Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 17

Milli threw her feet over the side of the bed and gave an impatient sigh, hoping to convince even herself that she was not afraid of the dark, only vexed that sleep was evading her. “I am not a child,” she said with an emphatic lift of her chin, wiping the clamminess from her hands as she pushed the bedsheet aside. She slipped quietly towards the window and peeked down at the gaslit street below her. There was no street, only fog.

The creak of floorboards outside her room sent her ducking madly behind the sheer drapes with a yelp. “Who’s there?” she hissed, watching the door like a startled thief. There came no answer, only another audible groan of boards as someone passed outside her door.

Where was the glow of candlelight beneath her door? Surely someone would have a light to guide them down the pitch black corridor on a night like this. And if it was someone—not a ghost or a murderer—why hadn’t they answered her when she’d called out? Though she was reluctant to leave her room, she could not bear feeling like a coward and so she tiptoed to the door and carefully opened it, thrusting only her head out into the corridor. There was no one there. She stood alone. But she could see enough to know Emma’s door was wide open.

“Emma?” The darkness crowded in, drowning out her voice as she crept to her sister’s room. There too, however, she found herself alone. Alone but for that terrible, yawning darkness that perfused the room. Its feral breath clung to her skin. Something felt terribly wrong with the darkness here. Milli could not say what exactly, she only felt desperate to escape it.

Out in the corridor, she called for her sister again, louder this time. Again, there was no answer.

In the morning she would berate herself for being a silly coward, and for being so fanciful as to imagine her sister’s room was steeped in frigid shadows, but the nighttime, at its thickest, had a cunning way of eclipsing one’s bravery. Milli was suddenly possessed of a primeval need to escape the unnatural solitude of the house—as though all were dead save her alone—and to find her sister. Perhaps Emma had taken herself to the library to find a book.

Without a candle? No, Emma was too sensible to risk her neck on the dark stairs. That was the height of foolishness, and Emma was never foolish. Milli carefully navigated down the stairs, her toes fumbling in the dark.

Mind you don’t break your own neck climbing down the stairs in this beastly darkness. For a terrifying moment Milli stumbled and felt her heart drop into her belly with a crash. Dash my wig! It was some moments before she pried the bones of her fingers from the railing and, still gasping, continued her descent. Dash my wig indeed—I’m like to dash my skull on the stairs!

Emma would likely have dismissed the sticky tang of panic Milli had sensed in her room as utter nonsense—a figment of Milli’s unfounded fear of all things dark. Well, she would keep that bit of foolishness to herself then.

She reached the landing with a sigh of relief. She padded along bare floorboards and oriental carpets towards the library, murmuring her sister’s name again. Yet that room too was empty.

A trickle of icy trepidation crept its way up along her neck. Something in this house was awfully amiss. It was then she heard more muffled creaking, but this time it had come from the boards in the entryway. Her hair bristled, alert. The sharp snick of the door bolt followed and then a whine of hinges. Milli was loath to call out again for fear the noises were not, as she’d supposed, her sister’s doing. Emma would have answered Milli when she’d called out. So who then was the nightwalker, and where was her sister?

She snatched up a gilt candlestick from the side table, its heft offering some small comfort, before she finally quit the library. Armed with her bludgeon, she made her way silently to the entryway and there found the front door ajar and the night creeping in. Alarmed, she rushed forward to shut it, but upon closing her hand on the latch she caught sight of her sister outside and already at some distance from the house. Emma was barefoot and garbed in naught but a shift, gliding soundlessly along the street like a White Lady. Her movements barely disturbed the fog and her silhouette was fast becoming consumed by the gloom.

“Emma!” Frantic, Milli abandoned her weapon and sprinted over the considerable stretch of road that separated them. She called out again, louder, but her sister appeared deaf to her own name. Nor did she react, except to freeze, when Milli seized her night-rail. “Answer me, Emma!” She then gave her sister’s wrist a hard tug for good measure.

But Emma appeared rooted. Suddenly she turned to Milli, her eyelashes fluttering sleepily. “Delighted you’ve come at last.”

“You are?” Milli faltered, confused. A frisson of dread coiled inside her to see her sister thus—eyes wide but insensate. “What in God’s name are you doing out here?”

“Heavens! I quite forgot the time.” Emma turned a faraway gaze into the fog, her fingers reaching out to something only she could see. “This way.”

“Gads, are you ill?” Or was her sister lost in some febrile dream. She certainly didn’t seem lucid. Milli gave another insistent tug, her eyes bouncing furtively up and down the street for fear a carriage might materialize out of the mist. Or Erebus himself. “Do get out of the street before you get us both killed.”

“Don’t mind the bird,” said Emma, grinning blankly. But she allowed herself to be lead home by the hand like a child.

“Yes, you are an odd bird. Next time you decide to ramble about in your slumber, I would as soon you do it indoors like a normal person.” To