“Nesbitt, just read it,” I tell him.
And he reads:
“First of January, 2005. Dawn of the new year for some, though the end of an era for others. Another Black territory in Mississippi was abandoned last month after the oldest of them, Destra, died. She was a fine witch. Destra’s Gift was a strong ability to heal others, an unusual Gift for a Black Witch. I met her a few times. She was confident, serene, and capable—an impressive witch. I heard that Marcus and Destra have become acquainted in the last year. Destra is supposed by some to be the mother of Ledger, though I don’t believe this. I’ve heard several other stories about Ledger’s parentage and Destra indicated to me when I met her that she had no children. I wonder why Marcus was interested in Destra; because she was an interesting woman or because he’s trying to find out about Ledger? If so, he’s wasting his time. Destra can’t help him. I met Ledger once, years ago—awful woman (man? thing?)—though one rarely hears of her these days and I rather hope never to hear of her again.”
Nesbitt closes that diary and puts it on the floor. He looks from me to Gabriel, saying, “Good, huh?”
We both look blankly at him.
“Knew you’d appreciate it, boys. So we found that and then we checked back through all the diaries looking for when Mercury had met Ledger. And we found this from 1973.” Again he starts to read and then stops, saying, “You keeping up with me? The map”—and he points to the parchment—“is from 1973.”
I resist rolling my eyes.
Nesbitt smooths the diary open and reads:
“Finally found the map room in the cellar of the house in P and it was simple from there. She loves that: mixing the extremely complex spells of the maps with a simple request to gain access to them. The map room is very much Ledger’s style: her idea of being clever. And her way of screening visitors—if you can find the map room, work out how to enter it and how to use the map, then you are worthy of visiting her. I’m not sure what would happen if you used the wrong map. I suspect you’d go to that place and be unable to get back, at least not without a long walk. The maps are impressive. Their magic is complex and Ledger is, I admit, powerful. Indeed, she has more power than I thought possible. But what is the point of having that power if she never uses it?
“Ledger and I talked for a while, though most of what she spouts is almost unbearable waffle. I asked her about the loss of Black territories and her concerns. She said, ‘I have none. All will come back to balance in the end.’ I replied, ‘How exactly will that happen when the Blacks are being wiped out?’ And she said, ‘Because it must be so. The nature of our Gifts means it will be so. The world will become more unbalanced but then . . . we have to believe that balance will return.’
“I was getting extremely bored with her at this stage and I said, ‘Well, I don’t see that happening. I see the Whites wiping everyone out. Everyone except me, you understand.’ And she looked at me for a long time and said, ‘No. I don’t see a White Witch wiping you out, Mercury.’
“At another point she asked me, ‘Who is your mother, Mercury? The wind or the rain?’
“I told her that my mother was Saffron, a fine Black Witch.
“Ledger said, ‘Isn’t your Gift like a parent to you now? Teaching, guiding, helping, and, even for you with all your power, a source of comfort?’
“It took a huge amount of self-control to resist the urge to freeze her jaw shut at that point.
“I asked her what her Gift was and if it was her mother. I wasn’t sure I wanted a reply as I was sure it would be more nonsense and I’d already had to put up with hours of it. She replied with a non-answer, as ever. She said, ‘I’m still learning about my Gift, Mercury, and still it eludes me.’
“Of course she was being ‘humble.’ She has learned many Gifts, and I am trying to copy her in that, I admit. She delights in disguise and shape-shifting. (I won’t bother to say what appearance she took on for me, except that it was extremely tiresome.) In any case, she is the most powerful witch I know of. The irony is that although she has learned to access many powers she has failed completely to be anything but tedious and absurd. She says things like ‘The Essence is our true home’ and that she is ‘merely climbing through a window to steal a few gems.’ To many questions she simply replies, ‘The Essence is the source of all Gifts.’
“At one stage she said, ‘Whoever can access the Essence, all power is theirs. There will be no limit to it.’ She knelt and touched the ground with the flat of both her hands (I had to stifle my laughter), saying, ‘It’s here somewhere.’ Then she looked up at me and said, ‘But perhaps, as your Gift is weather, you think it’s in the air?’ And for the first time I thought that she was genuinely interested in me, or rather in my Gift. That is her weakness: she is desperate for more knowledge.
“I replied, ‘Of course the air is the answer for me.’
“But now I’m back in my home and I press my hands to the walls of stone, I think that perhaps she is right and the earth is the answer.”
Nesbitt closes the diary and says something but I’m thinking about the earth holding the secret of witch powers. I feel that is true: the earth is the answer. It’s through the earth that I helped Gabriel get his Gift back. When we were in the trance and our hands were staked together, we were transported to Wales, at least in our minds we were. I’m not sure what happened then but when the stake went into the earth and into my chest, my heart, we connected with something. I touch my chest, feel the slight indentation scar left from the stake, and I look at Gabriel and he says, “The earth is the answer for me.”
Mercury was clearly jealous of Ledger but also impressed by her. She does sound completely unlike any White or Black Witch I’ve ever come across.
I ask Nesbitt, “Did Van say what Ledger was like?”
