The Night Itself by Zoe Marriott Page A

intensity. “You were dying. I could feel it. I reached out and tried to pull you back. I tried with everything I had. I strained and fought the blackness as I had never had the strength to fight before. Something … cracked. Within me or within my prison. Energy spilled out – more white flames – and for a moment you and I and the flames were …
one
.”
    “Miss Yamato?”
    I leapt up as if my seat had burned me. A new police officer – not one of the ones who had brought us here – stood near by.
Oh my God
. He couldn’t see Shinobu, so it must have looked as though I was having an intense conversation with thin air.
    I forced myself to answer. “Yes, that’s me.”
    “Your friend has had her x-rays. She’s asking for you, and I have some questions for you both. Then we can get you home. Come this way.”
    Despite the reassuring words, the man’s voice was strangely flat and metallic, like he was really furious about something and trying to hide it. I tried to check his expression, but he had already turned away from me and was heading past the rows of seats towards a door on the other side of the waiting room.
    “I think I’m in trouble,” I muttered to Shinobu as I followed the policeman, concealing the movement of my lips with a fake cough.
    “You have done nothing wrong,” Shinobu said. “They cannot punish you.”
    “Shows how much you know about the British legal system,” I said weakly.
    The policeman pushed the door open. He gestured curtly for me to step into the room ahead of him. Shinobu slipped in silently, and the door clicked shut behind us.
    It was an ordinary examination room, with a desk crowded with messy papers and an ancient computer, a curtain on a rail surrounding a high bed, and metal blinds over the windows. Jack was perched on the edge of the bed, looking bored. Her face lit up when she saw me. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Shinobu shouted.
    I spun round.
    He was frozen in the middle of the room, hands outstretched as if he had been trying to reach for me. His eyes were completely blank. Like a shop dummy. I looked at Jack to see if this really was my imagination, or something real again. She was caught mid-movement too, one foot on the floor, eyes glazed over.
    It was as if someone had hit the pause button on both of them.
    Someone?
    For the first time I tried to look straight into the policeman’s face. I couldn’t.
    Even in the bright fluorescent lights, even standing right in front of him, I still could not see him. My eyes just wouldn’t focus. It was like looking into a black hole.
    “What are you?” I whispered.
    He dissolved into darkness.
    The room filled with a wild, screaming wind that lifted me from my feet and threw me backwards into the wall. My head bounced off the plaster, and I cried out. I felt the katana rip through the material of my coat again, shredding what was left of the shoulder to pieces.
    I hung helplessly, feet dangling above the ground. Papers flew around me, shredding in the air. The blinds rattled like bones. My back and ribs screamed with strain. The wind was trying to push me right through the plasterboard.
    The seething mass of darkness was directly in front of me, warping and stretching, changing. It became a human torso in a long, black kimono, the fabric covered with strange patterns of gold. Something pale slid up into view, the shadows trickling away from it like water down a window. A face.
    Its proportions were strange, subtly skewed, too long and delicate to be right. Its eyes were closed, and its expression was blank. It was the man from Natalie’s party.
    The Harbinger
.
    Nothing was holding me to the wall. He wasn’t even touching me. But I couldn’t get free. My breath gulped and sobbed as his power drummed at me, pummelling my skin, my bones, my hair, my teeth:
Worship me, worship me, worship me…
    When his eyelids lifted his eyes were gone. There were only shining, white globes, rooted in his