Life Stealer

  It was as if she hadn’t heard me. There was dense snow all around us – in the air, on the ground; it covered an indeterminate landscape of something that might or might not be bushes and trees. Everything was snow. Kimmie’s snow. Chimera’s snow.

  “I could take this one.”

  Lightly, she touched what I’d taken to be a tree stump. The snow lifted, whirled around as if she’d blown it away, and settled elsewhere. The tree stump was Kahla. She was sitting on the ground with her knees pulled right up to her chin, and she, too, had feet and legs of ice.

  “Clara…” she whimpered. “I’m fr-eeezing.”

  Poor Kahla. More than anything she hated being cold. But this wasn’t real, I reminded myself. I looked at Chimera.

  “This is just a dream,” I said. “You can’t hurt Kahla here.”

  “Are you sure?” Chimera said. “Are you quite sure about that?”

  She touched Kahla again, and the ice ate its way up another part of the sitting Kahla figure.

  Dream-Kahla screamed. And she sounded exactly like real-life Kahla.

  “Leave her alone,” I said. “She’s never done anything to you!”

  “No,” Chimera said. “But it’s usually the innocent who suffer. Or die…”

  Was she thinking of Maira? Perhaps she was. For a brief moment she looked more like Kimmie than she usually did.

  “Or what about this one?” she said, touching something that looked like a snow-covered log pile. “He’s not particularly innocent.”

  It was Martin. Martin the Meanie in his hospital bed with tubes and cannulas and machines. He wasn’t unconscious now, he could see me and he frantically shook his head as if that were the only body part he could move.

  “Let me go,” he shouted in a hoarse, sandpapery voice. “Let me go, you cow, or I’ll beat the…” It wasn’t clear if he was talking to me or Chimera, but he was looking at me.

  “We could do without him, couldn’t we?” Chimera said. “Now what is it you call him at school – Martin the Meanie?”

  How did she know that? It felt as if she could look right inside my head and help herself to whatever she wanted – everything I knew, everything I remembered, everything I’d ever dreamt.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t take him either.”

  Because while I was fairly sure that Kahla was safe, that even if dream-Kahla got hurt, then real-life Kahla wouldn’t be… while I could just about believe that… I didn’t dare believe that Martin would survive in the real world. He was part of the soul tangle and the thread that connected him to life was now so fragile I could almost hear the delicate, high-pitched whine it would make if you pulled it so hard it snapped.

  “Or I could take this one, but I don’t suppose you care about him, so he doesn’t count…”

  It was Mr Gabriel. Kimmie’s dad.

  He was lying on the ground as he had done in real life, dragging his useless legs behind him, but he stared up at her with a defiant iciness that was just as strong as hers.

  “You don’t scare me,” he said.

  “Don’t I? Do you even know what I’m capable of now? I’m no longer that powerless little girl you could send to bed without her supper. Or scold. Or lock out.”

  “Someone’s feeling sorry for themselves, eh?” His voice was like a knife. “Poooor little Kimmie.”

  The sting hit home. I could tell from the way she flinched, and the strangely surprised expression in her eyes.

  “Shut your mouth,” she said. “That’s not my name any more.”

  “You have the name I gave you,” he said. “No matter what you call yourself to make yourself sound important, you are and always will be Kimmie Gabriel!”

  Every time he called her Kimmie, something happened to her. Her face grew younger and more vulnerable. Not as sharp, pointy and predatory as the Chimera I knew.

  “Shut up,” she said with fading strength and a shrill, strained quality to her voice.

  He tried to sit up.

  “Stay where you are,” she ordered, but he ignored her.

  “Little Kimmie always had to show off,” he said. “Little Kimmie always wanted to be special. Little Kimmie, who was so smart she could do without her head.”

  “Stop it!”

  He was standing up now.

  “What are you going to do, little Kimmie? What can you do? Useless little Miss I’m-so-Special.”

  Was he out of his mind? Why bait her? He, too, was in a pitiful state in the real world, and I had a strong hunch that she could kill him if she wanted to.

  She grimaced.

