by Tim Lebbon
“It’s all wisps,” she said. “They’re unreliable, treacherous. Of all the Kin I’ve known, other than the wraiths they’re the least… here. You know what I mean?”
“Ahara comes and goes,” Vince said, nodding.
“Comes and goes from this world.”
“Where does she go to?” Lilou shrugged.
“So you and the wisps have a history.”
She stared at her feet. Sighed. “I’ve only ever been bewitched by one creature, and the bastard broke my heart.”
“You’ve broken a few in your time,” Vince said, and Lilou glared at him, such an alien, inhuman stare that his blood ran cold. Sometimes he had to step back and remind himself that he chose to associate with creatures that weren’t human, however they appeared. Lilou’s eyes had seen other worlds.
“His name was Ecclehert,” she said, and her expression softened. She even broke into a sad smile. “I haven’t uttered his name aloud in… a long time. He came to me out of the tortured northern lands after the French Bastard King took England for his own. Ecclehert brought tales of murder and rape, crop burning, cattle slaughter, and famine. He spoke of cannibalism amongst the human survivors, and even those words could not shock me. The power to shock had been smothered by his power to entrance me, completely and utterly, and he didn’t even know what he was doing.”
“He was a wisp, like Ahara?”
“Very similar. Sometimes barely there. That’s why it surprised me so much. I’m used to being the subject of infatuation, not suffering from it. Ecclehert’s appearance broke my life in half. There was before—those old times shortly after the Time, when I was born into and wandered a land growing ever more inimical to the Kin. And there was after—when I swore that love would never touch me again.”
Vince sat on the edge of the bed. He knew what was happening. Even as Lilou talked about never lowering her defenses, her mask was slipping and the real nymph was showing through. His heart swelled, his groin ached, his soul pulsed with desire. He slipped from the bed and sat beside her on the sofa, and while every part of him screamed that this was wrong, Lilou’s gravity drew him close.
“More than anything, my love for him came as a shock. I believed myself immune. Because so many loved me, I thought I knew all there was to know.”
Vince reached for her, right hand stroking the back of her neck, left hand resting on her thigh. Lilou looked up at him and smiled, and she did not draw herself back. He craved her, groaning out loud at the pressure building at his center. She reached for him, her own eyes hooded and heavy, mouth slightly open, lips full and glimmering.
Vince’s hand curved over her thigh and reached deeper, and then Lilou gasped aloud and stood, backing away from him with her hands over her face.
“Lilou…”
“Even now, Vince?”
“I can’t… I couldn’t…”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She turned from him and took three heavy breaths. When she turned back she was only Lilou again. The nymph was reined in.
“Oh, fuck,” Vince said. He leaned forward with elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “Fuck!”
“Vince, it’s not you.”
“Of course it’s me!” He rubbed his head, then sat back. “Finish your story.”
“I’m not sure—”
“You started telling me, now fucking finish.” His erection remained, and Vince drew his legs up so that she would not see. He hated himself for what had happened. He hated the fact that nothing more had happened.
“If you want.” She sat on the other side of the bed, as far from him as she could, and looked down at her hands. “Ecclehert shunned me and left me. He made me feel like a child again, without control.”
“I know the feeling.”
Lilou turned her hands, examining them. “It was three hundred years later that I heard he had died. The news landed heavily on me. I believed he had stolen away a part of my life that would never again be complete. I carry a hole in my heart, and over time I’ve grown to blame Ecclehert the wisp for putting it there. They’re flighty creatures, rootless and constantly adrift, and no wisp I have met since has found itself able to condemn Ecclehert for his actions. So I carried the injury close, telling no one—not even Mallian. Like any untended wound, it festered.” She looked at Vince again. “You’re the first one I’ve ever told.”
“It’s not Ahara’s fault,” he said.
“All wisps are the same.”
“I’m sure there are Kin who believe all humans are the same.”
She shrugged at that but didn’t reply. Vince closed his eyes and tried to forget what had happened.
* * *
Angela and Meloy returned a few minutes later to find Lilou asleep on the bed and Vince surfing the Internet on the laptop. He’d been searching, but had found nothing to indicate where their journey should carry them next.
Angela had rented the room next door. She and Vince took it, and Vince was pleased that he felt not even a shred of jealousy at Meloy for staying in the same room as Lilou. He didn’t care what happened in there, and likely he would never know.
He did care what happened with Angela.
They shared a bottle of wine and made love, and all the way through he was thinking of Angela, only Angela. Afterward as she lay sleeping curled against him, he spent hours staring at the ceiling trying to convince himself that would always be the case.
* * *
Angela woke and realized that she’d slept much longer than she intended. After making love they’d huddled close together, and she reveled in it, holding onto a brief moment of intimacy and warmth before rising to continue their search. Now it was time to return to that search.
Sammi was still out there somewhere, and the more time passed by, the more terrible the danger Angela believed her to be in. The story Lilou had brought of Gregor the Kin-killer was testament to that, and the murders were continuing.
