The Laeduin: Disharmony Book 2: Disharmony Book 2

By Leah Giarratano

Love, death, war and betrayal . . .
The psychopath, the empath and the genius are finally together – and not everyone is happy about their reunion. As their powers grow stronger they are forced to seek out an unexpected ally. But as war between the worlds threatens to erupt, it becomes apparent that no one can be trusted . . . not even family.

The second book in this gripping new series about a collision of worlds, the power of destiny, and the darkness in us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
• Release date: Jan 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781742538129

Book preview

I don’t even know whether you guys are receiving these messages. I just have to hope that you are – well, I guess we all do – because the volume control has been ramped right up on the freakometer, and Luke, Samantha and Jake are in for a hell of a ride. And where they get off could determine whether we all live or die.

I still can’t get over the fact that their mother was alive! I so did not see that coming – Morgan Moreau, back and badder than ever. And I don’t see her letting the three of them go now that she’s worked so hard to bring them into life: The Psychopath, the Empath and the Genius – the children of the Telling. Nope, she’ll be gunning hard for them now everyone knows she’s back . . . and now she knows who the kids are. My bet is she’ll try to split them up – if she can turn them against each other before they come into their full powers, she’ll have the best shot at creating the crash and burn she was looking for when she started this whole thing.

Look, it’s never easy to log this stuff for you. You would not believe the spellware and incantationbots trawling the web these days. If anyone finds out that I can actually transmit messages, you can bet your brownies they’ll pull my plug in a heartbeat. So, please, just keep your wits about you – the kids need us all right now more than ever. Because Morgan Moreau is so not their only problem.

Like, who saw those crazy ninjas coming? They’re definitely mortal assassins, but who sent them in to bat? And what about the Gypsy King? Surely he won’t just let Samantha go like that? And that freaky Abrafo dude who tried to stab Luke has me pretty worried too. I’ve been looking into it and he’s definitely connected with Ghanaian voodoo. And, like, the worst kind. You would not believe what else I found out about him –

Oh, hell! A warlock web. I hope it hasn’t sniffed me.

Out.

Luke had felt himself die. No question about it. His punctured heart had haemorrhaged blood into his lungs, filling his airways, spurting into his mouth and nose, drowning him. And he’d been conscious through the final, agonising convulsion as his shredded heart had completely ruptured.

Yep, that stuff was definitely clear. He didn’t think he’d forget it in a hurry.

But what had happened afterwards made no sense at all.

Zac lay curled up on the other side of him, eyes closed. At least now he was breathing. The first thing Luke had done when they’d climbed out of the cupboard was rip up Zac’s T-shirt to examine the wound caused by Scarface’s sword. Zac had been paler than ever, with blood still saturating his clothing, but there had been no mark on his smooth, white chest. Absolutely nothing. Which was impossible, of course.

Luke didn’t have to lift his own T-shirt to know that the hole that had been punched through his chest no longer existed either. Again, not possible. Still, even though there was no wound, he could still sense the thick steel blade of the sword that had rammed up to its hilt into his chest, crunching through the bones in his rib cage, skewering his heart.

He struggled to pay attention to the others as he lay with his knees hugged up to his chest on the huge bed. They seemed to know more about his life than he did. But he couldn’t keep his mind on any one thing for very long.

Probably I’m dead, he told himself again. I mean, anything can happen when you’re dead, right? You could become a ghost with no wounds. Yep, I must be a ghost. Or maybe I’m in heaven. They say people die and go somewhere else, don’t they? Then again, I’m not holding my breath that I’m an angel now. I reckon breaking out of a juvie lock-up reduces your chances of that.

He yawned. Maybe when your innards are shishkebobbed and one life is over, what’s left of you gets sent to an alternate universe? That would explain a few things. Like getting an instant family when you’ve been on your own for fifteen years.

He half-opened his eyes and looked over at Samantha, his twin sister, speaking to Jake, his brand-new little brother. He half-hoped for that weird rush he’d felt when Samantha had appeared in Georgia’s house in Sydney. He never got weird rushes. But what he’d felt then could almost have been described as an emotion . . . well, from what he’d read, anyway.

He didn’t get emotions. Like, literally.

Staring at Samantha right now he felt nothing. Same old, same old, he thought.

