The Burning Read online

  American twins Rachel and Adam Newman have spent a harrowing summer rediscovering their British roots in the village of Triskellion, where their mother was born. But what should have been an idyllic break has quickly become a terrifying adventure.

  While staying with their grandmother, Celia Root, they have been befriended by “Gabriel,” a mysterious traveller boy. He has urged them to help him find a long-lost amulet, but their quest has made them many enemies. The villagers are willing to do almost anything to protect what is theirs, and the twins soon find themselves hunted by both Commodore Wing – the grandfather they didn’t know they had – and his son, Hilary, a dark and dangerous figure who seems bent on their destruction.

  The discovery of the Triskellion, an ancient and powerful artefact, has unlocked the dark secret of Rachel and Adam’s ancestry. A frightening revelation from the past that will affect every moment of their future…

  As they are airlifted from the village – where they are no longer welcome – by their friend archaeologist Laura Sullivan, it seems that Rachel and Adam have finally escaped.

  Or have they flown straight into a trap?

  The helicopter was banking slightly, moving across an area of flat, black ground, when Rachel heard the pilot pass a crackly message to Laura Sullivan.

  Laura nodded and put away the notes she’d been reading.

  Rachel looked across to her mother and Adam, pressed closely against each other in the seats next to her. Adam’s cheek was flat against the window.

  They’d been flying for about an hour, maybe more, she thought, and she’d watched the landscape waking up as they’d passed low above it. A patchwork of green and brown fields, loosely stitched together by threads of irregular lanes, had given way to clumps of terracotta houses that had become denser and more tightly packed as they’d approached the city. Lines of traffic had built up and begun to snake slowly along the main roads. Lights had winked in the windows and then faded as the sun had struggled up to bleach them out. Rachel had watched it bathing the crush of buildings and the twist of the river as they’d flown over the centre of London.

  Adam had sat forward, excited, and pointed out the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament and other landmarks familiar from films and pictures. Places they had seen, but never visited.

  Rachel yawned. Beneath the rattle of the helicopter blades, she thought she could hear a faint buzzing, just for a second or two, and wondered if a bee was trapped somewhere in the cabin.

  Zzzzz … dnk. Zzzzz … dnk.

  She looked around and finally located the stowaway slowly walking the glass circle of the porthole just above her head. With the sky behind it, the bee looked like a little man, exploring the surface of a new planet. She wondered if it had travelled with them from the village.

  One of Jacob’s, come to see them away safely.

  Laura turned round, reached across and laid a reassuring hand on Rachel’s arm. She signalled to Rachel’s mother, told her that they would be landing in a few minutes. Rachel watched as her mother nodded and squeezed Adam’s hand. Her mother smiled, but it was thin and weak.

  Her mother looked tired.

  Rachel was exhausted too: her brain and bones aching in equal measure. The last few hours, the last few weeks, seemed like a nightmare she was waking from. She was wrung out, but at least she knew it was over. That she’d feel better when they were on the plane, and better yet eight hours or so from then, when they were finally home.

  Through the window the land stretched out below her, flat as far as she could see. Free of trees, free of anything.

  She heard the men up front talking on the radio, its squawk like the noise of some angry insect, as the helicopter turned again.

  A complex of buildings came slowly into view ahead and to the left. It was single storey, concrete, and brown, and she could make out the line of a perimeter fence. She looked hard for other aircraft, for a control tower, but could see nothing. It wasn’t like any airport she’d ever seen.

  “Laura? Where’re the planes?”

  They came down fast, the large “H” in the landing circle growing bigger as they descended. They hit it dead centre with a bump that made Rachel’s teeth shake and she looked across at her brother to see if he was OK.

  He gave her a thumbs up.

  Then everything happened very quickly…

  Rachel was being pulled from the helicopter, out into the roaring wind of the rotor blades. Turning, she watched the same thing happen to Adam, and tried to get close to her mother. But Laura was leading her mother away, putting some distance between Kate and the men who had emerged from a metal door in one of the smaller buildings.

