Thyla - Kate Gordon [55]
I am already dead.
That man said he needed to kill me for me to be like this. A monster.
Powerful.
Immortal.
I am those things now. I can feel it. I am one of them.
Who was he? The man with the amber eyes? I knew his voice.
That man killed me. I knew it. I knew it as surely as I had known those other things.
I am Tessa. I am strong. I do not cry.
And I am dead.
I looked at my reflection in the glinting metal of the school gates. My eyes were huge. Long sharp canines protruded over my bottom lip. My nose had flattened, the nostrils turned up. I felt unbearably hot so, without a thought of dignity or proper behaviour, I flung my blouse to the ground. Underneath, I was Thyla. Powerful, beautiful Thyla – striped and strong. I shivered – not from the cold, but from exhilaration. I was wondrous. I looked back at the wall.
‘Well,’ I whispered to myself, ‘if I am dead, then what do I have to lose?’
I began to run.
Once you have flown, there is nothing else.
I only flew for a moment – soaring high and mighty above the wall surrounding Cascade Falls – but it was extraordinary.
I conquered the wall.
I was free. And I was changed.
Inside the walls of Cascade Falls, I was Tessa. I was a human girl. I made friends. I wore a uniform. I ate waffles. I went to science class.
Outside of Cascade Falls, I was …
Well, I was still not entirely sure what I was. But perhaps human was the first thing I wasn’t.
After all, humans cannot fly.
There was no time to think about the wonder of it all, though.
I could still hear their footsteps, cracking through the bracken. I could still hear their voices, low and rumbling and sodden with solemnity. I knew innately, through some new sense of time and space I seemed to possess along with my new, more powerful body, that they were close. And I knew now they were not on any ordinary bushwalk. I knew that their walks were part of all of this – Sarcos and Thyla and Chassebury and Cat.
And so I stalked them. I padded silently, growing more confident in my new gait. It was as though I had once known how to ride a horse, and then had not done so for many years, but was beginning again. My muscles knew how to do it. My brain just needed to catch up.
The forest was full and loud and brimming with the lives of the night creatures. Possums larked above me in the eucalypts. Quolls, pademelons and bettongs hopped and skittered through the brush. Above me, a masked owl whooshed through the leaves, hunting, and I could hear the terrified beating of tiny marsupial hearts.
‘I can do that, too,’ I whispered to the owl.
The pademelons had nothing to fear from me, though. There was only one group of beasts I was tracking. And I was closing in. I could hear their words clearly now.
‘So you’re sure the Diemens are on the hunt tonight?’ came Rhiannah’s voice.
My heart sped as I heard Perrin’s voice come next. ‘The Diemens are always on the hunt. That’s why we’re here. To stop them. And do you really think Lord donated that telescope out of the goodness of his heart? The more girls outside, the more vulnerable prey around, ripe for the picking.’
‘I wonder what it’s like in other places,’ asked another voice. Sara. I knew she didn’t need glasses in her new form. I wondered if she still wore her curls tied back with white ribbons. ‘I mean, do you think there’s anybody like us back in England? Is there anybody to stop them, or do they just run rampant?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Perrin, and his voice sounded heavy and exhausted. ‘I haven’t heard of any other clans over there. Rha says that back in the convict days he heard about a tribe –’
‘Perrin, we know this,’ Rhiannah groaned. ‘Honestly, sometimes you act like you’re the only one who’s been a Sarco all this time. Have you seen our hair? And our skin? We’re starting to get the Sarco colouring. That means we’ve been doing this for a while. We’re not clueless, you know. We know about the Vulpis.’
Vulpis.
The word snatched me from the present, from the bush, and dragged me back inside my head, where there was another