A Witch Alone (The Winter Witch Trilogy #3) Page 20

  Six o’clock. It would be night soon. Where would I sleep?

  The thought gave me a shudder. At least I had money – not much, but Marcus had paid for the cab transfer and that had helped.

  I turned my face to the wind and began to walk along the street. As I did, the lighted window of the Internet café drew my gaze and I caught a glimpse of Emmaline, hunched over a PC, her fingers flying furiously. Her back was to the window and I could see her screen. She was on a transcontinental rail site, running through lists of trains and destinations, trying to work out a way of getting out of Russia, fast.

  Tears pricked at the back of my eyes and a huge longing came over me to run in and hug her, say goodbye. I could hardly bear to go like this – leaving them both without a word. It wasn’t like I’d be coming back. I’d never get the chance to explain.

  Em looked up from the keyboard, rubbing the back of her neck, and then slowly, very slowly, pulled by some witchy instinct, she began to turn around.

  I felt as if something inside me was breaking in two.

  Then I ducked my head inside my invisible hood and walked on.

  I walked, and walked, and walked. Mainly to keep warm, because if I stopped I was going to freeze. The Russians around me were all dressed in boots and furs – winter clothes hastily dug out of storage, I guessed. The odd tourist hurried past with pathetic summer gear clutched around them, thin cardigans that showed blue arms – shivering children wrapped in rugs and their parents’ jumpers.

  ‘The g-guide b-book said average t-t-temperature f-f-fifteen!’ shivered a British woman to her boyfriend as they huddled in the door of a museum. He shook his head and then took off his fleece and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  ‘N-no,’ she protested. ‘You’re as c-c-cold as m-me.’

  But he said nothing, only tucked it tenderly around her and then wrapped her in his arms.

  The gesture tore at my insides. I thought of Abe putting his jacket round me in the church, of all the times I’d warmed Seth with my arms and he’d warmed me.

  I realized I was staring at them. I was invisible, but it still felt like spying, and I walked on.

  The wind was at my back now and, as I trudged through the streets with the snow scudding along the pavements in front of me, I felt as if I were being blown along like the spiralling flakes. The roads became a meaningless blur, my shaky grasp of the city’s geography slipping away. Each prospect was the same grey, swirling blank. The canals bled into each other. If I’d walked these streets before, I didn’t recognize them now.

  I had no plan. I’d have to find a place to spend the night, but for now all I could think was to get as far away from Emmaline and Abe as possible. Would they try to find me? Would they scry? I knew from Sienna that it was easier to find a still object than a moving one. So I didn’t stop. I just kept walking, my invisible body making a flurrying eddy in the snow as I passed, my footsteps on the slush-covered pavements like the tracks of a ghost.

  My feet were numb inside my shoes. My hands were numb inside my pockets. My insides felt hollow. When had I last eaten? I couldn’t remember. It no longer seemed to matter.

  All that mattered was to keep walking. If I stopped, they’d find me. If I stopped, I’d freeze to death.

  Except I wouldn’t. I almost wanted to laugh. Would it hurt, thawing my limbs? Was there a limit to what I could survive?

  I was passing over a bridge and something made me stop. I put my hands onto the frost-thick railing and looked into the swirling black waters flowing sulkily beneath. Snow slushed the surface, making the water look thick and strange. I had the strangest urge to jump. I imagined myself letting go, sinking into the depths, lying there in the still and the silence while the river froze over and I slept in an ice coffin.

  Would I survive even that?

  But my fingers were sticking to the icy rail. It burned, pulling them off, and I put them in my mouth, trying to suck away the pain.

  Then I saw something that made me forget even that. Something that felt like a punch in the gut.

  Seth.

  He was standing at the end of the bridge, looking down at something in his hand, and for a moment my heart gave that stupid involuntary leap, an agonising wrenching hope.