He flicked a glance at the still-sleeping Zac. It was strange that he’d even thought to care about whether Zac lived or died; before meeting Zac he hadn’t even been terribly worried about whether he woke up each morning. Maybe it was because Zac was the first person to ever actually stick up for him. Had it really only been a week ago that Zac had jumped in to stop a group bashing at Dwight? He half-smiled at the memory. Who’d have thought that a skinny white kid could fight like that?

And then he remembered who Zac was and the smile dropped.

Not technically a kid, he thought, sighing.

Through slitted eyes he glanced about the room again, stopping at the window in the curved stone wall. At first glance he’d assumed it was an LED screen. No one had a view like that from their bedroom, surely? And who the hell had stone bedroom walls and grew up in a castle, anyway? Way to go in the abandoned-at-birth stakes, Luke, he told himself. Your little brother did just fine. He closed his eyes again, feigning sleep, but it was too late.

‘He’s awake. We should get him to try.’

For at least the past hour Samantha and Jake had been trying to turn the storage cupboard back into the magic transporter thing that had brought them all here. Now Jake had noticed that Luke was awake, he wanted to see what else his furniture could do. But Luke wasn’t sure he was ready to know.

He sat up anyway. Jake was closest to the cupboard, one hand on the door, squinting inside it every few moments. Samantha sat cross-legged on the floor beside him. She seemed relaxed.

‘So where are we supposed to be again?’ Luke asked hopefully. Maybe reality had reset itself since the last time he asked, fresh out of the cupboard, just prior to the short bout of unconsciousness.

‘Clarens,’ said Jake. ‘Lake Geneva. Welcome back.’

Jake paused, and when Luke’s face remained blank he added, ‘We’re near Montreux. You have heard of Montreux, right?’

Yeah, right, thought Luke, nodding. Just go along with it. If I’ve landed in a fairytale, who am I to spoil the happy ending? This Jake kid looks as though he has toys to share, and I’m ready to make up for lost time.

‘Look, I’ll only be gone a couple of hours,’ said Jake. ‘There’s heaps you can do here while I’m gone. My uncle’s away on a lecture tour, and I’ll tell Adelheid, my – um, our housekeeper – that you guys are friends from the neighbourhood.’

Not that I’ve ever had any friends from the neighbourhood, Jake thought. And I can’t explain how you all got in my bedroom without using the intercom on the gates. Adelheid will definitely think something weird is going on. He scratched his head. She’d be right about that part. At least keeping them quiet yesterday had been surprisingly easy. They’d pretty much passed out with fatigue, camped out on the bottom floor of his bedroom. But now they were definitely becoming restless.

‘But where are you going?’ said Samantha.

She’d had the most questions since they burst into his bedroom, and for the first time in his life he didn’t have all the answers.

‘I’ve just got a class,’ said Jake. ‘I really can’t get out of it.’

‘But can’t you put it off?’ said Luke. ‘I mean it’s not like you get a family reunion every day you know.’

Oh, I know, thought Jake. If that’s really what this is. The long hours since his bedroom had been invaded hadn’t helped Jake accept the story they were trying to tell him. But why they’d show up like that and start spinning such an odd tale he couldn’t figure out. His latest hypothesis was that this was some kind of group delusion, maybe a hysterical reaction caused by some sort of trauma they’d been through.

But the problem with that theory was that he hadn’t been through any traumas recently, and he definitely had seen these three kids crawl out from his storage cupboard. And even though it was embarrassingly unscientific, he’d pinched himself to bruising point to make sure he was awake.

Jake studied Luke from under his too-long fringe. Luke seemed to be the least convinced of the group that they were all long-lost relatives reunited by a piece of magical furniture.

‘It’s just a class I can’t skip,’ Jake said. ‘But really – I won’t be long.’

I’ve got to get out of here, he thought. The hardest part of slipping out to the library last night had been dodging George. But he could see that George was going to be the least of his problems today. I can’t take them to the meeting in Montreux – just look at them! He furrowed his brow, staring at Luke and Zac and their T-shirts covered in dried blood. What the hell had happened to them? Stabbed by a sword didn’t compute: there wasn’t even a scratch to be seen. And do they actually think they’re gonna live here? I don’t think my uncle would just adopt another three kids. Besides, someone must be looking for them.