  The men who had come to take her children.

  They wore headphones and dark glasses. They didn’t speak.

  Rachel tried to yank her hand away as she was led towards the door, but the man escorting her only increased his grip. Adam cried out to her and they both cried out to their mother, but when Rachel turned to look she could see that her mother was sobbing and shaking her head. Laura was doing her best to keep Kate calm, shouting over the noise of the engine as it died.

  Telling her that everything was going to be fine.

  Rachel watched, helpless, as Adam was ushered quickly through a door, several metres away to her right. He shouted something which she couldn’t catch: his voice lost beneath the wind and the sound of her own grunts as she struggled to free herself.

  The nightmare hadn’t ended. She hadn’t woken up.

  The last thing Rachel saw on the outside was a hazy line: the furious arc of the bee as it buzzed around her. She twisted her head to get a last look, to pass a last message, but then it too was shut out as the heavy metal door slammed hard behind her.

  part one:

  hope

  Rachel woke up in a bed. In her bed.

  Not the creaky brass bed in the flowery bedroom of her grandmother’s cottage in Triskellion, but in her own bed, in her own room. Her own room in New York City.

  She lay still for a moment, letting her eyes travel around the room, afraid to close them again in case it disappeared. Everything was there: the well-thumbed copy of Where’s Waldo?, a childhood favourite; the china piggybank that only ever held a couple of dollars in change; the furry, glass-eyed cat; and a battered and grubby teddy bear that had belonged to her mother. Everything was in its place, each item a touchstone to memories that now seemed part of a distant past. Rachel’s gaze drifted past the Johnny Depp poster to the window, where narrow shafts of light were squeezing their way through the wooden slats of the blind. She could hear the low rumble and honk of traffic on the street outside. The sounds of Manhattan coming to life…

  Rachel blinked.

  The room was still there. She was not dreaming. But how, she wondered, had she got here?

  She remembered the helicopter ride – the flight from Triskellion with Adam, her mother and Laura Sullivan – and the landing, somewhere grey and misty, miles from anywhere. She remembered being separated from Adam and bundled into a building, feeling weak with exhaustion from the day’s events.

  Her thoughts began to spool back in fast rewind…

  Rachel shuddered and felt a fearful lurch in her stomach as she remembered what Gabriel had revealed to them. That they were like him. That she and Adam were human but had … something else in their blood. In their genes. Something that made them very different. Her stomach knotted as she realized that one fact would inform every moment of the rest of their lives: their bloodline had been created centuries before, by the union of a human and someone from another world. Rachel felt a wave of nausea and, for a moment, thought she might be sick.

  She breathed deeply and closed her eyes until the feeling passed.

  Whatever had happene
d, at least she and Adam had been reunited with their mother. At least they were home. She just couldn’t remember how she had got here. She must have slept for days. Maybe she’d been given something to help her sleep…

  But she took comfort from the fact that, however she had got here, she was a safe distance from England, from the village where it had all started. It would be a huge relief to talk to her mum about everything; to Adam…

  Then Rachel realized that, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t hear her brother’s voice in her head. Nor Gabriel’s voice, or any voices at all. Not even the insistent humming, like the drone of bees, that told Rachel she was on their wavelength; that she was ready to receive their thoughts.

  Just silence.

  She felt a little panicked and climbed out of bed. She needed to find Adam and see if he felt the same. Her head was fuzzy, and her tongue was thick and heavy inside her mouth. She felt unsteady on her feet and, guessing that she’d stood up too quickly, she reached out for the desk beside the bed to steady herself.

  The desktop was as tidy as she’d left it a month or so before, with pens in the plastic pot, a stack of CDs and the little round red mirror on it. Rachel picked up the mirror and stared at herself. She looked terrible. Her curly chestnut hair was greasy and matted and her face looked pale and puffy, as if she had been crying for days. She put the mirror face down and, as she raised her head, another thought struck her. This room – her room – looked and felt and sounded like it should, but it didn’t smell right.

