Rise of the Reaper Read online

  He turned away from the gardens and looked behind him, out over the thick woodland on the other side of the wall. Somewhere in there was the house Thom was renovating – a project he’d been working on ever since Danny could remember. Thom spent most of his time either away on business or staying with Danny and his father, though, so no wonder he hadn’t finished it.

  ‘He’s away at the moment. I overheard Mum saying so the other day.’ Poppy broke into his thoughts, having read his mind, and Danny nodded. Breakfast wasn’t the same without Thom and his dad messing about and joking, or lounging on the sofas, making fun of the children’s TV presenters. It made him nervous when people went away.

  To take his mind off his mother, who once again drifted into his thoughts, he lifted a cluster of strawberries from Poppy’s bag and gnawed the stalks off, competing with Katrina to see how far he could spit them, much to Poppy’s disgust.

  ‘If you get a single one of those on my garden wall, you’ll be scrubbing the whole thing off,’ she snapped, scrunching the mouth of the bag closed to block Danny’s returning hand.

  ‘We’re nowhere near your wall, or mine,’ said Danny. They’d picked a spot nearer the gate, where they could use an old tree stump to scramble up. It also offered more shade, courtesy of an overhanging sycamore.

  ‘Is there any cake in there?’ Danny eyed Katrina’s tin, which was resting with her rucksack in the grass below. A handful of strawberries couldn’t hope to compete with his appetite.

  ‘Yeah, but I messed up the icing and the top went wonky,’ she said, accepting a strawberry from Russell, who had got the bag away from Poppy. ‘Plus, it’s kind of dark grey.’

  ‘Dark grey?’ Russell said.

  ‘Yeah, Mrs White made me take Lucy’s after I ruined it with food dye. She got to have mine.’

  ‘The spit-cake,’ grinned Poppy. ‘Serves her right.’ Even Russell laughed, seeming to momentarily forget where they were. While Katrina slithered off the wall to break off pieces of cake for everyone, Danny looked down the row to his garden, the only one half-filled with junk from the stalled building work. Just above the kitchen window, next to the rickety old shed, which used to double as his father’s workshop, was a wind chime. Her wind chime.

  Danny had been three years old when they’d hung it together. His mother had held him up and he’d proudly hung the slender metal chimes on their hook, before snuggling back onto his mother’s shoulder and burying his face in her blonde hair, content to listen to the chimes singing.

  His father had joked and moaned about them, but now that she’d gone they were looked after more carefully than anything else. The rest of the house was in a state of half-renovation, with parts of the interior adorned with plastic sheeting, while stacks of wood and bricks had become almost permanent features since work had suddenly stopped, but the chimes … they mattered.

  At night, when the wind teased them, Danny would close his eyes and go over every memory he could until it hurt too much, or until sleep claimed him. Judging by his father’s haunted face when he stood at the patio doors and pressed his head to the glass, failing to hide his tears, it hurt him too. But the chimes stayed.

  While Katrina scrabbled back up onto the wall, Poppy was busy complaining about the cashier in the greengrocer trying to short-change her on fruit, so Danny quickly lost interest and closed his eyes, allowing the afternoon sun to tickle his face. His mother’s face swam before him and the singing from the dreams came to him; singing somewhere, way down in the darkness. Somewhere cold, somewhere foreign. Somewhere … where?

  There was a crash and he startled awake from wherever he had been; wherever she had been. His patio door had been flung open and had knocked over a stack of weather-blackened wood. His father was racing down the garden path, and Danny straightened in alarm.

  ‘Pete!’ Katrina’s mother, Jen, came bursting out after him and he stopped to let her catch up. Everyone’s attention was on the pair. ‘I heard about the beacon. Is it Niri?’ Danny’s heart flipped and then stopped. Everything stopped. His breathing, his pulse, every noise, every bird, every floating dust mote hung on the mention of his mother.

  ‘Don’t know. Josie’s on her way to the tower now, and I need to get to the Gatehouse to see Thom.’ His voice was urgent but panicked, hopeful but breaking – pain and joy and fear spilling out as wavering words. And then he and Jen took off at a run. He leapt the garden wall, their back gate having long been rusted shut, and ran to the small door to the woodlands, which was set into the wall they were perching on, and ripped it open. With a glance back at the house, they plunged through and were gone.

