There was no time. He had thought – guessed, hoped – that she was sitting on that damn throne because the effort of merging the two worlds together was draining her to a greater degree than she had been prepared to show.
Seemingly not. And now he was about to pay for that mistake with his life. The last thing he would ever see would be his son’s horrified face as the woman he’d come to think of as his mother revealed her true visage. He hoped Luke would at least have time to retrieve his dropped sword and try to defend himself, defend Ellie …
A moment passed and, shockingly, Danny found himself still standing, still alive. He turned, and his mouth fell open.
‘Steve?’ he blurted out in delighted disbelief.
Of all the things, in all the world he had ever expected to see, even after the events of the last few days … after the faerie monstrosities and the living darkness clouds and the empty universes the last thing on that list was the sight of his best friend, looking like an extra from Westeros, bloodstained and with his arm around Carman’s throat.
‘Ellie said you were–’
‘Tossed through a house and then pushed at high-speed out of a moving car?’ Steve finished. He winked. ‘All in a night’s work for Big Balls McGee, Danny.’ Then, following a significant growl from beside him, ‘Ably assisted by these huge hairy bastards.’
‘Wily?’ Danny said, astonished once again. ‘Is that you?’
The massive wolf inclined his head. ‘Morrigan,’ he said gravely. ‘It is good to see you again.’
‘You learned to talk properly,’ Danny observed.
‘For a start,’ Wily replied.
‘You! You shielded this human’s approach from me, didn’t you? You’re shielding him right now,’ Carman accused Wily. ‘Traitorous dogs … !’
‘Wolves,’ Wily corrected her calmly.
‘Steve, you’re alive!’ Ellie was beaming. She looked as though she wanted to hug him, if it wasn’t for the slight matter of Carman blocking her way.
‘Where’s your da?’ Steve asked, and just like that, Danny’s euphoria was sucked away.
‘He didn’t make it,’ Danny said, after a long pause, in which the only sound was the soft, insistent sound of Carman’s mocking laughter.
‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said, his levity gone now too. His arm tightened, and Carman’s laughter abruptly ceased. He seemed about to say something else, but looked as if he couldn’t quite figure out what it should be. Instead, his eyes flicked to the man standing alongside Danny and Ellie. He frowned, and Danny expected him to ask the obvious question, but he didn’t. He kept on staring, and then his jaw dropped.
‘Ach, you’re fuckin’ shittin’ me,’ he said eventually.
‘It’s really him,’ Ellie nodded, confirming the unspoken question.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Steve said softly, glancing at the other wolf, who was a whisker smaller than Wily but no less fearsome-looking. ‘So that’s what you meant,’ he said, and before Danny could ask, Steve nodded to Luke. ‘All right, big lad?’
‘You’re Steve,’ Luke replied.
Steve looked quite pleased. ‘Remember yer Uncle Steve?’
‘I’ve watched you. You came to my father’s house to drink beer and smoke drugs and try to convince him he was better off before I came along.’
Not for the first time in the last few moments, Steve seemed to be at a loss for words. He looked from adult Luke to Danny, to Ellie, and back to Danny again. Carman, still in his grasp, still being curiously placid, was beginning to smile, a grin so wolfish that Wily would have been hard-pressed to match it.
‘Aye, well. You watched In The Night Garden and thought it was fuckin’ mint, so there’s none of us perfect here,’ Steve shot back.
‘Luke,’ Danny said, finally daring to take his eyes off Carman to turn to his son, spreading his hands in what he hoped was a calming gesture. ‘That doesn’t matter now. All that matters is we figure out some way to put things back the way they–’
‘You had sex with my mother,’ Luke said, still addressing Steve.
– were.
The word died on Danny’s lips as the breath died in his throat. His heart thudded in his chest. He turned back to Steve, and saw that his friend wasn’t looking at him at all, he was looking at Ellie, and Ellie wasn’t looking at anyone, she was staring at the impossible grass beneath their feet in this impossible clearing on this impossible slice of unreality.
