by Tim Lebbon
Jay chuckled, a rasp in her throat. “Me neither. But I do love them.”
“How long?” Angela asked.
“Seventeen years, three months, give or take,” Jay said. “Three days after my Dizzie died. Cancer got ’im. One month fine, few weeks later gone, like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I took to walking. Even before he was in the ground I’d leave our house and drive up here, into these woods. We don’t live very far away. I used the tourist parking lots to begin with, wandered the trails, never quite alone enough, always with people having goddamn picnics or taking fucking pictures, as if this was all for them, and when they leave and go home nothing happens here. I knew it wasn’t here for me. Whether I walk here or not, the mountains don’t give a shit. You know that saying about a tree falling in a forest?”
“I know it.”
“It’s like that with us humans walking here. The mountains, the forests, they don’t even notice us. So we ain’t really here at all. Once we’re gone, give it a hundred years and there’ll be nothin’ of us left. Roads and buildings and reservoirs and parking lots and rubber tires and mobile phones and McDonald’s wrappers and used condoms tossed out of car windows, all gone and forgotten. That’s why I liked walking up here. Thinking about Dizzie and how that gruff bastard was at least half of me and my life, probably more. With him gone, I’m incomplete.
“So not being noticed began to suit me,” she continued.
“Went deeper, across the gas pipelines that snake through these places. Then deeper still, found some older trails leading higher into the mountains and ancient parts, then eventually no trails at all. You can get lost out here. People do, every year, and they’re never seen again. I reckon some of ’em are a bit like me.” She lowered her voice even more, as if the words were only for Angela. “I reckon some of ’em make the decision to not get noticed, forever.”
“But you got noticed,” Angela said.
“Yeah, but not by the forests, and not by the mountains.”
“Which one?”
“Her name’s Tah.” She glanced behind them, left, right. “She’s out there somewhere. They all are. They’re all good at being quiet, being hidden. That’s why they’re still here.”
“Which one’s Tah?”
“Old one-eye.” Jay chuckled. “She can be a real fucking bitch.”
They passed through a low, level stand of trees and the ground below them began to rise, the slope punctuated by rocky outcroppings and heavily wooded clumps, too dense to penetrate. Jay led them through and around these overgrown areas. She paused now and then to examine the surroundings, and once or twice Angela saw her poised, staring into the darkness with her head tilted, as if listening to a voice only she could hear, or watching a shadow. Then she moved on.
The slope grew steeper, so that here and there they had to grasp onto trailing plants and low tree boughs to help themselves up.
Vince walked close to Angela’s other side, always there, brushing her arm with his to reassure them both. He remained silent, listening. Being a listener wasn’t something he’d ever been good at, but since learning about the Kin she’d noticed that he sometimes fell into these quieter moments. She thought she knew why he was quiet now. Being told the story of one of the Kin, in a roundabout way, was a rare privilege.
“It was late one evening,” Jay said. “I’d taken to spending days in the hills, wild camping and trapping rabbits for food. I became pretty good at foraging and surviving. Most people come out here don’t know a rabbit from a skunk, but I was doing okay. Dizzie taught me all that. I was collecting by then, too.” She trailed off, perhaps going back to her own first sight of a relic, something so obviously not animal or human, yet real, tactile. Angela didn’t ask what it had been.
“There are places up here,” Jay muttered. “Not so many this low down, but higher in the hills, deeper in the wilderness. Places where you can find things if you know where to look. Know what I mean?”
“Vince is the relic hunter,” Angela said. “I was just drawn into it.”
“Right. Vince. So he’ll know what I mean.”
Vince didn’t reply, but Angela caught a nod from the corner of her eye. Moon and starlight showed her a little, filtered down through the forest canopy in a silvery glow, and her eyes had adjusted.
