“I can’t find my way through the wildways,” I said quietly. “But you can…”
It took less than ten minutes. But they were ten terrifying, fearful, cold and confusing minutes. My eyes were stinging. I was so scared of losing sight of Cat that I didn’t even dare blink.
He walked in front of me with his tail raised and his fur bristling. I followed him into the foggy land of the wildways. I tried calling out, but could manage only a pathetic whimper.
“Oscar…”
Cat turned his head and hissed. He wanted me to be quiet. We weren’t the only ones travelling the wildways tonight.
At length trees and frosted grass began to appear in the fog. I heard an owl call and I wondered if it was Hoot-Hoot out hunting mice. And then we were there, in a shorter space of time than it took me to cycle to school every morning. The brook, the meadow, the woods and the farmhouse with a thin plume of smoke rising from the chimney… I drew a huge sigh of relief. I’d succeeded. I’d done it – or rather: Cat had done it. Strictly speaking, all I’d done was traipse along behind him.
Star whinnied sleepily from the stable, but I made a beeline across the farmyard to the house. I could see that the light was on in the living room; it seemed Aunt Isa hadn’t gone to bed yet, though it was quite late.
The door of the house was ajar. Sometimes when you tried to close it, it refused to shut properly, it needed an extra tug and a small lift upwards. It had taken me a few days to learn the knack. I pushed it fully open.
“Aunt Isa…” I called out softly.
It was at this point that I realized something was wrong. Where was Bumble? Why hadn’t he come bouncing, bursting with welcoming canine joy, trying to knock me over and so make it easier for him to lick my face? And why wasn’t the door shut properly – after all, Aunt Isa certainly had the knack.
I entered the living room expecting the worst.
A solitary paraffin lamp was standing on the table beside the sofa, giving off a muted light. There was also a faint reddish glow from the embers in the wood burner. The patchwork quilt, which had covered Shanaia when she’d been resting on the sofa, was now lying in the middle of the floor and, when I stepped closer, I accidentally kicked a dropped and upended teacup. Cat hissed and puffed out his fur, making him almost twice his usual size.
Then I spotted the ferret. It lay very still, slumped up against the wall, with half-closed eyes and bared teeth. I didn’t need to touch it to know that it was dead.
CHAPTER 11
The Empty House
I stared at Shanaia’s dead ferret. Cat walked up to it and sniffed the motionless body before making a muted, indeterminable cat sound, a subdued mooooowwwwrrrrrr. I had never heard Cat say anything as simple and cartoon-like as meow.
“What happened?” I whispered, but he made no reply.
The house was quiet. The fire in the log burner crackled faintly, but otherwise there was nothing, no voices, no footsteps, not even the creaking of the woodwork.
“Aunt Isa!” I called out so loud that I even frightened myself. But deep down I knew that no one would answer.
It’s so unfair, said a tiny, resentful voice inside me. I finally do something dangerous and brave, walking all alone – apart from Cat, admittedly – along the wildways to Aunt Isa’s house because Oscar was in danger, and I thought that Aunt Isa was the only one who could help me. And then she wasn’t even here.
I knew I was being childish. Oscar was gone. Something terrible had happened in the farmhouse, Aunt Isa was gone, Shanaia was gone, and her poor little ferret was dead… All of which was obviously far more important than how I was feeling right now. But I’d pretty much convinced myself that all I had to do was get to Aunt Isa’s – and that had been hard enough – then she would fix the rest.
Oh, no. What if she hadn’t gone missing at all? What if she was lying somewhere, just as dead as the ferret…
I hadn’t thought my heart could feel sicker or more terrified. But it could.
I turned up the wick of the paraffin lamp and carried it with me while I wandered from room to room – the kitchen, the small bathroom with the hissing water heater, the creaking stairs leading to the attic and my own little room with the round window. There was no one, no dead or unconscious Aunt Isa – fortunately – nor any mysterious monsters or wicked foes lying in wait to ambush me. The house was deserted.
What on earth should I do? Wait? Start searching? I had no idea where to even begin. And it was pitch black outside.