  The perfection of the illusion was staggering. Everything – every detail. The rain-drenched hair plastered across his forehead. The sharpness of his cheekbones. The blue shadows around his eyes. The scars on his hands, the bruises on his face, the way his shoulder hunched inside his old sou’wester. The curve of his lips, lips that had kissed mine.

  It was all just as I remembered.

  And the pain inside my heart, the fish-hook ripping and tearing and my heart bleeding on to the snow – that too.

  ‘You bastard.’ I tried to speak, but the words were lost in a sob.

  He looked up. His face was blank. And I realized I was still invisible.

  I had one moment of advantage. I had to use it quick before Marcus saw through my spell.

  I bowed my head and let all the agony and anger and sadness flood through me, drenching every cell in my body, calling out of me all the magic I possessed.

  There were no charms for this.

  There were no words for the way I hated him in that moment.

  I clenched my fists, flung back my head, and let go.

  The blast rippled out across the bridge: an enormous, unstoppable wall of fire – and time seemed to slow, like a river freezing as it flowed.

  I saw his arm go up, as if he were trying to shield himself.

  I saw a ring, silver bright in the light from the street lamp.

  I saw the inferno engulf him and the ring burn impossibly bright.

  I heard his scream.

  And I felt the ring on my own finger, the seaglass ring, sear with a sudden, unbearable, burning heat. It scorched out from my hand, ripping through my body, flames burning through my skin, my clothes, my heart.

  It was a forest fire. An atomic bomb. Molten gold.

  I fell to the ground, convulsing in the hissing, steaming snow.

  And then – nothing.

  I was warm. That was something. I seemed to have been cold for ever.

  I was lying down.

  And I was – it came to me suddenly – I was on a boat.

  I opened my eyes.

  For a minute it was hard to focus, but then I blinked, and the shapes and lights resolved themselves into a blurry picture. Above me was a dark wood-panelled ceiling with an electric light, not a very bright one, and as I raised my head I saw I was lying on a bunk. There was a kettle on a locker and a table to my right with a half-drunk cup of tea and a sandwich.

  And there was…

  Seth.

  It was him.

  He was sitting on the bunk opposite, his head in his hands, and there was something about his utter weariness and despair that made me realize that it was him, had been him all along. He’d come back to me. And I’d tried to kill him.

  A sound escaped my lips, like a whimper. His head shot up.

  ‘You’re awake.’ His lip curled as he said the words and somehow he made them sound like an insult.

  I struggled upright, but the blood rushed away from my head and I almost fell again. There was a moment’s blackness and sickness, and the next thing I knew I was hunched over, Seth’s hand on the back of my neck, pressing my head down between my knees.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ he said, almost angrily. ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I clenched my teeth as if willpower could make the words true and then lifted my arm to push his hand away. This time, when I sat up, I kept it together, somehow. My hands were shaking and I had to prop myself on the table to keep upright, but I kept it together. ‘Where are we? How did I get here?’

  Seth sat on the bunk opposite, the table between us, and ran his hands through his hair. He looked emotionally and physically exhausted. Almost as tired as I felt.

  ‘We’re on my boat. In
St Petersburg harbour. When did you last eat?’ he repeated.

  I couldn’t remember. I just stared at him, stupidly, and he pushed the sandwich across the table towards me, and the mug of tea.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘But it’s yours.’

  ‘I’ll make another one.’

  I put the tea to my lips, feeling it scald against my hands. My fingertips were hot with the thawing pain that comes after extreme cold.

  Seth stood up suddenly, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me any more, and went to the hatch. When he opened it, a blast of frozen air whirled into the warm cabin, and outside there was nothing but dizzying white. I took a bite of sandwich and watched his back as he stood, his arms resting either side of the opening, staring into the night. His muscles were taut and too lean beneath his thin, faded shirt. I saw that he was favouring his bad leg, leaning his weight away from it as he stood. There was a stick – a crutch – propped against the locker. The sight made my stomach clench and the sandwich stuck in my throat.

