It was then that she had noticed Luke’s stuffed hippo, his precious Gar-gah. With trembling fingers she had reached out over her son’s cot and touched Gar-gah and sent the toy spinning end-over-end, for Gar-gah was floating in mid-air, gravity no longer applying. She felt light-headed, the world a closing iris, an inverted telescope and she was falling down into it. She saw Luke rising from his cot on a cushion of nothingness and reached out for him, closed her fingers around his little arm, just as on the verge of her hearing the front door opened.
She was here, in this place, between the stones. She was here with the monsters. But that was impossible because monsters didn’t exist. She would not let the baby go, she would not, no matter how the monsters pushed and prodded, she would not let go because she would protect him until they both woke up, her little child that she was hugging so tightly that–
They were laughing at her, all of them laughing, the queen and her court of monsters. The queen held a little baby in her arms and pointed to the baby’s mummy and coochie-coo’d and Ellie thought, That’s a nice baby, but it’s not as nice as my Lu– … Aaron. I really should get back to Dan– … Steve, and she blinked because the thoughts felt minty-fresh in her head. The thoughts had new car smell on them and the queen was making the little crying baby wave goodbye at her and wasn’t that nice, the baby was waving goodbye, she must tell little Aaron about all this–
Ellie uttered a shuddering, gasping cry and fell, breaking Danny’s touch. He caught her before she hit the ground. All of the images he had accessed had been passed between them, he knew. So this place, this was where Ellie had come to, when she had vanished that first day and night, before the world had reset and taken them both along with it for the ride.
‘Ellie?’ he said. Her eyes were closed. ‘Ellie?’
She stiffened in his arms as control of her muscles came back to her and she was able to support herself again. When she opened her eyes, he had to fight the urge to take a step backward, for there was a deep and real hatred revealed by the blocked-off memories; not directed toward him, but at the woman on the throne.
‘You brought me here,’ Ellie said.
‘I did,’ Carman said. ‘The price your father paid for my services to him. I returned you to the world when I had rebuilt it into something more to both of your liking.’
‘You stole my son.’
‘Stole him?’ Carman laughed. ‘You couldn’t wait to leave him behind.’
‘You lying BITCH!’
Danny managed to hold her back – for about a half a second. He grabbed her again, but this time she broke away even more quickly, causing him to fall, unceremoniously, onto his arse. Ellie’s move toward Carman, or more accurately the movement of her hands, nails and teeth toward Carman’s waiting throat, seemed utterly inevitable. Carman didn’t seem inclined to stop it, either. Danny saw a hunger on her face.
He held out a hand and called upon his new abilities, and Ellie’s legs froze in place where she stood.
‘Ellie, stop! She’ll kill you!’ he said desperately.
She turned her upper body and glared at him accusingly. ‘You’re doing this?’ she said.
He placed his hands on her shoulders – with all the appropriate caution of someone belling a Bengal Tiger – and tried to quell that murderous intent in her eyes. ‘We’re here for Luke. Her time will come, Ellie. I promise you that. If you rush her now, she will kill you, I know it. Please.’
Some of the fire died, but only some. He risked letting her go. She took a half-step forward and stopped.
‘Don’t you ever do that to me again,’ she hissed at him.
‘I won’t,’ he lied.
‘And you, Danny!’ Carman continued merrily, as though the drama of the last few seconds meant nothing to her. ‘We can’t forget about your little adventures. Finding peace with your father. Finding purpose. Becoming a true heir of the Morrigan line!’
‘You,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t talk about my da.’
‘Yes, I saw,’ she waved a hand at the Cauldron sitting at the base of the steps to her throne, at its shimmering liquid surface. ‘A shame. Still, he was able to accomplish what he set out to do. Continue the line. Bring about the’ – and she waggled her fingers in the air to create quotation marks – ‘“Chosen One”.’
‘He sacrificed everything for me,’ Danny said, unsure why he was even saying this, especially to her. Maybe it just needed saying, no matter the appropriateness of the audience. He needed to hear it himself. ‘I won’t let him die for nothing.’