I found a tea towel in the kitchen and used it to carefully wrap up the small, stiff body of the ferret. Then I put it in one of the cardboard boxes Aunt Isa kept for injured or sick little creatures and put the box in the boot room. If Shanaia came back, I thought, then she might want to bury it. I felt I ought to write something on the box. Name, date of birth, something along those lines – like an inscription on a gravestone, I guess. But I couldn’t remember the name of the ferret. I didn’t even know whether it was a he or she. It’s not so easy to tell with ferrets.
I opened the door of the log burner and chucked more wood on the fire, picked up the overturned teacup and the patchwork quilt, leaving it neatly folded on one end of the sofa. It seemed to calm me down, doing everyday things – putting logs on the fire, tidying up. I decided that making a cup of tea might settle me even more.
I tried. But I ended up sitting in an armchair staring at the cup while the tea slowly stopped steaming and grew cold.
“Cat?” I whispered and stroked his coarse, black back. “What am I going to do?”
His fur bristled even more, and he stiffened and tensed on my lap. I could feel his claws against my thigh.
Re. Member. He hissed from the exhaustion. Remember.
“Viridian?”
The tension eased and he rolled onto his back, so I could scratch his tummy. Yes. Remember.
“But I don’t know what that means.”
He swatted me with his paw – no claws, but quite firmly, as when a mother cat disciplines a kitten. I concluded he thought I was being very dim-witted. Then his paw suddenly shot out and he sank one claw into my thumb – only a tiny scratch, but enough for a single, ruby-red drop to balloon on my skin.
“Cat!” I tried pushing him away, but he refused to budge. I raised my hand to my mouth and sucked up the drop of blood. The moment the salty, iron taste spread across my tongue, Cat’s voice echoed in my head again: Remember.
“Blood,” I said spontaneously. “The blood of Viridian.”
He purred. At last.
“But why?” I insisted. “I still don’t know what it means. Why can’t you just tell me?”
I got the distinct impression that had he been human, he would have clutched his head and kicked something very heavy.
I sat like that, waiting, for hours. Right until the windows changed from black to grey because it was dawning outside. But Aunt Isa and Shanaia didn’t come back, and all the thoughts I was having meanwhile made me none the wiser.
When it had grown so light that I was able to go outside without tripping over every single fallen branch, I climbed to the top of the hill behind the stable to call my mum, who would undoubtedly be worried sick despite the note I’d left for her.
As soon as the display showed even a few bars of coverage, two text messages pinged to announce their arrival. One was from my mum, naturally. Where are you? It said. Call me!
The second was from Aunt Isa.
WESTMARK, it said in capital letters. That was all, nothing like Come or Help or Watch out for Chimera! Just the one word. It was up to me to decide what to do about it.
I thought about the picture Shanaia had shown me. The long coastline and the cliffs, the silky sea. The house at the edge of the world, the seagulls hovering in the wind. A strange sense of certainty grew inside me. That was where they were now. Oscar, Shanaia and Aunt Isa. And Bumble. If I wanted to find them, that was where I would have to go.
But… Chimera would also be there.
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CHAPTER 12
Wild Dogs
The first sound to break the chilly silence of the wildways was that of the sea. Quietly lapping waves and the cry of a solitary seagull, one long and four short: uuuuuuuuuuurrr – urr urr urr urr. Then I heard crunching under my feet as crisp crusts of ice cracked when I stepped on them. Dark cliffs loomed to my right and at their foot a frosty, yellow forest of tall reeds poked up through the ice. To my left the waves whispered quietly across the shore under a thin, oily membrane of ice.
I’d arrived. I recognized the place from Shanaia’s picture and, although I couldn’t see the house, it must be hiding somewhere in front of me, a little further along the shore.
Cat had led me through the wildways fog, never more than a few paces ahead of me. I couldn’t see him right now, and yet I sensed that he was nearby.