  ‘This weather, it’s witches, right?’ he said bitterly over his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  For a minute there was silence; neither of us spoke, we just listened to the scream of the wind and the sounds of the boats in the harbour: ropes whipping against the masts, the icy waves slushing against the hulls.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ Seth asked at last in a low voice, almost inaudible beneath the wind. His back was to me, his head bowed, but I could see his hands were clenched on the edge of the hatchway. They looked as if they might crunch through the wood at any moment.

  ‘Do what?’ I said hopelessly. I didn’t know what he meant any more: the blast of fire, the weather, everything.

  ‘If you wanted me so much, why did you try to kill me on the bridge? Why make me come all this way? To punish me? To show me you’ve still got me chained?’

  ‘I … Seth …’ I didn’t know which accusation to start with.

  ‘Why couldn’t you just let me go?’ he yelled suddenly, making me jump.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean!’

  ‘This!’ He grabbed something from a shelf and slammed it down on the table, so hard that the mug of tea jumped and drops spattered the melamine. ‘This is what I mean!’

  For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I recognized it. It was the brass compass I’d given him for Christmas – just six months ago, though it felt like a lifetime. The needle was pointing to me.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Seth’s jaw clenched. There was something close to fury in his expression, but he was keeping it reined in. I didn’t know how long he could hold on to his temper for.

  ‘Look,’ he spat. He picked up the compass, moved it from left, to right. The needle swung, pointing always towards where I was sitting. I frowned. I didn’t know much about navigation – but I did know that a compass should always point north.

  ‘Is it broken?’

  ‘Yes it’s broken,’ Seth ground out. ‘Let me spell it out for you. This compass no longer points to magnetic north. It points to you. Bloody fucking inconvenient if you’re stuck in the middle of the Baltic sea. So I bought another one. That one points to you too. Every ship, every piece of navigational equipment I get near, they all home in on you. You’ve made me unemployable. No ship will have me on board. I’m a danger to myself. I can’t plot a course. I can’t steer into a harbour. I nearly died, trying to get back to Helsinki. Is this your idea of a joke?’

  ‘I had no idea.’ My blood was running cold. I remembered saying to Seth as I handed over the compass, So you’ll always find your way back to me. And I thought of how I’d wished he would come back to me. Had I reset his compasses, just by the force of my longing? ‘Seth, I never meant—’

  ‘No,’ he cut in brutally. ‘You never mean it. You never mean to hurt anyone. But somehow I always end up bleeding when you’re around. So you dragged me here only to – what? What happened on the bridge? Did you just think it would be fun to burn me alive?’

  ‘No! Of course I—’

  ‘So you got me there and then what? You lost your nerve?’ he pursued, viciously. ‘You’ve got the guts to plan a murder, but not to carry it out – is that right?’

  ‘I didn’t plan to murder you!’ I cried. ‘And if you hate me so much, why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you just leave me to freeze on the bridge?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ he shouted. He grabbed his hair, his eyes squeezed shut as if he couldn’t bear to look at me. ‘Because … Because … maybe I am tied to you.’ His hands dropped and when he looked at me there was nothing in his face but bitterness and defeat. ‘Just like Grandad said. I can’t go on without you. God knows I’ve tried – but I can’t. I love you. And it’s killing me.’ He fell to his knees on the wooden floor of the boat and I felt it rock with the movement. Then his head was in my lap, his clenched fists gripping my shirt, his face buried in my jeans. His shoulders shook, as if the sobs were ripping him apart from inside.

  I slid awkwardly off the bench to kneel beside him and I put my arms around him, put my face in his hair, drawing huge shuddering breaths, remembering his smell, his body, the way we’d fitted together, still fitted.

  We knelt for a long time, locked together like two pieces of a carved puzzle, shaped into a twisted symmetry with each other. His tears were wet on my shoulder. I could feel his chest shuddering in and out as if every breath tore at him and knew, too, that it was my own sobs shaking his body that I could feel echoed back to me.