‘Don’t you think someone would be looking for you?’ he asked again.

‘Oh, people are looking for us,’ said Zac. ‘And for you too. I think we should all stay together until we can come up with a plan about what to do next.’

Jake stood and sighed.

‘Look, just do me a favour and stay put while I go and tell Adelheid you’re here? She’ll need some time to get things together to eat.’ And to scream at me a bit. ‘I’ll be back soon. I promise.’

He pulled closed the heavy wooden door of his bedroom and leaned briefly against it. The carved archway surrounding the door marked the entrance to the last historic part of the mansion. His uncle’s gutting of the six-hundred-year-old building had destroyed the fantastically ornate past, replacing it with a cold, polished, stainless-steel present.

As he made his way to the kitchen, each gleaming surface reflected back rationality and restraint. The streamlined corridors were serious and sane; the purified air sanitised, homogenised. Away from the arches and antiquity in his gargoyle-roosting bedroom, the craziness of the past eighteen hours seemed even more pronounced.

The scientist in him would not shut up. He knew for sure that a number of things weren’t possible. One, these kids could not possibly have been in a house in Australia yesterday. Two, they had definitely not been attacked by a madman with a sword and a seven-foot witch who was supposed to be their mother. Plus, he knew that his mother was dead. His uncle had told him so. Besides, seven-foot-tall witches had not featured in any of the sciences he’d studied so far – and that would be all of them.

Still, they did know his name and they were in his room. He couldn’t get past that piece of physics.

The massive space-age kitchen droned quietly, sensor lights clicking on as he approached. He frowned. This time every other day he would see Adelheid here, slicing and wiping, stirring and sweeping. But tonight it was empty. Except for a note.

Much more than a housekeeper, Adelheid had effectively been Jake’s mother since he was twelve months old, and his brow wrinkled for a moment, worried she was unwell. When he was home during study breaks they always ate together. Not tonight, apparently. He scanned the note and dropped it back onto the bench. What an excellent night for Adelheid to have an errand to run in town.

He cracked the double doors of the huge stainless steel fridge and leaned in. Just as the note said, there was plenty of food.

He lifted the lid on a saucepan. What do you feed a Romanian gypsy and two Australian boys covered in blood? Chilli? Yep, that’ll do.

On the way back to his bedroom he thought about his George problem. There was always a George problem. When he’d enrolled in his first degree at age eleven, the university had baulked at allowing him to stay on campus. But when his uncle had provided man-mountain George as a live-in chaperone, in addition to a kind donation which was enough to refit the science library, they’d capitulated, and for the four years since, Jake had been unable to get rid of him.

It wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if George had been able to play chess. Or even if he’d been able to understand the concept of a joke. But good old George seemed to have had a personality lobotomy and had been left with slightly less charisma than a box of rocks. The biggest problem was that George took his job very seriously and that meant that tonight, like every night Jake was at home, George would be camped in the guardhouse stopping everything larger than a lizard arriving or leaving the grounds.

Last night, to sneak out to the library, Jake had hacked into the security grid to shut down the sensor lights and open the gates. But George now had the manual generator running back-up until the techies could investigate the problem. So while he really wanted to ride his motorbike down to the meeting in Montreux, he’d have to settle for scaling the walls and walking to the train station.

Montreux was the next stop on the train line, and while the whole trip would only take him twenty minutes, he wanted to be there ahead of time to see whether he could spot his mystery friend arriving. He still couldn’t believe that someone had apparently hacked into the über-advanced security system he’d designed to protect his research. It was bad enough that his professor had summoned him to a clandestine meeting in the library last night to warn him it had been leaked, but to now be receiving emails about it from a corporate shark was a nightmare. He knew that his research would one day have extensive industrial applications, but it wasn’t yet advanced enough for sale in a commercial capacity. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he hadn’t yet encrypted the codes sufficiently to stop warlords and criminals bastardising them to use in weaponry. And his professor had been furious that he’d advanced his work to such an extent without her knowledge.

His brand-new family were sitting in his study, staring again at the cupboard door. He sighed. He hoped they could keep themselves out of trouble for a couple of hours. He couldn’t imagine them outside this room, strolling the streamlined museum the rest of the house had become. He had a sudden image of the house activating some mechanised immune system, hunting them down and ejecting them like germs.