I was here. I was really here. I was walking along Westmark’s shoreline, despite thinking I would never dare. I still didn’t dare, not really. I was just doing it anyway. And I didn’t believe for one moment that I could take on Chimera. I felt no bigger or stronger or braver than before. But the thought of going back to Mercury Street and pretending nothing had happened while the police and Oscar’s mum kept searching and never found him because they were looking in the wrong place… it was unthinkable. Much worse than being here, all alone, except for Cat perhaps, and waiting for Chimera to notice me.
I didn’t have any kind of clever plan. I could, of course, try to sneak as close as possible to the house without being seen, but if the soul-stripped animals had caught Shanaia in under an hour, it would surely take even less than that before they dug their claws into me. After all, Shanaia was born and bred here, and besides – although she was young – she was a fully trained wildwitch. My one slender hope was that Shanaia had been right when she’d said that for some reason the soul-stripped animals wouldn’t touch me.
The frozen shore suddenly looked exposed and bare. The sky and the sea, the ice and the sand, and not a bush or tree for miles around. The only hiding place was inside the jungle of whispering, yellow reeds, but I couldn’t go there, the ice crust wasn’t strong enough to support my weight, nor would I be able to tell if I was still walking in the right direction.
So I stayed on the shore, but kept close to the reed forest. I didn’t know if it made a difference. The seagulls would probably detect me no matter what I did. And what was it Shanaia had said about wild dogs?
I’d barely finished the thought when I heard a loud, yipping bark. It was coming from behind me, somewhere on the other side of the reeds, I thought. I’d stopped instinctively at the sound, but what could I do apart from walk on? Run? The dogs could probably run at more than twice my speed. Go away, I whispered in my mind. Go away, go away, go away.
The reeds rustled. And, although I’d decided not to, I suddenly found myself running. My wellies were heavy and clumsy, and the ice made it worse, either cracking under my weight, or, if it held, so slippery that I was constantly skidding and stumbling.
Yip-yip, yip-yip. More sharp barking – and gaining on me all the time. They were no longer only behind me, but also coming up on my right, through the reeds. “They surrounded me, and I couldn’t escape.” That was what Shanaia had said, and now the same was happening to me. I made a sharp left out onto the sandy shore where running would at least be easier. They might be able to see me better – but then I would also be able to see them.
The frosty air stung my lungs. Now I might not be the worst in our class at PE, but I’m far from the best either, and the school’s annual fitness run is always something of an ordeal. If I get out of this alive, I vowed, I’m going to take up running and healthy eating. Cross my heart! My boots flopped around my calves, and my thighs felt heavy, cold and stiff.
Yip-yip, yip-yip!
This time, the barking was coming from the reeds just in front of me. Four or five fox-like creatures emerged from the reeds and ran out onto the shore.
I stopped. The air was wheezing in and out of my chest and I was sweating so hard that the T-shirt under my jumper and puffer jacket was sticking to my armpits and my back as if glued there. But they’re not very big, I thought. Smaller than foxes, in fact. Tawny with dark spots on their flanks, black-rimmed, pointy, triangular ears and a dark mask around their eyes. Almost cute. For a moment I felt daft for being so scared and trying to outrun them. That was before I noticed the red glow in their eyes. They weren’t blood red, like the seagulls’ eyes had been, but it was there, a fiery, red glint in the dark.
The first five wild dogs were only the vanguard. Behind me, and from the forest of reeds to my right, at least twenty more dogs poured out onto the shore, their heads lowered and their legs strangely stiff. They approached slowly, one step at a time. There was no longer any reason for them to hurry, I wasn’t going anywhere. They surrounded me just as easily as they’d surrounded Shanaia.
“Cat,” I whispered. “Cat, are you there? Help me now!”
Remember.
That was all. That was all the help I got.
The dogs moved closer, also to each other, until they formed a full circle. A circle with me in the middle. Then I heard a final, sharp: “Yip!” from one of them, an older bitch with a grizzled face and a lop-sided, torn ear, and they pounced as one.