  Danny blinked. What he’d just seen took long seconds to filter past the white noise of hope and fear and the sudden beating of his heart. He stared down into the woodlands below, leaning so that he could see along the wall to where his father and Jen should have emerged. They hadn’t. The door on the woodland side was shut.

  ‘Erm …’ Katrina began, but trailed off. He could sense everyone else processing what had just happened. His father loved to joke around, but never where his mother was concerned.

  ‘Did they just … Is there another door?’ Russell said, sounding as if he doubted his own words.

  ‘No,’ said Poppy. ‘Just the one they use to go to Thom’s place. It’s usually locked.’ Danny swung his leg over the wall at the same time as Katrina, and the pair of them dropped down into the fringe of the woods. ‘Are they there? What do you see?’ Poppy called down.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Katrina, following Danny to where their parents should have emerged. Sunlight filtered through the branches of a nearby oak tree, its roots breaking from the ground to form gnarled humps in the patchy, baked earth. A half-hearted breeze stirred the branches, sending a jigsaw of shadow over the old wooden door set into the flint and brick wall.

  Danny righted Katrina as she tripped over one of the Nessie-like roots and stared at the door as Poppy and Russell joined them. This wasn’t right. It was half-overgrown with ivy, its hinges smothered in rust where the black paint had flaked away.

  He tried the handle, pushing down and tugging it with all his weight, but it didn’t shift.

  ‘That hasn’t been opened for years. Years,’ said Katrina.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ Danny snapped, feeling frustrated. ‘I saw Thom leave through this door a few days ago. I watch Poppy’s mum leave, too. They went through this door.’

  ‘Maybe we missed them,’ said Russell, scanning the wood behind them. Aside from a carpet of bluebells and a few dancing insects, it was empty. ‘This doesn’t make sense. We saw them.’

  Danny gave the door a vicious kick, taking more of the paint off. He didn’t want to be standing here, he wanted to know what was going on with his mother. Where the fuck are you, Dad? He raged to himself. What’s happening?

  ‘If they didn’t come out, why aren’t we checking where they went in?’ said Poppy, pulling a face at the rust that came off on her hands after trying the handle. Danny took off at a run to find a way back up over the wall.

  ‘Here.’ Katrina found an old wheelbarrow buried in a bramble thicket and hauled it to the wall.

  ‘That looks lethal,’ said Russell, eyeing the rust holes and missing wheel. ‘What’s that brown stuff?’

  ‘Mud, for fuck’s sake.’ Katrina swung it against the wall and scrambled on top of it before Danny could, earning a muttered curse.

  ‘Why couldn’t we just go round and come out on Brooks Close?’ Russell said. ‘Or does that make too much sense?’

  ‘Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know where they went?’ said Katrina, pulling herself up onto the wall, fast followed by Danny.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want tetanus, thanks.’

  *

  Russell hung back so that he was the last over, puffing and swearing to himself. It was alright for them, they didn’t have to feel embarrassed at anyone seeing them scramble over something. He had to put up with all the mocking and nasty comments
in gym class so much that it made him paranoid.

  At least they had waited for him – as much as it seemed to irritate Danny, who was bouncing impatiently on his toes, the bastard. Russell took a puff of his inhaler and traipsed after them, lamenting the state of his uniform.

  Poppy pulled the door open and they stared through. A faint heat haze shimmered over the woods beyond the doorway. Everything seemed normal. A frown crinkled her brow. ‘I don’t get it. We should have seen them,’ she said. Something was wrong, and Russell scratched absently at his hands, which had become itchy. Probably insects in the bloody moss, he thought. Then it clicked.

  ‘Wait, where are the bluebells?’ he wondered.

  ‘The what?’ Danny said.

  ‘Bluebells. The wood is covered in them. Where are they?’

  Everyone stared. He was right.

  ‘Where’s the oak tree? And why is there a path worn in the grass between the trees?’ said Poppy.

