The ring is heavy. It is thick, warm. I can’t make out the shapes on it in the poor light. I turn it around my finger and feel its weight and then I kiss it and whisper thanks. I am a witch.
I have met my father. Too briefly, but I have met him. And I think he must know that I don’t mean to kill him. He would not have given me three gifts if he believed that. My head feels clear, good. It’s an unusual feeling. I realize I’m smiling.
Then the sky above me fills with lightning and thunder drums the air.
Running
I turn back to the cottage door and Mercury is there, in gray chiffon, her hair only slightly more wild than normal, but she is in a fury and she swirls and crackles with lightning.
“I get the feeling that you have met your father.” Her voice has lost its slow measured pace and is screeching at me.
“Yes.”
“He gave you three gifts?”
“Yes.”
“And led the Hunters here.”
“No. The Hunters found you without any help from him. Marcus said that they have found a way of detecting your cuts. He wanted me to warn you to be more careful.”
A bolt of lightning hits the ground near my feet. “You should be more careful too. Where are Rose and Gabriel?”
“I don’t know where Gabriel is. Rose was killed by the Hunters.”
Mercury screams.
“You knew it was dangerous. You sent her in there.”
“And yet you survived. Do you have the Fairborn?”
Her eyes are black hollows.
“No.”
“But Rose got it from Clay?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it? Does Marcus have it?”
I hesitate but then say, “Yes, he took it.”
She screams again and a small whirlwind swirls around her and then stops abruptly.
“It seems that all I have is Annalise.”
“Where is she?”
“Safe. For now. Do you want her back?”
“Of course.”
“Bring me your father’s head. Or his heart. I’ll accept either.”
Mercury spins around in a cloud of gray, a mini tornado, her face appearing and disappearing in its calm center. The tornado flies up the valley in the direction of the glacier.
The air is calm again, the snowstorm over. It’s quiet.
Will the Hunters be able to find the cottage in the dark? Of course, they’re Hunters.
Then I hear the buzz of their phones. They’re here.
A shot, and another.
But I’m already running. And running is even better than before. I’m stronger, faster, more in tune. The night is black but I can find my way with ease. And I know where I’m going. I’m going to find my friend. Gabriel.
Acknowledgments
I started writing rather late in my life, not very long ago in 2010, and did my best to hide this new obsession (as it quickly became) from my friends and relatives. I certainly had no intention of making myself the object of ridicule when the most I’d ever written before was a note to the milkman. However, it didn’t take long before my husband noticed that I was up to something in our little office room until 2 a.m. every night. I decided to be brave and come clean.
“I’m writing a novel.”
I waited. Would he laugh? Tell me I was being ridiculous?
“Oh! Okay. Sounds good.”
Not the reaction I expected, but just what I needed. I could not have written Half Bad without his support and quiet encouragement.
After that I became a little bolder and confided in a couple of friends, who then had to bear the brunt of my tedious conversations about writing. Lisa and Alex were (and still are) amazingly good listeners, never yawned to my face, and always managed to say, “Really?” in the right places (and were early readers of my manuscripts).
Thanks as well to my other readers. I’m so grateful for their time and honesty. David gave me lots of advice on my original novel. Mollie was the first teenager to read Half Bad—that she chose to spend her time with Nathan I take as the perfect compliment. My Open University buddies, Gillian and Fiona, have been stars, giving me full and frank feedback.
I sent Half Bad to Claire Wilson at Rogers, Coleridge and White in January 2013, hoping she would be interested in acting as my agent. She was. She has championed Half Bad wonderfully and advised and guided me through the strange world of publishing. Claire had rejected my first novel, saying it wasn’t edgy enough, and I am so grateful, as without that kick Half Bad would not have been written.
I have an impressive array of people working with me at Puffin, all of whom have been a joy. Ben Horslen, my editor, should win an award for enthusiasm (and tact) and with him are a great bunch of people: junior editor Laura Squire; Tania Vian-Smith and Gemma Green and the Marketing and Publicity departments; designer Jacqui McDonough; and Zosia Knopp and her fantastic Rights team (along with The Map). Thanks to everyone at Puffin.
I also feel incredibly privileged to have Ken Wright as my editor at Viking in the United States, along with his associate editor Leila Sales. He also has a great team of people but in particular I have to thank Deborah Kaplan and her designers for the gorgeous cover art.
While writing Half Bad I revisited some of the literature from my teenage years (before Young Adult was invented), notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which reassured me that Nathan’s time in the cage was bearable.
The someone who said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them,” was Ernest Hemingway.
I was searching for a name to give the Fairborn and was inspired by the Fairbairn-Sykes knife, information about which I found on Wikipedia.
I haven’t seen the film Lawrence of Arabia for years, but the scene with the matches is one of the many that have stayed in my head.
As for Hamlet—well, if I’m honest I read it many years ago and have never seen the play on stage (I have watched a film version), but the line “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” was a key element in the forming of my story. While Shakespeare hasn’t taken up a huge amount of my time over the last ten years, being a mother has, and I often watched my son and pondered the nature vs. nurture question: “Why does he do that?” “What makes him him?” “What makes any of us the way we are?” These questions undoubtedly influenced my writing.
The mountains of north Wales were an inspiration as I scrambled up, down, and around them, as were the Sandstone Trail in England and the Lötschental valley in Switzerland. If you saw a woman walking there, muttering to herself (and sometimes a luckless friend) about fains and three gifts it might have been me.