It would have been hard to say who was more surprised out of the two of us. I'm not a violent person. Okay so I'd thought about slapping Grace on a regular basis but I'd never done it. It was a pretty good blow. My palm was stinging. Grace's head had snapped sideways. She turned slowly back to face me. Her eyes were furious through her dishevelled hair. Her lips skinned back from her teeth in a snarl. For a second I felt almost as afraid of Grace as I had of Haze a few minutes before. They were welcome to each other, I wouldn't interfere again. Grace raised her fingers to her cheek, tracing the livid red mark my hand had left. Her left eye watered.
My eyes stretching wide, mouth gaping open. My hand was still raised as if I was owning up. Mea culpa. Breath came, light and fast. Around us, liquid shadow pooled and clung. Lingering stains of Haze's presence. Just like before. But this time, more darkness was leaking from Grace.
The expression on her face was alien, almost inhuman. Her teeth glinted and I thought she might lunge at me. Snapping. Biting. Just like Haze. She didn't look like Grace at all. Someone else was standing there in my sister's skin. Then Grace's expression smoothed out. She laughed, high and brittle.
"For you, that was a good come back, Gremlin. At least it was to the point, for once. Gets boring hanging around, waiting for you to finish a sentence." She smiled maliciously, daring me to hit her again.
I stood, locked in place, dumb and wooden. Grace flicked a triumphant glance at me and then spun on her heel and strode unsteadily away.
I should have gone after her. She wasn't well. I knew that, even if she didn't. She might fall or hurt herself.
I didn't move. I was shaking with fury, struggling against the tarry darkness that crept and clung to my skin. I wanted to hurt Grace. Hurt her badly. Every nasty thought I'd ever had about her clamoured in my head. Every petty meanness or hurt she had caused rushed back. But magnified. Three times as bad. Ten times. My sister deserved whatever she got. She was a hideous person. I wanted bad things to happen to her. Things that would make her sorry. Haze could have her…
What? Grace wasn't that bad. I'd never hated her. The flat flashes of old-blood coloured hatred that I felt when we wound each other up, didn't count. They were gone in a second and forgotten and…I didn't want anything bad to happen to her. But for a moment all I could think about was hurting her. Everything else had been blotted out.
I was standing in rancid shadow. Crawling things nudged and nibbled at my skin. My anger, my hatred for my sister, for myself, was feeding them…
I broke into a headlong run in the opposite direction to Grace. Away from the grasp of dark desires and hidden grudges. I couldn't outrun my thoughts and fears. But maybe I could outrun whatever was feeding on them. The cloying shadows retreated. The road was far behind me. I flopped onto a clump of heather, panting. A mean little part of me still wanted Grace to fall flat on her face. Thought that Haze should be her problem, if she wouldn't listen to me. It was normal sisterly spite. I wasn't proud of it but I doubted anyone with a sister hadn't felt like that at some point. When I hit Grace, I felt true hate. Bitter, undiluted, poisonous. Something that relished others' pain. I saw with a bit more objectivity now I was away from the darkness Haze left behind.
Grace probably meant most of what she said to me. Probably thought it often. But I didn't believe she would ever have said it like that. Not calculated to hurt me as much as possible, for her personal enjoyment. As for me, I'd happily slap Grace on a daily basis but I never wanted her hurt. I felt sick thinking of how I'd lost control. How I was shaking with the desire to do more damage. Gouge an eye or rip at her face. Something permanent and disfiguring. But I was sure that wasn't really me. Or if it was, it was the worst version of me. My intuition prodded at me. We were being used. Sock puppets in someone else's show. Something was seeping in through the cracks where we didn't like each other very much. Where we didn't like ourselves. Taking our basest desires, magnifying them, twisting them. How did you fight something like that?
I started walking again. No destination in mind, I just needed to be moving. I could rationalize as much as I liked but I still needed to calm down. I was a time bomb. There was too much negative stuff in me that Haze could work with. At that precise moment, I hated just about everyone. Petty, toothless hate but enough for his purposes. At least I was afraid it was. I walked and walked, oblivious to the wide, rolling beauty of the moor. I wondered if Haze was even human. If he really was doing that trick with shadow and emotions, I didn't see how he could be. Then I thought about my own freakish ability. It was possible he was just a twenty-something-year old biker with a weird gift of his own. It made him no less dangerous.