  Danny shrugged and scratched at his hands. ‘I don’t care, there’s no time for this.’ Without waiting for a response, he plunged through the door, followed quickly by Katrina and then Poppy. Russell stared after them and sighed. So much for a lazy afternoon.

  *

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Jen. Thom felt her touch on his arm. When he had leapt up from his chair, he had startled both her and Pete, but he could still feel the residual magic tickling through him and slowly dissolving.

  ‘Their timing is fucking impeccable,’ Thom said. His sigh was replaced by a grin, and he shook his head.

  Jen shared a look with Pete and dropped her bag down on the coffee table. ‘Whose?’

  ‘This is all we need right now, as much as we knew it was coming.’ Thom moved to the window, leaning on the thick stone ledge and looking out over the jumbled gardens of the Gateway to the woods in the distance. Pete and Jen moved to flank him and he sensed their shared glance.

  ‘Four people just passed through the portal into the Gateway,’ he said, feeling their progression through the trees as he closed his eyes.

  ‘Yeah, Gatekeeper,’ teased Pete, thumping his arm. ‘That’ll be Jack, Knox, maybe Edred …’

  ‘No. I meant that portal. Our portal. The one that leads to our world.’

  Pete’s expression froze. ‘Oh fuck, no,’ he muttered.

  Jen sank down onto the sofa beside the window and banged her head back against the wall, her long dark hair spreading over her pale shoulders.

  ‘It’s really them?’ Pete said. ‘You’re bloody sure?’

  Thom nodded and slumped down next to Jen, leaning his head on her shoulder. ‘Yes. All of them.’

  Chapter 3

  ◊

  ‘WE’RE GOING TO END up lost,’ said Russell, cannoning into the back of Katrina, who had stumbled over another tree root after looking up at the sky rather than where she was going.

  ‘We’re on a path,’ snapped Poppy, wrenching her hair from the grasp of a low-hanging branch and pushing past him. ‘If you can call it that.’

  ‘I told you, something’s off … Where are the bluebells?’ Russell said, wishing they’d slow down and actually consider that something was wrong, and that they should maybe not rush ahead at breakneck pace.

  ‘Stuff the bluebells,’ Danny called over his shoulder, nearly losing an eye as he turned back and barely ducked a stray bramble stem in time. ‘If Dad knows something about where Mum is, I want to know.’

  ‘Is no one worried? Did no one else feel that weird, cold feeling when we went through the bloody gate?’ Russell shouted ahead at the others, who were starting to pull away from him.

  ‘Yeah, that was weird,’ said Poppy, slowing down to fall into step with him. ‘Are your hands driving you mad, too?’

  He realised he was scratching his palms as he hurried along. ‘Yes.’ He frowned. ‘It’s like mini prickles.’

  ‘What’s up with the sky, too?’ Poppy threw a glance skyward and picked up the pace, apparently refusing to be left behind by Danny and Katrina.

  Russell looked up. Like the gate, it was … wrong. It was blue, but there were no clouds, and the tone seemed off in a way he couldn’t quite catch hold of.

  ‘It’s kind of muted. Like matte paint,’ said Poppy, a frown wrinkling her forehead. ‘It looks …’

  ‘Wrong?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the heat,’ she said, seeming uncertain.

  Russell was also unconvinced. He was about to call out to Katrina, who was more likely to respond than Danny, when they broke from the treeline onto a baked dirt path running from left to right, hugging the edge of the woods. Ahead of them wasn’t the golf course, or the old furniture factory on the far side of the woods. He didn’t know what it was.

  ‘Did we take a wrong turn?’ Katrina muttered.

  *

  The sofa creaked as Pete dropped down onto it next to Thom and rolled his head back on the red fabric to stare up at the ceiling. ‘Why now? I can’t … He’ll have a million fucking questions and I don’t have time to answer them, Thom. I need to talk to you about the beacon.’

  ‘I’m waiting to hear from Josie – the others are on their way. The rest, we’ll have to deal with. Danny deserves to know,’ Thom said.

