Initiate
About the Book
She turned and saw them. Three black shapes in a crowd of colour, moving slowly like scuttling roaches.
Three women, dressed in leathers, carrying biker helmets.
They had come here to find someone.
They had come here to hunt.
Three hundred years ago, Lily's ancestor broke a solemn promise signed in blood. And now she is thrust into a shadow world where Satan is real, witches exist and evil is an ancient living thing that seeks to wreak havoc and rule.
The dark is coming, and only she can stop it.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Epilogue
Sneak Peek: Next Book in the Palace of Fires Series
To Stephanie and Russell Bennett
who taught me that words matter –
on a page, in a book, they last
She bent down and searched the clods of earth with dirty fingers. She found a tuber, pulled it up hoping it would be free of the blight that had infested the valley, but immediately she could see that bubbles of disease pockmarked its skin. It felt spongy and moist. She tossed it out into the barren field, her heart leaden.
They would all be like that. The entire crop. Useless even for a thin soup, or a bowl of gruel.
Her father was ill and weak, and he needed nourishment. Most days now he lay curled up in his cot shivering and clutching his fraying blanket. Her ma too was infirm with a cough that wracked her whole body. It would not be long before the Black Lung claimed her, like it had her younger sister Bronagh less than a year ago.
Her five-year-old brother, Deaglan, was as hungry as a young puppy, always pulling at her skirt and asking for food. It stabbed at her heart to have to tell him there’d be no dinner tonight, but perhaps tomorrow night. They had some meal in the larder, and half a sack of oats. Connie Dougherty down the road last week gave her a loaf of cornbread and a bag of carrots, but Jennett didn’t want to go there begging. Not yet anyway.
The skies thundered and it began to rain. Cold spittle stung her face. A bitter wind tugged at her shawl. She was only sixteen and yet she felt so much older, knowing that she and she alone was now responsible for her family’s survival.
She turned to leave and saw him standing by the gate in the low stone wall on the edge of the field. In the gloom of the darkening storm he seemed to be lit by a wayward shaft of sunlight, although with the swirling clouds above that was surely not possible.
He was watching her, and as she approached she could see that he wore the finery of a moneyed gentleman, perhaps even a lord: a fur-collared black coat over a gold-embroidered waistcoat, cut and tailored breeches, knee-high polished leather boots, a crimson scarf and a sweeping hat adorned with a large purple feather that held impossibly firm in the ripping wind.
As she got closer she could see that the hair spilling down from under his hat was shiny and jet black, his skin pale and flawless, his eyes the brightest blue she’d ever seen, brighter than the summer skies over a county fair. Even from a distance she could tell that this was the most handsome young man she had ever seen.
She reached the lichen-covered gate. He swung it wide for her with a flourish and a smile that cleaved open her heart with its warmth and joy. He offered his hand to help her over a large puddle. She took it. His skin was soft to the touch, and yet there was a strength to him, an assurance, that she found slightly giddying. His eyes never left hers as she skipped over the mud, holding his hand, and for a moment she felt like she was flying. And when she got to the other side he didn’t let her go but gently brought her to him.
Jennett was suddenly aware of her cheap and dirty flaxen dress, her hands rough and filthy from working the fields. She had soil under her fingernails, her face was smudged and her hair was a tangle. She’d not had a bath in a week and most probably she had a foul odour.
But still he smiled at her, and still his eyes were fixed on hers, and still he held her hand.
‘Thank you, my lord,’ Jennett said, her voice a lilt and her smile demure, thinking him from the castle on the hill on the far side of the village.
He laughed, and Jennett basked in the glow of that laugh. She smiled, and for a moment her worries were gone, and all that was right in the world was standing before her.
‘I am a lord, of sorts,’ he said. ‘I saw you here, and I sensed your distress, and so I came.’
‘Distress?’
‘Your family. Their needs. I can help, if you wish.’
Jennett suddenly felt her cheeks run hot. She swiftly withdrew her hand. ‘I don’t need your help, thank you,’ she said curtly and turned to walk away, flushed with embarrassment. She would be no one’s whore, not even this handsome man’s, not even if he offered her enough gold to feed her family for years. They would never eat from bowls filled with food from a slattern.
The young man laughed again and called after her, ‘You mistook my meaning. I have come to offer you help.’
She stopped and turned back to him. She was intrigued. Dirty and foul-odoured as she was, she was still the prettiest girl in the district, and had been courted by the most eligible of the lowly village suitors. Even so, this was a landed gentleman and surely he had no romantic interest in a poor farmer’s daughter. Curious, she asked, ‘Well then, what kind of offer would that be, sir?’
He smiled. ‘I can offer you bountiful crops till the day you die. You will have abundance, more than your family will ever need, and what you don’t need you can sell to the village for coin. You will have more than enough to pay for physicians and care, and to buy all the tinctures and potions you will need to heal your mother and father. From this day on, you will always be in wealth and happiness.’