Carman closed her eyes. Her lips moved silently. Wily’s head raised and he sniffed the air. ‘She’s calling to them!’ he said urgently.
The wind began to pick up inside the world of the stone circle. It whipped Ellie’s hair around her face and she lifted her hand to brush it away, but still couldn’t meet what she knew would be Danny’s searching gaze. Murmurs began to sound from the periphery of the standing stones, cacklings and rustlings made by approaching creatures. Wily and Larka began to pace agitatedly, growling at the source of the noises, moving their great heads this way and that.
‘They’re coming!’ Wily said again. ‘Morrigan, you must do something!’
‘Steve!’ Larka pleaded.
Their words fell on deaf ears. The four humans only had eyes for one another, and they seemed to have quite forgotten about the witch-goddess in their midst.
‘Did you?’ Danny asked Steve. Tiny sparks of pitch-black energy were crackling from his feet upward, as if he were a lightning rod for an upside-down world. The air began to taste heavy and metallic, a taint Danny would have remembered from his visions as the fingerprint of heavy concentrations of potential magical energy; if he had been thinking clearly at that precise moment. He wasn’t.
Steve licked his lips. Since waking up from that parallel existence he’d lived for a few days, after realising what he’d done while living that other life, he had known this conversation was coming. He began his defence.
‘It was crazy, it wasn’t real. It was a spell, it was bizarro world, a parallel universe, call it whatever Star Trek load of oul balls you want!’ he said. ‘None of us, Danny, including you, were who we really were! Far as I knew, Ellie and I had been together for years! We had a kid together, for fuck’s sake!’
Danny’s attention was now on Ellie. ‘You and him?’
Wily and Larka were running around the group now, bounding in huge leaps, passing over each other to create a constantly patrolled perimeter. Shadows were forming at the spaces between the four great pillars of stone, but there were sources of light in the darkness. The glint of glowing eyes, of teeth. Carman’s lips were still moving. The fingers of black energy around Danny’s legs had climbed as far as his waist now.
Luke watched all of this unfold without moving a muscle, but he had the expression of someone eager to see how this would end.
‘Yeah,’ Ellie nodded, drawing up to full height. ‘So nothing happened between you and Maggie, Danny? Because if you’ve noticed, I haven’t asked.’
‘Guess now I know why,’ Danny replied. Ellie blanched at that.
‘She is manipulating you!’ Larka screamed at them. Leaving Wily to guard the perimeter, she had tried to get closer to Steve, to Danny, to Carman herself, only to find she was unable to come within ten feet of the tightly-grouped bunch. Parked impotently at an invisible border, all she could do was try desperately to attract their attention before it was too late. Carman’s lips were moving so quickly as to be a blur. The energy around Danny was now at shoulder height – a twilight cape swirling faster and faster.
‘Here they come!’ Wily called.
Faeries. Monsters. A moving wall of them, all shapes and sizes, came pouring from between the stones, converging from all sides on the group at its epicentre. Larka gave up on trying to distract the humans and went back to her leader’s side as the faerie army rolled and bounded and lumbered and slimed toward them.
‘I had hopes,’ Larka said, turning to look at Wily. ‘Hopes for us. I have never hoped before, for anything. I liked that feeling.’
> ‘I know,’ Wily replied, dipping his head in apology. ‘I’m sorry.’
The energy had fully enveloped Danny now. His eyes burned with black, endless fire. Steve and Ellie found their mouths could move but no sound could emerge from them. Carman extricated herself from Steve’s grasp and he could make no attempt to recapture her.
She moved to Danny. He ignored her.
‘Perhaps I underestimated you,’ she told him, in a low voice. ‘Perhaps you, after all, are the one I should have given my attention to. Your whole life you’ve wanted to be something more. You’ve been held back by people like these,’ she indicated Ellie and Steve with a contemptuous flick of her head, ‘for far too long. Demonstrate your power.’
She extended a hand and the silver Sword Danny had discarded when refusing to fight his son rose into her grasp. She held it out to him.