  Thom looked at his best friend, hating the worry that burned in those intense grey eyes – eyes that raked the patchy, plastered ceiling, searching for the answers he was supposed to give to questions that had yet to be asked. For the answers to questions he himself had been asking for years.

  ‘I know he does. I just wish I could tell him what he wants to know. And once they know about the Lands, how do I keep him safe? What if he vanishes, like Niri did?’ Pete’s eyes closed and Thom’s hand barely beat Jen’s in reaching to comfort him.

  ‘I know. It doesn’t help that we’ve never yet figured out how to keep ourselves bloody safe,’ muttered Jen, with a wry smile.

  Thom grinned at her comment and let his mind slide out across the Gateway to touch on the edge of the woods where four figures stood.

  *

  Katrina frowned. This had to be wrong. Ahead of them lay a jumbled wooded expanse with crooked walls and snaking pathways among the trees leading to glimpses of dilapidated, overgrown courtyards, bright clearings and tumbledown archways. In the distance, overlooking the unordered mess of gardens – If you can call the whole thing that, Katrina thought – was a vast house. At least, that was what it looked like.

  ‘That’s the biggest, messiest-looking house I’ve ever seen,’ said Poppy, glancing up and down the path, as if half expecting someone to come charging along to shout them off.

  ‘More like a castle in some places,’ remarked Russell. ‘Look at those turrety bits, and the parapet. I’ve seen similar things in books about Germany, I think – like half mansion, half castle.’

  ‘It’s like fifty people argued over the design and they all decided to do their own thing anyway,’ Poppy said. Katrina had to agree. Different brick, stone, and design all made up the jumbled but oddly charming building, giving it soft edges, hidden nooks and angles, and a character all of its own. She decided she liked it. Somehow it suited the grounds in which it stood: messy, characterful, and intriguing.

  ‘There are no stately homes in or around town,’ said Russell.

  ‘Well, no, this is Thom’s house,’ said Danny.

  ‘Thom’s house is normal,’ replied Katrina.

  ‘He was renovating it.’ Russell looked doubtful.

  Poppy frowned. ‘I don’t remember it being that big,’ she said.

  ‘How many years since we’ve been here, though?’ said Katrina. She scratched at her hands and stared at the building. ‘If it is Thom’s, he’s hardly going to be pissed that we’re here, is he?’

  She picked one of the paths in front of them and set off before Russell could find something to fret over, and she felt a flutter of nerves until she heard everyone else pad along behind her.

  ‘Unless Thom’s a millionaire, t
his can’t be his place,’ Russell said from somewhere at the back.

  ‘Maybe it isn’t, then, but Mum and the others have been going through that doorway for years. Where were they going, if not here?’ Poppy pointed out. She got a grunt in return. Even Russell couldn’t fault that logic.

  Katrina found the whole thing exciting, although she wasn’t quite sure why. The tingling in her hands, the odd taste to the air, the sense of mystery – in an otherwise boring, unsatisfying existence – it was a gift.

  The path was uneven, with missing flagstones and encroaching brightly flowered weeds, but seemed to be taking them in the right direction, and she found herself gradually slowing down to take everything in.

  Roses crawled over a low, intermittent flint wall lining the path, while thorny branches had started to bully their way across the flagstones. Among the riot of foliage, several old overhanging trees leaned down to them, their long, delicate leaves brushing the stone, the branches frequently needing to be swept aside.

  Katrina paused to admire the patterns of light and shadow scattered over the path and nearly had Danny bump into her. ‘Bloody move! I want to catch up to Dad.’ He pushed past, and she gave him the finger.

  Trust him to spoil it, she thought, pushing onward. There was something oddly serene about the place, even if something wasn’t quite right.

  She was about to voice her thoughts about the odd feeling that the place gave her, when the path split around the edges of a small clearing, in the centre of which was an empty fountain, presided over by a rearing half man, half dragon. The bottom half being a dragon didn’t preclude him from certain masculine features, and Katrina stopped dead, barely jerking as Poppy and Russell ploughed into the back of her.

  ‘He’s got a big one.’ Danny tilted his head to one side to get a better view, as if anyone needed that. Katrina and Poppy started giggling, and Russell tutted and pushed past them.