Kai Read online

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Acknowledgements

  About Laura Bloom

  About the Dream Riders series

  What was that? I peered through the window. All I could see was darkness, and thick drops of water splashing up against the glass. The sudden rain sounded like a piece of sheet metal being shaken really hard. Or maybe that actually is the sound rain makes on a corrugated iron roof, I thought sleepily.

  I reached for the light switch to turn on the outside light, when I remembered that out here, in Swamp Creek, there’s no electricity. My candle was on the other side of the room beside my bed, along with the matches, and my phone, which had run flat before anyone thought to tell me I wouldn’t be able to recharge it.

  Now, as my eyes got used to the darkness, I could just make out the sleeping forms of Frankie, Storm, and Violet and her little brother Arlo, lined up in narrow beds on one side of the cabin, and Shannon, and Frankie’s dad Ray, on the other. They were all fast asleep.

  I pushed up the window, trying hard not to let it squeak. It wasn’t just the storm that had woken me, I was sure of it. It had sounded like a scream.

  “Ugh.” I shivered, and quickly closed the window.

  “Kai?”

  I turned around. Frankie was lying propped up on one elbow, rubbing her eyes and frowning at me, looking like a rumpled mouse.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “I thought I heard something out there,” I whispered back.

  “What?”

  “It was nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “All right.” She flopped back down.

  I tiptoed back to my bed. Good old Frankie, what am I going to do without you? I thought for the millionth time, as I climbed into my sleeping bag. In two weeks’ time I would be going back to the city, and I was going to miss Mullumbimby and the Dream Riders terribly – especially Frankie. On the other hand – I reminded myself – I would be back in the land of great ice cream, with all my old school friends, and shops that stayed open late. Most importantly, I would be back living at home with my mum and dad and my big sister Jingy, who I had been missing even more than I was going to miss Frankie.

  I was picturing the display at Gino’s Gelato, and trying to decide whether my first order should be chocolate chip, salted caramel or simple lemon – in my opinion the great gelato classic – when I heard it again: an unearthly sound like a high-pitched scream that pierced the night.

  I sat bolt upright. The rain was bucketing down again now, even harder than before. I couldn’t believe the others were sleeping through it.

  “What is it?” Frankie hissed. It’s funny how you can feel someone staring at you, even in the dark.

  “That sound,” I whispered back. “I could have sworn–”

  And then it came again, for the third time, so short and sharp it was gone almost before it had begun, fading instantly into the noise of the rain.

  “That’s a horse!” I hissed. It’s difficult to shout and whisper at the same time, but I managed it.

  “Hang on, I’ll get my torch. Ouch!” I heard Frankie suck in her breath as something hit the floor with a thud, and then a clatter as it rolled away.

  “Shhhh, Frankie!”

  “Excuse me, I am shushing!”

  By the time we’d found the torch – crawling around on the uneven wooden floorboards and bumping into each other, as well as into the metal bedframes – nearly everyone else was awake.

  “What’s happening?” asked Violet, sitting up and reaching for her glasses. I hadn’t realised she wore contact lenses usually, until last night.

  “Is everything all right?” asked Ray, swinging his feet to the floor. He was wearing Harry Potter pyjamas, I noticed. I had never seen an adult wearing Harry Potter gear before.

  “Kai heard something and we thought we should investigate,” said Frankie.

  “What kind of a something?” yawned Violet. “I’m surprised you could hear anything over this rain.”

  “I thought I heard a horse, screaming.” I felt stupid now, like some kind of nervous city kid who freaks out the first time he finds himself in the middle of the bush.

  “I heard it too,” said Frankie quickly. “And whatever it was, it sounded like it was in trouble.”

  “We’d better check,” said Shannon, pulling on a pair of thick pink socks and picking up the parka and sweater she’d dumped on the end of her bed.

  “I’m coming too!” said Arlo, completely awake now.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Violet, flopping back down on her bed. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “It’s 2.30,” said Frankie.

  “Seriously?” Violet groaned and pulled her sleeping bag over her head.

  Incredibly, Storm was still sleeping, her red hair fanned around her head on the pillow, and her arms crossed against her chest like a medieval knight.

  “Kai? Are you coming?” asked Shannon.

  “Um, yeah. I mean, I suppose so.” I didn’t fancy walking through the bush during the day, let alone in the middle of the night – let alone in the middle of a thunderstorm. After all, who knows what kind of creatures lurk out there? There could be a native Australian vampire bat that only feeds on strangers in the rain, or some species of wombat zombie that only comes out after a bushfire – a womzombie, that screams and impersonates creatures in distress, purely to lure humans to their doom . . .

  “Kai, if you’re coming outside you’d better get into your gumboots, okay?” said Shannon. “Arlo, you too. Who knows what we’ll be stepping into?”

  The five of us stood in the middle of the clearing, Arlo gripping my hand tightly, as we peered first in one direction and then the other, our torches barely making a dent in the pitch-black darkness.

  “It’s amazing to have the rain, anyway,” said Shannon.

