by Tim Lebbon
“Where?” he demanded as Angela topped the staircase. His attention switched to Jilaria Bran and again he asked, “Where?”
“Through there,” Jilaria said, pointing at the simple wooden door in the far wall. “I hear her.”
“It’s reinforced,” Angela said. “Metal with an electronic lock.”
Mallian was breathing quickly. His dark skin glimmered in the night, speckled with a thousand droplets that might have been sweat, or moisture from the outside air. He stank, too, exuding an odour of excitement and exertion. Though naked, there was nothing at all vulnerable about him. He was terrifying.
“Are there other ways in?” Jilaria asked, and Angela felt the power of the Kin’s withering attention. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the last time she’d passed through this door.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Inside, there’s a pit for the fairy, a platform…”
Someone approached them up the staircase. The footsteps were rapid but gentle, and Angela backed away, pressing herself against the wall beside where Mallian crouched. She felt the cool night air flooding through the hole smashed in the roof, and smelled burning from outside.
Where are the sirens? she wondered. Where’s the help?
Lilou appeared at the head of the staircase.
“Lucy?” Angela asked.
“Safe. Shaken. She’s downstairs, waiting.” Behind Lilou came Fat Frederick, groaning in pain with each breath, yet hanging on her every word. He held his gun by his side in his right hand. His left dripped blood. Vince was there, too. He caught Angela’s eye and nodded once.
That was good enough for now.
“I feel attention on the house,” Jilaria Bran said, shivering, though with fear or delight, it was difficult to tell. “Several sets of eyes, from a distance.”
“The police will be coming,” Angela said. “We need to hurry.”
“Mhoumar,” Mallian said. A shadow moved across the jagged opening in the roof, and the indistinct face of the winged Kin appeared. Mallian whispered something, then looked back at the others. “Wait here. Get ready.” Then he hauled himself back up through the hole, kicked his legs and was gone.
There was long enough for Angela and Vince to smile at each other before the banging began. The impacts were huge, shaking the whole attic, plaster and dust falling from the sloping ceiling and floorboards jumping.
“What’s through there?” Fat Frederick shouted, pointing at the door. Vince said something to him and the big man nodded, crouching down and aiming his gun.
Lilou came close and pressed her mouth to Angela’s ear.
“We have to talk about what comes next.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mallian is tired of hiding,” Lilou said. “Jilaria is with him. The others… I’m not so sure, but when we rescue Her, we need to melt away. This house is the center of attention now, people will be coming, lots of people, and we need to avoid them.”
Angela nodded. The police and fire brigade would arrive, finding bodies downstairs, discovering those diners still present and what they had been prepared to dine upon. Lilou might pass for human, but Jilaria Bran was so obviously something else, and Thorn, and Mallian himself.
“Does he want to reveal you all?” she asked.
“He wants Ascent,” Lilou replied. “Humans ousted, Kin superior. Violently, if necessary, and I’m afraid that She might help.”
“But there are so few of you,” Angela said, pulling away to look at Lilou.
The nymph’s expression said, If only you knew.
Then there was shouting, a whoomph and a flash of fire from beyond the hole in the roof, and a heavy thud as something dropped into the room beyond.
Immediately the wooden door burst, pushed outward by the metal door beneath. It slammed into the wall, plaster and wood exploding all around.
The fire from the other room was sucked through with the pressurised air, and Angela and Lilou dropped together. Angela covered her eyes and curled into a ball, feeling the heat wash over her and her skin tightening, smelling singed hair and spilled fuel, drawing in a scared breath and instantly terrified that it would scorch her lungs.
A gun fired. Someone shouted.
Another voice screamed.
Angela rolled against the wall and risked a look.
She glimpsed a shape leaping for the narrow staircase, taking advantage of their shock and surprise. Vince was close by, reaching for the fleeing figure, just failing to clasp the trailing jacket. It might have been Claudette, but Angela wasn’t sure.
