by Tim Lebbon
Then, meeting Lilou—realizing that she wasn’t human, and watching as Daley and Celine tried to take her—had changed his life.
Looking back, he realised he should have known. For a while he’d been hearing whispers, seeing things that hinted to him that the relics weren’t just the old, dead things he’d come to believe. That some of them were perhaps still alive. He hadn’t mentioned this to Fat Frederick, who still saw them all as ancient history, but then Mary Rock had approached him via one of her aides, courting his help in the hunt for “a very special object.” He’d met her, agreed to her terms. Even then he’d suspected some far more intricate business was afoot.
He hadn’t been prepared for the killing part.
That moment when he’d first seen Lilou in the shadows—seen her, and known that she wasn’t human—had blown apart his sense of reality. It had gone from a wide open plain where everything was in view, to a land of mountains and hills, valleys and forests, where more was hidden than in sight. Acting to save her life had been purely instinctive.
Chin resting on his chest, head throbbing, blood dripping from some wounds, already drying on others, that moment swept past again and again. He couldn’t imagine it ever having played out any differently, and as memory consumed him and became real—
* * *
Daley and Celine worked for Mary Rock, and they’d known what they were seeking. The real object of the hunt. They’d just never told him. Maybe they still didn’t trust his reaction, and in that they were right.
They had chased the shape through hidden ways deep beneath the city, cornering it at last. Daley had shot the fleeting shadow with the dart gun. It had fallen, squirmed, then laid still. Celine laughed, swept her silver hair back over her shoulder like a flirty girl, then pulled the blades from her belt and advanced on the creature. The girl. Butchery was her intent.
Vince demanded to know what they were doing, and Celine gave him a withering glare.
“You really think this is all about relics?” she asked.
Vince struck Daley across the back of the knees with his carved oak stick, which he brought with him on every relic hunt. It had caved in rats’ skulls, shoved aside floating isles of garbage in fetid sewers, felt the way into dark tunnels, and it was his friend. Now it broke, and Daley roared in rage as he fell. Vince used the sharp end to smack Celine across the throat.
Then he grabbed the shape. She was light, unconscious, and beautiful. As he slung her over his shoulder he fell in love with her, gasping at the foolishness of the thought. Fear was fucking with him.
Celine screamed after him into the darkness, through the tunnels, promising pain and death when she caught him.
The chase. He was the relic hunter, he knew these dark subterranean places well, but they pursued with the promise of blood on their lips. Celine had never liked him. Daley was muscle and hate on legs. If he was going to escape them he’d have to—
The woman woke and started thrashing.
He slipped and fell.
“No, I’m trying to help you,” he said. “I don’t know what you are but—”
She rolled away from him. There were cracked tiles beneath his hands, something roaring in the distance, no human voice. He’d found his way onto an old platform, long-since abandoned. He might have been here before. The signs said “British Museum,” the station empty and falling apart for almost a century. Then he heard it.
A train.
Daley came first, bursting from the shadows and matching the approaching engine’s roar. He charged into Vince and drove him onto his back, so that his head connected with the tiles in a blinding flash, the impact burning away shadows and giving him a white-hot clarity.
These were his last moments. What little light existed was swallowed by the knives in Daley’s hands, making them shine. His head was full of fire.
Vince kicked up and out and his feet sank into the mountain of Daley.
Celine shouted a warning. Maybe her cry caused Daley’s pause, which enabled Vince to piston his arms on the ground and push the huge man up and back. Or maybe he was already falling.
Daley, the brother of Claudette, Mary Rock’s most brutal lieutenant, slipped from the platform and seemed to float there on solid shadows, taking forever to sink down onto the track even as the roar became a scream, warm air squirmed alive through the tunnel and across the unused platform, lights blossomed and blinded. Daley’s scream seemed to become louder than the train’s, even though that was impossible. It rose, swirled, higher than was likely from such a brute, and as the train swept him from the world the scream sounded so like—
* * *
A baby was crying.
