by Tim Lebbon
“I’ll tell you. You can repeat them, louder. Loud enough to work.”
He believes me, Vince thought, and he breathed deeply to still his racing heart.
“Come closer,” Mallian said.
Vince took a few steps towards the Nephilim. He had never been this close in the dark. Mallian’s animal smell seemed amplified in the shadows, exuded from his naked body in warm waves. He appeared larger, his teeth glimmering with borrowed moonlight, his breathing slow and heavy.
“A little closer,” he said. “It’s under me.”
“The rucksack,” Vince said.
“I’m as desperate as you.”
Vince knelt, and only at the last second did he realise his mistake.
Mallian twisted and clasped Vince’s left ankle with one powerful hand. Wrist still secured to the ground by Grace’s spell, his fingers bit in deep, crunching muscle against bone.
Vince gritted his teeth and grunted. There was no point trying to escape. And his ploy depended on him taking whatever came next.
“If you fail me, I’ll make sure you suffer forever,” Mallian said. “The pombero wasn’t the only mongrel I have under my control. As the fairy eats them, so I’ll have them eat you. Small chunks, just enough to hurt, not enough to kill you. A finger, an ear, your cock. I’ll have them eat you alive over a long, long time. If you fail me, human.”
“Why would I want to do anything that means I’m trapped here?” Vince said, and he injected every ounce of love he had for Angela into his voice. For a moment he believed it himself. He believed he was capable of helping Mallian, if it meant he and Angela would be together again.
If he dwelled on Angela long enough, he thought that belief could become fact.
“Under me,” Mallian said, and he had to let Vince go and arch upwards so that the human could reach the rucksack hidden beneath the Nephilim’s back.
Vince could feel Mallian’s heat, smell his rank odour, and as he reached beneath his back he felt the hardened nubs and ridges where there had once been wings. He wondered at Mallian’s real, deep story, the true tale of his time on Earth and elsewhere, and he feared that to know would drive him mad.
Then he felt the rough material of the rucksack. He curled his forefinger through one strap and pulled, slowly, not wishing to startle the Nephilim with any sudden movements.
Even then he worried that he was being played with, a mouse to Mallian’s ferocious cat.
“I have it,” Vince said. “You can lie back down. You won’t be there for much longer.”
That final untruth gave him the couple of seconds he needed. He rolled back, stood, stumbled backwards some more, and only then did he allow himself to look at Mallian.
Mallian glared back at Vince with murder in his eyes. “No,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Vince said, though he really was not.
“No,” Mallian said again.
“You know I can’t let you do it. Maybe you are fading away, losing touch. You’d have never believed me before.”
Mallian was shaking. There was no more talk in him, no pleading, not even any threats. As Vince turned around and ran, the fallen angel roared so loud that he feared the Fold might fall apart beneath the scream.
Vince ran, and ran, losing himself so that he lost anyone or anything else coming after him. Then he started hiding the relics from the rucksack. There were thirteen in total, the ones gathered by Gregor—he assumed that Mallian held onto the fresh pombero’s tongue in one of his hands—and Vince dropped them at random, kicking them beneath rocks, wedging them down cracks in the ground, lobbing one into a pond and another into the flowing river. In his fear, there was no way he’d be able to remember where each one was, even if Mallian managed to escape, capture him, and torture him for their whereabouts. With each relic he hid away, he felt the reality of Angela becoming less and less solid, until the woman he loved was as faded and obscured as the landscape around him.
He’d never really held any hope of ever seeing her again.
Now, he had made sure.
* * *
Perhaps the human is right. Maybe he is fading away and growing vague. There is no way he would have been fooled like that if he possessed all his faculties.
But inside, Mallian is on fire. His fury is a furnace that scorches every part of him. He is shaking with hatred and rage, so much that he wonders whether he will shake himself free from the fairy’s invisible bonds. Wouldn’t that be a blessed irony? The Nephilim whose wings had been ripped away, confronting and defeating the fairy whose wings remained folded and furled. He wonders if she has flown in the past thousand years, or whether she has grown so old that she’s forgotten how to.
He will throw her from the highest cliff to find out. But only when he’s finished with her. That will be her payment for the power she will bring to him—a fall to her death, just as he once fell to this long, frustrating life.
Ascent remains everything to Mallian. His heart might beat weaker than it ever has before, but his purpose is his true life, his real heart, and that is as white-hot as ever. Even hotter. He’s had a long, long time to dwell on the implications of Ascent, lying here with grass dead and rotted beneath him and his subtle movements having scraped and worn his impression into the ground. He is the junction between land and sky, and when he escapes—not if, but when, because he cannot consider any other possibility—he will be the bridge between past and future. The past, a place where the Kin slink through quiet places and hide in shadows. The future, during and after Ascent, when those Kin who choose to stand with him will rise triumphant. Even those who do not side with him will be allowed to persist, and they will thank him for that. He will be their hero and their king.
The human fooled and betrayed him, which is what humans do. He will be dealt with. If Mallian’s anger were an energy, Vince would be a simmering husk in whatever cave or hole he is hiding in right now.
