He took three large strides towards her.
Samantha took three backwards.
A car waiting. I don’t think so. Maybe Amit really was just the kind of guy who focused on one job at a time, but she’d had enough of being encouraged into waiting cars. She decided to try sending him some positive energy.
She focused on the centre of her body and pushed. Her skin tingled and she thought this time she actually saw the buttery light drifting from her skin. She wondered whether anyone watching could see it.
‘Miss White,’ said Amit, baring his teeth.
She couldn’t feel any change in him at all. In fact, now he just looked scary.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me,’ he continued. ‘We can’t have people just wandering aimlessly around Heathrow. It’s a security risk.’
He reached out a hand and Samantha took another step backwards, right into someone else. She spun around. Another man in a grey uniform locked his big hands around her arms.
‘Come with us quietly, Samantha,’ he said, his head bent close to her ear. His grip was vice-like, his breath smelled like death, and again she could feel nothing from him.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
She lifted her foot in front of her as though she was going to try to walk away, but then, as fast and hard as she possibly could, she swung it backwards and smacked the heel of her sneaker full-force right on target: exactly where the trousers of the grey uniform met in the middle.
The man with death breath let her go. In fact, he dropped to his knees, his screams drawing a crowd.
Sam bolted through the people, losing Amit in moments.
Mr Grey Pants will need to see a doctor to get some ice on that, she thought. Huh. No Roma boy would’ve fallen for that move.
Weaving through the crowd, putting more and more people between her and the men, Samantha mentally reviewed at least ten other ways she could have got out of that hold.
The thought cheered her. She set out to find the bus to transfer to Terminal Three.
In the sky
Reclining in the huge business-class seat of the Qantas jet on her way to Australia, Samantha finally felt sleep catching up with her. She’d been up until dawn with Lala just two days ago, performing rituals for the moonlight festival. She blinked tiredly and sighed. Already that night felt like months ago. And then she’d snuck out with Mirela to the Carnivale. She’d been wide awake ever since.
But she had to admit, it was not difficult to relax on this plane. On the flight from Bucharest to London, she’d been too overwhelmed and intimidated to try to figure out how to use the instruments around her, but by watching the man in the seat next to her, she’d figured out on this flight how to make her seat recline and the footrest extend so she could lie back almost completely.
When the heavy-set, bald man in the suit next to her kicked his shoes off, she felt like doing the same, but she was pretty sure that her socks had holes in the toes and she thought that maybe – she bent down to check – yep, they didn’t even match. She left her sneakers on.
Surreptitiously checking out the cabinet to the left of her seat, she found a soft pillow and a rug. She felt guilty for touching these things, worried that she would be reprimanded at any moment. But the bald man was now breathing deeply, wearing earphones, so she ripped the rug and cushion from their plastic packaging and settled down into the seat. The moment she threw the light, warm rug over her clothing she felt safe. As though it was a shield. Right now, she belonged; she was part of the plane, protected by a piece of it.
She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again. Everything was just as it had been. Two impossibly regal women moved quietly about the cabin, filling a glass here, offering a hot towel or sweet there, leaning intimately over people’s seats to ensure that absolutely everything one could possibly desire was made immediately available.
At least, that’s how it felt to Samantha.
On the earlier flight to London from Bucharest she’d sat frozen in her seat, shaking her head when the stewards tried to encourage her to have some breakfast. The plump Gaje woman next to her had had no such reservations. She’d devoured a veritable feast as Samantha had watched from the corner of her eye. It began with a glass of wine before the plane had even taxied from the runway. At eight-thirty in the morning. Champagne, the woman told Samantha, raising her glass in the air. Samantha stared. This was the only word that passed between them during the flight.
But on this trip, Sam hadn’t been able to resist the food offered for lunch. The moment the flight attendant had smilingly passed her the menu, her mouth had begun watering. Nothing on the menu looked familiar. She recognised ‘salmon’, ‘lamb’ and ‘salad’, but the meaning of the words between them eluded her.
‘I’ll have what he’s having,’ she’d said quietly, when the flight attendant asked.
What he had came with a glass of red wine. Samantha had had red wine before – during festivals, occasionally with dinner, but never anything that tasted like this. The wine in camp had been a transparent, rosy colour, and sour. She didn’t especially enjoy it. But this wine was thick and syrupy and almost black. It looked like blood. It tasted of spice and soil and flowers and magic. She shook her head when the hostess offered a refill. Her neighbour did not.
No wonder he had fallen asleep.
Her head spun a little, but mostly she felt calm for the first time since the red doors had crashed open on the Ghost Ride. She knew she shouldn’t feel calm – she had no idea of what was coming next and how she was going to find her brother, but right now she could do nothing about that. She’d have to figure it out then – she’d done her best for now.
After she’d escaped Amit and his friend in grey at London airport, she’d decided she’d best stick close to people she could feel. That, and her newfound confidence at having outsmarted her enemies all on her own, helped her to make her way unobstructed to the Qantas Club. There, she’d gone straight to the computers and had learned as much as she could in ninety minutes about Sydney airport, especially about possible escape routes.
That she was going to need to know them, she was reasonably certain. Why would these people stop now when they knew exactly where she was going? But of pretty much everything else she had no idea. Like, who were these people after her? And if she did get away from them in Sydney, where exactly was she going to escape to?
Follow the signs, Sera had said. Huh. Great help there. I’m so sure there’ll be signposts in Australia to tell me exactly where to find Luke Black, my brother. Right. And if Sam really admitted it, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to meet her twin. The very little Seraphina had told her was not exactly promising.
‘What’s he like?’ she’d asked.
‘Well, he’s a lot like you, really,’ said Sera. ‘Except pretty much the opposite.’
When Samantha had spat a stream of words that would have made Lala cry and Esmeralda shove a piece of soap down her throat, Sera had made herself a little clearer.
‘All right, all right,’ she’d said. ‘Well, what the Grand Council has been able to learn is that your mother – endeavouring to conceive your brother – teleported herself into the cell of Harlan Craven. He must have been pretty surprised. Your mother was a very beautiful woman, Samantha.’
‘Did you say into his cell?’ she’d asked.
‘Well, yes. Unfortunately, Harlan Craven was a serial killer serving life in permanent solitary confinement at the SuperMax correctional facility in Australia. We think he may have been a daemon.’
The droning sound in Samantha’s ears had increased. This isn’t really happening, she’d told herself. Ever since she’d entered the Funhouse, she’d been repeating the line like a mantra every few minutes.