  It smelled synthetic, like the inside of a new car.

  Rachel slipped on her red plastic flip-flops and walked over to the door. The handle felt unusually stiff. She gave it a jerk and let out an involuntary cry as the door flew back. It didn’t open on to the carpeted hallway that led to her parents’ room but on to a brightly lit, white corridor.

  And somewhere near by an alarm went off.

  Stepping from the shadows of her room, Rachel squinted up at the harsh white light flooding from the fluorescent tubes that ran the length of the passage. The corridor resonated with the faint, low-level buzz given off by the lights and with the distant beep of the alarm that had started the moment she’d opened the door.

  The alarm that she had activated.

  Rachel was frightened and confused, but more than anything, she was astonished by the bizarre feeling of stepping from her own room into an institutional hallway.

  She felt as if she was a figure in a Surrealist picture (one of those her mom liked so much) walking from one room to another in a dream-like landscape with the “slap-slap-slap” of her flip-flops echoing like a ticking clock.

  There were other doors every few metres or so, and Rachel began to push gently at each one, as much to confirm their existence as anything else. She glanced up in alarm as a man passed quickly in front of her, a few metres ahead, where the corridor met another in a T-junction. He stopped and looked at her briefly before hurrying on.

  Rachel stood, frozen. He’d been wearing white overalls and she’d seen a flash of panic pass across his features when he’d spotted her. She’d watched him fumbling to push in small earphones before walking quickly away.

  He’d looked scared of her.

  Rachel moved on past another two doors, stopping at a third, which had something written on it. She looked closely at the small printed label and her heart lurched once again. It read:

  ADAM NEWMAN

  Rachel tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She opened it and walked into her brother’s room.

  “Hey, Rach,” Adam said. He was sitting on the bed and looked up briefly from the games’ console he was busily punching away at. “You just woken up?”

  Rachel was too stunned at her brother’s nonchalance to answer immediately. Instead, she looked around the room. Like her own, every single thing was in its normal place. Unlike her own, everything was strewn across the floor and spilling out of drawers: the old catcher’s mitt that had been their father’s; the wall plastered with thrash metal posters; an electric guitar with two strings still missing; the TV in the corner, draped with odd socks. Business as usual, Rachel thought. It was perfect in every detail. But quite unlike Adam’s room at home, it didn’t smell … boyish.

  “I had a fantastic sleep,” Adam continued. “Feel like I slept for a year. Didn’t dream about a single thing. Didn’t wake up with voices in my head.”

  Rachel dropped down on to the bed beside her brother. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Adam shrugged and looked down at his screen. “If getting the first good night’s sleep in weeks is strange, then give me strange.”

  “But the voices are you and me,” Rachel said. “You and me … and Gabriel. We know each other’s thoughts.”

  Adam looked his sister in the eye. “You know what? In the last few weeks I think I’ve had enough of knowing what you’re thinking, and as for what Gabriel thinks, well, look where that got us.” He’d suddenly lost interest in his game and there was something steely in his voice, something that Rachel found hard to argue with. “To be honest, he’s totally freaked me out. I wish we could just go back to normal, but I guess we’ve gone past that point. I’m trying as hard as I can to forget about it.”

  Rachel understood his opinion perfectly; understood that he was finding it tough to come to terms with what he had found out about himself. She could see that he was scared. But she still failed to understand why he was not more fazed at being in his own bedroom … that wasn’t his bedroom at all.

  “But what about this place?” she said, gesturing at the room around her.

  “They just want us to feel at home,” Adam said. “They made me a BLT. I was starving.”

  Rachel began to feel a tingle of panic in her limbs. “They? Who made you a BLT?”