He looks up at the stars and feels them staring back down at him. They see him, and mark him, and none of the other Kin in this place are seen by the stars. They pass their time running and hiding and being eaten, existing rather than living, and they will live and die without making their mark on this world, or the wider world where they all came from.
He shifts his shoulders and feels the damp soil compressing and shifting beneath him. He has made his mark. Until the moment he fades away, or the fairy finally comes to kill him herself, he remains determined to make Ascent work. Every cell in his body strives for that. It’s all he needs and wants. It’s all that is left for him.
He cannot believe that he will fail. It’s not about fairness, because Mallian more than most Kin understands that life is not fair. Life is what you make it, and he will make life triumphant.
13
Sammi thought that Lilou was right and this would be an adventure. She also suspected that the valley was more dangerous than it seemed. It was a feeling, an inkling, like static raising the hairs on her arms, even though on her left arm she hardly had any hairs since being struck twice by lightning. The markings she’d had for a while after the second strike had risen again, like a memory of sheet lightning scorched into her vision. They reminded her of the terrible man Gregor, the Kin-killer. She did not like those memories, but they would always be a part of her.
She had come to trust such feelings. They were part of the change taking place within her, linked to the sparkling lightning she could conjure from her fingertips, and the returned markings on her arm, and other, deeper changes that she had yet to make sense of. She wished her dad were alive so she could ask him about it. She wished her mom was here. She had Angela, and she was doing her best. But sometimes Sammi felt so alone.
She was certain that the Kin blood came from her mother’s side. She had been convinced for almost two years that she was different, ever since she faced the fairy and saw something of herself reflected in that unknowable being’s eyes. She remembered the feeling of Grace’s hand around her upper arm, the gent
le urging as she tugged her through from this world and into her own Fold. Sammi would never forget that momentary sense of belonging nowhere as she balanced between worlds. Just for an instant she had been part of neither, and the nightmare potential of slipping into the spaces in between was horrible.
It continued to give her nightmares. She quite liked silence and solitude, but in those spaces between worlds she had experienced true nothingness. She never wanted to see or feel that again.
She thought that her aunt Angela was aware of the changes taking place within her, even though Angela had no Kin blood—she and her mother had been sisters, though her mother was adopted. Lilou definitely knew. Neither of them talked about it much, and that suited Sammi. She wanted to discover it for herself before discussing it with other people.
Walking down towards the remains of Longford, she was alert for the indefinable danger she felt from this place. Maybe it was because it looked and felt so different from anywhere she had ever been before.
It could also be because Lilou was certainly hiding something from both of them.
The summer sun was low and already hot as they passed from green to grey and started down the gentle slope of the old reservoir bed towards the valley floor. Lilou took the lead, while Sammi and Angela followed close behind.
“We should have brought more water,” Angela said.
“We’re walking through a reservoir.”
“Ha! Yes. Maybe a couple of weeks ago, fish were swimming around our heads.”
“The ground’s hardening under the sun,” Sammi said, “but there are still lots of damp areas, puddles and pools. You can see the sun shining from them down in the valley.”
“No way I’m drinking from them,” Angela said. She didn’t elaborate on why, but Sammi silently agreed. They’ll be contaminated, she thought, with whatever makes this place so strange. And there are all those bodies buried down there.
Lilou was a woman of mysteries. She came to see them now and then, but she rarely told them much about where she’d been or what she had been doing. Angela knew her from London, and just sometimes a tension formed between the two of them that Sammi could cut with a knife. Neither had said, but she was pretty sure it was to do with Vince. Lilou was a nymph, and Sammi had sometimes felt the effect—a deep attraction, a beguiling allure. Maybe she’d had the same effect on Vince in London. Maybe something had happened.
Sammi didn’t ask and didn’t wish to know. The more she felt the change within herself growing, the more attractive Lilou’s exotic origins became to her. She told Angela she was fine living isolated in the cabin in the woods, but there would come a time soon when that was not enough. At least now she could escape into the trees and explore her new talents, the bright shining potential she felt blooming deep inside.
Coming here was another escape. She could see that Lilou believed it too, because the nymph moved with a cautious enthusiasm, eyes wide and her usual defences slipping now and then so that she exuded that naked animal magnetism that seemed to set the air around her aflame. Sammi only wished Angela could welcome the chance to escape.
She’s only human, Sammi thought, and she let out an unconscious giggle.
“What’s up?” Angela asked.
“Just enjoying being out doing something different,” Sammi said, and it wasn’t a lie. Angela smiled and it touched her eyes. Maybe somewhere beneath her fears for the future and bad memories of the past remained a sense of adventure.
The drying reservoir bed was not as smooth as Sammi might have expected, and they followed several shallow depressions that led down towards the remains of the settlement. As the slope decreased and they neared the outskirts of what had once been a thriving small town, Sammi began to pick out more details of what the flooding of the valley had left behind.