“There’s a ravine eighteen, maybe twenty miles from here with a couple of caves in its wall. Entrances are really fuckin’ narrow, and they slope down. First time I crawled in I didn’t know how narrow they’d become, and how steep the slope might be. You know when someone says delicious fear? Yeah. Delicious fear. I might’ve got stuck there, thirty feet in with my head wedged between rocks, starved to death.
“Didn’t though. Found a cavern, and from there a deeper network. It’s huge, and I still haven’t gone as far as I can. One day I will. Need food, lights, batteries—might be down there for weeks. And who the fuck knows where I’ll pop up? Or if I’ll even pop up at all.” She chuckled, and something rustled off to their left.
Angela gasped and crouched. We’re totally in her hands, she thought, and the realization sent a chill through her. Delicious fear.
“Cottontail,” Jay said.
“You’re sure?”
Jay only glanced at her, then carried on walking and telling her story.
“Tah found me in the third cavern, digging around in the remains of her ancestors. I was being delicate with the bones. They’re precious. Even dead Kin are precious, I knew that even back then. I was honoring them, and she’s told me since that it’s the only reason she didn’t kill me.
“I heard her first. The scrape of rough skin on rock, a movement, a breath. I shone my flashlight around but saw nothing, only shadows moving as the light switched around. Then I saw her. Peering at me from over a rock, one eye blinking in the light. Just one eye.”
“Better than both of yours,” a voice said. It was surprisingly high and light, and Angela caught her breath as Tah manifested from the shadows to their left. She moved silently and with confidence, and there was a grace about her movement that Angela rarely saw in a human. Perhaps it was a survival skill handed down through generations, a desperate evolution all to do with survival.
“Only because I’m old and keep losing my glasses,” Jay said.
“I’m two hundred and seventeen,” Tah said.
“And still just a girl.” Jay’s voice was lighter than Angela had yet heard it. Tah came in close, she and Jay merged into one shape, a kiss and then she was gone.
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Angela was filled with more questions, but she knew they could never be asked, because to answer them all was impossible. Each fact about the Kin inspired more questions. It was wonderful and infuriating, and she had learned that sometimes ignorance was best.
The slope increased even more, and soon they were scrambling toward a vague ridge line high above. Tah went with them, a shadow off to the left, and from the right Angela heard heavy sounds of undergrowth crackling and small branches snapping. The centaur was with them, too. Above them, silvery moonlight caught the shape of something flying high up.
She was panting by the time they reached the top and rested, sipping from one of the two bottles of water Jay had brought along. Angela sat close to Jay.
“Tah saved my life,” Jay said. The story was eager to come up, and the older woman took no prompting. “I thought she was going to kill me there under the mountain, but instead she let me go. Gave me something to fuckin’ live for, after that old bastard Dizzie went and died on me.” Her eyes glittered, adding to the starlight.
“Maybe she liked the company,” Angela ventured.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “She’s young for a cyclops, orphaned eighty years ago. I was company, and we became friends, and then more than friends. She saved my life and gave me a whole new one. And all with one fuckin’ eye.” Jay stood and looked around, staring out across the heavily wooded slope they had just ascended. Somewhere far down and away was the parki
ng lot they had left several hours before. “We’ll wait here a while,” she said.
“Wait?” Angela said. “No. No waiting, we have to go on.”
“It gets more dangerous from here, girl,” Jay said. “The terrain’s rough, and there are things in the hills—”
“Some of them are with us already.”
Jay frowned, then smiled. “True. True.”
“Where are they?” Angela asked. “I want to meet them. If they’re helping us, I want to meet them.”
“Maybe you don’t,” Lilou said. She and Meloy sat against a large rock. Vince stood beside them.
“Nymph lady’s right,” Jay said. “Tah you’ve seen close up, and the mothman has no name.”
“I thought that’s what it was!” Meloy said, excitement getting the better of him. He jumped up and looked around.
“He won’t be seen if you want to see him,” Jay said. “Most of the time you won’t want to. He’s here to help, but only because he understands the threat.”
