Tide Read Free Page B

thirteen – and they all pay a terrible price for it. Their nightmares are a torture they can’t escape, and one over which they have no control. They dream of the demons – or Surari, as they’re known in the ancient language – that seep into the world. Sometimes the Dreamers themselves become victims, hurt or even murdered in the course of their visions, and although they suffer no physical damage, they have to endure the pain and the panic as if it were happening for real. In her dreams, Sarah had been burnt, drowned, buried; most nights waking up screaming in a house that was often empty, with her parents out hunting. The constant terror had heightened Sarah’s obsessive nature. She’d wake up from some terrifying ordeal to clean and tidy and straighten anything she could put her hands on. Her rituals were her protection against the chaos in her life.
    Every night, alone in her huge, silent house, waiting for her parents to come back from the hunt, she performed her routines of wiping and sorting and aligning. If she did everything perfectly, in the right order, the correct number of times, her parents would return. If anything was out of place, if she neglected the smallest detail, her parents would be killed, and it’d be all her fault. It was on that basis that she had lived her life.
    Her pact with God hadn’t worked. In the end, her parents were dead. But if she stopped, more tragedy might befall her.
    The Dreamer’s duty was to write everything they saw in their dream diary, so that the hunters of the family would know what and where to hunt. Sarah’s diary was a black, leather-bound volume that had caused her endless anguish and symbolized all the fear she’d had to endure throughout her childhood. That volume was now a mound of cold ash in the fireplace, and its leather cover had floated down the nearby river towards the sea. Sarah had torn it page by page in a fit of anger towards her parents, towards her destiny. Burning her diary and throwing the remains into the river hadn’t changed her predicament, but it had freed her from so many terrible memories. There didn’t seem to be any need for another dream diary. Since the Scottish Valaya had been defeated and its leader Cathy Duggan killed, Sarah’s dreams had all but disappeared. At first it had been a relief, after the fraught few weeks when she’d been under nearly constant attack and dreaming like never before – but the truth was that the eerie silence that filled her nights was making her increasingly uncomfortable. Was it the quiet before the storm?
    Sean would know. In those few short months he, as Harry, had become her family, her world. Because her “cousin” was living with her, Juliet allowed Sarah to stay in her home, abiding by her parents’ will. She would never forget his arrival during these worst of times, to give her a ray of hope in such darkness.
    But he had lied. Harry Midnight was dead. Sean Hannay was his real name. Sean Hannay was the man who had pretended to be her cousin, had stolen his identity, the man who might have killed him, too. She couldn’t be sure.
    Sarah’s anger at Sean’s betrayal had been so great she had nearly used the Blackwater on him, the deadly Midnight power that could dissolve any living creature, but she had stopped herself in time. She shuddered at the memory of how close she had come. She refused to listen to his reasons, she refused to speak to him at all, and had sent him out of her house, out of her life. The night Cathy Duggan was finally killed was the last time Sarah had seen Sean.
    She missed him terribly.
    Despite everything, she missed him every day, every hour. Not even Nicholas could fill his absence, even as persistent and as heady as his presence could be. But Sean was a liar. He had made his way into her home, into her heart, on false pretences. He wasn’t her cousin, he wasn’t a Midnight – he was someone else, of whom Sarah knew a name and nothing more.
    Sarah felt