Spirit Prophecy (The Gateway Trilogy Book 2) (50 page)

“What have you wanted to tell me?”

She shook her head violently. “I will speak to you alone.”

“But they all want to help you. No one here will hurt you.”

She shook her head again. “I cannot trust them. I cannot trust anyone here.”

“Why?” I asked.

The Silent Child began to shake with emotion. She pulled at her hair and clawed at her own skin.

Hannah’s voice rang out, full of alarm. “Mackie! What’s wrong with Mackie?”

I tore my eyes from the Silent Child and looked over at Mackie. She was shuddering and gasping, clutching at her own arms and hair. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“Mackie?” I called to her. She did not seem to hear me at all.

“What should we do?” Hannah cried in a shaky voice.

“I don’t know,” I said. I turned back to the Silent Child. “What are you doing to her?”

The Silent Child continued tear at herself. “I will not trust them! Too much pain for too long!”

“It’s because she’s an Empath!” Finn said suddenly. “She is feeling the Silent Child’s pain, experiencing it along with her.”

As though his words had opened some sort of floodgate, Mackie began to writhe and scream, clearly in unendurable agony.

“What do we do?” Savvy asked. “Cage her again?”

“No!” I said. “She’s not doing it on purpose. Mackie’s just too sensitive to it.”

“We can’t anyway,” Hannah said. “We can’t do it without Mackie.”

Mackie’s screams rose. She fell back on the ground, her back arching.

“Do something!” I cried. “Expel her, Finn!”

But Finn was already muttering. He thrust his hands toward the center of the circle, and the Silent Child sailed backward into the air, looking like a strange white bird in the darkness. She landed soundlessly on all fours, like a cat.

We converged on Mackie whose body had relaxed the moment the Silent Child had broken the barrier of the circle. She lay panting and sobbing in her circle.

“Mackie? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she gasped, wiping cold sweat from her face. “I…can’t believe the pain she’s been in. It was…unbearable.”

“Can you guys stay with her?” I asked, craning my neck. The Silent Child was beckoning from the edge of the garden. “I’m going to follow her. She’s waited long enough to tell me what she wants me to know.”

Hannah looked like she was going to protest but Mackie spoke up first. “Go. I’m fine. We’ll clear up here and meet you back in the room.” Her face was so pale under her freckles that I faltered. “Are you sure?”

“Yes! That’s why we did all this! Go!” Mackie said, with a touch of her usual authority.

I smiled at her, squeezed her hand, and took off in the darkness.

“Please be careful!” Hannah called after me.

I followed the Silent Child back into the castle, tracking her tiny flickering form down several flights of stairs. She led me all the way down into the dungeons, beyond the displays of the Necromancer artifacts, which held a burgeoning horror for me as I ran quickly past them. When I arrived in the next chamber, she was nowhere in sight.

“Are you here?”

My voice, a careful whisper, exploded into echoes in the darkness.

“I came alone, like you said. There’s no one here to be afraid of.”

As my candle cast a guttering light into the corners of the chamber, a tiny shadow seemed to come alive, shivered and detached itself from the wall. It glided along the floor and nestled into the niche in the wall before it resolved into the crouching form of the Silent Child, scabby knees tucked up under her chin.

“What is your name?”

She thought long and hard about this before she remembered the answer. “Mary.”

She cocked her head to one side, and her curtain of hair swung across her face like a veil. It was my move, and I knew it. I hesitated to demand any more information, in case she saw it as a threat.

“How…how are you?”

She narrowed her eyes, as though the question made little sense to her.

“I do not understand you.”

I swallowed. “I mean, before we Uncaged you, you seemed to be in such pain. Are you…better?”

She raised her grubby hands from the floor, where she had been clutching tensely at the stone, and wrapped them around her knees. “Yes. I am free now.”

“Good. I’m really glad. We all hated to see you suffer like that.”

Her eyes narrowed and her hair crackled with that same strange electricity that had nearly ended our attempt to free her. “Many watched me suffer for a long time. Not one of them tried to help me.”

“I can’t speak for all of them, but I’m sure that many of them just didn’t understand what had happened to you. We certainly didn’t, at first.” As I spoke, I shuffled slowly forward, watching for signs of skittishness or fear. Then, when only about ten feet separated us, I lowered myself carefully to the floor and sat, placing the candle like some kind of offering between us. Her wide eyes watched my progress without blinking.

I sat in silence for a few moments, letting her adjust to our proximity. Her eyes fell upon the candle, and she watched the flame bob and dance in the drafts that whispered across the floor. As she did, her body relaxed by degrees; her knees drifted and then fell to one side, so that I could finally see her entire face. Her pointed chin was trembling, the corners of her mouth pinched in misery.

“You aren’t in pain anymore,” I ventured, “but you’re still not at rest.”

Mary wrenched her eyes reluctantly from the flame. “I cannot rest,” she whispered.

“Why not?”

“Because you must know. You must know what they did to me, for we are the same.”

My heart began to race. “What who did to you?”

“Them.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling as though she could see right through it.

“You…do you mean the Durupinen?”

She nodded solemnly, eyes still fixed above us.

“Did they do more than just Cage you?”

She nodded again.

“Did…” I swallowed hard. “Did they…kill you?”

The words had barely parted company with my lips and she was there, so close to me that I was staring at my own terrified reflection in her eyes. Her finger hovered between us, silencing me. I could feel the chill of it upon my lips.

