The Midnight Gate (3 page)

She stepped inside and blinked for a moment in the bright fluorescent glare. Mr. Evans was helping a customer and smiled thinly at her as she walked toward him. He had always been skinny, but since his wife had left him, he seemed to have almost faded away. His face was gaunt, with shadows under the eyes, and his body seemed to strain against some unseen weight.

Mrs. Evans had taken off soon after she and Steve had returned from the Other Side, leaving only the briefest of notes on the kitchen table. When she'd first heard about it, Belladonna had wanted to tell Steve that his mother had seemed to know more than she really ought to when she'd tried to stop them going through to the Other Side, but somehow the moment never seemed right.

Steve's Dad was devastated and initially spent his days standing at the front of his shop staring into space. After a few weeks of that, he pulled himself together and decided that Steve would have to take up the slack in the family business, which meant that apart from school and football practice, Steve had to spend every spare moment helping in the shop.

“He's in the back, love,” he said as she approached. “He's supposed to be bringing up some of them new MP-whatsits, but he's been gone long enough to make the things by hand.”

Belladonna smiled and made her way past the crowded ranks of screaming machinery to a small door at the back of what had once been the town's only theatre. She pushed it open and stepped into the cool semidarkness. Around her, where the seats had been, ranks of boxed electronics were stacked like the hedges in a maze. Other than the boxes, the theatre was frozen in time—even the gilded cupids on the front of the dress balcony looked like they were waiting for the evening performance. Belladonna glanced up at the stage. The old scenery was piled at the back where she and Steve had left it, and the doorway “flat” that had been their first entry into the Land of the Dead lay on the stage where it had fallen when Belladonna had struggled with Steve's mother. She could still make out the marks on the dusty stage floor where they had fought, though since October, new dust had settled over them like a drift of fresh snow. Soon any sign of their skirmish would be gone.

Belladonna turned away from the stage, pushed her hair behind her ears, and walked slowly past the rows of boxes, peering down each narrow canyon, looking for Steve.

All was silent.

She strained to hear anything that would indicate someone was in here looking for something, which was, after all, what he was supposed to be doing.

Nothing. She took another step forward and something cracked under her foot. It was only an old piece of plastic packing, but in the empty theatre, it sounded like a gunshot. Steve's head shot up like a meerkat on the savannah.

“I'm just getting them!” he said. “Oh, it's you.”

He disappeared once more behind the bastion of boxes. Belladonna sighed and made her way between the narrow rows to where Steve sat surrounded by the garish colors and detailed specs of DVD boxes and televisions, reading a comic and eating a packet of chips. He barely glanced up.

“What do you want?” he said grimly.

“What are you doing back here?” said Belladonna, ignoring his surly tone. “It's freezing.”

“Taking a break,” he muttered.

“Your Dad said you were supposed to be bringing some stuff up to the shop.”

Steve looked up darkly and Belladonna decided against pursuing the subject. This wasn't going at all as she'd imagined, and it seemed like the best option was to forget about what Steve's Dad wanted or had said or anything to do with the shop. She let her hair drop down from behind her ears, curtaining off her face until all that was visible were her dark eyes.

“I found something,” she said finally. “Mum and Dad said it wasn't anything, but…”

Her voice trailed off. She suddenly felt really stupid standing there among all the boxes, talking about feathers.

“Never mind,” she muttered. “Sorry.”

She turned on her heel and started making her way back down the narrow canyon of boxes.

“Wait!” said Steve.

Belladonna ignored him. She wished she'd never come. She should have thrown the feather away like her mother said. She squeezed past some particularly large projection TV boxes and was just about to step out into what had been the theatre aisle when her way was suddenly blocked.

“I'm … I'm sorry, okay?” said Steve, shoving his hands into his pockets. “It's just…”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Belladonna swung her backpack to the ground.

“I found something,” she said, and proceeded to tell him about her grandmother's new client and the mysterious feather.