The faerie hordes had reached Wily and Larka, who threw themselves into the melee without hesitation, biting and snapping, leaping against creatures that defied description – things that were little more than fangs in the blackness, hunger in the mist. Larka howled as the crest of the faerie wave swallowed her.
Danny took the Sword from Carman’s hand. He stared down at it then at his son. Luke nodded, knowing what his father was about to do, readying himself.
‘Do it,’ Luke said.
Danny called on everything he’d learned. Every ounce of power, every scrap of will he possessed, he took it and he gathered it up inside him. Every betrayal he had suffered, every disappointment, every regret, all of the rage and the hatred. Every time he had felt inadequate, felt like a failure, every time he had burned inside at how things had come to this or how helpless he had felt when they had.
All of these things he took into himself.
All of them he discarded.
The darkness exploded from him, drained into the ground around him as though he had pulled some invisible plug. In its place, light. At first diffuse, an ephemeral heartbeat of illumination, but with every pulse it grew stronger.
Bleeding, dying, bitten by a hundred different mouths, half-consumed by the soulless emptiness of the creatures swarming around them, Wily and Larka felt the light wash over them and felt the creatures weaken, then vanish, as it did.
‘What are you doing?’ Carman screamed in frustration. She lashed out at Danny, and her blow, which looked powerful enough to have split an elephant, was caught mid-downstroke.
‘What you asked him to,’ Luke told her. ‘He’s demonstrating his power,’ and with a shove he pushed his one-time Mitéra away, sending her tumbling end-over-end away from them.
When she rose, all pretence of humanity, of subtlety had fled from her. She dropped her palms to the surface and all of the darkness that had tried to claim Danny as its own abandoned him and redirected itself into her, through her.
Carman grew.
Larka realised she could move. Her wounds throbbed numbly, as if from a distance, somewhere faint and warm. She got to her feet and discovered Wily was doing the same, blinking in the newfound light rising into the air above the Morrigan. His attention was on them, which seemed a remarkable thing, seeing as how the most appalling thing imaginable was rising into existence behind him.
It had too many heads, too many everythings – every persona, human and otherwise, Carman had adopted over the few millennia of her existence. Its stomach, swollen and distended in some grotesque parody of pregnancy, irised open and closed like some great mouth, displaying circular parasitic ranks of teeth, as if offering a return to a womb forged in Hell itself.
‘Get them clear,’ Danny called to the two wolves, indicating the petrified figures of Ellie and Steve. Whether frozen through fear or some supernatural means, it didn’t matter – both were completely immobile, mouths agape, staring in horror-struck terror at the monster unfolding before them.
‘Move them!’ another voice said, trying to shake Larka into action. It was Luke, standing at Danny’s side, weapon ready. Two halves of the same whole. Father and son met each other’s eyes for a moment, as the wolves Danny had freed finally sprang into action and, with a gentleness that belied their savage countenance, picked Ellie and Steve up in their jaws and carried them off, back through the standing stone circle. Once between the stones they vanished entirely from Danny’s view. He exhaled.
Now he and Luke were alone before the still-unfolding Carman-monster. She was thirty feet tall. Now forty. Centuries of waiting and brooding and biding her time were being unleashed in one awesome display of power. Carman was lost to the magical spasms that wracked her body, drawing each ripple of dark power from the twilit world she inhabited. Danny saw the shades of some of her more nightmarish creations spiral back through the standing stones, screaming as they went, their life-forces absorbed into the central mass of their mother.
By now she defied description, a Lovecraftian deity made flesh. If you tried to look at her bloated body as a whole, you could persuade yourself you were looking at a multi-limbed, elastic, wyrm-woman hybrid. Try to focus in on any specific part of her, however, and the mind would shy away, yelping.
When she spoke, from the thousand orifices that dotted her diseased, disgusting body, she did not bother with things as mundane as sound waves. Her words were acid, etching themselves indelibly into the fragile nooks of the mind.
No match. No match for me.
Luke screamed in pain as his black sword, a gift from his Mitéra, dissolved in his hands, its individual particles whipped in the winds and were sucked back into Carman’s still-growing mass. He was defenceless.
