Relics--The Edge

by Tim Lebbon

  Lilou, too. The nymph had suffered her own loss when she’d seen her old friend Mallian swallowed up by the Fold. She had betrayed Mallian, desperate for his plotting of Ascent—an aggressive revelation of the Kin to the human world—to fail before it had begun. She had acted for the good of the Kin, the good of humanity, and out of her own strong beliefs that revealing the Kin to the world would lead only to conflict, pain and death. Still troubled by her actions, each time they met she also tried to persuade Angela that she would never see Vince again.

  Angela knew that they were both right. Vince was universes away, trapped in a whole new place and time created by the fairy Grace.

  Sometimes she wished that he was dead. She hated herself for thinking this, but the constant not knowing was so much harder.

  Hiding, living a lie, their lives on hold, she and Sammi had grown closer than they ever would have if none of this had happened. That at least was a silver lining. She knew that a time would come when they would have to re-evaluate their situation and face the future with a more solid plan, but she was good at persuading herself they should wait another few weeks.

  Angela looked through the steam from her coffee mug, out the open front door and into the woods. She had always been a city person, but now she loved the wild, relished the wilderness. She went running most days, and she and Sammi often kayaked along the nearby river. The woods here were vast and beautiful, and she was discovering places where people might never have been before.

  It was all a placeholder. She and Sammi both knew that their lives would have to move on one of these days.

  Just another few weeks, she thought. Just a little while longer.

  Sammi appeared in the doorway with several eggs in her hands. She smiled at Angela and went through to the kitchen, then glanced back into the living room.

  “Someone’s coming,” she said.

  “Huh?” Angela sat up and spilled coffee onto her T-shirt.

  “Down the valley. They’re walking, and they’ll be here soon.”

  Angela didn’t ask how Sammi knew this. There were things about the girl that didn’t add up, and she did her best not to confront them. Since being struck by lightning twice and taken into the fairy’s Fold, Sammi had displayed talents and tendencies that had not been evident before, as far as she knew. Angela was ready when she wanted to talk about it, but she would not bring it up herself. That felt like too delicate a barrier to break.

  “Jay, do you think?”

  “No. I think it’s her.”

  Angela knew who she meant, and she felt a prickling of anger and resentment. She welcomed it because it was a real feeling, a true sensation, as if she really was still alive and back in the world. Lilou was the reason she and Vince had been pulled into the world of the Kin in the first place.

  “Do you think she’ll want some eggs as well?” Sammi asked.

  “I’m sure she will.” She smiled. After everything Sammi had seen and endured, kindness shone through. Angela felt she could learn a lot from that.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later a figure appeared at the end of the lane leading into the woods. Angela recognised Lilou’s walk, her natural grace stiffened with caution. The nymph had to be careful among humans so that her charms did not overwhelm them. She’d seen Lilou a few times since the closing of the Fold, and lately she seemed slower than before, weighed down. Perhaps she was growing old.

  Angela had never asked her age, but knew it ran into centuries.

  “Changed your hair,” Lilou said as she approached the cabin.

  “Again.”

  “I like it short.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Want some scrambled eggs, Lilou?” Sammi called from the kitchen window.

  “Hello, Sammi! And yes please, that sounds great.”

  “What brings you here?” Angela asked.

  Lilou stopped a dozen steps from her, perspiring lightly from the walk up through the wooded valley to the escarpment where the old cabin sat. The lane was steep in places, and rocky, and only navigable by car using a four-wheel drive. Jay had bought them the old Jeep that was parked beside the cabin. Angela only used it once a week to go into the nearest town seven miles away to buy groceries. They were isolated here, and that was how she liked it.

  Lilou stared at her for a while, not replying. Sammi started singing in the kitchen, a modern pop song she’d picked up from the radio. It was something about love and dancing, things Sammi had not experienced and rarely done. Just a few more weeks, Angela thought again.

  “I wanted to see you both,” Lilou said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Six months.”

