Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) Read Online Free Page B

never forget that sky, the night I killed a demon for the first time.
    “Impressive.”
    A voice coming from far away. I shook my head, trying to dispel the fuzzy, unreal feeling that had taken hold of me.
    The green-eyed man was smiling. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I was shell-shocked.
    “Have you done this before?” He sounded interested, polite – as if he’d just asked something like ‘ever been scuba diving?’
    “Why did you not help me?” I could barely contain my anger. I could have died, and he’d been standing there all along, with a dagger in his hand!
    Harry was unfazed. “I wanted to see how far you’d go. You just met a Surari.”
    “Surari?”
    “A demon. Harry Midnight, by the way.” He offered me his hand.
    I hesitated for a second, then I took it. He pulled me up, and we were face to face. “Sean Hannay.”
    Our eyes met, and something strange happened: it was as if we’d recognized each other. I saw myself in him. I know he saw himself in me. We belonged to the same place: we belonged to the hunt.
    And that was the beginning.

    This is what Harry Midnight did for me: he lifted the veil that hides the truth, he showed me the world behind this world. He showed me how the rivers of time flow parallel and should never be allowed to touch, how the creatures from the beginning of time must be stopped from seeping into this world, and if they make it here, they must be destroyed without mercy. He taught me that we all live in danger, a great and immediate danger. When we sleep in our beds, we are not safe; when we go to work, we’re not safe; when we walk down the streets of our cities, we’re not safe. Our own children are not safe; nobody is safe, at any time, day or night, wherever we are.
    Most people are not aware of it, yet – the Secret Families do all they can to keep it from us. Most people choose not to see anyway; they choose to believe what they want to, and nothing else. They want to pretend that none of this is happening, that it’s not real. It’s all just a nightmare that will dissolve as dawn breaks. Soon this is a choice they won’t be allowed to make. Soon many more people will know what we know, and the whole world will be forced to see.
    I joined the fight because I loved the thrill of it. Yes, I loved hunting – that’s all there was to it. But as I saw what we’re really facing, as I discovered what’s really threatening us, it wasn’t a thrill any more. It became a survival mission for the whole human race. I made Harry’s mission mine, and now I live for it. I’m not part of a Secret Family – they’re not made, they’re born. I’m one of those around them, one of their Gamekeepers. Just like traditional gamekeepers hunt and cull the wild animals on the estates they look after, so we hunt and cull … but it’s not wild animals for us, of course; not deer, or pheasant, or hare. For us, the game is the demons. The Secret Council, formed by the heads of the most prominent Secret Families – or Sabha, in the ancient language – gave us the name of Gamekeepers. I think it must be their idea of a joke.
    Anyway, to become a Gamekeeper takes years of training and steady nerves. They test us over and over again to make sure they have our absolute loyalty. We are then allowed to go back to our old lives, keeping them up like veneers. Each one of us is assigned to a particular family by the Council, but we can be called away at any time to perform missions for different families, and be sent wherever the Sabha need us. We have to be ready at a moment’s notice to be sent anywhere in the world, to do anything they ask of us. We come from all walks of life, young and old, men and women, stumbling into a world we could never have imagined existed. Only one thing we have in common: to serve the Secret Families, with all that it entails.
    Mary Anne, my then-girlfriend, and I weren’t assigned to a family as such, but to an individual: Harry Midnight, who