“Glad you asked that, ’cause as it happens I asked that very question and Van said, ‘She’s remarkably calm, pleasant, and reasonable.’”
So this is beginning to look more straightforward. Calm, pleasant, and reasonable: at least it doesn’t sound like I’m going to have to fight her.
I say, “So we get to Ledger through the map room, and the map room is here,” and I point to the map.
Nesbitt grins. “Yep. In the cellar of the house in Philadelphia. The address is here in the diary.”
“Easy then,” I say. “Are you sure you’re not going to come?”
Gabriel sees that Nesbitt’s considering it and adds, “I don’t think there’ll be any Hunters there. Might be interesting.”
Nesbitt smiles and says, “I’m sure it will be interesting.” But he shakes his head. “If you don’t mind, fellas, I’ll leave it to you.” He gets up and makes to leave, then turns back, saying, “Nearly forgot. You need to be thinking about what to take with you. A token, I mean. Something to show you’re making a peaceful visit.”
“What did Van take?” I ask.
“She took a fancy diamond necklace from Mercury’s collection,” he says. “It was a weapon—kills anyone who puts it on.”
“Nice.”
“Van brought the necklace back.”
“She did give Ledger half of the Vardian amulet. That’s probably more rare and precious than diamonds,” Gabriel reminds us.
“True. Well, I’ll leave that with you. I’m going to cook dinner. The last supper together, eh, boys?” And he wanders out, saying, “Mercury has some decent wine here as I recall.”
The Last Night
After Nesbitt goes to the kitchen, I leave Gabriel in the library and wander around the bunker. But really I’m not wandering; I know where I’m heading.
The bedroom that Annalise and I shared is just as we left it. The bedclothes are rumpled and creased; there’s even a dip in the pillow. I remember lying there, Annalise’s head on my chest. There’s the small vial of potion on the chest of drawers: the one I used to wake her. The bowl of n
ightsmoke is still there too. We stood here in front of the bowl and kissed and caressed and I loved her. I loved her so much. She was gentle and kind and sweet. It was a beautiful time we had together here—only a few days but special. And I can’t work out if she changed or I changed or we both did or what. I don’t think I changed that much but maybe I did. From the age of eleven we knew each other but maybe not that well. Maybe we just saw in each other what we wanted to see.
I look at the bed. It seems strange to think that I lay there with Annalise, talked with her, kissed her, and now I feel nothing for her at all except loathing. My anger, my fury, has changed to simple hate.
There’s something on the floor under the bed and I pull it out. It’s the silk nightdress Annalise took from Mercury’s wardrobe. She looked amazing in it. I remember holding her, the silk against her skin, against my skin. And kissing her and everything we did was so good.
And now I detest her and I wonder how she feels about me. I know she thought I was getting more like my father. Marcus was always the problem. We never spoke about him but she knew I loved him and she didn’t understand that. I think she hated her own father and expected me to feel the same way about mine.
I remember a conversation we had about Marcus when we were working for the Alliance. She asked me where he slept. I told her, “Away from everyone. Where he won’t be disturbed. Where he feels safe.”
“In a tent?” And I think she asked that because she knew it was unlikely.
“No. In . . .” And I was going to tell her about his den that he grew around himself. A thicket of brambles like the one I stayed in with him. I said, “I’ll take you sometime.”
“I’ve never even spoken to him.”
“He doesn’t like it in camp.”
And the next day I went to see my father, sat with him in his den. Felt how good it was to be there. I told him Annalise would like to meet him and he said, “If you really mean that, then bring her here.”
But I never did. That was a few days before things started to go wrong between me and Annalise, and bringing Marcus into the problem didn’t seem like a good idea. And, if I’m honest, I knew she wouldn’t have understood him and so wouldn’t understand that part of me. And I knew in my heart that she wouldn’t feel at home in the den.
I hold the nightdress to my face, feel its softness, and then I let it drop back to the floor.
* * *
The meal Nesbitt has cooked is typically huge, enough for eight of us, and it’s good. Soup and fresh bread, followed by stew and lots of veg, and for Nesbitt a lot of wine too. I don’t drink and Gabriel’s small glass lasts all evening. We talk about the food and the bunker and then Mercury and Van. Nesbitt tells us stories of things he and Van did together, of places they went all over the world. Of how Van helped him when he was young and trained him and how she loved his soufflé but would never even try banoffee pie. He is nearly crying at the end of it. I’m glad for his sake that he’s leaving the Alliance and hope he finds something better, something he believes in. He says he wants to settle down, find “the right woman” and have kids, which I’m surprised to realize he’d be great at. We talk a little about people we have known but who have gone, most killed at BB. Sameen and Claudia and some of the others we trained with, Ellen, my Half Blood friend from London, who was a scout for the Alliance and who was killed in the aftermath of BB, and others we never had the chance to bury or even remember properly. And I wonder how many more of us will die in this war.
