by Tim Lebbon
“If she sensed what happened,” Sammi said.
“It’s a big if,” Lilou agreed.
Angela heard no doubt in the nymph’s voice, but it inspired hope, not fear.
Hope that Grace’s Fold, and Vince, might not be closed away forever after all.
15
The Fold is in darkness, and there is lightning in the east.
She is crouched on a rock high on the western valley slopes when she sees it illuminating the sky. She has a rabbit clenched in one hand, its neck broken, throat ripped out and chest and body half-skinned, but she is not happy with its meat. The blood is too thin and young, and it tastes of the human world. The flesh is weak. She has chewed and swallowed two mouthfuls, and already she craves something richer. It is not long since she ate properly. She should control her hunger, learn to manage with wild animals some of the time. Her Kin need time to heal between meals.
She drops the dead rabbit and stands, looking across her valley at the lightning sheeting across the opposite hilltop. The sound that rolls in is subdued, but she can smell it on the air, ozone and the memory of old times.
That is not me. That is not from my world. She knows everything about the Fold, and if she sits and concentrates for some time she can feel its ebb and flow through her insides—the drift of its river along her veins, the breeze in the valley stroking down her spine, creatures large and small stepping through her flesh. She can become the Fold, and in those moments she knows everything that is happening within its confines.
She knows that the lightning is not a product of the Fold’s ebb and flow. This is something else.
It’s her.
Her nostrils flare as she breathes in new scents. Her eyes widen as she thinks of the girl, in her hands for such a short time but in her memory forever.
It’s her, and she has found herself.
Another flash arcs above the hills, and this time the crack of thunder reverberates across the Fold. Startled creatures flap and flee. Closer to the river, a larger creature—one of the Kin, though she’s distracted and cannot tell which one in the darkness—takes hoof, afraid that she is preparing to feed once more.
She is done feeding for a while. She wipes the rabbit’s blood from her chin and starts down the hillside. The wings folded against her back, unused for so long that she is not even sure she can part them from her skin, itch and twitch.
The itch also exists in her mind. The Fold has not felt complete since the moment she first closed it off and made this place her new whole world. The girl would make it complete.
And now she has made herself known.
As she runs, the fairy opens her mind to the weight and geography of the Fold, she gives it her power, and she readies to create a chink that will enable her to slip through.
* * *
When Vince heard the lightning, he thought that his time had come to die.
He’d been waiting for days for Mallian to take his revenge. Whenever he saw, heard, or smelled a Kin he hid, terrified that it had been sent by Mallian to murder him, and even more terrified that it had been sent to disable him and drag him back to the Nephilim. He could barely imagine the tortures Mallian might be intending for him. Maybe he’d be fed to the fallen angel, held to his mouth by a strong Kin while Mallian bit, chewed, and bit again. He’d eat him alive, just as Grace was eating the Kin she’d lured to her Fold.
Maybe he’d be pinned to the ground close to Mallian, thick sticks driven through his hands and feet to hold him there. Then Mallian would talk to him as he slowly died from hunger, thirst or exposure, telling him what he would do to the ones Vince loved if and when he finally escaped Grace’s bonds.
The potential for agonies to come was huge. The chance of escaping Mallian’s wrath, even though right now he was unable to move, was slight. The Nephilim held weight, not only in his frightening size but his personality and aura, his hold on other Kin. What he had done to the pombero proved that.
Vince had changed his long, lonely, hopeless future into something short and filled with dread.
He considered taking his own life. It was an awful, shameful thought, but one which lingered. It had crossed his mind before during the time he’d been in the Fold, but had vanished again, like a bird flying into his view and then disappearing once more. Since stealing the rucksack back from Mallian, the idea had returned once again and settled on his mind. He never believed he was serious—never found himself on the edge of a long fall or with a sharp rock pressed to his wrist—but considering the most efficient methods to leave the place that was no longer his world played on his mind. If he knew more about plants perhaps he could find something poisonous. There were fungi growing in the forests, but he worried about picking something that would cause him intense pain and a long, lingering death. The hills were very high in places, and there were a couple of locations where steep cliffs would provide him a long enough fall to almost certainly kill himself. But almost was not enough. He had no wish to lie broken and bleeding into the soil at the bottom of a cliff, watching the uneven days and nights pass him by with painful indifference.
Most of all, he thought about the river. He was a good swimmer, but if he weighed himself down with rocks he’d sink and drown. The problem with that was the nature of the river. He thought perhaps his corpse would wash against one end of the Fold and enter at the other, swept down the same stretch of river again and again over weeks and months while rot and impact against the riverbed slowly broke him down. He would become part of the Fold.