  “I’ll say,” said Ray.

  “Is this enough to put out the bushfires?” asked Frankie.

  “Around here, I think it will be, for now, anyway,” answered Shannon. “It will definitely help with the drought.”

  As we drove here yesterday from Mullumbimby, everywhere we passed was dry. The riverbeds were hard and stony, and every blade of grass and leaf was parched and bleached. The farmers’ fields were just dirt, because nothing can grow without water, and as we passed through the Swamp Creek mountain ranges there had just been ash and the stumps of trees where the fires had come through. Here at Swamp Creek, the tree trunks were all black and charcoal and all their leaves had been burned off from where the flames had licked at them. Thankfully, though, the firefighters had been able to turn the fire in another direction, and so the sanctuary itself had been saved.

  Out here the air smelled sweet and fresh now, and the drumming of the raindrops made an orchestra of sound, all of it singing thank you. It was actually nice being out, I decided. I closed my eyes, held my face up to the rain and took another deep breath, and when I opened my eyes again I felt as though I could see into the darkness a little better. Ghostly gums stood around our little cabin, their leaves glistening, but there was nothing else to see.

  “Whatever it was that made that sound must have gone,” said Shannon. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  “No more creepy noises?” asked Violet as we trooped back in.
>
  “No,” I muttered. Maybe I really had dreamt it.

  “Or maybe this brumby sanctuary is haunted,” said Frankie the next morning as we walked over to the main house. “Maybe what you heard was the ghost of the Swamp Creek brumbies who lived wild out here a hundred years ago . . .”

  “Or, maybe it was one of the new ones, crying out,” said Danni, the head of the Swamp Creek Sanctuary, when Frankie told her about it. They had recently rescued a big group of brumbies from the Swamp Creek National Park. “There will always be a horse or two in any herd who particularly doesn’t like thunder.”

  “Maybe they know how dangerous lightning can be,” said Storm. “Especially when they’ve already been through a drought, and now a bushfire.”

  “Good point.” Danni nodded. She had short brown hair that was very straight, and her glasses were small and round, like an old-fashioned professor’s. “They say that the fire that came through here last week travelled over thirty kilometres in one night.

  I shivered.

  “You know,” said Danni, “there’s a legend around here that when you hear a sound like the one you heard, Kai, whoever made it is your spirit animal, destined to accompany you wherever you go.”

  “So you’re saying I have a spirit animal?” I’ve never been an animal person – I’m more of a tech person. But I kind of liked the idea.

  “What legend is this?” asked Violet, her head cocked sceptically. She was wearing her glasses again this morning, and their thick black frames made her look a bit like a professor, too. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It’s a special legend for people who don’t like horses,” said Danni, winking at me as the others all laughed.

  It’s not that I don’t like horses. I just don’t obsess over them the way everyone else on this trip seemed to do. I’d come along this weekend purely for the company. Although right now, I was wondering about that. Maybe it would have been a better idea to stay in Mullumbimby, fetching ice cubes from the freezer and lying in the shade. It wasn’t yet 8am, but the sun was already shining brightly on the horizon and there was a heat haze of dust and smoke in the air.

  “Brumbies are very social animals,” Danni was saying as she showed us around the sanctuary. “Instead of fencing them into paddocks and separating them from one another, the way you’d do with domestic horses, we fenced in the house and the garden instead. That way they can roam around all over the sanctuary together, completely free, while they get used to living with humans. Within our eight-foot-high perimeter, of course.”

  Gillie, Shannon’s little sausage dog, was listening doubtfully, one ear raised and the other flopping down, as Danni pointed out the tack and tractor sheds, and the round yards where they had given the brumbies health checks when they had first arrived.

  “This group we have here at the moment all arrived together two weeks ago during the worst of the fires,” she said, setting off at a brisk pace down the hill, the rest of us carefully picking our way down the loose gravel behind her. “Since then they’ve been neutered and had their teeth checked and learned how to lead, with a halter and rope.”

  “That was fast!” said Storm.

  “We need to be,” sighed Danni. “It’s going to be a long, hot summer; there’ll be a lot more horses coming in to be rehomed before we’re through.”

  At the bottom of the slope she paused. We were standing on a big apron of cleared land, surrounded by huge blackened gum trees. This would usually be a paddock, I guessed, but right now it was just a big dust bowl. “Eighteen months ago, this whole region was lush and green,” said Danni. “When we went into the national park to check on them last year, the brumbies were looking the best I’d ever seen them. Their coats were glossy, their eyes and teeth were good. There were the right number of them – not too many and not too few. Basically, everything was going great for the Swamp Creek brumbies.”

  “And now?” asked Storm.

  Danni looked up and adjusted her glasses, putting a hand up to shield her face from the sun.

  “We’ve been in drought ever since. Brumbies are tough, but week after week, the water and grass just keeps disappearing, so they have to go further and further to find food. Not only that, the temperature keeps rising, and the trees are all dying, so there’s less and less shade.”

