The Witch’s Kiss Trilogy. Katharine Corr

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      Merry was dreaming about blood.

      Blood, running in scarlet rivulets across the black tarmac at her feet, pooling around her toes. So much blood that she could smell the coppery-tinny scent of it, like a palmful of coins warm from being clutched in her fist. She put her hand up to cover her nose and mouth, tried not to breathe too deeply. In the distance, someone was screaming.

      She looked up. A boy was walking towards her across the flat, grey-lit landscape. Memory stirred in her mind. She knew this boy, and not just from her recent nightmares. She recognised his clothes: a cloak, pinned with a gold-coloured brooch, some sort of tunic and – trousers, she guessed they were, but not like anything she’d ever seen boys actually wearing. She recognised the evil-looking knife he carried. The boy was tall, with long, blond hair tied back – the same colour as her brother’s, but straight, not curly – and a handsome, angular face. As he came closer she saw for the first time, or maybe she just remembered, that his eyes were brown; brown, with little flecks of gold. And she gasped, not because his eyes were beautiful, but because they were hard and cold and full of cruelty.

      Another memory floated to the surface of her mind. Somehow, she knew the boy’s name.

       Jack?

      The boy smiled at her, and it was like looking into the maw of a shark.

       Meredith …

      Merry woke with a gasp, swore, rubbed her eyes and tried to remember where she was.

      In her bedroom, of course – she must have just dropped off. In the lamplight, she could see nothing had changed. There was no one else there: no strange boy with dead eyes staring down at her, threatening her with a knife.

      Just another bad dream, that was all.

      It was after midnight now. A quick peek into Leo’s room on the opposite side of the landing confirmed that her pain-in-the-neck older brother still hadn’t come home; it was just her and their mother’s two Burmese cats, and they were probably asleep on top of the boiler in the kitchen. Mum herself was working in France for the rest of the week. A self-employed graphic designer, one of her major clients was in Paris, and she spent a lot of time there. But that didn’t bother Merry any more. Not really. As she turned back into her own room, Merry’s glance took in the half-completed homework on the desk, the half-read magazines piled next to the wicker chair in the corner, the half-reorganised wardrobe. She picked up a couple of pairs of ankle boots and half-heartedly arranged them on the shoe rack, but it was no good. She hadn’t been able to settle, to actually finish anything, for days. The restlessness was like … ants, crawling over her skin. But there was definitely more to it than that. A person who was merely restless didn’t check under her bed every night before she turned out the light, or sleep with a tennis racket handily positioned against the bedside table.

      Unwilling to risk another nightmare, Merry texted and played games on her phone for another hour or so, until her eyelids grew too heavy for her to focus on the screen any longer. She got up to close the curtains and peered through the window for a moment, hoping to see some sign of her brother. But there was nothing. Just the darkness and her own reflection – auburn hair half-falling out of a ponytail, shadows underneath hazel eyes – thrown back in fragments from the uneven panes of leaded glass.

      Behind her, something began to rattle. Among the photos of her and her friends, which she kept on the dressing table, the one of her and Leo was shuddering. The СКАЧАТЬ