Vince was sleeping on his back, snoring softly as he always did after he’d had something to drink. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him. Light filtered through the curtains from the parking bays outside, and a red glow played across the bed from the alarm clock on the bedside table. Vince had changed so much from the man with whom she had fallen in love, but the passion endured, changing with time and events and molding itself to their new, stark reality.
She recalled with fondness their mornings waking in their flat in London, more often than not hearing their upstairs neighbors fucking like rabbits to see in their day. The flat was gone now, as were those comfortable, carefree times—part of the history of them that was being revised with every moment that passed.
Angela wished it was a less exciting story. She would have been content maintaining the routine—waking, Vince leaving for work, her studying at home, drinks with Lucy in the evening, dinner with Vince later on, TV or a walk or retiring early to bed to read or make love. Some people frowned upon such routine, and said it wasn’t really living, but sometimes routine was perfect.
She wasn’t sure Vince would agree. She’d never seen him so alive, so involved, as he was now. He had been passionate and eager last night, his lovemaking urgent, as if he’d been waiting forever. It reminded her of the early weeks of their relationship, when they’d disappeared from the world for days on end.
Angela didn’t believe that Vince would want that life anymore. She was too afraid to ask.
She rose from the bed, dressed, and drank some water. Though they’d only shared a bottle, the wine was stale in her mouth, like a memory gone sour. Delving into the bag she and Meloy had brought back from their shopping expedition, she took out a few of the items and started working with them.
Since being sprung from her cell and dropping out of sight, Angela had worked hard to translate her theoretical knowledge of the criminal underworld into working methods that might help her and Vince survive.
From her studies on both sides of the Atlantic she knew a lot about the proc
esses that would have been put into place to capture them. The authorities knew for sure that she was still alive, and they would assume that Vince was still at large, at least until they could prove otherwise.
The two of them shared a page and ranking on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and the information contained there was extensive. Their images would be readily available to police departments across the country, and their details were flagged at every border control point in airports, ports, and hard border crossings both north and south.
Once a criminology student, now she was a criminal.
Online accounts were an obvious target, and she and Vince had cut all ties with any social media accounts they’d once maintained, as well as banking sites and any website that required logging in with their old passwords. Between them they’d lost more than ten thousand pounds in several accounts, but it was a small price to pay for freedom.
Most criminals were caught through mobile phone records. She and Vince bought burners—a new one every few weeks—and on the rare occasions they did text or call each other, they never used names, real or otherwise. Angela had persuaded Vince to abandon any website surfing habits he’d had before. She had read several papers discussing the use of average search patterns, and the complex programs designed to identify them.
Before their lives had been upended, she might have spent her online time checking the BBC News site, retail listings for true crime books, a shopping site selling sexy underwear, ten minutes on Twitter, and half an hour jumping across YouTube. Repeating those surfing habits now would be begging them to be flagged.
Cell phone records, Internet searches, facial recognition software, voice recognition technology… no matter how she looked at it, the odds were stacked against them. They could take basic measures to avoid capture—her altered appearance was a start—but since Claudette’s slaying she would have to change that again, too. But habits were entrenched, sometimes subconscious.
Difficult to change.
To survive as themselves, they had to become new people.
Angela was troubled that he’d hardly taken her advice to heart. While she cut and dyed her hair, changed her choice of clothing, wore false glasses or color-altering contact lenses, Vince was still very much Vince. Tee shirt and jeans, a loose jacket if it was cool, leather boots. His hair was longer than before, true, but only because he hadn’t bothered cutting it. The problem was he didn’t seem overly concerned about surviving as himself. He wanted to survive as a friend of the Kin, first and foremost. They had become his whole world.
Where did that leave her?
She sighed and opened up the screwdriver set. The money Meloy had brought was proving useful, and within ten minutes she had murdered two phones and a digital radio and spread their guts across the small dressing table.
“Wassup?” Vince said from behind her.
“Doing some shit,” Angela said.
He yawned and sat up, shifting across the bed, standing, and moving behind her. She welcomed his familiar scent, his hands on her shoulders. It felt like home.
“What the hell?”
“It’s pretty simple really,” she said. She connected wires, stroked a screen, and then on the radio she turned the dial up and down, passing through crackles and areas of white noise until she heard voices.
“They sound like…” Vince said.
“Police channels,” she said.
“You never cease to surprise me.”
“Doesn’t mean we’ll hear anything useful.” She sat back into him and enjoyed the pressure of his hands on her shoulders, as his fingers worked at tensed muscles.
“That was nice,” he said, and she knew what he meant. It was a while since they’d been together long enough, and safe enough, to make love.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just like old times.” His hands paused, then continued massaging. She sighed. She knew it could never be the same again, so why continue berating him for what had happened? She didn’t blame him, not really. She hated that he’d lied to her. Yet deep down she was also grateful for the view of the wider world she had been offered, even though it had changed her life forever.