But he never got any further than thinking about it. He was too strong for that. And somewhere out there, a wrinkle in time or a universe away, was Angela. His love for her meant the idea of making any of his life-ending speculations real made him feel sick.
By the time the second burst of lightning sheeted across the sky he was deep in his cave, a heavy sharpened stick in his hand. The night outside lit up and he expected to see an unknown-shaped silhouette in the cave entrance. Something with hooves or wings, long teeth and fur. Vince loved the Kin, but he had never feared them more than he did right then.
The lightning could have been Grace in combat with Mallian, the great Nephilim somehow having broken his bonds. Even after two years or so in the Fold, Vince knew little more about Grace than he had when he entered, other than that her power was degrees more advanced than any other Kin he had ever met. Her power was magic.
He didn’t think Mallian could counter that with anything approaching her capabilities—not now Vince had stolen away his ability to do so—but he did not know for sure.
There was no more lightning, but something about the Fold had changed. The air was charged with potential. The land held its breath. Even Vince found himself breathing lighter and quieter, in case a heavy breath jarred the place from its condition of anticipation.
He edged towards the cave entrance, stick held out before him, ready to jump back and defend himself if anything should enter. As the seconds and minutes ticked by, he became less inclined to believe the lightning had been anything to do with him. It felt too significant, too impactful to have involved a mere human.
When he moved out of the cave it began to rain. It felt like the Fold crying. Something passed by to the south, moving quickly through the woods and across the grassland, and though Vince could not make it out, he tracked its motion as its surroundings were stirred. Trees waved and shook, rainfall was disrupted, creatures took flight away from the moving object, and he knew at once what it was.
Grace was rushing towards the site of the lightning, across the valley floor and up the hillside towards where the raging sheets had illuminated the sky.
Something gone wrong? Vince wondered. The Fold failing? He didn’t know and could not guess, but it provided something of interest to occupy his mind. Wielding the stick and grabbing a skin of water from his cave, he started off in the direction Grace had taken.
After three steps, the ground began to shake.
After another three st
eps, the sky to the east turned from night into day, and sunlight streamed in from somewhere beyond.
* * *
Mallian has been alive long enough to know what the lightning signifies. A fairy is casting her spells. This, however, is not Grace.
Held tight to the ground, he has to twist his head to the side and strain his neck to look up towards the eastern hilltops. There is no more lightning, but he understands that a change has occurred, a change that he never expected.
What he feared was permanent has now become temporary. The Fold suddenly feels paper-thin, like the painting of an idea rather than the idea itself. He is still trapped against the most solid part of this painting, but he can already feel something beginning to change. He senses a weakness settling around him, and as if in reaction his own strength begins to build.
His heart, old as the hills and witness to so much love and hate that he sometimes feels as if he has drowned a hundred times over, starts to beat faster.
I still see you, he thinks, imagining Vince running away with the rucksack in his hand. Whatever is happening now, whatever it leads to, I still see you, you human piece of shit. He has spent the past day and night imagining what he will do to Vince once he catches him. It has given him some bloody comfort following the apparent end of his scheme to escape.
Now, something else has happened to give him hope.
The ground shakes. One impact, two, then several more, all thumping up through his head, shoulder blades and hips. It hurts, but he welcomes the pain because it means he is still alive. He draws it in and relishes it.
In the east, the sky bursts alight with the power of a blazing sun. Somewhere else it is not midnight and the sun is shining. Grace has made a way through from here to there.
It must have taken a huge amount of energy. Her whole mind, body and soul were put into the forging of this new doorway, and Mallian can feel the pressure it put upon her. He feels it because the bonds holding him down have grown weaker. He squirms his body left and right and it moves further than it has in a long time. He flexes his legs and tries to lift them, but they are still heavy and held down against the ground.
He tenses and twists his left arm. It moves slightly, then drops back down.
Gathering his strength, focusing all his attention on his right arm, he lifts it up, pushing all his concentration through his shoulder and into his wasted muscles.
His arm rises from the ground. It’s heavier than it has ever been before, but his determination is stronger, and there is no way he will not grasp this unexpected chance.
Raising his hand directly above his face, he stretches his fingers wide to obliterate the stars.
16
Two years ago she’d been struck by lightning, twice, but even then she hadn’t felt as bad as she did now.
Sammi rolled onto her side and puked again. Angela was there to hold her hair out of the way, but Lilou seemed distracted, pacing back and forth and looking away from them, as if she could not bear to watch. Bone stood even further away. Strange man, Sammi thought. Like he’s living in a dream. She wasn’t sure where the idea came from. Her stomach clenched again but there wasn’t anything left to come up. Angela stroked her hair back from her forehead and over her ear, and Sammi had a flash memory of her mom doing that years ago when she was just a little girl.