Wasn't it more dangerous still that I was doubting myself?
Distracted, I stumbled down a slope and put one foot ankle deep in a shallow brook. Urgh. I pulled my foot out of the thick mud with a horrible squelch. Decaying vegetation sent a wet, green reek up after it. So gross. I sat down and took off my wet trainer, pulling a face at the clammy, cold feel of my soaking-wet sock. Up-ending the shoe, I poured out a dribble of excess water. It was going to squelch, damp and spongy, around my foot all the way home.
I should have just gone home when Amy's bus left. What an idiot I was for tearing across the moor after Haze's bike. If anyone was keeping score, I was barely scraping one all against Haze. Grace didn't even know she was under Haze's spell. Had she met him before and forgotten? I felt a chilly certainty at the thought. It was part of the Pattern Mrs Cranford had told me about. Grace was well and truly caught and I didn't even know what the Pattern was.
Under it all was the creeping dread that I would fail again. I'd lose Grace for real. Just like I lost Mum. Because I wasn't strong enough. When I finally saw the Pattern for what it really was, would I even want to know? I didn't want to know now. I had the sense of a huge, vague shape stretching over Arncliffe, the vicarage, me. The moor was too wide, too open, too endless. My breath was hissing between my teeth as I fought to keep a grip on the agoraphobic panic clawing its way up my throat.
"Didn't know people still lived wild out here." The voice was cheerily masculine.
I shrieked and whirled in a half-crouch.
A dark figure stood tall against the sky. It was him. It was Haze.
I was finished. I didn't know how to fight him.
Spots danced in front of my eyes. My throat had shrunk to the size of a pinhole. Why couldn't I just faint?
"Hey. Steady there." Warm hands caught me before I could fall. Steadied me. The heat on my upper arms was comforting. I took a few deeper gulps of air. My vision cleared. No bone deep cold. No shadows. Not Haze. A boy I'd never seen before. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. His hazel eyes were flecked with gold and narrowed in concern. Sandy hair, in need of a good trim, flopped over winged eyebrows and into his eyes. I gawked stupidly at him. Mostly from relief but also because there was something about him that drew me. He wasn't good-looking, not exactly, but he had high, arresting features at odds with a generous mouth. Those eyelashes were wasted on a boy.
He arched one swooping brow and I realised that he'd been talking the whole time. I hadn't heard a word of what he'd been saying. Heat crept into my cheeks. I noticed him surreptitiously scoping me out from head to toe. I flushed harder, knowing what he'd see. Skinny girl, mud- stained, tangled hair in a wild frizz, covered in scratches and holding one shoe in a limp hand. Probably couldn't have made a worse first impression if I tried. Although I hadn't tried to speak yet. I winced, Grace’s words were still too fresh in my memory. Peering up at him through my hair, I saw he was still waiting for an answer.
"S-sorry. Wuh what did you say?" I felt ashamed of the sound of my voice.
"I said 'are you ok?' You look like a…well you looked like you might be lost or something." His low voice had a pleasant lilt.
I wondered what he was going to say before politeness made him change his mind.
"N-not lost. Wuh walking." That wasn't cryptic at all.
"Do you normally walk along stream beds? Because if not I could give you some pointers." He smiled and a hidden dimple appeared at the corner of his mouth. I felt like I had stepped into a summer's afternoon, though the breeze was chilly around me. It was impossible not to smile back. This lad carried light, not shadows, with him.
"Oh ruh really? Do t-tell?" I quirked an eyebrow back at him.
"Well, usually it's best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes again later." He paused, smirking. "Also if I were going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I'd wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You're clearly a Spartan lass."
I sniggered. "Okay, I st-stepped into the bruh brook before I knew it was there. H -happy now?"
"Well, it's a fool of a man who doesn't appreciate an honest woman. My name's Ciarán by the way." He held out a hand. I wondered if he meant to shake hands but when I took it he just helped me up the bank. Kee-uh-run. I savoured the way he had said his name in that lilting accent.
"So you are Irish th-then?" I pulled my trainer back on, squelchy feeling, cold foot and wet vegetation smell included. Great. Not that he'd fancy me anyway but it would have been nice not to look like a complete lunatic. I sighed internally.
