‘Go where?’
‘I don’t know. To a supermarket.’
‘There’s no power.’
‘Tins and all that shit will be grand for a while yet.’
‘And pay with what?’
‘Who’s paying?’
Silence.
‘So this is it. This is how we’re going to live now.’
‘What other way is there? We’ve no power. No electricity. The guns don’t work.’
‘And the sun is never coming up.’
‘Ach, the fuck with this,’ the older man moved off the steps he’d been sitting on. ‘I have to go. I’ve kids. They’re sitting in the dark around candles and I’m sitting here guarding twenty stupid fuckers with no more power than I have. World’s changed. Whatever old life we had, it’s gone. Gone. We need to–’
‘Ssssh,’ said the woman.
‘Don’t you ssssh me,’ the man bristled.
‘Look.’
They looked in the direction the woman was pointing. At the beginning of the driveway, one mile distant, a pair of lamp-posts, positioned on either side of the drive, were sputtering and flickering into dim life. At this distance, they were no bigger than fireflies, but they were the most beautiful sight any of them had ever seen.
The second pair of lamp-posts began to illuminate.
The third.
‘Something’s coming,’ the woman said, matter-of-factly. ‘They’re bringing the power with them.’
‘We’d better tell them,’ said the younger man, and he ran off inside to do just that.
The two left behind looked at each other, and then back at the steady progression of the lights, a line of illumination growing longer and longer, heading straight towards the big house on top of the hill, its inhabitants … and its guards.
‘What is it?’ the older man croaked. ‘I can’t see. Can you see?’
‘I can see,’ the woman replied, still maddeningly calm. ‘It’s a woman.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Get her inside,’ the older man said. ‘She’s out there on her own. She must be terrified.’
His colleague shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No, I don’t think she is.’
REGENT STREET, BELFAST ABOVE, NOW
Luke was showing little in the way of ill effects. He was his old baby self, so far as Danny and Ellie could make out – same genial little personality, same capacity for loud squeals of excitement prompted by not a great deal. Same uncanny accuracy with urine.
Admittedly, however, there were some small differences.
‘He’s not going over,’ Ellie said. She was sitting in their bedroom in a chair beside the cot. The bed, fully three feet from the cot, had been quickly deemed as being much too far away, hence the evolution of the cot-chair. Ellie, knowing that Luke was unlikely to sleep with his mummy’s face looming over him, had ensured she was out of his line of sight, but it wasn’t helping.
Danny sighed. Gar-gah the ex-hippo was already in there. They’d wound the mobile fifteen times. It was approaching 1 a.m. Police and media helicopters whirled overhead, as they had for the past day and a half. He had a bastard headache.
‘Do it,’ he said.
And so, seconds later, the first strains of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ began to filter through into the bedroom.
Luke’s limbs splayed. Gar-gah was callously discarded, impacting the back wall of the cot with a moist splaf and slowly sliding down in a sodden heap. Luke’s breathing increased; his little chest rising and falling, his head jerking from side to side, tiny little feet beating the mattress in what, if you were inclined to believe such things, would be more or less perfect time with the thumping bassline.
They’d discovered the effects of this song quite by accident earlier this afternoon. As she always did in times of stress, Ellie had turned to loud and angry rock music. Luke, still in her arms at the time, had lain there peacefully enough throughout most of her selections. For this song, though …
Danny glanced across at Ellie. He knew she was as tired as he was, but she gave him a wan grin and even managed to make the universal symbol of rock with her fingers, which made him laugh silently and reach out to touch her hand.
He glanced back into the cot. Luke Morrigan, the Chosen One, all of eight months old, was drifting peacefully off to sleep as if the song pounding through the room was ‘Brahms’ Lullaby’.
His little eyes finally closed, his chest rose and fell steadily, deeply. Danny reached out and touched his son’s cheek. There seemed little point in wondering what was going on in there. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to know. It was enough that he was able to reach out, that his son had been returned to him. He’d paid a price for that, a price so high it terrified him even to think of it.