There was a grunt and Fat Frederick was on his back, both hands clasped to his chest.
Vince went to follow the retreating figure, but Jilaria blocked his way. He flinched back, careful not to touch her. She didn’t even need to speak.
She stared past Vince toward the burning room.
Flames danced and roared inside, but there was something curious about them that took Angela a couple of seconds to understand. Lilou held her arm and helped her up, staring only toward the doorway. The fire was reflected in her eyes.
The flames flowed and rose like waxy balls in a lava lamp, breaking against the ceiling and rolling across it, missing the hole smashed through the roof and washing up against the walls. Once there it dropped and formed across the floor once more, boiling and pulsing yet apparently under complete control.
Angela shuffled sideways to Vince, and together they looked through the open doorway at what was happening beyond. They held hands. She thought perhaps she might have gone mad without that simple, human contact.
Mallian knelt among the flames, seemingly untouched where they broke against his body,
parting and disintegrating into a thousand separate fires. He held Mary Rock with one hand, squeezing her throat so tightly that her eyes bulged, and her tongue, and blood flowed from her ears. She might have already been dead, but Mallian’s attention was fixed not on her, but on the creature in the pit.
In his other hand he held a nest of wires that spat sparks of electricity. He tugged on the wires and they broke through from inside the wall, chunks of plaster pattering down among the slow-moving, globular flames.
Angela stepped into the smashed doorway so that she could see better, and Vince went with her.
The fairy was climbing slowly from the pit, her electrical bindings broken. She looked like a child, terribly pale and malnourished, naked and vulnerable. Their eyes met, and Angela had never in her life sensed such power in a living thing. Her gaze was pained, but held total assurance, complete confidence in herself and her old, old soul.
The fairy lifted a hand and the flames curled around it like puppies drawn to their mother.
Mallian hefted Mary Rock high.
“No!” Angela breathed. “Killing her won’t be justice.”
He paused, staring right at her. “My justice,” he said, and he heaved her over the barrier, down into the pit where she had imprisoned the fairy for so long.
“She lives!” Jilaria whispered from somewhere behind Angela. To her left Lilou said, “Beautiful… beautiful.”
Angela wasn’t so sure. There was beauty in the fairy, in every movement and moment, but also something that scared her more than anything she’d seen or experienced over the past couple of days. It was like staring into the depths of a nuclear reactor, and realizing that thing was alive.
Mallian knelt before the fairy. She approached him and put her small arms around his big neck. For a moment Angela thought he would lift her, like a parent holding a sick child, but there came a pause. Even the fire curling around the fairy’s hand and body drew back and hung in the air like glaring mist. She whispered something to Mallian, and he smiled.
Then the fairy let go and turned around. Looked into the pit. Pointed.
“No!” Mary Rock croaked through her damaged throat. Her first word, and her last. The fire returned to its normal, natural state and flowed into the pit, consuming the woman and cauterizing her first awful
scream into little more than an echo.
Angela turned away. Fat Frederick was on the floor behind them, watching through the pain. Both hands were holding the blade Claudette had slammed into his chest as she made her escape.
That was meant for Vince, Angela thought.
He caught her eye, and she saw the flames reflected there. He blinked slowly, and Angela wished she could extinguish the sights from her memory so easily.
The stink of burning flesh tainted the air.
“She’s gone,” Vince said. “The fairy’s gone, up through the roof.”
“It’s over,” Angela said. “We need to go. We have to—”
“Mallian, no,” Lilou said. Mallian squeezed through the open doorway, slapping at his shoulder where the now-normal fire had taken hold. His skin was red. He seemed unconcerned. He came for them, and Angela knew that she and Vince could do nothing, not a thing, to stop him from cutting them down.
After all this, she thought, but the Nephilim was not coming for them. He shoved them aside, planted one foot either side of the fallen Meloy, and reached for the hole in the attic roof.