It echoed around the old swimming pool, a pained call that grated against Vince’s nerves and grasped his spine, squeezing. A horrible sound.
He jerked in the seat, bindings biting against him and pinching his skin even more. Blood dribbled. The bruises and ruptured skin all across his body sang out, begging him to remain motionless. But snapped out of his dreamlike memory, Vince had to see what came next.
Ballus had spent an hour battering and beating him with rotting body parts, prodding him with the splintered bone, breaking skin and allowing in infection, all the while demanding that he surrender what he knew. Yet somewhere, Vince had discovered a strength he never thought he had. The more he hurt, the less likely he was to tell. Lilou smiled in his mind’s eye, and he couldn’t find it in himself to betray her trust. He never would.
She and her kind could have killed him, after all.
The scream came again. Closer and louder, and Vince could tell that it wasn’t actually human after all. He was glad for that, but also more terrified. If not human, then what?
He heard Ballus’s pounding hooves before he saw him. The satyr ran into view at the far end of the hall, down by the deep end where dead things festered. Weak sunlight pierced the smashed high-level windows and slanted across the big space, some of it filtered green through the weeds that had taken root across the deserted building’s roofline. Spears of light illuminated the big man-goat as he ran closer, making it difficult to discern the struggling shape he carried under one arm.
Ballus was laughing. His voice went high as a little girl’s, then low as mud. He sang and grumbled, and as he drew closer, Vince could see the delight on his face.
He kicked aside the rotten limbs of impossible creatures, then stood just ten feet away, strong and upright as if waiting for praise from a proud parent. A fox thrashed and snapped beneath his right arm. Ballus barely seemed to notice.
“Dinner?” Vince asked.
“Now there’s an idea,” Ballus said. He flung the fox up with his right hand, caught it with both, and then squeezed. The animal yelped with that horribly human voice once again. Blood pattered across cracked floor tiles. Ballus grimaced, his muscles bulged, and he tugged hard.
With a cry that bit into Vince’s heart, the fox was ripped in two. Fur stretched and tore, steaming insides drooped down, bleeding things splashing on tiles and flesh long-since rotten. The warm stench of death filled the air, but to Vince it was like a fresh breath. It overlaid the scent of decay.
“Huh!” Ballus grunted, dropping both parts of the ruined animal at his feet. He performed a grotesque jig, hooves stomping down and ripping more flesh, crushing more bone. Then he stood on the animal’s back end, bent down, and tore off its tail.
“This is done, isn’t it? This is one of your weird human customs.”
He came toward Vince with the tail, once bushy, now heavy with gore and shit. Vince flinched back, but he had nowhere to go. Ballus slapped the tail back and forth across his face.
He tasted blood and faeces, smelled it, felt its warmth. It entered his eyes, turning his whole world red, but Vince did not gag. He grew angry, and that was something he was doing his best to grab hold of. Though terrified and disgusted, shocked and sickened, through all of this it was the anger that might save him.
“They’re coming!” Ballus
said. He was pacing now, kicking aside the dead things he had used to abuse and torture his prisoner. He seemed unconcerned with the question he had been asking again and again—Where are they?—and the anxiety was a hot ball in Vince’s stomach.
“Who’s coming?”
Ballus scooped up part of the dead fox and shook it close to Vince’s face, laughing. “Them! Looking for me, looking for you, lambs to the slaughter.” He paused, head tilted to one side as he mused, “It really couldn’t have gone any better.”
Vince spat blood from his mouth. His lips were split, burning, and he couldn’t tell whose blood he was swallowing. He supposed it didn’t really matter. Ballus would kill him soon, and he’d end up in that rancid water, rotting down into a mulch with creatures that should not be.
All these discoveries should have been wonderful, but right then nothing was.
Suddenly it stopped.
“Sorry to say, we’ve got to leave this place,” Ballus announced.