  “You’re keeping okay? Both of you?”

  Angela looked around at their beautiful, wild surroundings. It wasn’t really an answer.

  “How about you?” Angela asked. “What have you been doing?” Lilou wiped a sheen of perspiration from her face, and Angela sighed. “Come and sit down.” Her voice was softer, and Lilou’s gratitude was obvious.

  “Thank you.”

  They sat together on the wooden bench outside the front of the cabin, and moments later Sammi emerged and gave Lilou a friendly hug. It made Angela feel awkward, wondering whether she should have done the same. Sammi’s good nature and kindness often put her to shame. Sometimes in a kid of her age such behaviour was born of innocence and naivety, but Sammi was neither. She’d seen and done more things before her mid teens than most people do in a lifetime.

  “You smell,” Sammi said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Like you’ve been living wild.”

  Lilou shrugged and glanced at Angela.

  “Coffee?” Sammi asked.

  “I would fight and kill a grizzly bear for coffee,” Lilou said.

  “I’d watch that!” Sammi said, darting back inside. “Though my money wouldn’t be on the bear.”

  “Great kid,” Lilou said quietly as Sammi continued singing.

  “She is.”

  “She can’t stay here forever.”

  “She won’t!”

  “Neither can you.”

  “What do you expect me to do, Lilou? If I get arrested, what happens to Sammi? And is this really why you came here? Couldn’t we just pass the time of day first?”

  “No, no,” Lilou said. “I came here to see you both, and to ask...” She trailed off. It wasn’t like her to be uncertain, even vulnerable. Angela had seen that more in Lilou since the Fold, and especially since Frederick Meloy had sacrificed himself to help them escape. It had been obvious to anyone that Meloy was in love with Lilou. What hadn’t been so clear was that perhaps she was also fond of him. He’d been big and brash, a brutal man who’d found his calling in the Kin, but he’d also possessed an almost childlike quality, an innocence that might have drawn Lilou to him.

  Angela observed, but didn’t care enough to ask. Vince had worked for Meloy as a relic hunter, and saving Lilou from brutal thugs and murderers had been the catalyst for everything that had happened since. It was unreasonable to blame them, but she had to direct her blame somewhere. Grief and anger were not a good combination to carry around.

  “Ask what?” Angela said. Sammi emerged then with coffee and a bowl of scrambled eggs and some toast on a tray. She dashed back in to grab forks and plates, and the hot sauce she knew Angela liked.

  “I’m asking something of you both,” Lilou said, and they waited until Sammi pulled up a folding chair and joined them. “It’s a favour. I want you to come to Massachusetts with me.”

  “Why would we do that?” Angela asked. “We’re safe here, unknown and—”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  Sammi looked back and forth between them, eating her eggs. She was sharp. She’d pick up on Angela’s anger, and Lilou’s unusual vulnerability.

  “You’ve been in the same place for too long,” Lilou said. “I’ve been keeping watch, especially for the past couple of months.”

  “Keeping watch on
us?”

  “Partly, but also on people in the surrounding communities. There’s a man who runs long distances through these hills sometimes, and he says he’s seen lightning balls chasing him in the forest.”

  Angela glanced at Sammi, who was looking down at her eggs. A brief, tense silence was all she offered. She knew that Sammi was changing, and Sammi knew that she knew. I have to talk to her about all this one day, she thought.

  “There’s a place I need to go,” Lilou said. “I think you should come too.”

  “You can’t even drive,” Sammi said.

  Lilou shrugged. “Never was much need for it in London.”

  “Do any Kin drive?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “Wow. Even if they can fly?”

  “But why ask us?” Angela said. “It’s not like you need us. We’re only humans.”

  Lilou ignored the barbed comment. “You’ve shut yourself away up here. I’m spending my time wandering the wilds, hundreds of miles a month, after so long constrained in London. So in a way we’re both aimless. It’ll do you good, and I could... I need the company. It’s a long way to travel alone. And you know I’m not at my best among people.”