Now that wider world was a threat to her sister’s only child, and if they didn’t work quickly, Sammi might be the next one dead.
“What are you hoping to hear?” he asked.
“Something that might lead us to Sammi,” she said. “Or this Gregor character. The cops will be searching for him.”
“They’re calling him the Lightning Killer,” Vince said. “Why does every killer need a name?”
“Good for the TV series,” Angela said. “I’m going to shower. I’ll leave this on.”
“Yeah, great, nothing like the disembodied voices of local cops to ease me back to sleep.”
“We’ve slept too much,” she said, standing and turning to him. “You need to listen while I’m showering.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He tasted of sleep, and of her.
“We didn’t sleep that much.” He smiled, raising and lowering his eyebrows.
“We need to go,” Angela said. “Sammi.”
“You found me,” he said. “You’ll find her… and we’ve got help.”
“Yeah, a nymph and a gangster. That worked out well last time.”
“Hey.” Vince held her tight. “It’ll be okay.”
Voices rattled from the radio speaker, calm and flat. It sounded like business as usual out there.
“Sure it will,” she said. “Make me coffee.”
* * *
Angela took a quick shower, wishing for more than the weak, lukewarm flow. As she dried, she heard a commotion outside in the room. Voices. She covered herself with the towel and opened the door. Lilou and Meloy were standing inside the closed door. Vince was crouched over the radio, head tilted as he listened.
“Oh no,” Angela said, because the scene she feared was playing out in her mind again and again.
“Not Sammi,” Vince said.
“What then?”
“Two dead cops.”
“Stabbed,” Lilou said. “Gregor uses a knife.”
“Do you know where?” Angela asked, alert and alight.
“Yeah,” Vince said. “I know where.”
19
At last they are starting to arrive.
From her vantage up on the hillside she sees the first figure. She has been walking the Fold, probing its boundaries and ensuring that the magic she cast is firm and rich. There is no reason to doubt, but she is going to be here for a long, long time. It’s wise to make sure that this new world will function and persist.
Looking down the steep slope at the near end of her valley, she sees the remnants of the human road that once led into the place. It protrudes a little into the edge of the Fold, and already the majority of the artificial surface has been subsumed into the land, wiped away by her powerful magic and leaving behind untouched countryside, virgin soil on which she will make her own mark. The same has happened to the score of buildings that were contained within the boundary, so there are few traces of them left.
The fragment of road, the final remnant of humanity, has been left for the arrival of her Kin.
She’s too far away to see the newcomer clearly, so she hurries down the steep slope, bounding from rock to rock like a young child, and not the ancient thing she is. Freedom is giving her such energy. Already she feels more alive than she has in many, many years, and the prospect of sealing off the Fold and making it hers forever is almost too exciting to bear.
As she reaches the valley floor and approaches the short ribbon of paved surface, she sees that it looks like a man, accompanied by one of her wraith servants. That is no surprise. The deniers are all very humanlike—it was a necessity for their incorporation into a world that would never willingly welcome them. Once he understands what has happened, the knowledge will enable him to re-embrace his true self.
“Welcome,” she says.
“Mistress,” the shape with the
man says. It shimmers in the air, and bows, a vague presence that seems to pulse and throb with reflected sunlight.
“You’ve done well, Gradaal,” she says.
“Thank you, Mistress!”
“My name’s Jeff. Who the fuck are you?” The old man is agitated, looking around as if seeking someone else. “Where’s Mary? I was told I was coming to meet Mary.”
“And did you really believe that?” she asks.
The man’s eyes flicker to the side, then back again.
“I don’t know what you are,” he says. “I don’t know what this thing is that brought me here, but I want none of it. I want my old life back.”
“And I’m giving it to you,” she says. “This is your old life, here with your Kin. Not out there with those… humans.” She almost spits out the word, it’s so distasteful.
“They’re not so bad,” the man mutters.
“Can I go?” the wraith called Gradaal asks.
“I’m giving you something they never can,” she says to the man.
“What if I refuse?” he asks.
“I’ve fulfilled my purpose,” Gradaal says. “As you requested, as you instructed, I did everything—”
“Go!” she shouts, surprising even herself. The shimmering shape, wraith of the elf Gradaal who died at the hands of human inquisitors over five hundred years ago—burned and cut, sliced and pulled apart—flickers away to nothing. As she vanishes again from the world, she leaves behind a long, low sigh of peace.
“What have you done?” the man asks, shocked by the shout, startled by the wraith’s disappearance.
“I gave her peace, just as I promised,” she says soothingly. “I’m offering you the same. Look at my world, the Fold in reality I have made ready for you, and for me, and for all of us. Look.” She turns and gestures along the length of the valley. “It has a river and waterfalls, seven lakes, three areas of marshland, woodlands so numerous that they never begin or end. East to west, up the valley sides and through ravines, it leads to the hilltops from which you can see the entire Fold. Caves and canyons, hidden places, a hundred square miles to wander to your heart’s content. And up, higher… look.”