He cannot believe that he will fail. It’s not about fairness, because Mallian more than most Kin understands that life is not fair. Life is what you make it, and he will make life triumphant.

13

13

Sammi thought that Lilou was right and this would be an adventure. She also suspected that the valley was more dangerous than it seemed. It was a feeling, an inkling, like static raising the hairs on her arms, even though on her left arm she hardly had any hairs since being struck twice by lightning. The markings she’d had for a while after the second strike had risen again, like a memory of sheet lightning scorched into her vision. They reminded her of the terrible man Gregor, the Kin-killer. She did not like those memories, but they would always be a part of her.

She had come to trust such feelings. They were part of the change taking place within her, linked to the sparkling lightning she could conjure from her fingertips, and the returned markings on her arm, and other, deeper changes that she had yet to make sense of. She wished her dad were alive so she could ask him about it. She wished her mom was here. She had Angela, and she was doing her best. But sometimes Sammi felt so alone.

She was certain that the Kin blood came from her mother’s side. She had been convinced for almost two years that she was different, ever since she faced the fairy and saw something of herself reflected in that unknowable being’s eyes. She remembered the feeling of Grace’s hand around her upper arm, the gentle urging as she tugged her through from this world and into her own Fold. Sammi would never forget that momentary sense of belonging nowhere as she balanced between worlds. Just for an instant she had been part of neither, and the nightmare potential of slipping into the spaces in between was horrible.

It continued to give her nightmares. She quite liked silence and solitude, but in those spaces between worlds she had experienced true nothingness. She never wanted to see or feel that again.

She thought that her aunt Angela was aware of the changes taking place within her, even though Angela had no Kin blood—she and her mother had been sisters, though her mother was adopted. Lilou definitely knew. Neither of them talked about it much, and that suited Sammi. She wanted to discover it for herself before discussing it with other people.

Walking down towards the remains of Longford, she was alert for the indefinable danger she felt from this place. Maybe it was because it looked and felt so different from anywhere she had ever been before.

It could also be because Lilou was certainly hiding something from both of them.