  “What is this place?” Angela asked. Lilou’s comments about watching out for them troubled her, but not as much as what she’d seen and heard. Whispers about her and Sammi would grow into rumours, and rumours stuck. Soon they might have people driving out to watch them from the woods. After that, strangers knocking at their door. Clips on the internet. People seeing her face who knew how to see past cut and coloured hair and contact lenses—like the British police whose Most Wanted list she likely still topped.

  “It’s a valley,” Lilou said. “There was a town there a long time ago called Longford. Something happened there, and the town was abandoned and the valley flooded. Now it’s drained again. The dam ruptured, the water’s lowered, the remains of the town have been revealed.”

  “Why does this interest you?” Sammi asked.

  “Because there were Kin there,” Angela said.

  “There were. And I lost an old friend when the disaster happened,” Lilou said.

  “What was the disaster?” Angela asked.

  “Contagion.” Lilou shrugged. “The official story is that there was a disease outbreak that killed most of the townsfolk. They cleared the town and flooded the valley. But there are other tales about what happened.”

  “Your friend died there?” Sammi asked.

  “What was he or she?” Angela asked, and it was the question that cut to the root of the conversation.

  “Mohserran was a selkie,” Lilou said. “I haven’t seen him for over a hundred years, maybe more, and he hasn’t been seen since the valley was flooded. Yes, he probably died there along with two other Kin, one of whom might even have been from the Time, but no one knows for sure. And I need to go, because there aren’t so many of us left that we can ignore three who are missing and might not be dead.”

  * * *

  Sammi left her aunt and Lilou talking outside the cabin and went for a walk into the woods. She liked going up to the waterfalls, and she loved pretending that she was the only human who had ever seen them. There was nothing to indicate that was not true. They were wild and untamed, and when she was there she felt in control of herself. Lately, it was one of the few places she did.

  At the cabin with Angela and Lilou—and often when it was just her and Angela—she had to work harder and harder to control the pressures building inside. She smiled and joked, joined in the conversations, provided a light response to Angela’s worried, dark tone, and all the while her mind pulsed with constrained possibilities, and her senses thrummed with things she should not see, sense, smell.

  She knew that Angela perceived these changes in her, and that the fairy’s interest in her had been the first warning sign. She also knew that her aunt respected her enough to let her discover her own self. That, or maybe she wished to deny her niece’s growing strangeness.

  When her mom was alive, Sammi had been a normal little girl. When it was just her and her father, surviving together had taken most of her strength, distracting her from the unusual feelings she had, the strange thoughts that affected her dreams and sometimes followed into her waking hours.

  Now that she was an orphan, Sammi felt the full gravity of that secret she kept inside drawing her in. Being struck by the fairy’s lightning had awoken it. Being touched by Grace, looking into her eyes and seeing a reflection of her own, had allowed it release.

  Sometimes the pressure needed venting. That was why she liked walking in the woods on her own, and at the waterfalls she felt secluded enough to let herself go.

  Today the pressures were greater than ever. Lilou’s presence often brought them on, because she knew more about Sammi than Angela. The nymph had never been overt about it, but on those few occasions she had visited them in the cabin Sammi had caught Lilou glancing at her with a strange look in her eyes. It might have been curiosity, and sometimes it might have been fear.

  The woods were peaceful today, and as Sammi approached the waterfalls she sensed that she was the only person for miles around. The sounds of the falls drew her in, a whisper in the distance, a grumble, and then a roar as she entered the narrow ravine and negotiated the wet rocky path along the side of the stream. The falls were maybe ten metres high, a series of tumbles and splashes rather than a straight drop. Sometimes she was lucky enough to catch a smear of rainbow colours in the mist, but today the sun had yet to penetrate the ravine. The water fell in shadow, and if she listened hard enough, she thought she could hear ancient voices of the wild whispering lost secrets beneath its roar.