“I could not be allowed to live, when they discovered what I was. I was an abomination. I was a terrible, terrible mistake,” she whispered.

I couldn’t ask aloud — the words wouldn’t come. My question echoed inside my own head and her voice joined it there.

What do you mean, a mistake?

I should never have been. I was too dangerous.

Dangerous how?

They had been warned. For many hundreds of years they had been warned, but my mother did not listen. She was one of them.

One of the Durupinen?

Yes. She knew it was forbidden, but she could not help herself. She loved him so.

She loved who?

My father. They were forbidden but they did not care. They loved each other, and so I was born in secret.

Their relationship was forbidden? Was…was he a Caomhnóir?”

Yes. The Guardian and the Gatekeeper must never be as one. It was their greatest fear. I was their greatest fear.”

But why? You were just a child. What could they have to fear from you?

The prophecy. They feared the prophecy would come to pass.

What prophecy?

She was gone, pressed once again into the shadows of the furthest corner of the room, hands pulling desperately at her wildly tangled hair. Her voice continued to echo in my head as though she were crouching on my shoulder, a tiny angel of death muttering in my ear.

They do not speak of it, for their fear keeps them silent. But I must show you. I must warn you, for if I do not, you will surely meet my fate.

But why? Why me? Why would anyone want to kill me?

We are the same.

I was breathing so hard and fast now that I cupped my hand over the candle for fear my frantic breath would blow it out and plunge us both into complete darkness.

How? How are we the same?

We are the same. And if they discover it, you both will surely die. The prophecy cannot come to pass. They will never allow it to be.

But what do you mean, Mary? How are we the same?

But I knew. I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. The greatest question mark in my life whispered away by a child ghost in the darkness. My father.

But if you and I are the same, that must mean that Hannah is, too. Why did you choose me, and not Hannah to speak to?

The Caller is too dangerous. She is always surrounded by whispers. She is never alone. It would never be safe to speak to her, with so many of the dead around to listen.

Okay, but you still haven’t told me. I need you to say it. How are we the same?

We are both forbidden. We are both an abomination. We must be ripped from the world lest we destroy them all. The prophecy must never come to pass.

But what is it? What is the prophecy? Show it to me!

You cannot unsee it.

Show it to me now! Mary, I have to know.

She cocked her head to the side like a curious little bird. She seemed to be deciding. As she did her eyes filled with the ghosts of the tears she had cried in life. She nodded once.

Be it so. Mercy upon you.

And before I could draw another breath, she flew at me, flew into me. There was a flash of light, a rush of screaming sound, and everything went dark.

THE ACRID SCENT OF ANCIENT WOOL BURNED IN MY NOSTRILS, and its fibers were like sandpaper against my cheek. Aches coursed through my body like they were racing against each other to reach my fingertips.

My eyes opened, but only a blurred vision revealed itself, like trying to see the world through a window as rain beat mercilessly against it. Why the hell couldn’t I see? And where was that terrible sound coming from — that horrid, wailing keening? I swallowed convulsively to dampen my bone-dry mouth and the wailing became muffled and then cut off. It was me. I was making that wretched sound. And it was tears that had clouded my vision. I was crying uncontrollably and I had no idea why. I blinked furiously to dislodge the tears from my eyes and tried to master my ragged breathing as they coursed in silent rivers down my cheeks.

I focused on calming down as I peeled myself off of the rug and into a sitting position. I put a hand to my throbbing head and felt something wet. What the hell was on my face? I stared at my fingers. They were covered in blood, but it wasn’t from my head. My fingertips were rubbed raw and bleeding, the blood mixed with something dark and dusty, running in rivulets down my arms. My skin, from fingertips to elbows was blistered, red, and peeling away, coated in what looked like ash. As I looked at them, the dull aching that had awoken me exploded into pain such as I had never endured before, and the sobbing began afresh.

What the hell had happened to me? What was the last thing I remembered?

A candle. A dark tower dungeon. Mary.

The prophecy. She was going to show me the prophecy.

I tore my gaze from my ruined arms to the floor around me. I was on the rug in the entrance hall, just in front of the enormous stone fireplace. Bits of coal and blackened firewood were scattered all around me, some smoking, a few still glowing in their hearts. The charred remains of one was still clutched between two of my numbed and battered fingers.

A scream rent the air and my head jerked up instinctively to find the source of it.

Olivia stood at the gallery railing, her hands clutched white-knuckled on the bannister. Her shriek was answered within seconds by a flurry of slamming doors, shuffling footsteps, and answering cries.

“What’s going on?”

“Is everything okay? Who screamed?”

“Olivia, are you…oh my God!”

“What is it? Who did it?”

“Someone get the teachers!”

No one was looking at me. They were staring around the room in apparent horror. Brushing the blinding tears once again from my eyes with the back of my ruined hand, I looked around myself properly for the first time.

The entire entrance hall, from floor to ceiling, was covered in drawings. No, not drawings. A drawing. One elaborate mural wrapped around the entrance hall from floor to ceiling like the embracing arms of a nightmare. All around me, figures were running, screaming, writhing, and falling, their faces a study in terror as they stared back at the source of their torment. I followed their gazes. High above the marble mantelpiece was the image of a towering doorway. Hordes of ghastly figures burst from it, flying in every direction, intent, so it seemed, on terrorizing the fleeing masses around us. And there, silhouetted all alone in the center of the doorway, was a tiny, dark haired girl, her arms outstretched, unleashing this unspeakable horror on all of them