Free Dreams (Sarah Midnight Trilogy 1) by Daniela Sacerdoti

place. I would have given it all away, my music, my work, my life, to be a Midnight again, to be with James.
    While Anne lived with James, while she learnt all her magical skills from Morag Midnight, I was running and running on a treadmill, getting nowhere, or at least nowhere that mattered. People standing up to clap and cheer; the prizes, the all-important gigs I got; it was all a whirl of nothing to me.
    Contrary to what many people thought, it wasn’t Anne who’d lost our lifelong competition, it was me. It was me , the famous, rich one, who’d lost everything. Any chance of happiness I ever had was gone. My life was empty, and set to stay that way.
    Word came through they’d had a daughter. I was playing in Hong Kong when I found out. I felt so ill I thought I’d pass out. Their life paraded in front of me like a trophy, tormenting me every day, every night, while I played my soulless music all around the world. I knew James pitied me for the choice he’d made, the one that left me out in the cold. Anne didn’t pity me; she didn’t hate me, she wasn’t scared of me – she simply didn’t think of me at all. I didn’t even deserve a thought; I was so far removed from their lives. I didn’t matter. I never existed.
    I was in a haze for what seemed like years, sleepwalking through my life, wishing I was dead. When I came back to myself, I could see clearly: I had to be like the Midnights, I had to become them, in order to destroy them.
    The Midnights had set fire to my life, burnt it down, and walked away – but they had left something behind, like a precious stone, intact under the ash and dust of my existence. It was a little nugget of knowledge, a black seed that I could plant, and watch while it grew, its pale roots feeding on my dreams. Secret knowledge the Midnights wouldn’t touch, waiting to be cracked, waiting to come to life. And I did it, I brought it to life.
    Like Anne, I don’t come from a magical family. The blood that runs in my veins is as common and plain as hers. But she had mentors – James and Morag, who took her by the hand into the amazing, exciting, dangerous world they lived in. I was only taught briefly, so briefly. I did the rest myself.
    It took ten years to learn how to open the rivers of time – ten years to learn how to slip them into our reality, the creatures that walked the earth before we came. Demons is one of the many names they were given through time; in fact they are Surari , in the ancient language of the first human tribes. Legends and myths talk about them; the folklore of every country in the world has stories about them. Supernatural creatures , they’re called sometimes – but there’s nothing supernatural about them; they’re creatures of nature like us, just a lot more ancient. They seem unnatural because they don’t belong to this time, because they should not be here, among us.
    But they are, and they keep coming.
    The Midnight motto is: Don’t Let Them Roam . My motto is: Let Them Come .
    The Midnights and the other Secret Families around the world were entrusted with the duty to send the demons back where they came from, to the primeval waters that covered the Earth at the beginning of time – while it’s me, and those like me, who force the flow of time in order to get them here.
    The Surari we’re allowed to call are only as powerful as the magic that summons them. Some of us, like the members of my Valaya, can only call Ferals, the animal-like demons with great strength but very limited understanding. Ferals are brutal, senseless beasts. They can also fall into our world by chance, through a fold in time and space, unknowing, unwilling, and find themselves lost and raging in a strange land. They end up living in the sewage system, in condemned buildings, in the few corners of wilderness we have left, and scavenge and kill to survive.
    Some of us – like me, of course – have enough knowledge, enough power to call the Sentient ones, the