They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

Aidan Carnegie flew down the M1 at unnatural speeds. It was half-three in the morning – the only time he could bank on the roads being so clear – and he was dismally aware that he didn’t have much time before the sun returned and he would have to face the world again.

To his horror, he realised he was crying. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, but all that had happened – it was too much. It didn’t seem fair that just as things had begun to feel like they were coming together, Stephen had died.

No, not died. Killed himself.

For perhaps the hundredth time since he’d heard the news, he thought it didn’t make sense. He’d just spoken to Stephen the week before; they’d met at their usual bench in Hyde Park. He hadn’t given the impression of a man about to take his own life. Though, Aidan had to admit, he had seemed troubled by something.

Still. Suicide? It felt like betrayal.

Aidan lifted one of his hands from the wheel just long enough to wipe away an angry tear. He stared out at the dark unchanging motorway. Normally, the emptiness of the late-night road was comforting, but tonight he felt lonely in a way he hadn’t experienced since he’d left Carrickfergus. It hit him that he was 500 miles from home – and despite how out of place he’d always felt there, here he was yet more foreign.

He swerved the car onto the next exit and headed wherever the road might take him. His phone buzzed on the passenger seat. It was probably Melody, worried after the way they’d left things. After all, he’d thrown his suitcase, containing everything he had left in the world, in the back of the car and taken off, with no idea where he was going. Of course she was calling.

So why did he have the mad notion that if he picked up the phone, Stephen Loveguard would be on the other end of the call?

Aidan shook off this notion and eventually pulled up at the edge of a river. He hauled himself out of the car as if it had just crashed. He left his phone in the vehicle and walked to the water’s edge. He sat heavily on the grass and wrapped his arms around his knees. A cool breeze flew past, rustling the willows that bordered the river and tossing Aidan’s slightly overgrown brown hair into his eyes. Whenever the clouds parted, moonlight shone on the water and made it glow.

The air was clearer out here. There were no telephone masts or electrical pylons blotting the landscape, though there were a few wind turbines dotted around like futuristic windmills. Dimly, he wondered what Don Quixote would have made of them.

He swallowed back the lump in his throat and turned to look behind him. He had the strangest sensation that someone was watching him – but, as usual, Aidan was alone.

He turned back to the water, and started – for at the centre of the river there appeared to be a dark patch. It was spherical, like a black shiny ball, pulsing and throbbing under the moonlight.

His heart raced. It was so like his dreams – the black pulse that had followed him into his sleep night after desperate night, until he’d snuck into the double-garage at the back of the disconcertingly large house he’d grown up in, in Northern Ireland, and stolen his father’s car.

South, it had spoken to him in the night.

And finally, London.

Whatever it was that had been calling to him for so many months, he was convinced he would find it in London.

He still didn’t understand the meaning of his dreams, or what the black pulse was, but instinct told him it held fantastic power. Most of all, it was beautiful. Even now, as he stared at the darkness in the water, he wanted it more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life.

He slowly rose to his feet. It was only when he was a foot deep in water that he realised what he was doing.

He hurled himself back onto dry land and leaned forward, hands on his knees, trying to calm his breath. His body warmed, and inky wisps, like dark electricity, dashed in the air around him – a sign that he was close to losing control.

When he dared to look back at the water, the pulse was gone.

He blinked, unbelieving. But the pulse did not return.

‘I’m hallucinating, now, am I?’ he asked aloud. He half-expected someone to respond, but still, there was no one.

He straightened and walked back to the car. Not for the first time, he thought wryly that his father was probably more concerned about his missing car than his missing son. The car was a 1973 convertible Jaguar E-Type in hunter green and mint condition, which had cost about €20,000 to buy and thousands more to maintain.

Aidan, on the other hand, was dangerous. It didn’t matter that he’d spent all his time alone with his nose in his books, while the other boys at the private school were rebelling against the parents they would ultimately come to emulate. After all, it was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for.

Aidan got back in the car and stared at himself in the rear-view mirror. His steely grey eyes looked swollen from tears.

‘Now what?’ he asked himself. ‘Find Stephen’s daughter, like he asked me to?’

He waited, as if his reflection might provide him with an answer.

When there was no reply, he sighed and restarted the engine. He pulled away from the river and headed back the direction he’d come.

‘How am I supposed to find her, anyway?’ he wondered.

He’d been turning over this idea in his mind for hours. Stephen had intimated they would just find each other somehow. But that was mad. And how was he to trust what might have been the ravings of a man planning to take his own life?

‘I don’t even know her name,’ he continued to talk to himself. What had Stephen once said? That it was something Mayan?

Aidan shook his head, his previous grief replaced with confusion at the mess he’d somehow found himself in.

He supposed the first step was to attend the funeral. How he was going to get himself invited, he had no idea. As far as he was aware, no one knew of his relationship with the deceased.

The first rays of sunrise shot over the road at the next turn. The roads would soon start filling up and then he would have to slow down.

He headed back onto the motorway and followed the signs for London, not knowing where he would stop. He couldn’t go back to Melody’s flat in Ealing. But he couldn’t go back to Carrickfergus, either. He’d made his choice and now he had to see this journey through to its end.

He’d have to find a hotel, he decided. He could find somewhere more permanent later, after he’d slept.

All the way to the hotel, he had that lingering sensation of being watched.

All the way back, the black lines swirled around his head.