The Darkening

were free. They began to weave the air above the flames, seeming to pull shadows and firelight through each other, drawing symbols in the shimmering, sparking air above the fire pit.

Nicholas stared, mesmerised. Her voice was a singsong of words he didn’t understand, but their tone was clear. Invoking. Inviting. Imploring. Please. Please. .

He was startled from the spell by the thudding of the first heavy drops of rain on the shingles above him. It was a short entree; in just moments, drenching rain stampeded down. Rain to deter the searchers. Rain to buy Quill time enough to kill Hannah Gerlic and move her body to be found kilometres away.

Nicholas rolled onto his back. The ropes dug painfully, pinching the skin of his wrists and cutting most of the blood to his feet, making them cold and numb.

‘Let the girl go, Rowena.’

For a while Quill said nothing, but cocked her head and listened to the tapdance on the roof.

‘She can’t go back,’ she said. ‘She will bring them here.’

‘You killed her sister, her parents are already-’

‘She won’t suffer,’ snapped Quill. She rose quickly to her feet and hobbled across the room. No sign of the young, svelte Rowena now.

He’d seen the terror on dead Dylan Thomas’s face as he was hauled, again and again, to a violent death that occurred somewhere near here. A death, Nicholas was sure, he would see tonight.

‘They suffer,’ he said.

She sent an angry glance at him, ready to bite again.

‘It’s an honour. They don’t know it, but they give of themselves so that others live.’

‘Trees,’ whispered Nicholas.

‘Yes, trees!’ snarled Quill. Orange light danced under her chin and eyes, so she seemed to rise like a fiery djinni. ‘And more than trees. There are secrets in live wood.’ She turned her full face to him and, as her passion rose, she again grew younger, so chillingly beautiful that Nicholas could only stare. ‘The woods ruled once, and men were tiny in them — tiny an’ afraid. The woods fed us an’ taught us an’ shared their secrets with those that listened to Him. Oh, how terrified they were when we learned fire! Fire an’ steel. Fire an’ steel, an’ the scales swung. Then we grew more plentiful than the trees. We became the blight on ’em, like that cursed fungus on our lumpers. Poisonous, infecting everythin’. One of them,’ she pointed out the window at the black panorama of hidden forest, ‘can grow five hundred years. Do you know how many people can breed from two humans in five hundred years? A million! A million mouths an’ bodies needin’ more fire, more wood, more food, more space.’

She shook her head and her long, blonde hair sparkled like silk. Her eyes probed his, desperate.

‘We’re the disease,’ she whispered. ‘What odds if a few young ones must die? There’s always more. Trust me on that.’

She lifted her head, her throat was long and slender and white. On the skin that plunged down from her neck to the curving tops of her breasts glistened delicate gems of perspiration. Nicholas found his skin growing hot, and looked away, angry with his body. The rain swelled on the roof. Rowena and he could have been the only people in a hundred kilometres, a thousand kilometres. Despite his fury, despite his disgust, his body wanted her.

‘It’s a lie,’ he whispered. ‘You’re a lie.’

She rose from her chair, lithe and light as air, and crouched over him. Her eyes sparkled.

‘This hair’s a lie?’

Her face hovered over his and her hair fell like gold curtains around them. Her teeth were perfect pearls behind thick, soft lips. She lowered her mouth till her lower lip grazed his forehead.

‘This skin?’ she murmured.

Her touch was electric. His blood throbbed and his groin ached.

‘It is fleeting now, yes,’ she purred. ‘But it needn’t be. I have only to ask. I have never asked for anything for me, just for me.’ Her head crept forward until her white throat was over his face, and her breath blew over his chin, his neck, his chest. Her breasts swung loose and full, tantalising centimetres from his eyes, his mouth. ‘We can be young together.’ She prowled backwards till her lips were above his.

Nicholas felt his heart thumping in his chest, so hard it shook him on the floor. He felt the pulsing rain outside was driving his blood, falling hard and alive, desperate to sink into the ground, to rise through roots and trunks, to explode in lush, bright leaves.

But Hannah. .

‘And what will that cost?’ he whispered.

The corners of her perfect lips curled upwards in a gentle smile. ‘She’ll not suffer long,’ she whispered back, a breath as young as saplings.

He could feel her heat. Smell her sweet sweat. The skin above him was so white and perfect that there was nothing else to the world — she could be his sky, his bed, his food. He gritted his teeth. It’s a lie, he thought. It’s all a lie. Her excuses, her double life, her names. Pretending to be part of a town that she fed off, that she bled, which she plucked children from as carelessly as weeds from a herb garden.

‘Your church was a lie, too,’ he hissed. ‘A church to one God, but meant for another.’

She hovered over him, her lips so close to his the air tingled as if lightning were ready to leap between them. She smiled.

‘What makes you think they are not one and the same?’

Nicholas blinked. Did Pritam once say that, too? It was so hard to think. His groin throbbed painfully, ravenously. His chest hammered. His mouth felt at once wet and dry. What was she saying? Church of Christ? Church of the Green Man?

Her tongue danced behind her white teeth. Her eyes were wide, her pupils dark and large with excitement, her breath was sweet and lightly spiced.

‘He has gone by many names in many ages. But His story is the same,’ she said. ‘He dies so we can live. Each year He dies for us, and then is reborn for us. And all He asks in return is humility,’ her lips touched his, ‘and a little sacrifice.’

It seemed so simple now. Stay. All he had to do was stay. Wasn’t this what people dreamed of? An idyll, a singing nest of trees in which to live a life so long he would be like the trees themselves: deep-rooted and protected and safe. A woman who understood him, who knew his gift, who wanted him enough to kill for him, who was achingly beautiful and raised his flesh like a drug. Time would lose its weight. Life would be perfect.

Rowena smiled at him, as if reading his thoughts. Her fingertips ran down his throat — her lips gentled the air above his own. His mouth was wet with the need to taste her flesh. Her body was so close its heat poured down with the erotic rhythm of the rain. Yes, she said without words. Life would be perfect.

Except. .

‘Except for the ghosts,’ whispered Nicholas.

He spat in her face.

As she shrieked, the mask of youth ripped apart like smoke in a sudden gust and the old hag Quill reared over him, wrinkled and rotting. She slapped his face so hard that white stars joined the orange sparks in the air.

Rain clouds rolled overhead and what little light the night sky had given was vanished. Where moonlight had sliced three white knives through the gaps between the heavy timbers of the cellar doors, raindrops now leaked, accreting into globs of cold water as big as marbles that fell and spattered on the brick stairs.

Hannah was soaking wet and sobbing. Her fingers were frustrating millimetres too thick to slip between the boards of the trap doors and reach the bolt. So, she crouched on the stairs on the underside of the doors, reaching between the heavy timbers with the paring knife, trying to snick and persuade the barrel bolt to move. . but it was fruitless. The bolt needed to twist ninety degrees before its loop would clear the guide and it could be slid aside. The blade found no purchase on the round steel.

Hannah could feel her heart trotting faster. She didn’t know how long she’d been down here, but it had certainly been hours. She remembered that it had rained this heavily the night Miriam had been taken. Time surely was running out. She was going to die.