  “Perhaps I should stuff you and put you on a twig,” she said. “See how you like that!”

  He frowned.

  “Are you still sulking about that?” he said. “It was just a scruffy old bird.”

  Chimera contracted her talons, and invisible hands seemed to lift Mr Gabriel’s long body into the air.

  “He wasn’t a scruffy old bird,” she said. “He was my friend. And you took him. And you wrung his neck. Cut him open. Skinned him. Stuffed him with sawdust. And put him on that ridiculous twig…”

  Her father’s neck twitched. The invisible hands spun him around and turned him inside out. In a few seconds his insides had disappeared as if they were never there in the first place, and his skin and hair and clothes were forced over a framework only roughly human-shaped. Sawdust spilled from his mouth and ears, and his hands looked like washing-up gloves stuffed with cotton wool.

  This is a dream, I kept telling myself. A dream, a dream, a dream… It had to be because although there was nothing left of him but his skin, he was still alive, his eyes flickered, his hollow lips tried to form the word:

  “Himmie…”

  A stuffed human being still able to talk.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Now you shut up!”

  Coarse stitches sprung up across his mouth as his lips were sewn together with big black crosses like something out of a grotesque cartoon. His eyes twitched, his head jerked a little, and sawdust trickled out between the stitches, but he could no longer speak. The sound still coming from him was so strangled that it was nothing but hissing filtered through sawdust.

  “Now perhaps we can get some peace around here,” Chimera said. She paused with her fingertips pressed against her sharp cheekbones. “You told me yourself,” she said to her stuffed dad. “Never be sentimental, you said. And I guess you were right. Caring so much about a scruffy old bird was stupid. I never made that mistake again.”

  She turned to me. Her yellow eyes studied me as if she were looking for the right place to stab. And there was no escape.

  The dream dust had been a mistake. A terrible mistake. In the real world you could at least run away. Here inside Chimera’s personal nightmare, she was far, far too strong.

  I wondered if I could wake up. Would that be a way out?

  I couldn’t move enough to pinch my arm, my shoulders felt locked in place. So I dug my nails into my palms as viciously as I could – if pain was the trigger, that ought to work too.

  Nothing happened. Nothing except for the twinge in my palms.

  “What are you doing, witch child? Are you trying to get away?”

  “Yes,” I said defiantly. “Why not? This is a dream and I can wake up.”

  “And you think you’ll wake up because your hand hurts a bit? It takes a lot more, trust me.”

  She never even touched me. She just trailed a long talon in an arc through the air. There was an icy chainsaw whine from my wrist. When I looked down, my left hand was lying on the ground. There was no blood; it looked like something that had fallen off a statue. But it was my hand.

  “Did that hurt?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I whispered. The tears froze to ice on my lashes and made them stick together. It hurt. I’d never tried losing my hand in real life, so I didn’t know whether it hurt more or less than in the dream. It burnt and throbbed, but I was still here. Pain wasn’t the way out.

  “You’ll s
tay here for as long as I do,” she said. “And if we wait long enough, our bodies will wither, and then you’ll die, witch child. In real life as well. Get it? I hold your life in my hands. Do you understand?”

  I nodded silently.

  “Right, then let’s negotiate, witch child. The price of a pair of wings. You didn’t want to sacrifice your little wildwitch friend, nor that unpleasant young man in the bed. The scarecrow doesn’t count; he’s mine, not yours. So what’s it to be? You will pay for what you have done to me. The only thing we’re haggling over is the price. Oh, wait. I think I’ve decided.”

  The snow in front of me lifted, at first just a little, then a bit more. Something was lying underneath it – a flat, extended body, trapped and frozen in mid-leap.

  Cat.

  Ice crystals glistened in his fur. He was frozen from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, but his golden eyes flashed with life. And with rage.

  My heart skipped a beat. Not Cat. She had better keep her talons off him, I wouldn’t… She mustn’t…

  Somewhere out there, in real life, he was lying in his basket while Aunt Isa fought to keep his limp, lifeless body alive. It wouldn’t take much to snuff out his faint heartbeat, his rasping breath. She could kill him by snapping her fingers. And I could tell from the expression in her eyes that she knew it.

