Caleb took my hand, both of us hurrying over to the children. I knelt beside Benedict, shaking him gently.
“What!” He sat up instantly, his eyes wild with fright.
“It’s just us,” I soothed, pushing back his hair. His body was trembling.
“Sorry,” he murmured, “bad dream.”
I nodded, feeling a pain in my chest. I hated that he’d seen so much, had been so afraid for so long that even his dreams were haunted. I could only hope that his fear would become a distant memory after he left this place.
Slowly all of them started to wake.
Ben and River flung themselves at Field, embracing him in a huge bear hug. I did the same with Hazel, and watched happily as Claudia wrapped both Ash and Ruby into an embrace. I didn’t replicate my embrace with Tejus—I had the feeling he’d rather be left alone. However, it didn’t stop me from feeling a strong parental affection for him.
We told them about the battle, how we’d finished off the shadow armies and the few ghouls that were left on Earth and done our best to restore a sense of normality to the cities—but in some cases, particularly Paris, the clean-up would take months. I hoped they’d eventually find a way to straighten the Eiffel Tower.
“What about the jinn?” Derek asked after the kids had had their fill of our stories.
Benedict looked about in agitation, as if he’d lost something, but then calmed down again as a very tall, willowy figure started to walk toward us. She’d been at the far end of the cove, and from the state of her hair and dress I thought that perhaps she’d been sleeping in the bushes.
She looked very lost. As she got closer, I recognized the strange dark runes shifting about like shadows on her arms… I’d seen something like them before.
An… Oracle?
Benedict started to tell us the story of how they’d found her in the Dauoa forests—a half-Ancient, half-jinni Oracle who had resided in Nevertide all her life. My instant reaction was one of skepticism—and even fear. I knew from extreme experience that Ancients were not something we should be messing around with. Had I known that she was here with my kids, I would have come back with them straight away…
Claudia glared at the woman, moving to stand in front of Ruby.
“She means no harm,” Nuriya said wearily. “Admittedly her birthright is questionable, but I do believe she is a victim of circumstance—as far as I understand she has done nothing to harm any of us, and has no desire to do so.”
“Queen Nuriya, with all due respect, I don’t believe we can give an Ancient the benefit of the doubt,” my father added, his jaw clenched tensely.
“Wait till you hear what she has to say,” the jinni replied, “then judge her.”
Queen Nuriya prompted the Oracle by taking her hand gently. The woman looked as if she was preparing to run off into the forest at any moment.
With a quiet, almost musical voice, the woman started to explain how she had come to Nevertide—how her parents had used the land to protect her, how they had cast the dome that Ibrahim and the other witches had found surrounding Nevertide and its ocean.
I did wonder what they had been protecting her from, but if she was the offspring of a jinni and an Ancient, then most likely it was their own species they felt she needed to be cut off from. To call Ancients conservative would be an understatement.
“What about the planet of the stones, the one in the In-Between?” my father asked after she had explained that she’d been responsible for locking the entity away.
The Oracle shook her head.
“That was my father’s tribe. They knew the magic of the stones, which was passed on to me as a young girl. My father was responsible for the planet—he believed that it was the only way to render the ghouls powerless.”
My father frowned. “It wasn’t ghouls that escaped from those stones—it was the shadow.”
“The shadow are ghouls,” Benedict announced with a strange level of delight, “they’re super ghouls—ghouls in their purest form! Tell them the history!” he demanded of the Oracle.
I suddenly felt queasy.
The Oracle frowned at my son.
“Benedict of The Shade, if you don’t learn more courtly manners, you will find it a lot harder to get what you want in this life.”
Benedict sighed. “Okay, please can you tell them about the history?”
“The creatures from the stones are the original ghouls, a lot stronger than the type you have come across before. When I arrived here, there were already supernatural creatures who had made Nevertide their home, and some of these were the regular, bone-like skeleton ghouls that you are so familiar with. I had been here a few years when the ‘original’ ghouls arrived. I do not know where they came from, perhaps somewhere far off in the In-Between. My father never found their home. The ‘entity,’ as you call him, the leader of the original ghouls, took over Nevertide. He built a fortress here in which to keep the memories of his victims. I had no bother from them, and they left me alone for the most part. That was until the human invaders came. They traveled by boat, and were fierce warriors. Even so, they were no match for the entity and his armies. Within a day the humans were made slaves. It was sad to see.” The Oracle stopped for a moment, looking past us all, off into the distance as if she was watching her own tale unfold in front of her. With a dreamy sigh, she continued. “The future unfolded, and I didn’t like what I saw. I helped the humans stage an uprising, I gave them weapons and asked them to consume the immortal water. They fought the entity, and I trapped him, knowing that many moons from that moment, there would perhaps be a time when he was set free.”