‘And here he stands, before me,’ Carman went on, savouring every word. ‘The Chosen One. The Morrigan the prophecies spoke of. Mightiest of the line. Oh, a shame about the separation from his father part, but a necessary evil, wouldn’t you say? What’s worth gaining without sacrifice, after all?’
‘Nothing,’ said Luke. It was the first word he had spoken.
With that single word, Danny finally understood. The great puzzle that had been assembling all this time before him, the final piece had finally slotted in, and only now was it clear that he’d been looking at the whole fucking thing arse about face.
‘It’s not me.’
‘You?’ Carman said, and indulged herself in a good laugh. ‘You? It was never you.’
Luke stood up straighter and, though Danny hadn’t previously thought it was possible, his adult son grew even more physically imposing. While not obviously oversized as Dub had been, Luke was an incredibly powerful-looking young man. His arms were thick. His eyes were steady. His breathing calm.
‘It’s Luke,’ Danny said. ‘He’s the one.’
‘Yes. A child of both lines,’ Carman said. ‘The Tuatha, you see, were so in love with their own cleverness. When the time came to imprison me and my children down here, they devised spells within spells, rules within rules. Magic is a funny thing, Danny. It’s limited only by the imagination. Fiendish imagination, fiendish rules.’
‘But the Network …? I thought that was all you needed. Isn’t that how you were able to merge the worlds? Bring Ireland to you?’
‘It got the engine running,’ Carman admitted. ‘But what I really needed, Danny, was you.’
That brought him up short. ‘What?’
‘That little light show you put on earlier, when Daddy …’ and she pantomimed getting stabbed in the chest, and made a sad face, causing the roles to reverse and Ellie had to grab Danny to stop him from advancing.
‘Ah yes, I see you remember. That sealed the deal. Your rage, your power, all of it surging through the Network, through the Sword. Right here. Ground Zero. Merging complete. We couldn’t have done it without you, Danny. All of this – all of your training, all of your little vision quests and detours, putting you into the Cauldron. All of it was to train you, make you aware of your power. All we needed then was a catalyst for you to blow your stack. Exit Tony, stage left. Honestly, bravo. Now, Luke and I have some big plans for this brave new world, and you’ve more or less fulfilled your usefulness so, Luke? Kill Mummy and Daddy like a good boy.’
Luke charged.
Danny had only seconds to shove Ellie clear. There was no time for finesse; his one priority was getting plenty of distance between her and the fight in which he was about to be embroiled. He’d been foolish enough to allow the Sword to drop to an off-guard position during the latest round of revelations, but now he held it high and it met his son’s with an echoing clannggggg.
He had parried the blade. The charge, however, he could do nothing about. Luke’s bulk was considerable, his musculature far superior to Danny’s own. Immediately after the swords met, Danny was knocked clean off his feet and sent sprawling to the grass. He rolled and kept rolling, his danger senses screaming at him to keep moving. He sensed rather than saw or heard his son’s blade bite into the earth inches behind his rolling body.
Gathering his legs beneath him and pushing off his feet, he sprang from his vulnerable horizontal position into a passable crouch, bringing th
e Sword up over his head in a defensive stroke to prevent Luke’s blade from cleaving his head clean off his shoulders. He pushed back against the stroke this time, managing to negate some of the immense physical strength behind each of his son’s blows and stopping himself from being knocked back on his arse once again.
Momentarily thrown, Luke took a half-second to recover, a pause that gave Danny time to get to his feet. He couldn’t afford to be so unprepared for another charge, he knew. Luke wouldn’t fail to finish him off if he managed to get him on his back once more. Staying on his feet was critical to staying alive. He feinted to the right and left, letting Luke know he was ready and able to dodge out of the way of another brute-force assault.
Luke got the message. He dropped out of his head-down stance and began instead to whirl his sword through the night air in extraordinarily complicated strokes as he moved forward step by step, closing the gap between himself and his father, hoping that Danny would be so dazzled in trying to follow the path of the blade that he would leave himself open for a quick debilitating stroke to the sword hand or to the neck.
Danny heard Ellie screaming from somewhere to his right, and with a part of his mind currently not concentrating on staying alive, hoped that she would stay out of range.