Jennett eyed him cautiously. ‘How do you know what my family’s needs are, my lord? Have you been in the village asking of the folk there?’
He took a step closer to her, his eyes blazing blue. ‘It seems that your merciful God the Almighty has forsaken you, dear lass. Your sister last year, taken too young, soon your father, thereafter your mother. Your God the saviour is not saving your family, Jennett, is he? This I can do.’
‘How?’ she asked, irritated by his arrogance. Who was he to predict the wellness of her mother and father, even though Jennett knew in her heart that he was correct.
/> ‘Watch,’ he said, and then he jumped over the stone wall in one quick and effortless movement. He reached down into the soil and pulled out a large potato, brushed the soil off, then threw it to her.
She caught it, looked at it. It was unsullied with blight. She wiped it clean, took a bite. It was crisp and sweet inside. She was astonished. All the potatoes in her field, and in the fields surrounding, were stricken, she knew that. How had he managed to find such a perfect specimen with such casual ease?
He jumped back over the wall again and stepped up to her. ‘I can guarantee health and plenty,’ he said. ‘And your family will live like kings.’
Jennett put the potato in the pocket of her jacket. Boiled down to soup, it would feed them all tonight. ‘What do you want in return?’ she asked, trying to keep at bay her growing sense of dread. She’d heard stories from the old women around the well in the village. Some talked of evil enchanters come from the bogs dressed in various guises, sent to lure the unwary into a never-ending night of horrors.
‘Ah, yes, there is always a price.’ He laughed again, and took out a scroll of goatskin parchment from a pocket inside his coat. He handed it to her. She unfurled it, her heart pounding in her chest, and looked down at a jumble of scratched writings that she couldn’t understand.
‘I can’t read,’ she said, fear rising in her throat, crimping her speech. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a contract, dear Jennett, that’s all. It states that you will have abundance for the rest of your days. There are only two stipulations; you must promise never to break it, and you must sign in your own blood.’
‘My own blood?’ she asked, and looked up to see him producing a knife with a razor-sharp blade and a deer-hoof handle.
‘It won’t hurt.’ He took her palm and made a quick cut across the flesh at the base of her thumb. She flinched. Blood sprung from the wound. He then took a feathered quill out of an inside pocket and dipped it into the blood. He offered it to her, poised over the parchment.
‘Sign, dear Jennett, and you will nevermore be in distress.’
She stepped back holding her sliced hand, droplets of blood falling onto the dead soil at her feet.
‘I know what this is,’ she said, her eyes now wide with terror. ‘You’ve come from the black bogs, haven’t you, to take me into your dark mists.’
‘You sing the wrong hymns to the wrong god, Jennett,’ he said, his smile now fixed, his eyes like a snake’s locked on its prey. ‘All my Master and Mistress want is for your happiness. Your one true God has ignored all your prayers, and soon with the death of those you love you will discover that for all these years, your faith has been misplaced. You will be alone, your family gone to a heaven filled with pox.’
‘No!’ Jennett said, and began to walk away, stumbling over a large clump of earth, turning her ankle. She grimaced in pain, stopped, bent down and held her twisted foot.
He was beside her, silently. Concerned.
‘Why do you resist, Jennett?’ he said, his voice like oil on ice. ‘All you need do is sign, and all your worries will be gone. Soon your father will be chopping wood again, your mother back in the kitchen making homely dinners, and your fields will be plentiful in crop, when all around you the blight will rage. You will sell into a market devoid of produce, and merchants will shower you with silver and gold. You will have everything you need, and more.’
‘But in return you want my soul,’ Jennett said, looking up at him, tremulous.
‘What is your soul, Jennett?’ he said. ‘It is nothing. Can you see it? Can you touch it? Will it feed your family? Will it drive off the Black Lung? It is a will-o’-the-wisp after you’re gone, and after you’re gone, what will you care? But you’ll care if your father dies next week. You’ll care when your mother coughs herself to an early grave, and when your young brother succumbs to disease because you can’t put food on the table. And you’ll care knowing that you could have saved them, if only you’d signed this simple contract.’
He unfurled the parchment again and Jennett stood, the pain in her ankle now throbbing. She looked at the scratched words, words that meant nothing to her. She thought of her father, too weak to even stand. Before the turn of the moon she would be burying him in the village cemetery beside his father, unless she could get him a doctor. But doctors required coin. Her mother too would only last perhaps a month before she joined him. With a failed crop and no prospects in the village, she would have to take her young brother to the city and hope for work. And if there was no work, then . . . she would have to reconsider her moral decency, if she wanted to keep him fed.
He gently took her hand. She didn’t resist. He squeezed her palm. Fresh blood flowed from the slit wound. She watched as he again dipped the feathered quill into the drops of spilling blood, then offered her the pen. ‘This will not be redeemed until the moment of your natural or unnatural death, Jennett, and by then, what will it matter?’
