Hidden Among Us (27 page)

Rafe just sighed. “Don’t give me that. You can’t stop thinking about her. I saw. I saw the way you looked at her at the lake. You hardly know each other and you followed Lissy down into the Halls of the Hidden, you’d have followed her again if me and my dad hadn’t stopped you.”

“Right. I was running away from the Fontevrault the first time, in case you’d forgotten.”

He shook his head. “But not the second time, Joe. Don’t deny it. You’ll make it worse for yourself. I know what they’re like, the Hidden. How people become obsessed by them. That’s what you’re like with Lissy. You’d do anything for her, wouldn’t you?”

I just stared out of the window at the dark water, ashamed by how obvious it was. Lissy was somewhere on the other side. I just couldn’t reach her.

“Forget about my sister, Joe,” Rafe said. “Even if she ever came back, she’d still be young when you were old and weak and dying. You can’t have her. Walk away. Just walk away, like Miles should have done.”

I still didn’t speak and after a while, Rafe left. I heard him shut the door, a quiet click.

So I didn’t tell Rafe, not about Larkspur.
There’s still one Hidden left on our side of the fence, mate
.

The question I keep asking myself is what he will do next.

Fes, Morocco

I sit down to rest on a wall already hot with the sun’s heat, drawing the hooded blue robe closer around my body. The city sprawls out before me, a jumble of white rooftops and shadowed alleyways. I watch the people move about, smaller than insects from up here. They pulse with life, loving, laughing, weeping then dying: all so fast. The waste they cast aside heaps against the city wall, a stinking tide of human rubbish that spreads out behind me, rotting food, broken trinkets, they gather so much about them and in the end it is all discarded.

White gulls swoop and soar above the rubbish, scavenging.

Each time one gull veers from the flock my heart clenches like a fist, because I know my father will come; he will find me eventually. Somehow he will open the Gateway, or find another less well protected. There are others. Of course there are, all bound in iron or otherwise sealed somehow, long ago.

The Reach is bound by iron. Again. Lissy is not like me, or my poor mother, her throat cut by a mortal knife, or even Rose. Lissy can touch iron. My father will find a way. She’ll lift the protection. When he wants something, he gets it, just like Lissy.

He’ll find a way of opening the Gateway, of lifting those iron‑bound age-old prayers and curses left there by those poor church-men grieving for Tippy and her father.

The mortals have not yet started to die. I have been waiting; I have seen them suffer great plagues before now: their dead piled up in the streets, the nights thick with fear and their cries of mourning.

But that has not yet happened. Still they all seem to live and die at their usual pace.

Whatever has become of Lissy in the White Hall of the King, she has not yet helped him break through to this world. Perhaps tomorrow they will all start to die. Or the day after. Hope lives like a frail featherless bird just moments old. And while there is still hope, I must try to end this a better way, because the mortals will not let my father go unpunished. They will take their revenge.

And then we will
all
die.

But Rose is dead, though, and I will be the one who pays for that, because I was there. I chose not to stop the boy. If I could have wielded that knife myself, I would. When my father comes I will be ready. I won’t be alone. He has taken Lissy, my only sister, but there was another like her. Long ago when the world was young, before the covenant in the great church at Fontevrault, far to the west where the sun was warm on our backs and sweet bitter olives hung in the trees, and the air smelt of crushed oranges. Before it was all forbidden.

And all the time, with every rumour I follow, every half-forgotten story, I am closer to finding him. I trace every step.

Together, we will fight. Together, we will destroy the Swan King for all time.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to say a big thank-you to Denise Johnstone-Burt, Daisy Jellicoe, Ellen Holgate, Kirsty Ridge and Catherine Clarke for all their help with
Hidden Among Us
.

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Other books by Katy Moran:

Bloodline
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Dangerous to Know