  “Not. Cat.” I could barely get the words out.

  “No? I could see to it that you got to keep him forever… I think he would look nice on your mantelpiece. I promise you, he’ll turn out better than my poor, ugly jackdaw.”

  “Don’t. You. Dare. Touch. Him.” Why was it so difficult to make the words? Was it because the ice was creeping closer to my heart, closer to my cold lips? “Take me. If you. Absolutely. Have. To. Take someone. Then take. Me.”

  She smiled bitterly.

  “That wouldn’t be any fun,” she said. “Not here. I can’t even use your blood, you don’t have any.” She pointed to the statue hand that was slowly being covered by falling snow. “It doesn’t even hurt now, does it?”

  It didn’t. She’d chopped off my hand, and I could no longer feel it.

  “But that.” She jabbed my chest with a sharp, cold finger. “In there. That’s where it hurts, isn’t it? If I take your cat, it’s going to hurt – isn’t it?”

  I couldn’t speak. It hurt so much that I couldn’t even nod.

  “Now that would be a revenge that would satisfy the hunger – at least for a little while,” she said, sounding pleased with herself.

  I couldn’t let her do it. But how could I fight back when I couldn’t move and could barely speak?

  Find out who the hungry one is.

  “Kimmie.”

  She jumped.

  “That’s not my name.”

  “But it. Was. Once. Kimmie.”

  Every time I said it, my lips grew warmer.

  “Kimmie, Kimmie, Kimmie…” I whispered. Was that why Mrs Pommerans had insisted it was so important? You can’t vanquish something before you’ve found it. And you can’t find it until you know what it is. Did I know Chimera well enough by now?

  “Do you want me to stitch your lips together too?” she said.

  “You take, Kimmie,” I said. “All you ever do is take. What makes you think you can just take whatever you want?”

  “Because I have nothing,” she said. “Everything I had, I had to take, and I could never hold on to it; someone would always snatch it away from me. Always. My dad. That stupid school. The Raven Mothers. You. But I swear that you’ll pay for this. Because when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.”

  Suddenly I could see it. The hunger. It sat inside her like a black creature, a darkness, an emptiness. An empty void that could swallow up the whole world without ever being filled. And Kimmie didn’t care. She didn’t care if the whole world disappeared. Why should she; it wasn’t her world.

  I think it was the first time I understood Chimera. Understood what it must be like to be her. And I didn’t like it.

  At that moment a jangling, quivering sound penetrated the snow. Chimera… No, Kimmie. Kimmie clutched her heart.

  “You have me.”

  A girl came walking through the snowdrifts. She wore a grey woolly hat and a scarf wrapped four times around her neck.

  Kimmie clasped her chest as if her heart would jump out if she didn’t stop it.

  “You died,” she said. “They took you from me. You too.”

  “No,” Maira said. “I’m right here.”

  The black hunger twisted. It seeped out between Kimmie’s fingers and spread across her chest.

  Suddenly I remembered what Aunt Isa had said that terrible dark and hungry night where I had tried… when I had wanted to…

  The hunger doesn’t belong to you.

  What if it didn’t belong to Kimmie either?

  It had taken up residence in her the day Pavola had shown her the cave. From that day onwards she had eaten and eaten, taken and taken – first to sate a simple hunger, a hunger for food. But later she had taken not only food but lives – and more and more of them.

  Kimmie could feel it now. And I realized she wasn’t trying to contain her heart, but her hunger. She tried, but she couldn’t. It oozed out like oil between her fingers, trickling over her chest, her body, her legs.

  “Go away,” she screamed to Maira. “Run. I can’t hold it.”

  The hunger was the revenant. And the revenant wasn’t Chimera. Who it was or who it had been, I didn’t know. The oily, all-consuming shadow trying to escape from Chimera’s chest had no face, no body, but I remembered its strength only too well. I staggered backwards on stiff ice legs, not wanting to touch the shadow or Chimera, I just wanted to get away.