A price he’d pay again in a heartbeat.
Ellie switched off the song, slightly disturbed that her son found so much comfort in lyrics about watching for things in the darkness, and sleeping lightly for fear they would come for you in the night.
‘Never thought I’d fuckin’ miss “The Wheels on the Bus”,’ she muttered.
WASHINGTON DC, NOW
The command was given. The keys were turned. The button pressed.
One more job.
REGENT STREET, BELFAST ABOVE, NOW
Wonder of wonders, Ellie was asleep beside him. Danny shifted, causing her to stir slightly and mumble something incoherent, before she resettled. He lay there, beside her in their bed, just taking a moment. Just one moment. It wasn’t too much to ask for, after all he’d been through. On trips through time and through dimensions, in seeing his father’s past and Ireland’s ancient history and meeting mythic washerwomen and creating entire universes, this was what he’d fought for, wasn’t it? The right to not be doing those things.
The strangeness of it all ate away at him. For hours he’d been unable to decide why he felt so strange, and then a few hours ago he’d come to something of an epiphany. It was because things were continuing. In the back of his mind, he’d been expecting end credits to roll, the word ‘Fin’ to appear. The events he’d been through were so outlandish, so shattering, that for real life ever to return seemed one miracle too far. And yet if real life, if nappies and bedtime rituals and worries about paying for oil never returned, what the fuck had it all been for?
He couldn’t stop thinking about Steve, about his father. Mired down there, in a dark reflection of this world – a partitioned shadow of Ireland that ran on magic and where death was only a momentary inconvenience. Would he ever see them again?
The bedroom television was on in the background, volume turned down to a fraction above mute. The murmur of voices used to always help Luke get to sleep. Danny was just grateful that Ellie had finally relaxed enough to get some sleep of her own.
‘What about us?’ she had asked him, before she had gone to sleep.
‘Us?’
‘Everything we’ve been through. I feel like I’m supposed to cuddle up to you and give you some sort of speech about how I’ve realised how you and I are meant to be together and how nothing’s ever going to change that. Then we kiss and everything’s fine, forever.’
He kissed the top of her head. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘All I know, all I can say for absolute certain is that I remember – when things changed – I remember how wrong it felt to feel someone else’s head on me, lying where you are right now. I know that’s not some grand speech that makes everything okay, but–’
She shook her head. ‘You eejit,’ she said softly. ‘It kinda does. I love you too.’
Those had been the last words she had uttered before sleep had claimed her, and that had been almost three hours ago now.
There was a knock at the front door. Loud, insistent.
Amazingly, given her jumpiness and overprotective mania, Ellie still had not stirred. Luke likewise remained flat out. But it wasn’t going to be possible to just lie there and ignore it and, c’mon, what evil fae
rie worth its salt was going to knock on the front door?
Gently, he extricated himself from the duvet and, stepping carefully so as not to disturb his sleeping girlfriend and son, quickly pulled on jeans, trainers and a T shirt. If it was a faerie demon, fuckin’ sure he wasn’t going to face it au naturel or wearing a fluffy blue Eeyore robe.
It wasn’t a faerie.
‘Danny,’ Brigadier Hughes said. If Danny thought the man had looked haggard when they’d first met – cut off from the rest of the human race and armed with non-functioning guns – it was nothing compared to how he looked now.
‘Brigadier? What’s wrong?’
‘They don’t understand what’s happening here! When we told them what we’d seen it only made things worse! Olympus …’
Well, here it was. Danny had known the other shoe would drop sometime; he just hadn’t expected it to be this soon. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
After the Otherworld and the Dagda’s Cauldron, Lircom Tower and the battle with Carman, whatever the man had to tell him couldn’t possibly be that bad.
