That same woman’s voice, darker now, stronger, it reaches out and curls around us, makes him flinch. His mother’s voice – I recognize it from the scene in the mirror – though it sounds darker now, amplified by the power in the air.
‘COME AWAY FROM THE RIFT, BAVAR.’
‘It’s not like I thought,’ he whispers, stepping closer. His face glows with the light, and the sense of magic around him that normally feels like static is rolling off him, full and easy, like sunlight.
‘CLOSE THE DOOR,’ the voice says. ‘MY BOY, YOU AREN’T READY FOR THIS!’
‘What do you care?’ he shouts, still fixated on the rift. The swooping creatures in the flare-lit sky are getting closer now, and the air around Bavar warps, hot and heavy. Somehow he’s pulling power from the rift. What if he stumbles and falls in? I reach out, wincing, and it stings but I pull at him anyway, and he resists me, takes another step towards the world of the raksasa.
‘BAVAR! I ALWAYS CARED . . . EVEN WHEN YOU COULD NOT SEE IT!’ The woman’s voice rises in desperation. ‘PLEASE, COME AWAY NOW.’
He doesn’t even hear her. Trails of gold sparkle in the orange sky before us as the raksasa rise and fall on a hot wind, twisting and calling to each other. Beneath the wings, their bodies are almost human in shape, and there’s a joy in their movements that even I can see. They call to each other, and their voices make the air ring. He’s dazzled by it. What would happen if he went in? Is that what he’s thinking? That he’d just grow wings and fly, free of care?
‘Bavar!’ I pull again, harder. What if I lost him here? If I lost him, and I just had to go home, to the little house and Mary and Pete, and the jumpers, and all the not fitting, and missing the people I’ll never see again.
‘NO! I need you here!’ I haul at him, closing my eyes and gritting my teeth, absolutely never, never letting go, no matter what, even if he pulls me in there with him, I’m not giving up. ‘BAVAR!’ Something lends me strength in that moment, and as I pull he falters, stumbling back, away from the call of the raksasa.
‘Close the door,’ I say, breathing hard.
He stares down at my hand, still clutching his sleeve.
‘You have to close it.’
‘But we found it,’ he says, turning back to it. ‘The rift! It’s right here!’
‘Yes, but . . .’
I’m so tired. The air burns, my eyes are streaming, and he wants this so desperately. The sense of it all seems to wither as the world before us darkens to nightfall, a scatter of stars and a strange blue moon appearing in the sky. I can’t make him do anything. He takes another step back towards the rift.
‘YOU NEED THE SPELL!’ the woman’s voice says. ‘YOU CANNOT WIN THIS BATTLE WITHOUT WEAPONS!’
He’s standing there, just gazing into the rift.
‘CATALYST,’ comes the voice now, like cool water against my mind, so sure of itself. ‘BRING HIM BACK. YOU CAN DO THIS. DO IT, OR WE ARE ALL LOST . . .’
A great roar goes through the house, and it throws me into action. I brace myself, stretching out, pulling him back and hauling on the door until it bangs shut, the sound echoing all around us.
‘What on earth is going on?’ shouts Aoife, running at us as we slide down the wall opposite the door, both of us exhausted and battered with heat and smoke. ‘What was that?’ She looks from us up to the little portrait high up on the wall. ‘What did you do?’ she demands.
The dark-haired woman in the portrait says nothing, her eyes are on Bavar, who stares back at her.
‘Come!’ Aoife snaps. ‘Away from here, both of you! I don’t know what this is, but you look like you barely survived it!’
I didn’t think.
I wasn’t thinking. I was just looking, feeling the power in the rift as it glowed before me, a living, breathing thing that wanted me, that craved me and soothed me and called to me in a million bright voices. I could feel it in my blood, in my heartbeat. I could have dived in, I wanted to, and then my mother’s voice was there. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to leave, to stop feeling that power. And then it was Angel, and I couldn’t hide it from her. I couldn’t leave her.
‘How did you close the door?’ I ask, as we traipse after Aoife. She’s absolutely furious, striding along, the lights flickering in her wake, the ancestors all struck dumb before her.
‘It was the house,’ she whispers. ‘There was a woman shouting, and then, I don’t know, Bavar. I don’t think it was me.’ She looks up at me and I see how close we came to really hurting ourselves. Her eyes are streaming, and there are dark smudges on her flushed skin. ‘It was the house.’
‘What were you thinking?’ Aoife demands, hustling us into the kitchen. ‘Look at the state of you, Bavar! Explain!’
‘I told you I wanted to close it,’ I say.
‘But did you think it through? How are you going to close it?’
‘I don’t know! Grandfather said the first thing was to find it!’
Her mouth tightens. ‘And now you have found it, and nearly lost yourself to it, and you take Angel with you! Angel, who has no place in this! You find a friend and you lead her into danger and you hadn’t even thought about how you were going to deal with that. I thought you were better than that, Bavar! If it hadn’t been for the ancestors, you’d both be lost!’
‘What did the ancestors do?’ Angel asks, her voice small.
Aoife takes a breath, fills the kettle with water from the tap. She’s wearing a plain dark dress that my mother would never have worn, but the way she moves is so like her. Sometimes it’s like living with her shadow. The same, but so different too. It’s not a bad thing, but it hurts anyway. Like being constantly reminded of the thing you lost, that you still crave so badly. ‘They saw the danger and lent you their strength,’ she says. ‘The rift, the house, it is all connected; it is all the same magic. It is why this place is as it is. It is how Bavar fights. It is how they saved you.’
She’s so angry, I can tell from the way she swishes around the kitchen, opening drawers harder than she has to. Angel stands there with wide eyes, listening, pale now with shock, her hands trembling as she rubs at her face.
She was the one who saved me.
What was I thinking?
You were thinking you wanted an end to it all, a little voice that was hope reminds me. You were thinking you could rid the world of the raksasa forever.
‘I have to go,’ Angel says, refusing Aoife’s attempts to feed her.
‘You’ll come back?’ I ask, following her out into the hallway, loitering by the stairs.
‘I’m not leaving it alone, Bavar,’ she says. ‘We found the rift, and Dad had a way to close it. I’m going to find that book he had; I know where it’ll be. I’m going to find it, and I’m going to use it, like your parents should have done before the monster came down and killed mine.’
And now she’s said it, and it rings in the air, and it needed to be said, because we both already knew it, but it hurts anyway. It hurts more than raksasa venom.