There were teeth behind his smile. Stone behind his eyes. His lips were unnaturally red against the milky pale of his skin.
She took the pen and signed her name with a mark. Her blood scrawled across the page. He leaned in and blew, congealing the blood.
‘Well done, lass. You have just saved your family from the unjustness of your harsh and vengeful God. You will now live a happy and prosperous life.’ He rolled the scroll up and tucked it back into his jacket. He nodded respectfully to her and turned to leave.
‘Who are you?’ she called after him.
He turned back to her and smiled with eyes that were no longer summer blue. They were now a bottomless, limitless, timeless black.
‘You will come to know me,’ he said, ‘for all eternity.’ And then he was gone.
A pesky ray of sunlight found a gap in the curtains and woke her. Lily groaned, rolled herself out of bed, stumbled like a zombie across to the window, opened the curtains and peered out at hurtful brightness. At least it’s not a school day, she thought.
Through bleary eyes she looked out across the valley at gossamer veils of drifting mist, soon to be burnt off by the rising sun. Up by the tree line, a couple of deer were warily grazing. The sky was cornflower blue and cloudless. It was going to be a beautiful day.
She padded down the hallway to the bathroom. She could hear her mom in the kitchen making breakfast. Saturday breakfasts before market were always hearty. Lily could smell eggs and spinach, and her mom’s coffee percolating on the pot-bellied stove. The smell of coffee always reminded her of mornings in Seattle before the accident, years ago, when her father was still alive and they had a home, a true home. Not a farm at the long end of a remote track that no one could ever find.
She surveyed herself in the bathroom mirror. A mistake at this time of the morning. Her hair was short and unruly. Orange red in colour, just like her mom’s. It had been the source of teasing and nicknames all her life, ‘carrot top’ being the most common and unimaginative. A friend in Montana had called her ‘Matches’ and she kind of liked that, because she was like a match – red on top and matchstick thin. And incendiary, Lily thought. Yeah, capable of suddenly bursting into flame and scorching anyone that deserved it.
She looked at her wire-framed body under the oversized t-shirt that she’d slept in. She’d just turned sixteen a few months back and she’d been hoping that her recalcitrant glands would have celebrated by kicking in with some industrial strength hormones. Lily had her mother’s lean figure, and it didn’t seem like it was going to fill out anytime soon. But she also had her mom’s pale-green eyes, high cheekbones, upturned nose, freckles, and a mouth that was inclined to smile and grin, and sometimes even laugh. It was a face full of spark, a face that challenged the world.
Her mother’s looks had settled into a classic yet understated beauty. Her eyes had acquired a wisdom tinged with sadness, still compassionate and full of mirth, but underlined by something deeper – a determination and toughness that Lily figured came with the loss of her dad, and the challenges of bri
nging up a teenage daughter as a single parent. Angela had even cut and dyed her hair black after the death of David, losing the burnt red curls that had so clearly defined her in her younger years.
Lily let the shower play on her face, the tiny jets of warm water washing away any remaining traces of sleep. She’d had that nightmare again, of running down an endless stone hallway somewhere deep in an ancient castle, torches flaming in brackets on the walls, running from something unimaginably evil, knowing there was no escape other than to wake.
And so she’d woken, gasping, clammy with sweat. It was a dream that had haunted her ever since her father’s death. Last night she’d finally fallen back to sleep by playing in her mind some BB King blues harmonica licks. That always worked. And by morning the terror had vanished like the drifting valley mist, gone with the sun.
With a towel wrapped around her she ran back to her bedroom, opened her wardrobe, looked at her choices. Jeans, jeans and jeans. T-shirts, t-shirts and t-shirts. Her treasured tan leather jacket, which her father had bought for her at a vintage market a few weeks before he was killed. It swam on her when he bought it, but fitted her well now. It was her most precious possession. And then there were her trusty Blunnies – Blundstone boots. They too were an essential part of her uniform. Lily didn’t own a dress and she felt good about that. And anyway, jeans and a t-shirt with a vintage leather jacket made life so much simpler.
She chose a black t with red Chinese hieroglyphics emblazoned across the front, faded black jeans and the tan jacket. She put product in her hair to mess it up in an acceptably cool way, then looked at herself in the mirror again. Not exactly boy-bait, are you, Lils? Do you seriously think this is going to turn Kevin Johnstone’s gorgeous head at the market today? What the hell. It feels right.
Kevin Johnstone was the son of a berry grower who had a stall near theirs at the Mill Valley Farmers’ Market. He was a year older, and totally unattainable. Tall, football muscled, with dark floppy hair and piercing blue eyes – he had movie star looks and the kind of body you’d see on an underwear billboard. He was the one boy all the girls at school wanted to date. There was online gossip that he was seeing an older woman, but that just made him even more hot.