*
From launch silos across America and Russia, the missiles emerged, trailing fire into the skies. Calculations had established that it would take two hundred and seventeen warheads with a five-megaton yield to effectively carpet-bomb the surface area of Ireland into a radioactive quagmire from which nothing would grow for thousands of years.
England and France had, not surprisingly, raised a few issues with this approach but the response from the rest of the world was swift.
It was the only way to be sure.
IRELAND BELOW, NOW
‘Hello,’ Carman said. Her face was being broadcast on all TV channels, her voice simulcast on all radio frequencies. Every television and radio in the land had switched itself on to tune itself in. She was sitting, not on a faerie throne, not in a standing stone circle, but in a place they all recognised. She was in Stormont, in a room of wood panels and blue carpets. She was looking particularly human. She wore no otherworldly attire, merely a modest gold circlet around her head and what looked like a very businesswoman-esque light green jacket.
She was sitting in the speaker’s chair.
As if to acknowledge her appearance and setting, she smiled disarmingly into the camera. ‘I realise this method of communication is a little different to the one I used before,’ she said, inclining her head with a slight grimace, almost as if she were acknowledging an error on her part. ‘Well, what can I say? I’m learning. And I have a lot to learn.’
Her expression hardened slightly, but only slightly. ‘We all do,’ she said. ‘Like it or not – and I’m sure, for all of you watching me out there, it’s not – you’re my guests down here. Some of you chose this. Most of you didn’t. All of you will be wondering just what exactly you’re in for. I’ll admit that, until recently, things didn’t look too bright, did they? Our worlds are so different. Yours runs on technology, on electricity. Mine has none of these things.’
She smiled. ‘You’re probably wondering how you’re watching me now if I’m telling you electricity doesn’t exist down here. The reason is because your technology, your televisions, your fridges, your iPods, every little gadget you’ve come to surround yourself with over the last hundred years or so – I have reconfigured them to run on something else, an alternative source of power. Magic. This world runs on magic,’ she smiled.
‘I’d hazard a guess that until very recently, most of you would have been convinced magic was fiction. Now you know better. But what you know is only the beginning. Where you came from the magic has been running out, winding down. Up there, it’s almost gone. But down here, well, down here, you’ll see that things are quite different. Magic is unlike anything you know. It’s more than a source of power. It’s clean. It’s’ – she paused, but only for half a heartbeat, a pause easy to miss – ‘limitless. I’m not only piping it into your homes, so you can use it to power all of the things you’ve grown dependent upon. I’m giving it to you. All of you. I’m giving you all back something that was taken from you hundreds of years before any of you were even born. Something you all miss terribly, without even knowing what it is, without even knowing why.’
Hearing her words, in homes all over the country, Carman’s new subjects, over one million souls strong, sensed that if there was to be a but anywhere in this speech, it was imminent. Hands tightened around other hands, or gripped chairs. Children were clutched. No-one could look away from those eyes, those perpetually calm and never-blinking eyes staring back at them from their televisions.
Never one to disappoint, Carman told them exactly what she wanted in return.
‘Your leaders,’ she said, and the camera panned around to take in the assembled ranks of politicians, all sitting emotionlessly, ‘have been wise. They have asked me to assume responsibility for the well-being of all the souls on this island. You once prayed to a distant and unfeeling God who never answered those prayers. All I ask is that once a day, you pray to a goddess who will never fail to.’
BELGRAVIA AVENUE, BELFAST BELOW, NOW
The transmission ended.
‘Is she takin’ the piss?’ Steve said. ‘Pray to her?’
Wily’s voice was emotionless. ‘Look around you, Steve. She’s brought back electricity. Light. Methods of communication.’
Despite his best attempts not to, Steve thought of that moment inside the standing stone circle when Carman had changed from woman-shaped and humanoid to something so far beyond his worst fears he suspected – hoped – that it would take his nightmares a while to catch up.
‘She runs on belief. She’s powered by worship,’ Wily said. ‘Before long, she’ll have more power than she’s ever had.’