"No flies on you are there? Yep, county Cork. Staying with me Aunt Mary this summer in a little nothing of a place called Arncliffe -"
"That's wuh where I live!" I said. Well obviously.
"It's past my lunchtime and I'm betting it's past yours. Shall we walk back together?" He held out an arm as if to gesture me forward.
"Sh-sure." I slipped past him, trying to ignore the hideous squeaking made by my wet shoe.
"So, do you have a name?"
"Yes th-thank you." I grinned mischievously.
Ciarán eyed me narrowly. "Fair enough. A name's an important thing. Needn't be giving it out to strangers."
"It's Emlynn." I enjoyed a moment of triumph. If there is one word that stammerers can rarely get out, it's their own name. Which is how I ended up with 'Emlynn'. When I stammered as a child, I could only get out the first syllable of Emily and the first syllable of Lynette. It stuck. I liked it better anyway.
"How did you get so scratched up then, Emlynn?" He glanced at me uncertainly again.
I felt wildly like laughing. Too many swooping highs and plummeting lows. What a weird few days. Weird being a massive understatement. I liked the way he said my name though. Not two blunt syllables but a lilt that made it almost pretty. Em-i-leene.
"Cr- Crawling through gorse bushes." I took a perverse delight in answering his questions in a way that told him nothing at all. I'd never paid much attention to boys before. Maybe Grace was on to something after all.
"Crawling through gorse," he repeated. "Part of your action girl antics no doubt?"
"Nuh no doubt." I smirked again.
"So is Arncliffe the picturesque Yorkshire village it's held up to be?" Ciarán seemed to actually want to talk to me. He must have noticed the stammer but he was acting like he hadn't. I was profoundly grateful. Nearly everyone who heard me speak got 'The Look'. The 'poor dear' look or the 'must-end-the-conversation-now' look. It was hard to value what I said when no one else did.
"It's al-alright." Lame. At least try to be interesting. "W-we only muh moved in last Friday. Haven't s-seen much y-yet."
"Never mind, we can learn all its secrets together. It'll be nice not to be the only one from 'off' as that charming fishwife in the post office put it."
I threw back my head and laughed properly. I couldn't remember the last time I'd laughed like that. It hurt but in a good way. I slipped the idea of us exploring together in the 'empty chit-chat' file though. He seemed nice but he was Grace's age. Just being polite to a mad-looking, dishevelled girl he found on the moor. Don't go getting the wrong idea, I told myself.
After nearly half an hour we reached the end of the lane to the village. The vicarage was off to the right up a long dirt track. I didn't fancy walking through the village in the state I was in. Time to say goodbye. Nice while it lasted.
"This is muh me." I indicated the lonely track.
"Really? What's up there?" He peered over my shoulder in genuine curiosity. "Is there a house up there? You're not a sylph or something that really does live wild are you?"
"The vuh vicarage is up there. My d-dad is the vicar." Might as well get that off-putting fact out there now. Ciarán would hear it soon enough if he stayed in the village. I wondered if his Aunt Mary was as big a gossip as Mrs Holden.
"Is he now? You don't look like the church sort somehow." He pursed his lips. Very distracting.
“I'm nuh not. I'm the m-make my own mind up sort. Eh- anyway. Suh see you." I started towards the track, wondering why I was trying so hard to give him the brush off.
"Hey now, bide a bit! When will I see you again? You can't leave a poor lad dangling like that!" His look of bewilderment made me bite my lip to keep from laughing.
"Why would you wuh- want to?" The words were out before I could stop them. A rare occurrence for me. And now I would seem pathetically needy. Very attractive.
"Because I love a pair of pretty green eyes." He grinned. "So I'll see you tomorrow?"
"W-Wednesday. I'll b-be in the vuh village." I kicked myself for giving in. This wouldn't end well. But Amy did say to make friends. At least, that was the excuse I was going to stick with.
"Excellent. Wednesday it is then." He smiled even wider. "See you later green-eyes." He gave me a mocking bow and sauntered off towards the village. How could anyone be that comfortable in their own skin? It was like he didn't have any hang-ups at all. But that smile… I shook my head, trudging up the lane to the vicarage. Ciarán was far too charming. I needed to be on my guard.