Page 3 of Secrets of the Eternal Flame

We were close to the water, looking over the loch with the mountains rising up behind it. At least three hundredpeople were gathered on the shore, but even with such a crowd it was what wasinthe water that made my jaw drop.

‘Erm, am I seeing things,’ I asked, ‘or is that the Loch Ness monster?’

Chapter Three

While there were definitely some similarities between the beast I was looking at and the Nessie that had been in newspapers and on postcards for decades, as the creature rose further out of the water I could see it wasn’t the monster. No: it was a freakingdragonsplashing about.

No wonder Eva was scared. Its enormous body protruded from the water in three arches, but rather than the standard green of the cuddly toys stocked in almost every gift shop that we’d seen since we’d crossed the border, its skin was a deep purple ribbed with pale pink. On the third arch a pair of iridescent wings extended at least fifteen feet. Nessie didn’t have wings; this was something else entirely.

What was even weirder was that the great monster’s head was looking directly at a podium that had been placed at the end of a pier as if it were waiting to listen to a speech. Stranger still, it appeared to be smiling, flashing its teeth in a grotesque grin that somehow wasn’t threatening.

Yes, Purple Nessie was definitelysmiling.

As we watched, a curvy woman with large pearly wings similar in colour to the dragon’s took to the podium. She was one of the fae folk. ‘Welcome, everybody,’ she started warmly, speaking into a microphone that ricocheted her voice around the harbour. ‘It’s lovely to see so many members of the community joining us today to give thanks to our dear knucker.’

A knucker. Of course: it was a water dragon. No wonder it was splashing around in the loch.

As the fae lady turned her head towards the monster and lifted her hand slightly, rapturous applause flooded the air.

‘I thought knuckers only lived in Sussex,’ Fraser muttered.

‘Theyfamouslylive in Sussex,’ I countered. ‘But maybe the Sussex knucker is an exhibitionist and the others keep a lower profile.’ Fraser snorted with laughter.

Though I wouldn’t have thought it possible the knucker smiled even more broadly at the sounds of the thunderous clapping. It was flashing deadly teeth that were surprisingly clean. I wondered inanely if one of the villagers was tasked with cleaning those gnashers.

‘As we know, our life in Hallowburn Harbour is what it is because of the knucker, and we are so grateful for all that she does for us. The cleanliness of our water, the fertilityof our land and, as such, the abundance in our farms, is down to her generosity. Like many of you, I, could speak for hours about the kindness and compassion of this great creature, but there is someone special here to say a few more words about our beloved knucker and her role in Hallowburn – none other than the High Priestess, Adele, Guardian of the Eternal Flame.’

Everything around me disappeared into the ether as my gasp resounded in my ears. I had found the Guardian of the Flame! The person I had spent weeks searching for – I had found her.Just. Like. That.She had fallen into my lap. I was obviously being blessed by something.

As cheers of support rose from the crowd, all I could focus on was the woman climbing the steps to the podium. Like me, her hair was an unnatural rich red, a colour that looked like it had surely come from a bottle though I knew that it hadn’t. Her gait was steady and she was dressed smartly in a blue floral dress, but the way she tugged at the skirt gave the impression of someone who was more at home in jeans and a T-shirt. I liked her instantly.

She was probably in her late forties, and that alone caused a knot in my stomach. She was almost exactly the same age as my mother would have been had she lived. When my parents had died, I’d tried to console myself by thinking that they were old and they’d had a decent runat life, but now I was almost thirty I recognised just how young they’d been. By my age, they’d already had a child – me – and I could barely take care of myself and Eva. I wasyoung,dammit, and they had been too.

‘Thank you, Provost,’ the Guardian said to the fae woman before she cleared her throat and turned to the crowd.

‘So much for thinking we’d have to hunt down the Guardian!’ Maddie whispered excitedly beside me.

I didn’t respond; my feet were already moving towards the woman I’d been searching for. I needed her help; I knew instinctively that she had the answers I desperately needed, and I wasn’t letting her get away. Excitement and elation thrummed through me and I had to resist the urge to whoop loudly. I wassoclose now. Answers were within my reach.

The crowd was so dense that I knew I could lose her the moment she stepped off the podium. I wouldn’t let that happen; Icouldn’tlet that happen. ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ I muttered as I pushed impatiently through to get to the front. My heart was singing with triumph, but I told it to calm down: I wouldn’t be triumphant until I was sitting beside that woman and her Flame.

Evawas barking from behind me and I heard Maddie shout, ‘Bea, hold up!’ I ignored her, gripped by an urgency I couldn’t have resisted even if I’d tried.

The crowd near the podium was even more tightly packed and harder to move through. My elation started to slip away, replaced by panic. I couldn’t lose her now that I was so close!

I jostled, shoved and apologised as I fought my way forward. There was a loud burst of applause and my heart lurched. I stood on my tiptoes to see: the Guardian’s attention was on the knucker, and she was nodding her head as if she were saying her farewells. Any second now she’d step off the podium but I was still a good fifty metres away, blocked by at least a hundred people.

‘Please, please move. I need to see her. I need to see the Guardian!’ The panic that was rising inside me felt very physical, and I felt hot and feverish.

I dimly recognised that something was very wrong with me – this heat and this anxiety were not normal. I could feel something trembling in my hands, desperate to escape. I tried to lock down my mental shields again but I was too far gone to do more than flail at them ineffectually. They were already locked down; whatever was going on inside me wasn’t coming from my empathetic powers.

The heat was growing stronger by the second and I was burning up, as I had done when Nour had tried to help me. It felt as if my skin would start to blister at any second. In desperation, I tried to push it out of my body.

Immediately there was an explosive crack, so loud that it bounced across the mountains. It echoed like thunder, only the sky was perfectly clear. A second later, someone in the crowd shrieked and several people started pointing. I turned away from the High Priestess to look at the other side of the loch.

The word ‘crack’ was spot-on: a huge chunk of rock had been dislodged on one of the fells exposing a deep crevasse. For a second it wavered as if it might stay put, but then the moment passed and the monumental boulder tumbled down the mountain towards the water.

People screamed as it hurtled towards them, though others like me remained rooted to the spot. From somewhere in the distance I heard Fraser call my name but I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the rock rolling towards us. The heat had left me now and I felt a strange emptiness, but at least I wasn’t burning.

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