Scattering Like Light Read Online Free PDF

him, the less I wanted to be at the party.
    After a while I noticed that Max had reappeared, joking and laughing with Josh. He was looking slightly dishevelled and was clearly in a very good mood. There was no sign of the brunette. I tried to ignore him but at one point I couldn’t resist looking over to where they were standing. Max was staring straight at me, a half-smile on his lips, and when he saw me looking back he quickly turned away.
    Moments later he was at my shoulder. “Fancy a dance?” He was holding out his hand, waiting to lead me across to the tiny dance floor. The candles and fairy lights made his dark hair shine, his eyes unreadable. Callum would understand that there was no harm in a dance, wouldn’t he? I was about to take Max’s hand when I remembered the brunette: not an hour before he had left the party with her, and a desire not to be his second conquest of the night washed over me.
    “I’m a bit bored with dancing now.” I shrugged as nonchalantly as possible, determined to make a point. His smile faded and he turned away.
     
    I didn’t sleep well and the next morning I woke up ridiculously early. Sabrina was snoring gently in the other bed so I couldn’t turn on the light to read. Finally I gave in and got up, hoping to clear myheadache by heading for the beach. Leaving a note I eased the door open silently and escaped into the cool morning air.
    I enjoyed the early morning and had done this before: walking along the huge beach pretty much on my own, watching the little birds race around on the sand between the waves, listening to the silence. I could go for miles without seeing more than a handful of people.
    As I walked I tried to put Max out of my mind and focus on what was important: working out how to bring Callum over so we could be together. First, I had to find out what had happened to Lucas after he’d attacked Rob. I knew that he hadn’t taken all of Rob’s memories, because when Rob came round he could remember everything apart from the last five weeks, everything since I’d found the amulet, in fact. I’d fought Lucas using the power in my amulet and he’d dissolved into a puddle of sparks. Without a complete set of memories, it didn’t seem possible that he could have done the same as Catherine and come back to life. Or was it the same? Was Lucas sitting in a London hospital somewhere with only five weeks of Rob Underwood’s memories in his mind? Or was he dead? Drowned in the river as he rematerialised? Or had I sent him on somewhere else? Somewhere he could be properly dead as all the Dirges hoped they could be?
    I had no answers. The same questions continued to circle my brain as I walked. If I knew that Lucas was OK, then I could risk seeing if the same thing would work with Callum. All I had to do was stand in front of him, our amulets together, and push hard with my mind. The only thing I was sure about was that I didn’t need Catherine. She said that she knew how to rescue them all and that she would never tell me, but she didn’t know what I had done to Lucas. I could feel the power in the bracelet, just waitingto be used. I looked down at the silver on my wrist, glinting in the low, early morning sunshine, and wondered yet again how it did what it did.
    Looking up I realised that I had walked further than usual. I was approaching the part of the beach where the kite-surfers practised later in the day, but this early it was still mostly deserted. One lone surfer was out on the water, and I stopped to watch for a moment. The bright red and yellow of the kite was easy to see against the dark turquoise of the waves.
    The beach was long and curved with a headland at one end and the town and port at the other. I was much nearer the headland end, where over the years the incessant wind had blown half the beach on to the land to make huge, towering sand dunes. The kite-surfer was tacking away from the beach, towards the dunes. I loved the way the kites moved, and good