His sister started to argue, but he didn’t listen. If he lost Ari now, he’d never find her in the night. She was probably heading back to the gîte. Where else would she go? But still… He’d caused this and he had to fix it. Why on earth had he brought up Simon? Why had he even told her anything about the madness that surrounded his life? No one sane would believe any of it. His family only knew it through bitter experience. They had no proof, just old stories and a string of dead men.
‘What did you do?’ Laure called after him, but he was already running down the drive, looking for Ari Walker.
The storm came in from the west. Storms in Paris could be dramatic, but they didn’t warrant the same name as the wild tempests that lashed the Atlantic coast. He could smell ozone in the air and the rain swirled around him, caught by the wind, falling in every direction, even up. The trees lining the avenue lashed from side to side and he pressed on against the gusts threatening to drive him back. He could just make her out, a small figure in the distance, but when he shouted her name, the gale whipped his voice away.
A gap in the racing clouds uncovered the moon, just for an instant, and he saw a shadow, the height of a man. It flitted along beside her, not her own, but something else. Rafael blinked through the rain, frowning. For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he saw was real. It wasn’t possible.
At the end of the drive, she stopped, looking either way as if making a decision. The figure that could not possibly be there leaned in and whispered in her ear. Rafael called out her name, but the wind stole his voice again. Ari turned and started up the path. She wasn’t heading for the main road, or the village, he realised, but out towards the coast instead. This was madness. True, in daylight, in good weather, it was quicker to take the coastal paths back to the Ty Elen gîte. But not now. The trails and paths that wound their way over the open clifftop were barely visible and beyond them, too close for comfort, the sea was wild, throwing foam up to heaven. There were crevices, some of which led to the rabbit warren of caves beneath their feet. Some led directly to the sea itself. It was dangerous to be out here alone in a storm.
Yet she was not alone. It felt like his nightmare all over again as he ran after her but didn’t seem to make any headway. The wind pushed him back, the wet ground underfoot hampering him. Clouds scuttered away from the moon again. Striding alongside Ari’s slender form, a tall figure cloaked in rippling shadows flowed across the rough ground. As Rafael finally drew closer, it resolved into a man, taller than either of them, wearing a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat which the wind didn’t touch. Long white hair lifted in the air as if underwater.
‘Ari!’ Rafael tried again.
She didn’t react. Perhaps she didn’t hear him. But the figure glanced back over his shoulder, and Rafael caught a glimpse of a bone-pale face, a rictus, skeletal grin. The figure lifted one hand and pressed it to her back. Just the lightest tap.
Ari screamed and went down, vanishing into the ground. The dark figure dissolved into the shrieking wind.
‘Ari!’ He scrambled after her. She had to be OK. She had to be.
He couldn’t think about who, or what, he had just seen or what it meant. He knew the figure from his nightmares. How could he call himself a Breton and not? Ari Walker had just been touched by Ankou. Death’s right hand.
‘Down here! Help!’
Her voice. She had to be OK if she could call out. But where was she?
In the darkness, he couldn’t see her, but he got his phone out and turned on the torch, swinging the beam of light over the ground where she had been.
‘Ari? Keep talking. Where are you? What can you see?’
An answering light shone from beneath an overgrowth of bush and scrub, and he saw the fissure in the ground. She’d had the same idea about using her phone. ‘Rocks? And… Oh god, what’s that? Ugh.’
She sounded so deeply affronted that under any other circumstances it would be been amusing.
As a kid he had explored the caves, along with Laure and other friends, as far as they dared, which wasn’t really very far. They weren’t meant to go down there at all and if an adult found out, there would be hell to pay.
He reached out and pushed back the brambles with his arm. Her pale face looked back up at him from a gap in the ground. Even standing, she’d have a hard time climbing out alone. It was a couple of metres down.
‘Here.’ He lay down on the wet earth and reached out his free hand. ‘I’ll pull you up.’
For once, she didn’t argue. She threw her shoes up and grabbed his arm, clambering over the rocks. When she tried to stand unaided, her legs went from beneath her. He caught her before she could fall.
‘You’re hurt.’ It was a stupid thing to say, he knew that.
‘Just give me a minute. I’m just…I’m just winded.’
Oh, she was never going to admit that she was hurt, that much was certain. ‘Just let me help you. Come back to the house.’
She shook her head. ‘Not like this. Look at me. I’m covered in mud and God knows what. I think there was something alive down there.’ She shuddered. ‘When did this storm blow in? It took me right off my feet.’
‘What did?’
‘A gust of wind.’
Right. A rational explanation. She liked them, he got that. So what had he seen? A trick of the light? A hallucination? He closed his eyes in despair.
‘Ari…’ he began with a tone that could hide his dwindling patience. It wasn’t safe out here. Not just the weather and the treacherous ground. Something more. How did he explain that? Preferably without telling her he’d seen a mythical creature from folklore? Because after the conversation they had just had, she was not going to believe that. Not for a second.
It had been a trick of the storm and the limited light. It had to be. He was a rational man. This was ridiculous. He’d already sounded like a madman earlier, talking of curses and ancient legends. He wasn’t about to compound that now.