Steve seemed about to make some smart remark about people who went to séances in general and her grandmother's clients in particular, but his expression changed when she got to the part about the feather. Belladonna thought he blanched slightly and she definitely saw a muscle in his jaw tighten.

For her, much of last October's adventure had been about discovering why Dr. Ashe had captured all the ghosts, trying to prevent the long-dead necromancer from opening a door to the Dark Spaces for the Empress to return, and realizing that she, Belladonna Johnson, really was the Spellbinder. But she knew that for Steve the most vivid memory was of the Night Raven's poison scorching through his veins, and she suspected that he still woke up in the night with his heart pounding at the memory of hovering near death with the evil Dr. Ashe administering just enough antidote to keep him alive, but never enough to make him well.

“No,” she said hastily, “I don't think it's a Night Raven. It's too big.”

She flipped open the top of her backpack and rummaged around. Where was it? Why was nothing ever easy? She threw her notebook, six packets of Parma Violets, and two cans of Tizer onto the floor, pushed aside the remains of last Wednesday's sandwiches (some kind of nasty avocado spread), and finally retrieved the long, blue-black feather.

Steve looked at it, then took it from her and turned it over slowly.

“D'you think it could be a—”

“A Kere?” It was the one thing that would be worse than Night Ravens, for the Kere had said she was the bringer of Death itself.

“Yeah.” He handed it back. “But it couldn't be. We killed her or sent her back to wherever she'd come from.”

Belladonna nodded dubiously and bit her lip.

“What?” said Steve, starting to get annoyed.

“Don't you remember what she said? She said she was one of the Keres, bringers of death.
One of.
What if there are more?”

“More?”

He made her feel that it was somehow her fault. She began shoving her belongings back into her backpack.

“Did she have wings?” asked Steve as Belladonna slid the feather into a side pocket and zipped it closed. “The woman, I mean. The visitor. Could you tell?”

“She was wearing a big black coat,” said Belladonna. “But … no, not that I saw.”

“Well, she can't have been a Kere, then, could she? I mean, you'd hardly miss wings that size, would you?”

Belladonna looked at him. She was almost certain that a creature like a Kere would have no difficulty concealing her wings from mortal eyes, and she was just as certain that Steve knew that. But there was a sort of eagerness in his eyes, a desire for things to return to the way they had been before they found the Door. Could he really feel that way? Only a few months ago he'd joined her quest to find her parents on the Other Side with almost fearless glee. But perhaps that was the problem—she had found her parents, but he had returned to discover that his mother had gone. Just gone. In that ordinary human way that happened every day and that no amount of questing or adventure could fix.

“No, you're right,” she said, smiling. “I was just being silly, I suppose. She probably didn't even drop it.”

“You said it was nearly dark.”

Belladonna nodded and swung her bag over her shoulder. Steve walked with her to the front of the shop.

“See you on Monday, then,” he said.

“Yeah, see you,” said Belladonna and headed for home.

A slow drizzle had started and the icy wind clawed at her face and ears. As she trudged up the street, she could hear Steve's Dad asking him where the MP-whatsits were and what on earth he'd been doing in the storeroom all that time and didn't he know that there was a sale on and he couldn't see to every customer himself and …

The sound of his voice gradually faded into the general babble of voices and sounds, and Belladonna walked quickly home, hoping that Steve was right but knowing that he wasn't.

 

3

The Chair

THE WEEKEND
'
S DRIZZLE
had developed into a full-fledged downpour by Monday morning. Belladonna gazed grimly out of the kitchen window as she ate her cereal. Her father was leaning against the doorjamb, watching the steady rivulets of rainwater cascading down the kitchen window.

“Sorry I can't take you into school, Belladonna,” he sighed. “You're going to get soaked through.”

Belladonna smiled encouragingly. She knew her parents hated the fact that they couldn't take more part in her life, but given that they were dead, she thought they did a pretty good job.

“It's okay,” she said. “I'll just take an umbrella.”