“What about the centaur?” Angela asked. “Where does he live? How does something like him get around without ever being seen?”
“If I told you his secrets, they wouldn’t be secrets anymore.”
“He trusts you with them?”
“No, girl.” Jay sighed and shook her head, and it might have been the first time she’d been wholly herself in front of them. “Baylor trusts no one and nothing. That’s how he’s still alive.”
Angela looked around for Baylor the centaur, but he was nowhere to be seen. Of course. That was how these Kin survived. Defying expectations, denying themselves to humanity, protecting themselves behind veils of mystery and myth. The cyclops might still inhabit her network of caves deep beneath the mountains, but even in revealing that, Jay hadn’t betrayed her in any way. These mountains and forests continued for hundreds of miles, and trying to locate a certain crack in a ravine wall would be like trying to find a particular leaf.
29
Lilou listened to Jay and Angela, taking the opportunity to walk slightly apart from the rest of the group. Meloy remained close to her, but she ignored him. Shut him out. It didn’t make her feel good, but it was required.
Even she wasn’t used to such long exposure to human company, and this, combined with being so distant from home, left her unsettled. She hadn’t been alone since she got on the plane. A gentle queasiness played at her gut, and dizzy spells plagued her on the steepest part of their climb. She took in deep, slow breaths, conscious that Meloy was throwing worried glances her way. Clinging onto plants, she scrambled up the slope on her hands and knees.
Her thoughts had become so confused and uncertain that she craved time on her own. An hour to sit and contemplate. A day to hide away and recharge, let darkness soothe away the fears that plagued her. Back in London in their safe place she’d had such retreats, rooms shut away from the outside where she could spend time pretending she was far from the human world. In truth she’d been at the heart of it, and some of the Kin had perfected the trick of hiding in plain sight.
That was something that these American Kin seemed less able to achieve, but it was hardly a surprise. The three that accompanied them—centaur, cyclops, mothman— would hardly look at home in a shopping mall or walking along a city street.
In the darkness, with only a silvery sheen of starlight to provide illumination, it was Ahara they turned to when they reached the ridge. Sitting back against a rock with Meloy by her side, Lilou watched the wisp. Ahara brought back bad memories, and Lilou couldn’t find it in herself to trust her. Surely her aims were selfish. Surely she sought Grace for reasons they could not discern.
Though the same could be said for Lilou.
“Moving,” Ahara said. She stood looking north, across valleys and toward the ragged shadows of higher mountains in the distance. Her head projected forward as if she was sniffing, and she moved it slowly left and right, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. “The Fold is not one place. It drifts. Even where it touched our world, it shifts.”
“Then how can we find it?” Angela asked.
“We’ll know more when we’re closer,” Lilou said, watching for any reaction from Ahara. There was only a nod.
“The nymph is right,” the wisp said, and she pointed. “It’s that way, north, a little east. The closer we draw, the clearer the entrances will become.”
“So we’ve got to move,” Angela said. “No time to rest.”
“No time at all,” Ahara agreed, and she was the first to head down from the ridge and into the next dark, deep valley.
Lilou remembered her wisp. Her Ecclehert. He had taken her heart and then broken it, and the hate she had exuded for wisps ever since was a display, like the mask she pulled into place whilst in human company. The hurt was still so great that she betrayed it as anger and rage. There was something in Ahara that reminded her of him, and that only made it worse.
Their love had been deep, intense, passionate, fed by the fury of those times. Lilou had let herself go and opened herself up, dropping her defenses and reveling in a newfound vulnerability. It was he who had entranced her, rather than the other way around, a freeing sensation that she had never grown used to. She had not been given time.
Since that betrayal, Lilou had not trusted a wisp. A thousand years bearing a grudge, so long that it no longer weighed so heavy. It had become more a habit than a driving force. Yet on those few occasions when she had encountered a wisp, the past had reared up again.