“But I was just starting to like it here.”
“You’re joking with me?” The satyr leaned in close, his strange face chipped from harsh stone. Then he laughed out loud. Vince could only close his eyes and turn aside.
Ballus disappeared behind him and grabbed the back of the chair, tilting it backward and dragging it across the pool floor. The legs screeched against the tiles, jolting now and then when they hit a broken one.
Birds took flight up in the roof space, flitting from metal supports and then darting through smashed windows. Yet they must have heard much worse before, and Vince wondered why any of them had ever come back. He tilted his head and looked up at the back of Ballus’s head. The satyr was mumbling to himself, words that Vince couldn’t quite hear or understand. He found no hope of escape. Even if he could slip his bonds, the beast had just ripped a live animal apart with his bare hands.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked through swollen lips.
“It’s complicated.”
With a single heave, Ballus lifted Vince and the chair out of the pool and onto the poolside. Climbing to join him, he grabbed the chair and continued on his way. Moments later they passed out of the hall, along a darkened corridor, and into a lobby area.
Boarding had been placed across the wide front doors and windows, and Ballus passed them by. The floor was undamaged here. The chair slid almost noiselessly, and Vince actually relaxed back into the tilted seat, his wounds and bruises protesting but his tiredness embracing the opportunity to recline.
They entered a large room containing old, rusted pool machinery, then Ballus started descending a staircase. The chair thumped down onto the metal treads, each impact reminding Vince of every wound the satyr had given him. There were many. His clothes were wet with blood, and it was all he could do not to scream each time.
At the bottom of the stairs Ballus paused, kicked open a heavy metal door, and started down again. More thudding, creaking as the chair struggled beneath the impacts, and Vince closed his eyes. He remembered the many amazing things he had seen and accepted over the years, and the wonder he’d felt realizing that Lilou was one of them. A living one.
Ballus, too. Him and his pool of dead creatures that few people would understand, even if they were ever found.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked again. For a while Ballus did not reply. They descended into shadowy basements, then out through a door and along a corridor that appeared to be hacked into raw stone. The satyr grabbed a flashlight from somewhere, and then came a brick-lined tunnel, with a long slope heading steadily downward. Light danced, and Ballus’s shadow bulged and stretched back the way they had come.
“Because I’m going to be the last of the Kin.”
His voice was calmer than Vince had yet heard, though he sounded at his maddest.
“I’m going to be famous.”
* * *
Angela hated the idea of telling anyone where she was. She’d made such an effort to lose any followers that to give away her location seemed like a backward step. But she also knew that she couldn’t do any of this on her own. She was desperate to find Vince, but she had to face the sobering fact that she had to determine where to begin.
So in the end, she had to sit in the cyber café, drinking more coffee and eating a second slice of cake, until Dean called her back. Her phone was on silent, but there were already seven missed calls. It was the same number every time, not recognised. Having lost her, it seemed her followers were eager to regain contact.
Finally Dean’s number showed up on the screen. Leaving the café, she stopped at a small shop to buy some new clothes, because wearing someone else’s felt wrong. The light jacket fitted her better, the summer hat shadowed her features, and wearing a skirt for the first time in years felt strange, but good. She looked less like herself than she had in a long time.
Even so, she felt eyes upon her.
Years of research into the criminal mind had revealed some secrets of covert observation, and she knew just how dangerous electronic communications might be. Internet, email, texting, phone calls, online messenger, Skyping, and Internet calls—all of them were tied into a web that any skilled pursuer might be able to penetrate. When Dean told her his intended meeting place, she’d imagined Claudette and Harry sitting in a car somewhere, wearing small headphones and smiling as they closed a laptop and started the engine.
So she was especially careful as she approached the west entrance to the shopping mall. The streets were busy, a riot of colour and movement, with cars lining up, buses puffing diesel clouds, and pedestrians weaving singular routes through the chaos. Some of them chatted with friends, others walked on their own, focused and alone. A few stroked smartphone screens as they went, somehow managing to avoid colliding with others or being run over.