  “Some guy knocked on the door when I woke up, asked if I was hungry. It was weird, ‘cos I’d wanted a BLT for days. Couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  Rachel wanted to shake her brother. Of all the weird things they had experienced, his desperation for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich didn’t even register on the scale.

  “Aren’t you worried about where we are? What this place is?”

  “I know it’s not that village.” Adam went back to his game. “I feel safer here.”

  “We were supposed to be going home. With Mom. Have you seen her?”

  “She’s here too, I guess,” he said, without looking up.

  Adam’s acceptance was beginning to rattle her. She sat on the bed and prodded her brother in the ribs. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Not exactly,” Adam said, wriggling away from her. He gestured towards the window. “But it looks like New York, kind of…”

  Rachel stood up and opened the blind, letting light stream in. The view certainly looked … American. Not the New York that they knew, but a built-up town of tall buildings, their rows of windows glinting in the sunlight. Rachel sat back on the bed, her head in her hands, trying to gather her thoughts.

  “Why don’t we switch on the TV?” she said. “The news should tell us where we are … or which country we’re in, at least.”

  She picked up the remote and turned on the television, scrolling through the channels. There were cartoons, and Adam wanted her to stop when they saw Homer Simpson’s yellow face beaming out at them. But Rachel kept scrolling, stabbing furiously at the remote as yet more cartoon channels appeared and, dotted among them, some live-action American sitcoms; the actors’ faces as familiar to them as those of their own family. The canned studio laughter was momentarily reassuring: a reminder of evenings tucked up at home with family and friends. Rachel reached the fortieth channel and threw the remote control across the room in frustration. There were no presenters, no weather reports, no current affairs…

  No news.

  “That’s weird.” Adam shrugged, going back to his game again.

  The panic tightened in Rachel’s chest. “They don’t want us to know where we
are,” she said. She watched as Adam, despite appearing to concentrate on his game, began to chew his trembling lip and push at the tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

  “Do you think Mom is here?” he said, swallowing hard. The confidence he’d shown moments before seemed to be draining away.

  Before Rachel could answer, there was a knock at the door and she found herself automatically telling whoever it was to “come in”.

  The door swung open and Laura Sullivan stepped into the room. Rachel took her in at a glance, amazed at the difference in her appearance since the last time they’d seen her. Laura looked scrubbed and clean. Her long red hair was tied back in a ponytail and her clothes were smart and businesslike.

  “Hi, you guys,” she said. “How are you doing?” Her tone was calm and friendly, but her eyes darted nervously between the twins. Rachel registered the look and felt adrenalin surge through her. Her thoughts raced. She was looking for someone to explain everything, someone to blame…

  Laura Sullivan had stumbled upon their secret by digging up the chalk circle in Triskellion. Was that what archaeologists did? Dig into the past only to mess up the present? Rachel felt a powerful jolt of rage at the fact that Laura had dug up their past. If only they hadn’t gone to Triskellion, if only Laura hadn’t excavated the Bronze Age tomb, they’d have been none the wiser. They could have spent the rest of their lives as ordinary Americans. They could have grown up innocent and had kids of their own. How could they now, knowing about their gene pool?

  If only. If only…

  “Where are we?” Rachel shouted. “Mom said … we thought you were taking us home.” Her voice was getting louder, almost a shriek. “Where is Mom? You tricked us.”

  Laura held her hands wide, imploring. “Rachel—”

  But something in Rachel snapped and she threw herself across the room, launching herself at Laura Sullivan, her hands grabbing at the tall Australian’s face and hair.

  Sullivan’s strong, sinewy hands grasped Rachel’s wrists and held her fast. They stood face to face and Rachel saw that, despite the effort of restraining her, Laura’s eyes brimmed with sympathy. Suddenly the fight drained from her. Her limbs felt weak and she fell sobbing into Laura’s arms, while behind her Adam hovered awkwardly, not knowing whether to defend his sister or to try and break up the fight.