Anyone watching Danny with the sword, at least anyone who had witnessed Tony Morrigan in combat, would have commented how similarly the two wielded a blade. This was more than genetics; Danny knew that when he had reached inside his father’s mind, both in the cottage and in the office shortly before he died, he had exchanged more than memories. He had absorbed Tony’s skill with a blade. It was lucky for him that he had, or Luke would have been able to cut him in two with that initial lunge.
Luke went for his father’s throat in a sudden burst. Danny took a long step back and to the left, ducking under the swipe and, adjusting the Sword in his hands, was able to lean forward and connect the flat of the blade with Luke’s behind.
It made a thwack sound that echoed long and loud. Luke recoiled and issued a gasp of pain, whipping his sword around, but Danny was ready and the two blades met evenly. Looking into Luke’s shocked, outraged expression, Danny decided to try something that might just be suicide.
‘Bad boy!’ he said, in a tone of voice he’d have used a week, and a lifetime, ago.
Luke blinked. For just a second, some of that arrogance, that invincibility he exuded, seemed to crack, but soon the warrior was back and Danny was again fighting for his life, parrying and retreating and jumping out of the way of a series of increasingly angry strokes.
He couldn’t do this forever. Luke was better; there was no doubt about it. Younger and fitter and stronger and, from all available evidence on show, quite willing to kill his opponent which Danny most certainly wasn’t. Luke held all the cards, but for now, the memory of that unexpected spank with the flat of the Sword was still burning brightly and the anger it had generated was making him rash enough to be clumsy, even predictable.
That wouldn’t last forever. And when Luke regained his composure, when he cooled down and started planning his attacks properly, Danny had no clue what he was going to do.
Well, strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. He was pretty sure he was going to die.
Think, he urged himself. No matter what age he looked, Luke simply couldn’t be an adult. He had the body of one – given his build, more like the body of one and a half – but where, how, when had he grown up? Here. In this twisted place, under some time-accelerated conditions. Danny burned with a deep and terrible anger at that. If he died trying, he’d make that witch responsible for perverting his son’s childhood, make her pay for what she’d done.
Right now, however, he had to take control. If this was to stay a physical fight, he was going to lose. It had to be more than that.
‘You’re my son,’ he said, timing the words so they were audible between sword-clashes. It was difficult enough staying out of the range of Luke’s blade. Doing so while trying to come up with a verbal angle of attack was only going to make things worse, but he had no choice. He had to try and get Luke to talk. Only then could he assess what damage had been done to his son’s mind.
‘I know,’ Luke replied, lashing out with a foot and striking Danny a glancing blow on the left knee. Pain exploded from the impact. Danny half-staggered, forced to abandon all attempts at a graceful defence and simply duck and run to gain some breathing space. What strength did his son have if that was how painful a glancing blow could be?
‘Luke, stop this!’ Ellie pleaded, coming as close as she dared to. ‘We love you! We came here to save you!’
‘Love me? Save me? Neither of you ever wanted me!’ Luke snarled. ‘I watched you!’
‘Watched?’ Ellie was confused. Danny wished he was. His own trips through time and space with the Morrigan for company had been harrowing enough, but he had at least been an adult when he underwent them. It was suddenly clear from the look on his son’s face exactly what Carman had done. How she had turned him.
For the time being, Luke had stopped his relentless assault. He didn’t even look out of breath. Danny looked, and felt, like he’d gone twelve rounds with a Kodiak bear.
‘Show them,’ Carman commanded.
Luke planted his sword in the earth. Raising his hands, he swept them forward. In that instant, the area inside the standing stone circle contracted and shifted. Ellie and Danny found themselves somewhere neither of them had ever expected to see again.
THE ROYAL VICTORIA HOSPITAL, BELFAST, 8 MONTHS AGO
‘Are you all right?’ Ellie was asking, as she lay on the hospital bed, wearing a flimsy hospital issue nightie, not a drop of makeup on her, forehead covered in sweat, and a large midwife between her legs.
