The Night Princess Page 7

  She rose into the air, intending to dive to aid her friends from above.

  She didn’t get far. She didn’t see Evangeline approach but felt the force of her impact. Evangeline came from above and slammed her full weight into Juniper. Responding without even thinking, Juniper caught Evangeline with both hands and turned, using her momentum to swing around and throw the Var away from her. Evangeline slammed backwards against the house.

  There was a shout from below. ‘That’s her! Var Valerian has promised a reward to anyone who will bring him the Magnifier!’

  All of a sudden, it seemed like every vampire for miles around headed straight for Juniper. The first one who came within arms’ reach received a blow that sent him crunching into the solid stone wall of the Guesthouse. The next one, she grabbed and flung him so hard that he flew into the air and landed on the roof. He didn’t get up again. Juniper gritted her teeth and began to fight her way back to her friends.

  But there were so many vampires in her way. As they drew near to her, their powers expanded, and even those who were not strongly gifted were suddenly able to use their abilities in ways that they never had before. It only fuelled their desire to catch her. That reward promised by the King had to be something else indeed.

  Slowly but surely, Juniper made her way through the press of bodies. She had never been in a fight before, and even though she was fighting for her life, she didn’t want to hurt people. So she pulled her punches, and tried not to hit them too hard. The memory of that man, or what looked like a man, on the roof, lying so still, haunted her. She slipped out of their grasp and flew straight over the heads of the attacking vampires to land in the small, clear space between her friends and the Guesthouse door.

  ‘Mrs Elliot, come with me!’ she shouted, touching the older lady on the arm.

  Mrs Elliot responded by whirling to face Juniper. Juniper reared back. As Mrs Elliot was still holding the knife, she’d nearly taken Juniper’s nose off. Her eyes were wide with terror, and Juniper suspected that she could barely see for fear.

  ‘Mrs Elliot, come with me!’ Juniper repeated. ‘I can save you, but I need your help!’

  Mrs Elliot nodded and let Juniper pull her into the Guesthouse. As soon as they were inside, she dropped the knife, with a clatter that was barely audible over the noise outside. They went down the corridor to the Door that led to all the other worlds.

  ‘I need you to be ready,’ Juniper said. ‘I want you to open the Door to the world that Katie and Rick are from. I’m going to bring everyone back here. Stand ready, Mrs Elliot. We need you to be brave.’

  Mrs Elliot nodded, her face still pale. Juniper ran back down the corridor to the others. They’d been pushed back faster than she’d expected and were in the large octagonal room beneath the dome already.

  Var Valerian, the Vampire King, was with his followers now, leading the charge. He reached out for Ysande.

  Juniper pulled Ysande back just in time, nearly pulling her off her feet. Ysande had been ready to strike, but she bit back her angry words when she saw Juniper.

  ‘This way!’ Juniper shouted. ‘Quickly, it’s the only way!’

  The others listened to her. They abandoned the fight and turned to run down the corridor. Mrs Elliot was standing next to the Door, holding it open. Juniper pushed Mrs Elliot through the Door, taking her place before ushering the others through as well.

  The vampires were right behind them. Var Valerian was stalking along the corridor. He reached for Juniper, a hungry look on his face.

  Juniper flung herself through the Door and tried to pull it shut behind her.

  She couldn’t.

  Var Valerian was holding it.

  ‘You’re mine,’ he growled. ‘I can already taste your power.’ He pulled at the Door and ripped it off its hinges. Juniper held back a cry. The Door thudded against the wall and fell to the floor behind him.

  ‘I’m warning you,’ she said, because even now she felt like she should be nice. ‘Don’t try to come after me.’

  ‘Little girl, I can follow you anywhere.’

  ‘You can’t follow me here,’ she told him.

  He took a step towards the Door.

  She couldn’t stop herself from taking a step back. She threw the ring towards the Door. She knew that she was supposed to place it there carefully, but she was too frightened to control the convulsive moment. It had to hit the right spot, and Juniper wasn’t known for her athletic ability.