The umbrella was purple with two broken spokes and a small tear on one side. It did nothing to belie Belladonna's image as a fashion disaster, but it did keep some of the rain off as she trudged through the gloomy streets to school.

By the time she got there, she was freezing, her hair hanging down like rats' tails and her shoes soaked through. She hung her coat and scarf on a hook in the cloakroom and made her way to the classroom. Sophie Warren and her friends were already there, of course, warming the backs of their legs on the radiator. Sophie's Dad drove her to school every day, so she always looked flawless, though she was the kind of girl who never seemed to get ruffled at all. Netball, lacrosse, tennis, Sophie came through it all with the sleek aplomb of a supermodel. On days when outdoor sports combined with pouring rain and slicing wind, and every other girl in class ended up looking like they'd been dragged through a hedge backward, there was still hardly a hair out of place on Sophie's blond head. Though Belladonna suspected that, given the opportunity, the Wild Hunt would easily take her down in a chase to the death. She smiled a little at the thought of Sophie running for her life, pursued by a howling mythological horde, horses and riders thundering out of the sky, their huge dogs baying beside them, but she was soon brought back to earth by the sound of barely suppressed giggles.

She glanced up. By the way they were all looking at her, Belladonna guessed that Sophie had just said something terribly funny about her sodden appearance.

She dumped her bag by the side of her desk and sat down with a thump.

The day pretty much went downhill from there, and by the time lunch rolled around, Belladonna was feeling gloomy and frustrated, and the cheese and onion pie on offer in the school cafeteria didn't help at all.

She put her coat on and wandered outside, avoiding the main areas of the grounds and walking instead along the side of one of the Victorian houses that made up the school buildings. It was a little dark and considerably colder than the rest of the playground, but there was a small bench nestled beneath some leggy, overgrown bushes, where she knew no one would bother her.

At least that was what she thought.

“Belladonna!” The familiar voice sounded more than usually excited.

Belladonna sighed and looked up. Elsie was leaning out of a window near the back door. The window was closed, but that was neither here nor there for Elsie, given that she'd been dead for nearly a hundred years.

“What?” said Belladonna, a note of irritation creeping into her voice.

“It's Sophie,” said Elsie, “that odious Warren girl.”

“I'm not interested in her,” sniffed Belladonna. “I'm trying to read.”

“Oh, right. Fine, then. You can find out the hard way.”

“Find out what?”

“Oh … nothing.”

Elsie was clearly miffed. Belladonna stood up and walked over to the building. She couldn't risk anyone seeing her shouting in the direction of an empty window, and Elsie couldn't leave the school buildings that she had chosen to haunt.

“Find out what?” repeated Belladonna testily.

Elsie looked away, toying with one of her luxuriant brown curls. Belladonna sighed loudly and turned to walk away.

“She and her friends are planning a trick,” said Elsie hastily.

“What else is new?” muttered Belladonna, turning back.

“You're not going to just
let
them?” Elsie looked at Belladonna in amazement.

“They're always doing it,” explained Belladonna. “I'm used to it.”

“But…”

“It's just easier,” she explained. “They get their jollies and then redirect their energies onto some other target. It's okay.”

“No, it isn't!” Elsie sounded genuinely shocked. “You can't let people walk all over you just because they can! That's not the attitude that won the Empire!”

“Britain doesn't have an empire anymore.”

“Aha! Well … exactly!”

Elsie folded her arms triumphantly.

“No,” said Belladonna. “We didn't lose the empire because we didn't … Look, fighting doesn't prove anything.”

“Yes, it does,” said Elsie with the kind of certainty that made Belladonna a little jealous. “Fighting proves who is strongest. And cleverest. But anyway, I wasn't suggesting fighting. I was thinking more of ‘own's back.'”

Belladonna looked at her. There was something undeniably tempting about getting back at Sophie Warren, even if it did mean that her life would be made thoroughly miserable afterward.