‘It’s me,’ the second Ellie, the one Luke had just spirited here from inside the standing stone circle, said in astonishment. She turned a full circle, her mouth agape as she took in their surroundings.
‘Uh … yeah, not too bad,’ Past Danny was saying numbly.
Danny reached out for Ellie. He was finding this a little disconcerting himself. It was one thing to be flung Scrooge-like to the ancient past or even to the 1980s. It was another to be three feet from yourself and marvel at how pale and shit-scared you once looked. His younger self would have needed a blood transfusion to pass as a corpse.
‘They can’t see or hear us,’ he told Ellie, finding her hand. In a strange moment of symmetry, he squeezed it just as his younger self squeezed Past Ellie’s hand.
She turned to him. Now over the initial shock and awe of seeing herself in a position in which no woman should ever have to behold herself, Ellie was struggling to cope with the enormity of what she was re-experiencing. Her eyes shone with tears.
‘Danny,’ she said softly. ‘This is incredible.’
‘I know,’ he said softly. What with ancient battles and creating universes and time travel, he’d almost been desensitised to miracles. He was glad she was there to remind him. He was just glad she was there.
‘Right, when I tell you to push, you push!’ the midwife ordered.
Past Ellie looked up at Past Danny. ‘I,’ she said in a reasonable tone, ‘am going to murder her.’
‘I don’t remember saying that,’ her future self said, flushing hotly, then flinching as Past Ellie gave a yeowl of agony that echoed throughout the delivery suite. ‘I remember that, but,’ she said ruefully.
‘Push! Push, Ellie!’
They noticed Luke – warrior Luke – for the first time. He was leaning casually against the far wall, watching the proceedings with a detached air. He had the look of someone who had seen this particular film many times before and could have acted a part in it. Which, of course, he was about to.
‘I can see hair!’ the midwife exclaimed.
As Past Ellie asked his younger self to go and see what colour it was, her future self, unable to contain herself any longer, moved a few steps closer. Taking a very deep breath, she leaned forward on her tipt
oes to see past the midwife. Danny had to wonder at the sight of his past self and Ellie’s future self each craning their heads to look, in perfect symmetry over Past Ellie’s akimbo legs.
‘Mmmm …’ Past Danny said, clearly trying to give himself time to form coherent speech so it wouldn’t be unexpectedly replaced with puke, ‘Black.’
Ellie, meanwhile, merely rocked back on her heels. She very slowly and very carefully walked back to stand beside Danny. She pointed at his crotch with one finger and, with her face utterly composed and calm, warned, ‘Come near me with that thing– ’
‘Aye, aye, I know,’ he cut her off. He couldn’t help but smile. Luke, seeing this exchange, curled his lip in disgust and slammed his palm against the wall of the maternity suite. The real and solid wall of the hospital room stayed intact, but the ethereal, Quantum Leap wall of the projection rippled, bending slightly at Luke’s touch.
As the ripple spread, it dislodged the clock from the wall behind Ellie’s delivery bed. It clattered to the floor below with a resounding crash. Danny – both versions of him – seemed to be the only one startled by the impact, but for two entirely different reasons.
This isn’t just a vision, Danny realised. This actually happened. Luke was always meant to be here. Always watching this moment.
Which means Ellie and I were always here too …
With this racing around in his mind, he watched as their younger versions went through the final, astonishing moments of labour. Watched as Luke, tiny and red and screaming, emerged from Ellie and was placed in Danny’s grasp.
Danny’s attention wavered from the birth to the young man standing at the opposite side of the room, watching it all with a cold expression.
‘Why bring us here?’ he asked Luke, moving forward, walking through the midwife as he did so. ‘What does this prove? How can you say we didn’t love you? Look. Look at us.’
He stopped in front of his younger self, barely a foot from him. Past Danny was cradling his newborn son in his arms, even as the midwife told him it was a boy. Luke moved from his position against the wall. He had no sword here in this place, but then neither did Danny. Thankfully, the weapons hadn’t made the journey. As Luke moved toward him, rather than electing to walk around or through the stool Past Danny had been sitting on, he shoved it casually aside. Again, despite their insubstantial nature, he succeeded in knocking it over.
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