  The ring flew through the air, the opal-coloured stone catching the light of the other world for a moment before it stopped suddenly. It hung, suspended in the air, right in the middle of the door.

  Var Valerian tried to grab at the ring, but he drew back with a cry of pain. The same blue sparks that had come from the book when someone other than Juniper tried to touch it came from the ring. Electricity sparkled across the whole surface of the Door.

  The Vampire King tried to shove through the Door, but this time, there were even more blue sparks, showering all around him.

  He threw back his head and roared. ‘I will get you, Juniper Green!’

  ‘You can’t come into this world.’ Her voice was shaky and not nearly as firm and badass as she wished it was. Her hands were trembling so badly she knew that if she had to throw the ring again, she wouldn’t have been able to do it. ‘We will stop you. I have the power to stop you.’

  Juniper drew in a deep breath and firmed her voice. ‘I am the last of the line of the Company of Stewards. I was born to stop you. This will be your only warning, Var Valerian. Stop preying on the innocent, or I will destroy you.’

  She didn’t stop to listen to his raging. The door she’d stepped through into the fictional world was a French door into a ballroom in a palace. Behind her was a garden. Juniper stepped back and carefully and quietly closed the door.

  Var Valerian vanished.

  The door was once again, an ordinary door. Well, as ordinary as a French door leading into a ballroom in a palace can be.

  Juniper turned around to face the others. They were all staring at her.

  Ysande was the first to speak. ‘That was bloody awesome,’ she exclaimed. ‘We’ve got to do that again.’

  Keep reading for an excerpt from my next novel, Daughter of a Captive God, the first book in The Author’s Daughter Series. Set in the same universe as The Night Princess, it follows Katie as she learns that not everything is as it seemed and the world was more dangerous than she ever knew.

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I was twenty-three, my Dad ran away from home. Given that he was living with my mother I was sympathetic. Still, I had to go home to help Mum, no matter how I felt about it. That’s what you do. I spent my first day back home talking to the police and spending a terrible, terrible time in the morgue identifying a body that looked enough like my father to fool the casual observer.

  That night I lay awake, upstairs in the guesthouse in my parents’ backyard. I planned my Dad’s funeral. While I was at it I planned my own funeral and listened to the house settle.

  I’d never slept in the Guesthouse before. It was a very old building and to give my Dad credit, he’d renovated it thoroughly. It had a big bedroom upstairs with an en-suite with a lounge room and a kitchenette downstairs. They say old buildings make noises as they settle, though you’d think they had enough time to settle in the last century and a half.

  There was another noise. That wasn’t the house settling.

  I swung my legs out of bed. Silly me, I’d packed clothes and soap and deodorant. I hadn’t packed a weapon — not that it would do much good, since I didn’t know how to use one. Mum had moved all my toys from my old room into the Guesthouse with me, so I picked out the one I could most easily use as a club.

  A hobby horse, with a plush fake-fur horse’s head on top of a stick might sound like something out of a horror novel, but it’s an actual thing. When you’re five and pretending you’re a knight on horseback it serves well enough as a horse. Now it serve
d well enough as a pointy stick.

  I crept downstairs, quiet, quiet, the hobby horse raised in my hand.

  There was nothing there. An empty room, kitchen benches clean and tidy, the bank of storage cupboards that lined the back wall… wait. One of the doors wasn’t quite shut.

  There was another thump. You couldn’t miss it. It was inside the cupboard. I braced myself, hobby horse at the ready. The cupboard doors bumped slightly, hiccoughed almost. They burst open with a loud crash.

  I took stumbling steps backwards as a slavering, bestial thing shouldered its way out of the splintered remains of the cupboard doors.

  It was enormous, looming over me, a Thing of leathery skin and teeth and claws and its breath tasted of things long dead. It lunged towards me and knocked me to the ground, claws digging in to my arm and drawing blood. I screamed in pain and fear and rolled away, the force of my movement ripping my own flesh on the monster’s claws.