The growing stopped. She loomed over them. Even with the Sword of Nuada, even with all that he had learned, Danny felt as though he were about to try and stab a mountain to death.
I am all of my children. I am thousands. I am legion. What hope do you two have?
‘You’d think,’ a new voice said mildly, ‘from way up there, she’d at least be able to count.’
That voice …
‘Daddy?’ Danny said, as if a small child once again.
Tony Morrigan, holding a silver Sword of his own, looked proudly at his son and his grandson. ‘Would you look at you two lads,’ he said softly, gesturing to Luke in particular. ‘I knew it when you were wee. You’ve the look of my da about ye.’
Who brought you back? The creature raged above them, its anger radiating so strongly through the psychic channels it was using to communicate that it caused Danny and Luke to stagger, almost to fall. The skies darkened and cracked. The four monoliths shook. Who?
‘Dunno about that. I think the wee fella must take after his ma,’ another new voice sounded. Dazed both from the psychic assaults from the Carman-monstrosity and from the reappearance of his dead father, it was all Danny could do to redirect his attention towards Luke.
Beside him was another impossible ally. Another silver Sword.
‘Da?’ Tony Morrigan said softly.
‘Son,’ James Morrigan returned. He looked exactly as he’d looked the night he died, not a day older – making him look of a similar age to Tony. He appraised the scene going on around him. ‘Call this a fuckin’ afterlife, do yis?’ he said evenly.
‘Granda?’ Danny said faintly.
Upon seeing this latest arrival, Tony Morrigan did what Danny had been tempted to do himself. He ran forward and embraced his father fiercely.
THIS ENDS NOW!
‘Look out!’ Danny cried. He tried desperately to shove the others aside before Carman’s grotesque bulk could smash down upon them.
‘No.’
The word was spoken softly, yet it reached the ears of all four Morrigans standing there. On Carman, though, that single word seemed to have a more dramatic effect - the seemingly inexorable collapse of her demonic form on top of them was arrested, suddenly, completely. There was an ear-splitting crack, a smell of ozone and burned flesh and, somehow, that hideous bloated mass was repulsed, its attack blunted.
Smoke curled from Carman in great belching
clouds. Her scream of pain and hatred resounded in their minds, increasing in intensity until Danny felt his grip on reality narrow and contract into a pinpoint of consciousness. He was blacking out, his mind squeezed to a pulp by the pressure exerted on it.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
As the voice spoke again, he felt the pressure ease off, and a presence he hadn’t felt in some time settled back into a corner of his mind and curled up there like a dog settling itself by a fire.
Four Morrigans became five.
‘Well,’ the Morrigan – the original version, the Mk1, triple goddess, ex-crow – remarked briskly as she took in the scene around her. ‘What’s the craic, lads?’
‘Who in the name of fuck’s this meant to be?’ Tony said.
‘Tony!’ James snapped, rebuking his middle-aged son for his language.
‘The Morrigan,’ Danny and Luke said, in unison.
‘Well. It’s about fuckin’ time too,’ Tony said.
‘You brought us back,’ James said.
‘Yes. Brought you back and armed you for this battle,’ she said, gesturing to the silver Swords they all carried, save Luke. She nodded in Luke’s direction and a silver Sword appeared in his waiting grip. This time, perhaps because he was attuned for it, Danny felt a slight tug on his own copy of the Sword, as though it were being diluted to create the copies.
‘She’s been working with Carman,’ Luke said. ‘She brought this about. They hatched this plan together.’
Danny felt as though he’d been kicked in the chest. He recoiled from her presence inside his head, and felt her recoil at the same moment.
‘You just love blurting this stuff out, don’t you?’ the Morrigan said, addressing Luke.
‘Is it true?’ Danny managed to ask.
She didn’t bother denying it. Behind her, the Carman-thing had, insofar as these things could be judged with something so hideously misshapen, righted itself after its unexpected setback and was moving toward them once more. Whether weakened by the Morrigan’s initial attack or whether the Morrigan was doing something to time itself, the huge creature’s approach seemed a mite more ponderous than before.
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