  “Help her,” Maira pleaded. “She can’t do it on her own.”

  Chimera had said it herself: You’ll stay here for as long as I do. But what if she… was no longer here?

  It was as if everything stopped for a moment. I felt the cold, the grey snowflakes that were still falling. The snow had already covered Kahla up again, and Mr Gabriel’s clumsy, stuffed figure was also nearly hidden. But Cat… Cat had fought to get back on his feet, although I could see and feel that every movement threatened to burst his heart. He looked at me with eyes glowing like liquid gold.

  You have claws, wildwitch. Use them.

  Could I?

  There was something inside me. I’d felt it before. There was something sharp and steely and once I’d used it to cut off Chimera’s wings as if with an invisible sword.

  I closed my eyes. I can do this, I whispered to myself and tried to believe it. I’m a wildwitch. I have claws. I’m not a little mouse. I reached for the invisible sword inside me, I stretched out my hands –

  No. One was lying in the snow. Chimera had chopped it off without batting an eyelid. With only a thought. By flicking her little finger. What could I do against something that was stronger than her? How can you have claws when you don’t even have two hands?

  If you can’t do it, then I’ll die, Cat said.

  It wasn’t an accusation or a threat. He was just stating a fact. If I couldn’t do it, that was the end. He would be gone. And the thought was unbearable. I had to, it was that simple. With one hand or with two. With or without claws, with or without invisible swords.

  I opened my eyes again.

  One hand was the same as it always was. The other was made of fire. I had fingers of flame, claws of fire. The heat from it rose up my arm.

  I didn’t shout STOP or goaway, I just thrust my flame-hand into Chimera’s chest, where the revenant’s hungry shadow was pouring out of her.

  Ice and fire clashed in a hiss of steam. Chimera screamed. Her claws sank into my arm, but she wasn’t trying to push it away, on the contrary. She pressed my flame-hand against her heart as if her only wish were to make it stop beating.

  The world splintered. It was as if we’d all been inside a snow globe that someone had now smashed. Sunlight poured in, darkness
, warmth, earth and sounds exploded around me.

  Then it felt as if the earth rose up and hit me from behind.

  Cat! I could no longer shout it out loud, but nor could I stop myself from trying.

  Here, was all he said, and he was next to me, his warm, black fur, his claws and his body, and the hole in my heart was filled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When Something Has Died

  Ilay still for a while.

  Nothing could be wrong as long as I could feel the heat from Cat’s body and hear him purr. Or at least that was how it felt. But then I sensed something else.

  Underneath me the earth was moving.

  Not violently and quickly as I imagined an earthquake would feel, but quietly and calmly. I was raised up and then lowered down again, as if lying on a lilo floating on gently lapping waves.

  I opened my eyes just as a warm breeze rose and fluttered the leaves on the trees.

  Leaves on the trees.

  I had to shut my eyes and open them again. It was no use – I was still seeing the same thing. Everything was green. Including all the things that had been dead earlier. It wasn’t just a fine light-green veil of spring buds, it was green. Everything was in bloom. And everything was moving, very softly, very gently, in tune with the slow, gentle rhythm of the Earth.

  The Earth was breathing.

  “It’s gone,” Kahla said.

  She was sitting on the grass next to me.

  “Are you OK?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “Yes. I had some strange, cold dreams, but…” she shuddered. “Everything’s fine now.” She smiled. “The monster has gone, and everything’s… fine.”

  It wasn’t like her to just sit still and smile in a vaguely silly way. But I could feel it myself. You couldn’t help but be happy. Happy and strangely blissful.

  “I think it’s the air,” Kahla said. “It’s almost… green.”

  And it was. If I looked very carefully, I could make out a soft green glow in the air around us.

  Cat slowly got up and stretched every muscle in his black, feline body. He sniffed the green air. His tail swished from side to side; I think he was checking to see if there was any danger nearby. Then he sat down again and started giving himself a proper morning wash from his chin down to his tummy, then all four paws and as much of his back as he could reach.