  It caught up to me, roaring in fury as I beat it around the head, swinging the hobby horse with more strength than I knew I possessed. I screamed again, this time in fury. I spun the hobby horse around and drove the sharp end into the belly of the beast. As it fell it reached out a clawed hand and dragged me down with it.

  The Thing pinned me to the floor. I tried to roll and scramble away but it drew me back to it. I gagged on the smell of its breath and fought to free myself. The beast lowered its head, its teeth ripping my shoulder. I screamed in horror at the idea that it might torture me, play like a cat before finally killing me. It lowered its head again and from that bestial mouth came a sound, a word. My name.

  ‘Katie,’ it growled.

  ***

  Three days before the only person I had to hide from was the boss. I was gardening, gardening, I say, when the boss called out from the verandah that there was a phone call for me. I could have been gone into the bush and not been found for… well, usually people who go into the bush aren’t found, so I answered the damn phone.

  ‘Yes, Dad?’ I said, cradling the phone next to my ear while I picked dirt out from under my fingernails. It was only just past sunrise but that’s the best time to get started on garden work. I had to be sure I worked hard and was seen to work hard. It had been hard for me to get work and I couldn’t afford to lose this job. I had no ID. When I’d asked Mum for my birth certificate she told me that I didn’t have one.

  ‘Do I exist?’ I’d joked.

  ‘No,’ she replied and kept a straight face. So when I ran away I disappeared into the Australian outback and did odd jobs on enormous stations for cash in hand, bed and board.

  ‘Katie, it’s Cecilia. I’m so sorry to call-’

  ‘Silly?’ I asked. It wasn’t my fault I called her Silly. Her name was Cecilia Beally, what else did her mother expect? ‘Silly.’ I sat down. I sighed into the phone and she sighed on the other end of the line in response.

  ‘I’m sorry, Katie.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. It’s just my family I ran away from, not you.’

  ‘Katie, it’s about your Dad.’

  ‘Yeah, what?’ I rubbed gingerly at my chest. The scars were still fresh and sore, so I poked at them five or six times an hour to see if they were any better yet.

  ‘Katie, your Dad’s gone missing.’

  I stopped probing the sore spots. ‘Missing? He hasn’t left the house since I was sixteen. Has Mum checked behind the lounge?’

  ‘Katie!’

  ‘Sorry.’ There weren’t many people on earth I’d say that for, and even for Silly it was a recalcitrant mumble.

  ‘Katie, your Mum needs help.’

  ‘Can you stop saying my name like that? It’s not Simon Says. Has Mum even tried to do anything or has she been too busy weeping into a lace hankie and complaining that Sherlock Holmes hasn’t been any help at all.’ I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper. It was my bucket list, treated with no more respect than it deserved.

  ‘Katie, you know your Mum…’

  ‘I know my Mum lost her grip long before she sent me away to that stupid boarding school.’ Go cross country walking (start with a small country).

  ‘Bunty sounded nice. You were always so mean about her in your letters.’

  ‘I didn’t want another best friend. And Mum didn’t want me so I’m not going back and that’s final.’ See a glacier before they all disappear.

  ‘Um, Katie…?’

  Oh, God. ‘Yes, Silly?’

  ‘I’ve already driven up to get you. I’m in Collarenebri. I stayed at the pub last night. I just need directions to the property.’ To Do: Live longer.

  I pursed my lips. Now I was screwed, wasn’t I? What else could I do? She’d already come eight hundred odd kays, she might as well come the last twenty kays from town. When I got off the phone I threw the bucket list away. There was no point, really.

  It’s not the number of breaths that you take, they say, but the number of moments that take your breath away. They say. Smug bastards. You don’t say things like that when you’ve got cancer. It was only after the mastectomy they told me that I was doomed anyway. More important than that, I only had fifty bucks in my account. You can’t get far on fifty bucks.

  Silly had been my best friend since her parents moved in next door when we were three. By the time we’d driven through eight hundred kays of the picturesque Australian countryside, four hundred of which passed while I tried to wedge a towel in the window so I didn’t burn to a crisp, I was ready to end our friendship in a number of creative ways. All methods were going to be permanent, but the hotter the sun got, the more reasonable they sounded.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me your air-con was broken?’ I asked, as we passed through Narromine.