“Mallian!” Lilou shouted.
Mallian glanced down at the nymph, smiling, then hauled himself through.
“What’s happening?” Angela asked.
“Exactly what I feared,” Lilou said. “They want to leave their mark.”
29
They gathered in the ground-floor hallway with fire crackling high in the house above them and smoke heavy on the air. Outside, several vehicles were burning. Inside, Kris’s corpse lay in a puddle of blood. Lucy was slumped beside the closed front door, hugging her knees, shivering, crying.
Angela was shocked by the sight of her friend. She held her left arm out from her body, nails ripped away. Her hair had been hacked. Harsh lines were cut across her right cheek, close together so that they could not be stitched. She was covered in blood, stark and fresh, and dried dark. When Angela walked over she looked up, then lowered her head again without speaking.
“You’re safe,” Angela whispered, but she couldn’t really promise that it was the case. In fact, she was far less certain now than she had ever been before. They had been inside the building for ten minutes, and with the explosions and fires, the police would be here soon.
Mallian had climbed down the building’s exterior and entered the sumptuous dining room. There he stood, blocking their view of what had him frozen to the spot. Gently touching his scarred back, Lilou squeezed in past him. Jilaria Bran went next. Thorn was still in there, singing his song to bewitch the late Mary Rock’s guests.
Behind where she and Vince stood in the large hallway, Angela heard Fat Frederick making his cautious descent of the staircase, gasping with every step. She should have been amazed that he could walk with a knife in his chest, but nothing amazed her now. Maybe he’d been lucky and Claudette’s knife had missed everything vital. Or maybe he was a dead man walking.
There was no sign of the fairy. She might have been outside in the cool darkness, hiding with Mhoumar.
“Mallian, we have to leave,” Lilou said from inside the dining room. “This doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the Nephilim echoed. He was so tall that Angela couldn’t see his head.
“You know what I mean. Mallian, I’ve been with you for so long, followed you, schemed with you about how best to survive. You know no one will believe them. They’ll be found in a burning house with dead people inside, and even if they try to tell what they were doing here, they’ll be ridiculed. We’ll take away the evidence and—”
“Evidence!” the fallen angel roared. Angela felt her guts sink, her skin tingle with a rush of ice-cold blood through her veins. She had never heard such a voice, and she truly believed she was never meant to. Behind her, Lucy began to cry with deep, throbbing gasps. When the echoes of Mallian’s shout died away, Thorn had fallen silent.
No one spoke. There was no answer to such an exhalation of rage.
Vince moved forward, toward the doors. Angela snagged his jacket with one hand, but she didn’t hold him back. Instead she went with him, because his fascination had become her own. They’d come this far, and to not see now would be to deny themselves the full truth.
As they reached the wide double doorway Mallian moved forward into the room. He skirted around the large, long dining table and stood by a curtained window, the reflections of flames from outside casting his huge shadow across the beginnings of the feast.
Around the table sat five men and three women. They were dressed in evening wear, and they all looked confused, glancing around as if suddenly waking in a strange place. Also present was the chef, and he looked terrified.
Thorn stood on the chair at the far end of the table. His mischievous glint had vanished, and his face was pale and grim.
Angela remembered the awful sights that had greeted them in the kitchen, but nothing could have prepared her for this.
The large table was set for a grand feast with crystal glasses, silver cutlery, and antique candelabras. Candles burned, oily smoke curling ceiling-ward. The lighting in the dining room was low, but complemented by the candlelight and the flames from outside, it was more than enough to illuminate the table’s central feature.
A cooking pit had been built there, lined with gas flares on low, an automatic spit slowly turning above it. On the spit was a man. He must have been cooking for some time, because his body was hairless, skin a rich, crispy red. His legs were fixed straight along the spit by wires, his hands similarly wired behind his back. The spit entered between his legs and emerged through his mouth. His lower jaw swung low as the spit turned, connective tendons burned away. Angela saw long, clawed fingers on his hands, and his toes were the same. His legs had an extra knee, and his nose and mouth formed a protruding snout.