Samantha rushed forward as he struggled to close the door behind him. ‘Let me help you with that,’ she said.

‘Smells good,’ said Luke.

‘I’m vegan,’ said Zac.

Well, of course you are, thought Jake.

‘Okay, you guys,’ he said. ‘Dinner is served. Well, not for you, Zac, but there’s loads of stuff in the kitchen. Help yourself to anything you want.’ He pushed a stack of books aside and rested the tray down on his huge desk. The setting sun had turned Lake Geneva pinky-purple and he knew he had to move fast.

‘I’ve got to go. No one else is home at the moment. If you want to take a walk around the yard just beware of the gatekeeper, George. He’s harmless enough, but you’ll want to let him know that you’re friends of mine pretty quickly. If he wants to know how you got in here past him just tell him you’ve all been here the past few days. He’s likely to think he forgot. His hard-drive has a limited storage capacity and he’s used to it dumping data when it overloads.’

He backed out the door before they could say anything else.

Before Jake had even pulled the door closed Luke knew that he wouldn’t be coming back. Well, not for a while anyway. He’s giving us the brush-off, he thought. And who could blame him? If it wasn’t for the weird I-just-know-she’s-my-sister feeling he’d had from the moment Samantha had stepped through the doorway in Sydney, he’d still be doubting this long-lost sibling fairytale too – and he’d seen his birth certificate. He watched his wild-haired twin happily filling a bowl full of chilli, while Zac, T-shirt still crusty with blood, tore a chunk from the loaf of bread. He knew he looked equally as odd. I know what I would’ve done if people like us had just appeared one day in my bedroom, he thought. I’d want as much space between us as I could get. And I wouldn’t have fed anyone first. What are you really up to, Jake? Would a class really be so important that you need to get out of here tonight, just when we’ve all finally met?

‘What if Jake’s going to the cops?’ he wondered aloud.

‘What? Why would he do that?’ said Samantha, swivelling to look at him, almost dropping her bowl.

‘He probably doesn’t believe we are who we say we are,’ he said. ‘Do you blame him?’

‘He just has a class,’ she said, but she frowned.

‘Mmm,’ said Luke. ‘We’ll see.’ He shovelled food in, surprised to find himself hungry. He was aware of Zac’s eyes on him as he ate. ‘Maybe he’s not going to the police, but I don’t think he’s telling us everything.’

‘How do you know?’ said Samantha.

‘I can just tell.’

She frowned again. ‘Yeah? Well, I’m usually pretty good at picking up things like that, but I’m kinda finding it hard to read him.’ She kicked a heel against her chair leg.

Luke put his bowl down on the tray and stood. ‘Anyway, I’m gonna look around,’ he said.

Zac stood too, and they both disappeared up the stairs in the corner of Jake’s bedroom.

Samantha picked at the corner of the bread, but didn’t put it in her mouth. She’d lost her appetite. The stone-walled room was silent, as though the boys above her had simply vanished into the air. Which was always possible, given the way the world had been working for her lately.

She stepped across the ornately patterned floor, her eyes losing focus in the carved wooden maze. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and was surprised to feel them wet with her tears. I’m back in Europe again, she thought. I can’t believe it. Am I really only a train ride away from my family? From Lala and Mirela and Tamas?

She clutched at the strap slung across her shoulder. Even in the middle of the madness that was Sydney she hadn’t let go of her bag once. It held everything she’d brought from home. If she’d had any idea when she’d snuck out of the gypsy camp with Mirela and the boys that she’d be travelling with it across the world, she’d have packed it a little better. Like, with some clothes.

She sighed, looking down at her jeans and T-shirt. Already she hated the sight of them. Well, she had been wearing them for four days. Four days.

Just four days. She shook her head. It was too overwhelming to make sense of how much her life had changed in less than a week. She forced herself to focus on what was right in front of her and moved around the room.

How could one boy have so many books? Many of the titles were apparently in English, but that didn’t help her understand what they might be about. Biological Cybernetics. Nonlinear Spatio-temporal Neural Dynamics. Computational Theories for the Functions of the Hippocampus. Quantitative Biology. She wondered whether Jake had read all of them. He really must be smart. Like most of the gypsies she knew, Samantha hadn’t really been to school. Her family was always moving. She’d been enrolled a few times, but making it to classes was a different story. As far as her education went, Lala had taught her to read and Yahoo had done the rest.