Now there was a far greater betrayal to consider, and she wondered whether Mallian would ever trust a nymph again.
“He’ll probably kill you,” a voice whispered in her ear.
“Fuck off, wisp.”
How Ahara had come so close she did not know, but little about wisps could surprise her now. Not their secretive, silent movements, nor the idea that this one seemed to know what Lilou was thinking. Ecclehert had been much the same.
“How his bitch nymph has turned.”
Ahara spoke the truth, and that made it painful. Lilou looked up and behind her, at Meloy working his way down the rocky slope. He paused and smiled, not appearing to notice a shape hovering and muttering into her ear. Maybe the voice was all her own. She looked ahead and down the winding, rough path, and Jay walked with Angela by her side.
They followed the hazy disturbance that must have been Ahara.
“What is it?” Meloy asked when he drew alongside. Vince passed them by with a curious glance.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Friends.”
“Don’t let Mallian and his gang worry you,” Meloy said, his voice low and angry. “We’re your friends now.” It was such a naive, childlike statement that she couldn’t help the soft laugh that escaped her.
“Yes, Frederick, and I value that.”
Real or imagined, Ahara did not whisper to her again, yet Lilou felt the weight of her own betrayal hanging around her heart like a dead weight. Remembering Ecclehert and the effect he’d had on her made her angry all over again— being lovestruck was such a human emotion, so weakening and revealing, something that would open her to danger in the tough world of the Kin. Yet perhaps it was love that set her and Mallian apart.
Even back in Ecclehert’s time she had known Mallian. He’d wandered more then, using the dense forests for cover and rarely revealing himself to humans. With a more rugged terrain and far fewer humans inhabiting it, the Kin had enjoyed much greater freedom in those times.
More regular meetings in the centuries that followed had cemented their great friendship, and sometimes in Lilou’s eyes their relationship might have been deeper. But only in her regard. Her nymph’s wiles did not affect the angel. The Nephilim stood proud and aloof, despite his fallen nature.
She felt a hint of shame for not supporting him. It was a chink in their friendship, perhaps a fatal flaw that would slice through all the ties of the centuries, and rip them apart. Yet she
could not deny her beliefs. The faster Ascent approached—coaxed by Mallian, brought closer by his ever more rash actions—the more she railed against it. In the past, his desires had seemed almost an abstract notion, a potential uprising that would never happen. Now, as it approached, she could only imagine it being catastrophic.
They walked into the night, descending the treacherous mountain path into a dark valley where very little starlight penetrated the canopy, and moonlight was shielded by the bulk of the land they had crossed. Angela and Jay remained at the head of the group, with Vince now close to his lover. Lilou and Meloy followed behind.
She was often aware of the other Kin around them—the rustle and snap of Baylor the centaur working through the woodland, the darting shadow of the cyclops, Tah, and occasionally the drifting shape of the mothman swooping effortlessly above.
They paused again by a stream, with Angela and Vince standing close and whispering to each other. The mothman landed with a swirl of wings and a waft of stale, old air. The aroma was one of secrets.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
“Where?” Jay asked. “What?”
“From upstream. Something big.”
The night was ripped apart by a deep roar.
30
“You’d better step aside,” Jay said, but Angela was already reaching for Vince, the two of them tripping in the dark to splash down into the edge of the stream. The cold stole her breath as it soaked into her clothing. She rolled onto her side, propped up on one elbow, and watched the figure closing on them. It splashed along the stream, throwing up sprays of water that caught the weak starlight.
Meloy and Lilou were close behind her, and behind them Angela saw the mothman streak skyward again with barely a flap of his vast, fine wings, launching himself out of harm’s way.
A gunshot sounded, harsh and shocking in the darkness. Jay stood on a rock, rifle braced on her shoulder, leaning into the shot as she fired a second time.
In the muzzle flash, Angela saw the hairy cannibal man Jeremiah leaping for Jay with clawed fists.