Eventually, however, Nesbitt’s talk makes no sense at all and he begins to fall asleep at the table. Gabriel says we should put him to bed, though I really don’t see what’s wrong with letting him sleep on the kitchen floor. But Gabriel has this idea that it’s our last night together and we should look after him, so we take an arm each round our shoulders, Gabriel grabs the bowl of nightsmoke and we walk Nesbitt down to one of the bedrooms and drop him on the bed. Gabriel throws me some blankets and I make a bed up for myself on the floor. Gabriel does the same.
And I sleep.
A wonderful sleep that must last all of half an hour because I wake to the sound of snoring. Snoring that is loud, irregular, and unmistakably Australian.
Bastard!
I get up. It’s impossible to ignore snoring, especially when you know it can be stopped by smothering the idiot who’s doing it.
The light from the nightsmoke gives the room a faint green glow and Nesbitt looks ghostly in the light. He’s lying on his back, his mouth wide open. I roll him onto his side. He mutters, but doesn’t wake. I stand by him and wait, and he sighs. The snoring has stopped. He breathes quietly.
I go back to my blanket on the floor and am about to lie down when the snoring starts again.
A new kind of nightmare!
I haven’t had a vision of me killing Nesbitt but there’s a chance it might happen unless I get out of the room. I look over to Gabriel but he seems to be asleep so I take a small bowl of the nightsmoke and go looking for somewhere quiet. The next room down the corridor is a bedroom with a comfy-looking bed, but I have the urge to go somewhere else: to the room I’ve avoided since we came back.
It’s just a bathroom. Very cold now. The bath is dirty, still lined with bloodstains. Mercury’s blood. This is where I came after I killed her. I washed here and I kissed Gabriel here.
I walk over to the basin and look in the mirror. I look older and strangely unreal in the greenish light of the nightsmoke. I touch my face and feel the small scar on my cheek where Jessica caught me with the photo frame when I was a child. I guess I was about three or four, so Jessica would have been ten or eleven. She’s oldest of us four children, though she’d just say three children and a half Black. I can’t remember any occasion when she was nice to me. She hated me from birth. And in a way it’s understandable; my father killed her father. And yet Deborah and Arran didn’t blame me for what Marcus did. And they must have wondered about me, wondered about my Black Witch side.
I pull my hair back to see my eyes. They’re the same as ever: black, and the empty triangles in the blackness tumble around slowly and steadily. And the tattoo on my neck is the same: B 0.5.
I feel my cheek and the stubble there, but I don’t need to shave much. I’m still only seventeen. My chin and my patchy beard say seventeen but my eyes, and maybe my soul, say one hundred and seventeen. I guess I’ve done a lot more than the average seventeen-year-old.
I see my father in my face too: a younger version of him. I’m not sure if that’s part of my problem. That what everyone sees when they look at me is his name, his myth, the people he’s killed and eaten. And maybe that’s what happened with Annalise. She began to see not me but only Marcus and the stories about him.
And part of me is proud Marcus was—is—my father. I’m proud that I’m like him. We’re alike in so many ways. Fighting, yes; being good at drawing; our Gift to turn animal; and our appreciation of solitude. But I’m unlike him too. I had a White Witch for a mother and a grandmother. I’ve got—
“Hi.”
I look in the mirror and see Gabriel is standing in the doorway. “Nesbitt wake you as well?”
It’s not really a question and Gabriel doesn’t answer; he stays in the doorway and I stay leaned over the sink.
“You OK?” he asks. A genuine question.
I speak to my reflection as I reply. “Yeah, great.”
He doesn’t say anything.
So I look up again at his reflection and ask him, “How old are you, Gabriel?”
“Umm . . . nineteen.”
I turn to face him. “You look older. Twenty or twenty- one maybe.”
He shakes his head. “Turned nineteen a couple of months ago. You missed the big party.”
And for a brief second I’m jealous to think there was a party, with Greatorex and the trainees and I didn’t get an invite, but of course he’s joking. But
then again a couple of months ago I was with Annalise and I’ve no idea what Gabriel was doing when I was with her.
“Wish I’d known. I’d have done something. For your birthday, I mean.”
“I doubt it.” And he leans against the door frame, clearly not going to come into the room, and says, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I really don’t care about my birthday.”
And I’m irritated. I think he does care, maybe not about his birthday but about me not even knowing or asking before now.
And I suppose I can still give him a present. He bought me a knife for no other reason than he wanted to give me something. And, typical of Gabriel, it was a perfect present, beautiful and useful. But less typical was how nervous he was when he gave it to me. I’d like to do that: give him something and make it so clear it was special, that it was important.
I say, “I can still give you something.”
“Yeah?” He sounds skeptical.
“A knife or . . . I don’t know . . . a book or . . . or something.”
“That would be nice,” he says, and then adds, “Nice isn’t normally one of your strong points.”
“No . . . Sorry.”
“And did you say sorry then?” He shakes his head as if clearing his ears. “That’s the second time you’ve said that to me.”
I know that I owe him lots of “sorry”s. He once said he liked how I was honest with him and recently, since I last said sorry to him, I’ve tried harder, but I never tell him half of what I think, not a fraction. And I wish he’d come into the room but he’s still standing there in the doorway. And I know he won’t come in because of what happened last time we were here and I kissed him.