To the eyes of Sammi more than two years ago, before everything in her life had changed, this might have been a desolate, forbidding, unwelcoming landscape. But Sammi today saw it as something amazing. No efforts appeared to have been made to prepare the valley for flooding, other than the construction of the dam. Many trees remained standing, stripped of all branches and bark and remaining now as pale, sodden fingers pointing skyward. Old woodland that had once been lush and rich now consisted of acres of these peculiar sculptures to the past, many of them already darkening as they dried, dead wood flesh growing brittle beneath the sunlight they had not seen for decades. In weeks or months they would probably degrade and crumble, falling if touched, blowing down and away in the slightest breeze. Countless other trees had already fallen beneath the water, roots undermined and their trunks driven over by the softest of currents. There were piles of broken wood and tattered trunks spread across the valley floor close to Longford, carried there by the last of the water as it had found its own level and drifted towards the broken earth dam.
Everything was covered in silt, a fine coating as if a light grey mist had descended across the world. Where the sun had baked it dry it had crumbled from many of the landscape’s features or fallen away beneath the slightest breeze. Elsewhere it remained, making ghosts of whatever it touched. These were memories of trees, echoes of rocks, recollections of old tumbled walls known only to those spirits that remained.
Because there were remnants. Sammi felt them deep in her bones, in places where she had never felt anything before. That was another aspect of the change settling over her, as the grey dust of ages had descended across this valley. She sensed a presence there in the dead old town, something old, like the echo of a breath exhaled many years before. Deep inside, she heard that breath.
It was pained, and that was troubling.
She glanced at Angela and Lilou, wondering if they felt the same. Angela wore her normal frown, an expression Sammi had come to know but which she believed hadn’t been there a couple of years before. Her aunt had told her the story of how she and Vince had become involved with the Kin, and with the gangster Fat Frederick Meloy, and she made no secret of the fact that she resented what it had done to their happiness. Amazing though they were, the Kin were also responsible for the destruction of the comfortable, happy life she’d been leading. So much that she’d planned had changed. So many ambitions had been trodden beneath the feet, hooves and claws of creatures that mostly did not care. Whether or not Angela sensed the sadness that Sammi felt here, she knew that her aunt would be expecting trouble.
Lilou was unreadable. She felt Sammi looking at her—her stance changed, the way she held herself—but she didn’t acknowledge it. I think I could make her tell us what she’s hiding, Sammi thought. But not yet. I’ll give her the chance to come clean on her own.
How she could make her, Sammi didn’t know for sure. The change didn’t tell her that much.
“Longford,” Lilou said, pointing past a tumble of trees and rocks to a more regular-shaped mound.
“Is that a building?” Angela asked.
“What’s left of one,” Lilou said.
Much of what had once made this building a home was gone. If it had once been two storeys, there was no evidence of that now, with the walls reaching barely to shoulder height. Patches had been scoured clear of silt by wind or had simply fallen away once revealed to sunlight, and the old brick peered through. Tired, crumbled, still it held on even after decades submerged beneath the reservoir. Walls stood straight, holed here and there where windows and doors had fallen or rotted away. The ground level was at least two feet higher than it had been pre-flood, giving the house the look of a shrunken thing, or a dwelling for little people. But the floor plan was quite clear, and the structure close by could only have been a garage.
“Anyone home?” Lilou said, but she didn’t call too loudly, and her chuckle sounded nervous.
“Let’s look,” Angela said.
“It might be dangerous,” Lilou said.
Angela glanced at her. “You wanted us to come.” She approached the old home and Sammi went with her.
There was nothing within the walls that mig
ht have identified it as a house. No furniture or belongings, no internal structures. Just the outside walls, encasing a layer of flat silt that was cracking beneath the sunlight.
“Maybe they moved all the people and furniture out,” Sammi said.
“It looks... sad,” Angela said. “Like it’s been forgotten.”
“Mostly.” Lilou was beside them now, and she leaned through an opening in the wall to peer closer. “Wow. Look at that.”
At first glance Sammi thought it was the body of an unknown animal, strange ribs exposed in a twisting ribbon. Kin! she thought, and her breath quickened, her heart beat faster. Then she saw that it was not the remains of anything that had lived. It was a keyboard, warped and with many keys missing, but still settled into the shell of a decayed wooden piano. It was slumped in one corner of the room on broken legs, half buried, a useless thing.
“Look over there,” Angela said. “Is that...?” She didn’t finish her sentence, but walked around the old house rather than through it and approached the garage. Sammi jogged after her. Her footfalls on the silty ground felt strange, and it reminded her of how it sometimes felt walking through the pine woods close to their cabin, like there was a hollowness to her footsteps, as if the forest floor was settled on hidden spaces underneath, caves or tunnels, unknown shadows. She thought perhaps the tree roots were so interlocked that they formed a canopy over the space beneath, leaves and pine needles gathered over the decades to form a false ground. Or perhaps there were caves down there, inhabited by pale blind things that listened to her footsteps and made up stories about what could make such a sound.
“They left their car,” Angela said. “Ford?”
“Don’t know,” Lilou said. “They all look the same to me.”
“Oh yeah. You don’t drive.”
“Weird,” Sammi said. The garage had mostly rotted away, the skeleton of heavy timber walls sagged and holed and fallen onto the vehicle. The car was rusted and deformed, but the windows were still in place, obscured by a slick plant growth on the inside surfaces. It was another sad sight, another forgotten thing.