But Jake must have had a really good education if he had all these books. For the first time Samantha felt a little intimidated. She’d never worried about keeping up with the Gaje kids, but Jake was something else. Her brow wrinkled. He was something else in more ways than one. She’d become so used to sensing people’s emotions, it was like eyesight to her. But with Jake she felt blind; like with the two guides at Heathrow Airport, she couldn’t read how he was feeling. But unlike with the airport workers, this didn’t seem to worry her. She had trusted Jake instantly.

Although Luke hadn’t, apparently.

Luke was another person she was having difficulty reading. She could sense something from Luke, but it was very faint and far away, as though his emotions lay at the bottom of an extremely deep well. And when they’d hugged, just briefly, in Sydney, she’d sensed that wherever his emotions were, it was somewhere very dark. She shuddered, remembering the feeling. Her brother had seen too much. But as with Jake, the missing parts didn’t frighten her – she felt strangely safer when she was near them than when she wasn’t.

And Zac wasn’t so easy to read either. Maybe I’m broken, she thought. Maybe a person isn’t supposed to travel around the world and back again in four days. At least she felt something from Zac. Not his emotions, exactly; more like a vibe, a colour even. He felt green. She smiled slightly, bemused to be describing him that way. Like the very coldest water in the deepest part of the river; like the brand-new grass when the snows cleared. Zac smelled like life, like the cool shadows deep inside the Bãneasa Forest.

She already knew she’d fight to protect him. Just as she would for any one of her family – and that included Birthday Jones. Her bottom lip trembled as she remembered the last cruel words she’d said to him. She reached around in her bag, searching for the ticket. Her fingers found it immediately – or it found her fingers – and she pulled it out and studied it. The ticket looked exactly like a slightly battered Carnivale ride pass. Admit One it boasted tiredly. It should be tired, she thought, given that it had managed to convince every airport official from Bucharest to London to Sydney that it was an official travel document. Birthday Jones and Seraphina had given her the ticket to get to Sydney to find Luke. Was it now defunct? What if it still worked?

Tamas was two hours away from here on a plane. Or she could hop on a train and bus and find him and Mirela within a couple of days. She could make sure Lala was okay, that the Gypsy King hadn’t gone postal when she’d left. She could be in camp for breakfast if she left right now.

With a sigh of regret, she slipped the Carnivale pass back into the pocket inside her bag. I can’t go back there now, she thought. Seraphina said that they’re unsafe with me around. She crossed to the window and stared out over the rooftops across the lake to the Swiss Alps and the setting sun.

‘Lucky boy, isn’t he?’

Sam turned to find Luke standing at the base of the stairs.

‘I guess,’ she said.

‘Well, it looks like I was right,’ said Luke. ‘I just read Jake’s emails. He’s not going to class. He’s going to a meeting in Montreaux tonight.’

‘You read his email?’

He shrugged. ‘Yep, and Zac thinks we should join our brother at this meeting.’

Sam didn’t hesitate. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

‘Why should we?’ said Luke. ‘He obviously doesn’t want us there.’

‘He could be in danger,’ said Samantha.

‘And we’re supposed to stick together,’ said Zac.

‘Well, Jake doesn’t seem to think so,’ said Luke.

‘How are we gonna get there?’ Sam said, pushing past him to Zac, who had nudged one of Jake’s PCs to life.

Zac scrolled, typed a few words and then stood. A printer on the desk shot out a single page.

‘It’s not far from here at all,’ Zac said. ‘Come on.’

Luke trailed behind Samantha and Zac as they headed out of Jake’s bedroom. A few steps down the ultra-modern corridor left him wondering whether they’d just stepped through another portal. It looked like a completely different house, all shiny and new.

It still looked like a millionaire’s house though.

He didn’t know why it mattered so much to him that Jake had grown up here and that he . . . well . . . that he’d been left in a cardboard box in the driveway of drug addicts. And his surroundings hadn’t improved much ever since. Ordinarily, he didn’t worry a lot about it. Like he didn’t worry about anything, really.

But he had to wonder whether he might have felt differently –