from the boy after a moment, and the child shook his head. Gage pouted mockingly at him, and the boy buried his face in his neck. Gage, seeming to have lost patience, set the boy down roughly and strode up to the window. From his pocket, he took what looked at first like an orange ball. But then Sky saw the eye sockets, the eerie imitation of a skull etched into it.