The Book of Beasts Read Free Page B

should have been.
    â€˜Jeannie! Let the wave go,’ Matt shouted in desperation.
    He could sense her control collapsing like sand. He struggled to his feet. The creatures were swarming the beach now. Matt ran towards Jeannie, dodging them when they lunged for his ankles, but there were too many. He tripped, falling flat on his face. The creatures skittered up his legs, along his arms, hundreds of them smothering him beneath their slimy shells, their mouths snapping and sucking at his exposed flesh. They pressed him deeper into the sand. Their pinchers tore at his neck and his face. Everything Matt had been trying to keep at bay jabbed at him. Every living thing on these islands, on this coastline, in this time, might die. And it would be his fault.
    A crab chewed a chunk of flesh from his ear, and Matt shouted with grief and pain. He tore it away, his blood trickling down his neck. ‘Enough!’ he screamed into the sky.
    With a massive effort, he wrenched himself free, tossing the creatures from his shoulders, shaking them from his back, brushing them from his arms and legs. The crabs crunched under his boots, leaving puddles of blue in his wake.
    He took the opera glasses from his pocket and looked up at the hillside. He saw immediately that Jeannie’s eyes were sliding in and out of focus and he gasped at the weight of the old housekeeper’s love for him. He read her barely moving lips.
    â€˜Draw something, son. Or yer gonna drown.’

SIX
    The Abbey
Auchinmurn Isle
Present Day
    The Druid’s piercing black eyes followed Em the way a portrait in a gallery sometimes does, but he never moved a limb, never shifted from his place on the rocky ledge. A strange pulsing energy was coming from him, a line of concentration so intense it was as if he held only one emotion, one significant thought, one focus. Em wondered if this was why he wasn’t moving. It was taking all his energy to put himself here in her room.
    Zach! Wake up!
    What was it about teenage boys that they slept through anything? Obviously Zach didn’t hear the normal things that woke people – hooting owls, car alarms. But an Animare, screaming in his head?
    Matt was just as bad. Their mother put it down to hormones. But Em could hear her grandfather Renard’s calm tones in her mind. ‘Some Guardians can settle their minds so that they can sleep without hearing or feeling an Animare’s presence all the time.’
    Whatever the reason, Zach was not responding.
    Shivering from the increasing chill in her bedroom, Em flipped through her last sketches again. She couldn’t find anything even resembling this guy.
    Hugging her pillow to her chest, she stifled a sob. She’d been missing Matt so intensely that she hadn’t eaten or slept much in days. Maybe her mind was cracking after all. And once it cracked, then there would be nothing anyone could do to save her. Like other Animare throughout history – da Vinci, Gauguin, van Gogh and so many more – the Council of Guardians would be forced to bind her. She would never be able to draw again.
    Suddenly Em felt an overwhelming desire to sketch.
    She turned to a clean page on her pad and began to draw the apparition, smudging the charcoal with the heel of her hand, darkening the helix shape on her picture, trying to ignore the rancid smell of him. The more she focused on the drawing, the clearer the figure became, as if her rendering him on paper was giving him more strength. When she finished capturing him, she drew the landscape behind him as quickly and skilfully as she could. As she worked, the glow around him became stronger while the room was getting darker. Em lined and looped and shaded frantically across the paper.
    â€˜Can you hear me?’ she asked, looking up from her drawing for a beat. ‘Who are you?’
    Em dropped her charcoal. A dark hole had burst open on the rock face behind the figure in a swirling storm of yellows, blacks and