‘To do what?’ Tony wondered aloud. ‘She swore an oath to stay away from the surface world, an oath she can’t break no matter how much power she gets.’
‘The oath cannot be broken,’ Wily said. ‘But it can be withdrawn. Only by the same person who made her swear it in the first place.’
‘Danny?’ Tony shook his head. ‘Why the hell would Danny ever do that?’
LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST ABOVE, NOW
The doors to Dother’s office at the top of the (still very much in existence) Lircom Tower were thrown open with such force that they shattered.
‘Do come in,’ Dother, sitting at his desk, said mildly.
‘Surprised to see you back here, boss,’ Danny said. ‘Thought you’d had enough of it all?’
‘Oh, I have,’ Dother replied.
‘Then what are you doing here?’
‘One last job,’ the man formerly known as Mr Black replied. He was looking at Danny in a way the younger man couldn’t quite decipher. Gone was the malice and the hunger. In its place was something that could almost be mistaken for desperation. He had the nagging feeling Dother was trying to communicate with him without speaking aloud. The pity was, he hadn’t time for games.
‘Where’s the Sword?’ Danny said. ‘She promised she’d send it back. I’m betting she was stupid enough to send it right here.’
Dother pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed readily, and reached under the desk, hefting and sliding an object across the ornate surface. ‘Nail on the head there.’
‘The fuck is this meant to be?’
‘This,’ Dother said, indicating the charred, burnt-out sliver of metal, ‘is the Silver Sword of Nuada. Well, what’s left of it. You juiced it up nicely once upon a time, but resurrecting all those people, splitting a landmass in two and throwing the original back through a portal … well, it takes its toll.’
Danny lifted the remnants of the once nigh-omnipotent relic. Dother wasn’t lying, he could have sensed it if he was. He discarded the ruin of the Sword with disgust. So much for that part of the plan.
‘After all this, our own people are gonna blow us all to fuck?’ Danny said. Ellie was right behind him, baby Luke bundled up in her arms.
‘So you’ve heard? The news
leaked moments ago,’ Dother said, pointing to himself casually with a thumb. ‘Can’t think who may have released it to the masses. Twitter is abuzz with horror. Rest assured I’m unfollowing several world leaders in protest.’
With a flick of his arms, Danny sent the ornate desk tumbling end-over-end until it crashed against the thick glass of the windows of the Lircom Tower penthouse. He grabbed his former CEO by the lapels of his expensive suit, so that his feet no longer touched the ground and strode purposefully to the windows he had just weakened.
‘If you’re asking for a pay rise,’ Dother remarked, ‘I fear you may have left it a little late.’
‘Do not fuck me about,’ Danny said. ‘I didn’t go through hell over the last few days with the family Faerie just so we could all come back up here and be nuked. Stop it.’
As he spoke, he pushed Dother against the glass. The cracks in the windows spread from the pressure exerted by Dother’s body.
‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Dother managed.
Danny stretched out his hand and Dother’s phone leapt through the air and dropped neatly into his palm.
‘Get yer ma on the phone. Now,’ Danny said. ‘We need to talk.’
BELGRAVIA AVENUE, BELFAST BELOW, NOW
In Tony Morrigan, Steve knew he’d found someone else who had experienced every single toe of the kick in the balls the last few days had been.
After Carman’s television address, they had debated long into the night about what their next move would be. Steve had contributed, at first, but more and more he’d found himself lapsing into silence. Now, he was just staring blankly out of the window.
It was too much to take in. He’d lost his best friend, lost his entire way of life. In the course of that crazy night when Belfast had gone to hell, when he’d charged around with Larka like some sort of knight on wolfback, it had been … well, it had been fucking terrifying, but he’d felt energised, like he was part of something, making a difference. Killing those things and protecting Maggie – well, it was proper caveman stuff, wasn’t it? A far cry from clocking in for a nine to five job, slaving over a hot network setup for some faceless small business.
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