Lop-Ear struck me just below my chest like a furry cannonball. Other teeth closed around a calf, an arm, a welly. I shouted and lashed out at them, trying to stay on my feet, but they were tugging and pulling at my waterproofs, sleeves, boots, I was tugged and shoved and harried, and eventually dragged to my knees, and then, seconds later, three or four dogs were on my back, and I collapsed under a pile of salivating jaws, tawny bodies and broad paws with strong, yellowish claws.
“GO AWAY!” My mouth was full of sand, I could hardly breathe. Spitting and coughing and writhing, I screamed “GO AWAY” as loud as I could, inside and out. But they weren’t going anywhere.
They’re going to maul me to death, I thought and panicked. Soon all that will be left of me will be a few stripped bones and a bloodstained patch of frozen sand.
Then I realized two things.
They were silent – there was no growling or snarling. And so far, none of them had bitten anything other than my clothes. They weren’t trying to eat me. They just wanted me to lie still so they could restrain me. I ended up half on my back, half on my side, with Lop-Ear on top of me. She squatted and peed on my leg. Then her head shot forwards in a sudden and terrifying movement, and her jaws closed around my neck and chin, just hard enough for me to feel how sharp her fangs were.
I stopped shouting. Instead, I lay very still while hot dog pee seeped through my not-quite-waterproofs and the thinner leggings underneath, and I felt my leg grow wet. I closed my eyes. She kept her grip on my chin and throat for what seemed like an eternity, but perhaps it was seconds or minutes, I don’t know.
Cat, I thought. You’re supposed to protect me, aren’t you? How can you let them do this?
And the worst part wasn’t even that I was lying on the icy sand with dog pee on my leg and a set of jaws clamped around my throat. That was just the beginning. Because I was starting to realize why they didn’t bite me properly, why they were only restraining me. Shanaia had said it: “They surrounded me, and I couldn’t escape.” They hadn’t killed Shanaia either, they had only pinned her down while they waited, just as they were doing now.
While they waited for Chimera to arrive.
CHAPTER 13
Lop-Ear
How long? How long would it be before Chimera came? I’d seen her fly once, though other wildwitches claimed that not even wings as big as hers would be able to support the weight of a human – or something that had been human once. I stared at the leaden sky, but could see no wings other than those of the seagulls.
“Cat,” I whispered. “Cat, help me.”
I’d been crying and hadn’t even noticed. Now I could feel the sand sticking to my cheeks, wet from tears and w
ild dog drool. But I couldn’t see or hear Cat. Perhaps twenty-five wild dogs were too many to take on, even for him. Perhaps that explained why he’d stayed away.
They were eerily still, the dogs. Lop-Ear might have released her grip on my throat for the time being, but she was still lying across me with all her weight on my chest. Nine or ten dogs had their jaws clamped on my sleeves and waterproofs, so moving would mean dislodging forty or fifty kilos worth of dog. There was no way I could do that, not with my legs, and definitely not with my arms. None of them made a sound. They just held me down. Those that hadn’t managed to get their teeth into something stood completely still while they waited. Not a single one of them shook itself or scratched an ear or sniffed or did the things that normal dogs do. “A heinous crime,” Aunt Isa had called it, and it wasn’t until now that I truly understood what she meant. It wasn’t the same as controlling an animal, like when a person trains a dog or a horse. What Chimera had done to the dogs was something completely different. She’d taken them over. She’d stripped them of all their natural instincts, their canine nature, and turned them into small, remote-controlled robots. Aunt Isa was right. It really was heinous.
I heard Chimera before I saw her. A rush as if a thousand birds were taking off at once. But this wasn’t a thousand birds, it was just one. A giant non-bird with a wingspan that shut out the sun.
Chimera.
I started resisting again. I couldn’t help it, even though I didn’t think it would be any use. And of course it only made Lop-Ear close her teeth around my throat again.
“Cat! Cat!”
Remember.
It was the only response he’d given me, the only help, and I had no idea what to do with it. I made a last, desperate attempt; I twisted my entire body violently, so violently, in fact, that Lop-Ear’s teeth slipped and pierced my skin.