Angela watched them all from where she stood at a bus stop, and there was no sign of anyone she recognised. If Mary Rock’s people had somehow found her again, they were keeping their pursuit well hidden.
She stepped away from the bus line, crossed the road with a group of people, then walked through the swinging doors into the mall. It was warm inside, and ringing with the sounds of shoppers going about their business. A street musician plucked Beatles numbers from his acoustic guitar, drawing a small crowd. A gang of teenagers slouched in seats outside an ice cream parlor, taking selfies and laughing, and she wondered why they weren’t in school and why no one was asking them. Probably most people thought they were someone else’s problem, and right then so did she.
Last thing she wanted was to draw attention to herself.
Two escalators rose to the second floor, and beside them was an electronic store locator. She tapped in “Gregg’s” and studied the screen’s map, then continued onward. The bakery was at the far end, and the man wanted to meet her there, but not inside.
“They won’t want me in there,” he’d said, and she was curious as to why. Perhaps he was even more cautious than her.
She left the mall through the eastern doors. Gregg’s was busy, and shoppers spewed out into a large landscaped area with benches, fountains, several felt-smooth lawns and a few copses of trees offering precious shade. The day was growing warmer, and Angela hadn’t had a drink in hours.
Standing outside the mall she felt a chill, a deep shiver that would usually make her comment to Vince, “Someone just walked over my grave.” But not today. She didn’t want to say that today. Coming to meet a stranger, with no one knowing where she was, was something she’d have never contemplated just a couple of days ago. How quickly a life could change.
“Fairy,” a voice said, and when she turned around a man was sitting on a bench watching her. He was scruffy and old, with straggly gray hair and wrinkles deep enough to park a bike in. Although he appeared confused, she could perceive a deeper truth in his eyes. He wore his age as a disguise, and couldn’t camouflage his simmering intelligence.
He glanced around and held out his hand.
Angela pulled a couple of pound
coins from her pocket and gave them to him. He had a large wheeled suitcase, and she wondered what it contained. He wore a shabby old coat, and for a panicked moment she thought it might hide wings, or scales, or fur. Still, he looked so very human.
“You seem nervous,” he said.
“Mary Rock’s people are looking for me.”
His eyes went wide. “That bitch?”
“You know her?” She’d spoken without thinking, and wondered whether she’d made a mistake. The woman’s reach must go far, and she had no idea who it encompassed. Claudette, Harry, Vince… this man?
“I know something of her business.” He almost spat the last word. He looked around, even shiftier and more cautious than before. “Come on, we can’t talk out in the open. You’re sure they’re not still following you?”
No, she thought, but she nodded.
“Good. Come on then. Pretend you’re buying me a meal.” He rose, groaning and taking a while to stand. His joints clicked and creaked, and she saw just how old he was. “Actually, don’t just pretend. A pasty would go down a treat right now.”
Before they could move to the bakery, though, it all came pouring out.
“My boyfriend worked for her, and now he’s vanished,” Angela said. “She says he kills them. Butchers them for their parts. Like relics. And I think she wants to kill him for that, and she has a fairy she’s protecting in her basement, and—”
“Protecting?” His surprise was evident, his voice edged with anger.
Angela frowned.
Someone grabbed her arm, tight, and started pulling her away from him.
Angela fisted her hand and swung around. She seemed to be watching and experiencing this moment from somewhere else. She felt the grip on her arm, saw the old man’s surprise, and swung her whole body into the punch. She hadn’t struck anyone in anger in over twenty years, since she’d had a fight in school back in Boston.
Her fist connected with the woman’s shoulder, a glancing blow. Expecting to see Claudette or Harry there, she was surprised when the punch had little effect, and woman squeezed her arm harder. She was short and slight, with exotic features and piercing eyes. The sight gave Angela pause.