I nod, as she closes the book with a sigh. ‘We’ll figure it out. Grandfather will know some of it.’
‘I thought it might be easy,’ she says.
‘Did you really?’
‘Well, I thought it might.’ She brightens. ‘We can definitely do the salt, anyway.’
‘We’ll work it out,’ I say. ‘We have the book. The spell. That’s what we came for.’
‘Yeah.’ She fingers the battered leather cover. ‘We did it.’
We don’t speak, as we head to the train station, and the journey home is subdued, because we did it. We got the book. We have it, right here, and we still don’t have the answers we needed – the spell is just too dangerous. Angel is silent now, lost in her own world, and I’m heading back to mine. I put my head down and whisper the words of not being seen, and I concentrate on that and nothing else because I have to go back. Back, back, back, to where none of this is possible. They all said it wasn’t possible, and I put my hope into a small girl, holding a big book, and now I feel like I’ve been kidding myself. What was I doing, in universities and libraries, running through wide streets, telling myself that I could make it work? Could find another way to make it all end? It is endless. The sky is amber over the house as I head up the hill and I can already hear shrieking and that’s mine. That’s my shriek, my business.
Fight, Bavar, they say, as I let myself in through the creaking door. You need to fight.
I growl as I head up the stairs to the library. I get out on to the balcony and the raksasa spirals from the sky towards me, talons stretched like blackened daggers aimed at my heart. I jump out, roaring, and land on its back, its wings beating by my ears. We fall to the ground, and half-stunned I stand and I raise my arms and I don’t know whether I’m fighting the monster or myself by the end, but the strike is true and the sun rises and it’s all just shadows and I’m starting to think that maybe I can do this.
I can fight.
If the alternative is to hurt her, I can just fight.
School. Home. School. Not thinking, not doing.
I didn’t give up. It’s just a little break. People stare harder when Bavar isn’t around, so I lower my head, and wish that he were here.
He was so horrified by what was in the book. As soon as I turned the page, he shrank in on himself, the light in his eyes snuffed out. And I don’t know. He muttered about angels and blood, and humanity, and something about sacrifice, but he wasn’t looking at me then. He was looking at something I couldn’t see.
I meant to go back to the house with him, there and then. Get his grandfather to look at the book, and work out what we were going to do. But the warp in the air around Bavar got stronger and stronger, and by the time we got off the train I could hardly see him myself. He was just an idea, a rush of energy beside me. I held on to the book, and looked at the space where he was until my eyes watered.
‘It’s OK,’ his voice said, from a million miles away. ‘We did our best. We found the book. We did everything we could.’
‘We haven’t!’
But he’d already gone. He’d gone, and left me standing there alone with my father’s book in my arms. Maybe I should have tried harder, but I just couldn’t, not right then. I was tired, and I missed my dad, and my mum, and all I had was this stupid book, which didn’t have the answers I was looking for, and I’d just had enough of it all. I stood outside the little vanilla house, and the crying came, because really all I wanted was home, and no matter what we did I would never have that back.
And it was Dad who lead them straight to our door.
They say I’m a fool.
They want her back.
But they want Bavar the fighter too, and they can’t have both.
‘Here I am,’ I say in the mirror, teeth sharp against my tongue. ‘Just the way you wanted me. Doesn’t that make you happy?’
But they don’t look happy. Nobody looks happy at all.
The book is haunting me. Doesn’t matter where I put it in my room, I can feel it, full of secrets and answers. I’ve looked at it a few times, and it makes no sense to me. I even ran it all through a translator thing on Google. Whatever it is, it’s pretty heavy stuff. Heavy enough to make Bavar run away from it all.
I’ve read the rest of the book. Well, most of it. Some of it is very difficult to read, and some of it’s just a bit gruesome. Obviously I knew that Dad had travelled a lot. He was away half the year, most years, and we’d talk on Skype, and I guess I never really thought that much about where he was, or what he was doing. History stuff, I thought. Talking to people about myths and cultural heritage.
Turns out history stuff meant searching the world for monster-lore. Peru, Brazil, Thailand, Norway and Indonesia, where the pages get darker, the handwritten scribbles more frantic, and there’s a lot of mention of something called the Orang-Bati, which translates as ‘men with wings’, and in his sketches it looks a lot like the creatures Bavar’s family has been fighting for so long.
He knew they were real. He saw them for himself, in the ‘boiling clouds’ over the depths of the rainforest, where dark things fluttered and men whispered, in fear of the night itself. That must have been how he recognized what was happening here. And I guess that’s why he thought he could help. He’d found the spell, in among the writings of those ancient Indonesian tribes. The spell that closes rifts – that could have stopped it all.
But it didn’t. Bavar’s parents didn’t use it, and all Dad did was lead the monsters to us. And now he’s gone, and so is Mum, and I could just howl with it all. I’m so angry with him. Why couldn’t he be an accountant? Or a historian who specialized in pots? Why did he have to get himself all caught up in this? He should have just left it alone. He had a family.
I had a family.
I pound my fists into my pillow and it all spills out in great big heaving, choking sobs, and I wish – I wish I could change it. If there’s going to be magic in the world, that’s the kind of magic there should be. Why monsters? Why this?
Bavar is fighting. I can see it from the window; orange skies over the hill, shifting clouds, and the black silhouettes of the creatures he’s been hiding from all his life.
I wanted him to fight. I wanted to fight with him. Now I’m just sitting here in my pyjamas, watching it all from a distance.
‘It’s OK,’ I tell myself. ‘It’s OK to let it go.’