  Silly had her eyes fixed on the road. There were only two or three turns in the road between Sydney and Collarenebri so I understood why it took her full attention.

  ‘Oh, um, you know…’

  ‘Silly, it must be fifty degrees outside! And it’s hotter in the car! We’re going to die.’ Or at least, one of us is going to die.

  ‘I hate taking the car to a mechanic. They always overcharge me. They get this look in their eyes when they see me coming.’

  ‘You could try standing up for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, um… I know…’

  Yes, I knew.

  As we got to Come-by-Chance (and, as they say, went like blazes) I realised that the sun had shifted. I yanked the towel down from the window and wound it down. The sun was shining in Silly’s window now. I was unforgivably smug all the way to Penrith.

  When we pulled up outside the house I seriously considered not getting out of the car. I might have stayed there a lot longer if it hadn’t been so ready to murder my best friend. Anyway, I felt disgusting, like a sweaty, smelly, dishevelled remnant of what had once been a woman and at the very least, if I got out of the car, I might be allowed to shower.

  Mum met us at the door. Weeping. I said ‘There, there, Mum,’ and lugged my bags inside.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Katie,’ Silly said from the doorway. ‘Bye, Mrs Elliot.’

  ‘Silly don’t you dare leave me here-’ but she was already halfway down the path.

  I dumped my bags in the lounge room.

  ‘Oh, Katie, darling,’ Mum said damply, ‘remember when you were a little girl? You used to play behind that lounge for ages.’

  ‘Dad told me I’d be chased by an army of the undead if I came out.’

  ‘Him and his silly stories.’ She pressed the predictably lacy and realistically damp hankie to her breast.

  ‘There’s sure… something… to be said for being the daughter of a horror writer.’

  ‘It was good practice, anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Good practice? It would be nice if she’d hold it together for just a few minutes until I caught my breath but I knew I was asking too much. That was why I was here, wasn’t it? I sighed and followed her.

  ‘Make
the tea would you, darling?’ Mum said when I joined her in the kitchen. ‘I’ve got Atahualpa and eighty thousand Mayan soldiers in the Guesthouse and I want to make sure that Mrs Danvers isn’t feeling too overwhelmed.’

  ‘Sure thing, Mum.’ This wasn’t the weirdest thing she’d ever said to me, so whatever, right? ‘Are Jenny and Lance staying?’ They were the only guests I’d ever seen in the Guesthouse. It’s not like a business run by my mother would ever do a roaring trade.

  ‘No, darling.’ Mum came over and ruffled my hair, which I despised. ‘They only come at Christmas. Open a packet of biscuits if you like. They’re… well, they’re somewhere.’

  The biscuits were in the cutlery drawer, but they were chocolate coated, so I was OK with it.

  I’d had my tea and biscuits and I was upstairs, unpacking, when the police officers knocked on the door.

  Mum was downstairs so I let her answer the door but I stood near the top of the stairs so I could eavesdrop.

  ‘Mrs Elliot, we’ve got some news about your husband,’ a man said and I was down the stairs in time to see Mum’s confused look.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s a policeman, Mum,’ I said. ‘That’s probably as much as you need to know.’

  There were two police officers, one male, one female. The man looked me up and down and so help me, I did the same to him. Tall and strong and handsome in his uniform, dark hair curling under his hat — but then, I was a wreck of a woman who didn’t have breasts and couldn’t have children thanks to the cancer treatment. It didn’t stop his dark eyes from looking me up and down like I was his new best friend.

  ‘Katie Elliot,’ he drawled.

  ‘Am I on a list somewhere?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ His face went very bland as he seemed to gather his thoughts. ‘You’re Mr and Mrs Elliot’s daughter. Is your brother at home, too?’ The other officer gave him a look and he said, almost as though he was explaining it to her, ‘We have news for your whole family, Katie.’

  ‘The whole family is right here,’ I snapped