She knew it was a man because his genitals had been pinched together with a tight garrotte. They were crisped and blackened, no doubt intended as a delicacy for one of those attending.
The one who bid the most, perhaps.
“Chenoweth,” Lilou said. “They took him. All this time I thought he’d gone deep beneath London. He did that sometimes, relished the time away on his own. As many of us do. But…”
“What is he?” Vince asked, leaning into Angela so he could whisper.
“Don’t know,” she said.
“Chenoweth the goblin,” Jilaria Bran said. “The last of them that came with the Vikings.”
“Not the last,” Mallian said.
“Oh?” Jilaria asked.
The eight diners and the chef remained seated around the table. They had been enraptured by Thorn’s glamourous song, but now it was Mallian’s fury that kept them pinned to their seats. Rage simmered from the Nephilim, hotter than the cooking flames, more all-consuming than the fires beyond the window or high above in the attic. Most of them looked terrified, but even so there were expressions of superiority, defiance.
Angela recognised a couple of faces. One man might have been a politician, another she’d seen on American TV, though she couldn’t place the woman who sat with him. Perhaps an actor, or someone famous for becoming famous. Sometimes such rich people didn’t accept that they could be wrong, and even through their fear they retained a stubborn belief in their rights to do what they wanted.
“Not the last!” he roared. “None of us are the last!” Mallian stepped behind the nearest chair. A tall, old Chinese man sat there, knuckles whitening around the seat’s arms as he continued staring down at his plate, dwarfed by the Nephilim.
Mallian placed his hands either side of the man’s head.
Look away! Angela thought.
The muscles on the Nephilim’s arms rippled and flexed.
Close your eyes!
But sick fascination meant that she had to see.
“We are the first!” Mallian shouted, and with a grunt he shoved his hands together. The man’s mouth fell open, his eyes opened wide, and with a grotesque crunch his hea
d was crushed. Its remains splashed onto his plate and spilled down his brilliant white shirt.
Vince’s hand sought hers and squeezed.
Behind them, Lucy gasped, breathless, winded by shock.
“Mallian…” Lilou said, voice filled with despair. Jilaria Bran giggled. Thorn jumped onto the table and stalked around the goblin’s cooked body, staring at the diners and singing again. Even through their terror they turned his way.
Mallian moved to the next diner and twisted her head around. Her neck snapped. He twisted again, again, until it came off in his hands.
“They’ll see us,” he growled, throwing the head against the wall. A crystal wine glass shattered at the sound of his voice. The next man was shaking and crying, struggling to tear his attention from the hypnotic pixie song. He was fat. Mallian pushed him down into his seat, head almost disappearing into his bloated neck. With a crack the chair legs gave way, and so did the man’s spine.
“They’ll know us again.”
“Not like this,” Angela said, despair evident in her voice. “Why like this? What good can come of murder?”
Mallian turned his gaze upon her. His eyes were wide and mad, his skin slick with sweat and blood, gore dripping from his hands and splashed up his arms.
“Just another human,” he growled.
“Mallian, the Time is long passed,” Lilou said, drawing his attention. “And we have to go!”
The Nephilim glared at her.
“This is a new Time.” He tore out a throat with his clawed fingers. Smashed ribs and ripped out a heart. Slammed a face onto the table so hard that plates shattered, wood splintered. Blood splashed and flowed. Tears were cut off, pathetic whining fading into Thorn’s continuing, hypnotic song.
Mallian killed, and when he reached the last one left alive—the chef—he paused.
Angela felt sick. Yet Vince’s expression displayed that other emotion she was struggling to deny. The sick, bloody fascination which was perhaps distinctly human.
“Please…” the chef said. Thorn stopped singing and crouched on the table. The pixie was splashed with blood.
“Please?” Mallian said.