  ‘How could you do that?’ he asked at last. His voice was broken. ‘On the bridge. My God, Anna, I’ve hated you. But I would never – I could never …’

  ‘I didn’t.’ I closed my eyes tight shut for a moment. ‘Seth, you have to believe me. I thought you were Marcus.’

  ‘Marcus? Who’s Marcus?’

  ‘Another witch. He – he knew about you. About us. And he pretended to be you one time. He used his magic to look like you. So when I saw you in St Petersburg …’

  ‘But you knew I’d be here, you made me come here,’ he said, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand. Wasn’t it you, with the compass?’

  ‘I think …’ I rubbed my hand across my face, trying to make sense of it all. ‘I think perhaps it was – but I’d never have done that deliberately. I never meant to.’

  ‘So you were trying to kill this Marcus guy? Why? And why did I survive? I saw that wall of fire. It should have killed me.’

  I didn’t speak. I just took his hand and put it against mine. The silver ring was gone. In its place was a seared white mark on his ringfinger, like the silvered scar of a very old burn.

  On my finger, where the seaglass ring had been, was the same scar. ‘I put a spell on that ring,’ I said. ‘That was why I gave it to you.’

  ‘What was the spell?’ Seth’s voice was very low.

  ‘I enchanted it to protect you. I said –’ I swallowed ‘– I said I would give anything to keep you from harm. Even my life. I just never thought …’ I stopped; it was almost too hard to say the words. But I forced myself on. ‘I never thought that harm would be from me.’

  ‘So the fire … rebounded on you?’

  ‘I think so. It should have killed me too.’

  ‘But it didn’t.’

  But it didn’t. The thought was cold and hard.

  We sat for a long time in each other’s arms, feeling the shift and rock of the boat beneath us. I knew I couldn’t stay – but I knew there was no peace for me where Seth was not. Whatever had brought us together, whatever the rights and wrongs and reasons, it was set. We’d suffered and fought side by side. We’d hurt each other, and healed each other, and saved each other. And somehow, during it all, we’d grown to be part of each other, twisted together by what we’d been through, like two trees growing too close in a forest, twisted by the wind, so that being apart meant tearing out a living part of ourselves.

  I knew I should go. And I knew I couldn’
t. Not tonight, anyway. Maybe tomorrow, when I was stronger, but tonight I couldn’t do it to myself, to Seth …

  At last Seth lifted his head and looked into my face, and his expression made my insides shiver with longing.

  He took my hand and pulled me to my feet.

  Then he turned out the lamp and together we walked slowly in the darkness, to the door at the far end of the boat, beneath the prow.

  Seth pulled open the door and inside was a bed, no floor at all, just a tumbled sea of sheets from wooden wall to wooden wall.

  We lay down together, side by side. Neither of us spoke. Seth closed his eyes and I traced one finger down the line of his forehead, the bridge of his nose, the curve of his lip, feeling the smoothness of his bones beneath the wind-roughened skin.

  There was no light apart from a little moonlight filtering through a frosted porthole. In the moon-dappled darkness he was no longer an angry stranger. He was Seth. My Seth. The bitter, too-sharp lines softened into the face that I knew and loved, that still tugged at my heart.

  ‘Seth …’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t open his eyes.

  ‘I love you. I always have. I never stopped.’

  His answer was so low I could hardly hear any words, but his lips moved and I felt his breath on my skin.

  I shut my eyes and he pulled me into him, my head on his chest, his arms around me, and we lay in the quiet moonlight and slept in each other’s arms.

  When I awoke it was still dark, but the wind had dropped and it felt maybe a degree or two warmer.

  I opened my eyes to look out of the porthole window, but there was nothing to see. Either it was too dark, or the snow was too thick on the pane. So I closed them again, feeling the warmth of Seth’s chest beneath my cheek and the slow, steady beat of his heart. I should not have felt happy. There was no room for happiness in the middle of all this horror and uncertainty. And there would be no happy ending for Seth and me. Tomorrow I’d have to get up and go to meet whatever waited for me. And Seth – Seth would be free at last.