  I crossed my arms across my chest. Just thinking about it made me feel hot and uncomfortable.

  “Plus, they have to compete for water and food with all the other hungry and thirsty brumbies. And then imagine what happens if there’s a bushfire.”

  I felt sick at the thought of what it must have been like for the brumbies, knowing a bushfire was approaching with nowhere to run to or turn. “What about the rain last night?” I asked. “That will help, won’t it?”

  “It was wonderful, but it only lasted fifteen minutes, off and on,” sighed Danni. “We need days and days and days of rain to fill up the creeks and the rivers again, let alone to put out all the bushfires.”

  I couldn’t see a sign of the rain, now, I realised, looking around. Just dryness, everywhere you looked, and the clear blue sky, with not a cloud in sight.

  “The fire’s out now, though, isn’t it?” asked Storm.

  “If only.” Danni held up her phone, and opened the app called Fires Near Me. She zoomed in on the Swamp Creek area, where you could see icons of flames burning, dotted all over the Swamp Creek mountain ranges. Then she zoomed out to show the whole of the east coast of Australia where you could see there were at least twenty fires burning, even though we were only in early spring.

  “The brumbies in Swamp Creek National Park are in bad shape, like all of our precious native animals, and their homes.” Danni adjusted her glasses and for a moment it seemed almost as if she was crying. “We are so grateful that there are young people like you who care about the brumbies, and are going to take one home.”

  “Speaking of which,” said Violet, piping up brightly from the back of the group, “when are we going to get to actually see one?”

  Violet’s not afraid to get to the point, even if it makes her sound rude. It’s one of the things I like about her, although I could see why it annoyed people sometimes. “This is a brumby shelter, after all,” she added quietly, so only Arlo and I could hear.

  “Absolutely,” said Danni, shaking herself a little. “Now, on a day like today, where do you think a brumby would choose to be?”

  “Water,” said Arlo loudly, pointing over Danni’s shoulder.

  Arlo doesn’t say much, but when he does, he makes it count.

  “Exactly.” Danni smiled. “Let’s go and find them.”

  The path Danni led us on wound steeply through a thick stand of bushes, which I hadn’t even realised were there until we walked over the bank.

  “Oh!” Frankie gasped. We hurried the last few steps to see what she was looking at. “Oh no!”

  “What is it?” I asked. We were standing high on the bank of a deep and wide river gorge, which right now was just a narrow ribbon of water running between banks of golden sand.

  “Look!” pointed Frankie.

  At the bend in the river stood a group of horses. There were twelve of them, I counted quickly. Their ribcages bulged. Their noses looked sharp in their faces, and their hindquarters looked like triangles of bone with just a little bit of skin covering them. Their coats looked scabby and rough.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I whispered.

  “Nothing in particular,” said Danni. “This is just what a drought will do.”

  My chest ached to think of looking for water and not finding any; of trying to nibble at the ground, which would usually be covered in springy grass, and finding only dirt.

  “They’re okay now,” said Danni, trying to comfort me. Trying to comfort all of us, probably, because we were all in a state of shock – even Arlo, who was looking at them with his head cocked and his eyes narrowed, the way he does when he’s trying to puzzle a problem through.

  “These h
orses are the lucky ones.”

  “Will they all find homes?” asked Frankie, her voice shaking.

  “Oh yes. Brumbies make such wonderful pets and riding horses, we’ll find homes for all of them eventually. It’s the ones we had to leave behind in the national park that I’m worried about. I just wish we could rehome them all.”

  The only thing making me feel better was looking at these horses, I thought, as we scrambled down the bank to the sand. They seemed so happy and peaceful, standing together in the cool water, nuzzling one another and resting their chins on each other’s backs.

  “Would they have been together in a herd like this before you caught them? In the wild, I mean?” I asked.

  “Some of them would have been,” said Danni. “Others not. The strongest stallions with the strongest herds are taking all the best grazing lands for themselves in hard times like these. These particular horses are the doggers, the ones who, for one reason or another, have been more or less left to fend for themselves.

  “The national park where we caught them is over there,” said Danni, pointing at the hills rising on the other side of the river. “These guys are just a two-hour drive from where they were picked up, but in terms of how their lives have changed, they have entered a whole new world.”

  Like me, I thought. That’s what it had been like for me when my parents sent me up to Mullumbimby to live with Frankie and her family six months ago. When I got on the plane I couldn’t even imagine life outside the city. I had been terrified. And look how that had turned out!

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said.

  “Pardon?” said Danni.

  I looked at Storm, standing straight and tall to attention like a medieval knight, and Violet, lounging against a tree trunk in her jodhpurs and snow-white shirt; at Frankie sitting cross-legged on the grass in her striped T-shirt and karate pants, and Arlo, sitting next to her, his eyes still narrowed thoughtfully. “I just have a feeling that it’s going to be all right.”

  “Thanks to Storm’s donation to the sanctuary it certainly will be, for one of these lucky horses at least,” smiled Danni. “Right, Storm?”