  Sammi sat on a rock she knew well, far enough above the stream and pool to avoid getting wet, close enough to feel the cool kiss of mist against her skin. She closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, smelling the innocent tang of forest water. Deeper down were scents of older things. She could not identify them, but she knew that they were secrets. She felt a tingle of excitement and fear at their smells, as if she’d been offered a brief glimpse behind the veil of reality.

  They are reality, she thought. As am I, whatever I’m becoming.

  Such thoughts frightened her. Becoming something more was drawing her away from the life she knew, even though that life had changed so much over the past couple of years. She feared the idea of her mom and dad fading in her memory, part of the story of someone so different from her that they became strangers. That frightened her so much. Yet she was also aware that she had little choice in the change, and the excitement was too much to ignore.

  Sammi held out one hand and opened her eyes. Her fingers tingled, and the quicks of her fingernails sizzled and glowed. Arcs of electricity danced between her fingertips. Across her left forearm and bicep she saw the fernlike trail of subtle scars from the lightning strikes two years before begin to emerge once again. Back then they might have been a map, but now she knew that they were more a guide to her emerging self than a particular place.

  As the electricity danced and spat, she raised her hand and urged it to form together. The resultant lightning ball fell from her hand and bounced from the rock at her feet, drifting slowly towards the pool, throwing up a hiss of steam as it struck the surface, and then disappearing below.

  The sense of release was immense. The lightning ball was all her stresses combined—the effort of hiding herself behind a smiling mask; the fear at what she was becoming; the grief at what she might leave behind. Sitting by those roaring falls she became someone else for a little while, and her human concerns faded away as the sparking electricity diluted itself through the violent waters.

  She became the Sammi she would one day be.

  4

  This might have been Vince’s hundredth time walking around the edge of the Fold. It usually took him a whole day, with a few stops to pick berries and nuts or eat scraps of food he took with him. He tried to make every walk slightly different. Today, the sun beat
at his back as he walked along what might have been the eastern ridge above the valley. Some days the same ridge appeared more like the northern extreme. The sun rose and fell, the dark skies were speckled with stars he did not know, and there seemed to be no patterns to any of it.

  The only certainty was that there was no escape.

  He strode along the hilltop with the Fold spread out across the valley to his left. From this high up he could make out familiar landscapes and features. The winding river was one of the constants, its path cast into the rock of the land, water always flowing in the same direction. Where it came from, where it went, he did not know. Trying to follow the river presented him with the same problems as attempting to leave the Fold in any other direction. Past the river towards the other side of the valley were the rocky slopes where he had made his home. There were several caves there, and he had taken the shallowest and smallest for his own. Deeper, darker caves were home to other things. He saw the woodland that smothered the head of the large valley, the sharp escarpment and cliffs that provided a distant boundary, and somewhere down on the valley floor lay Mallian.

  He was too far away to see, and Vince was not interested in looking.

  After so long, his clothes were beginning to fail. He washed them weekly in one of the small streams tumbling through the gnarly landscape around his cave, laying them out in the sun to dry, but the hard living and the rigours of foraging and fending for himself were taking their toll. His jeans had worn at the crotch, and several rips on the legs were fraying and growing worse. His T-shirt was weakening at the seams. His boots and socks were worn, underwear threadbare, and the light jacket he’d been wearing when he was trapped in the Fold had gone missing days after his arrival. He sometimes thought he saw a fleeting figure wearing the jacket—one of the Kin the fairy had brought here—but he had never managed to get close enough to see for sure.

  He had made a coat of rabbit furs in anticipation of winter, but true winter never came.

  He reached what he judged to be the highest point of the hill and took a good look around. It was a warm day and a refreshing breeze swept past him as he looked down into the valley that had become his home. The wind came from behind him, from beyond the valley, and carried scents he could not identify. He did not understand that. Like the river, it showed signs of starting and ending beyond the Fold. But that could not be.