Even then her mom must have known what she was destined to become. She wondered if she’d ever told her dad, and thought not.
“I feel like shit,” Sammi said. Her head pulsed, eyes throbbed as if they’d been removed and boiled and rolled back in, her throat was dry, and her stomach rolled. She was covered in thick, cloying mud. The sick taste in her mouth brought memories of yesterday, and fears for tomorrow.
Each throb in her head was echoed by the bang, bang, bang coming in from the distance.
“I’m sorry,” Sammi said.
“It’s okay,” Angela said. “I’m not stupid, you know. I knew something was different. It was so obvious. You think I thought you were disappearing into the woods to meet boys?”
Sammi laughed, and groaned. “I wish.” And she did. Secretly meeting boys in the woods would have been much less dangerous than what she had been doing. She had never been out with a boy. She was sixteen and had never been kissed. Hiding out in the wilderness with an aunt obsessed about keeping you safe wasn’t conducive to making new friends, let alone finding romance.
Lilou was still pacing back and forth. Bone was closer to the place where they’d trapped the three Kin. The sun beat down on the metal door.
“What about them?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about them, worry about yourself.”
She brushed off Angela’s soft touch and sat up. Though in pain her senses felt heightened. The smell of the old reservoir hung in the air, the memory of dead fish and water, reeds rotting across the banks and dirty pools slowly being absorbed back into the land. Deeper in that memory was the town of Longford. She drew in a long breath and she could smell that place, as if it was still there and not just the ghost of a town. She was in the belly of the ghost, but she could sense its true, original size and shape. She felt the soil beneath her parting, her hand sinking down into the damp ground, fingers spreading and closing around silt and mud that had once floated in the great reservoir. When she breathed in she could taste the fear and confusion as the town’s life had effectively ended. She heard people shouting, and crying, and then raging as they writhed in agony on the ground, or had their insides blown out by bullets.
Sammi gasped and shook her head, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she was back where she had been.
“What is it?” Lilou asked.
“I can’t control it,” Sammi said.
“Of course you can.” The nymph knelt beside her and held her hand. Sammi caught an expression in Angela’s eye that almost broke her heart. Lilou’s looking after me like she can’t, she thought, and an immense sadness closed over and around her.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
“What is?” Lilou asked.
“Is the kid okay?” Bone asked. “That was something.”
“She’s fine,” Angela said. “You need to stay away.”
“And we need to kill those things before they get out,” Lilou said.
“You’re not killing them,” he said.
“So what’s your story?” Angela stood and walked over to the man. He didn’t back down, but neither did he face up to her. Sammi sensed no real threat in him, but he was someone still filled with mysteries.
“I could ask the same,” he said.
“Yeah, but I asked first, and we outnumber you.”
Bone glanced at them all, as if sizing them up.
“And I can fire lightning from my hand,” Sammi said, holding up her right hand. The skin of her palm was tight and shiny, but other than that there was no sign of what she had so recently done. It was so far beyond what she had believed herself capable of that it should have been surreal, unbelievable. And yet the power nestling within her felt so at home. The sickness was abating, although she still felt weak and woozy. I’m someone I never thought I would be. She smiled at Bone, and he offered an uncertain smile in return.
“Mohserran is my father,” Bone said.
“I did wonder,” Lilou said. “And you’re the one who escaped from here, though you must have been a kid when it happened.”
“Oh shit,” Angela said. “Am I the only human left in the world?”
Sammi laughed. It was loud and strong, considering how weak and crappy she felt, and Angela’s look of surprise at her outburst only made her laugh some more.
Bang-bang-bang came from the old cooler room, as if in response to the revelation. Bone looked that way and Sammi could not read his expression. No wonder he doesn’t want them killed, she thought.
“He might have been your father once, but not anymore,” Lilou said. “He’s been under the water for forty years. And you’ve seen what they’ve become.”
“He’s still alive,” Bone said.
“No.”
“Yes! I came here to find out once and for all what happened to him, and the last thing I expected was to find him walking.”
“You warned us about them,” Angela said.
“They scared me.”
“They scared me. If it hadn’t been for Sammi...” She turned and smiled at the girl.
Bang-bang-bang.
“You know they’re still infected,” Lilou said. “You came here to find out what happened, I came here to make sure they’re all dead.”
“He saved me,” Bone said.
“How come you weren’t infected?” Sammi asked.
“I was. We all were, but it just made the humans sick. The Kin—the pure Kin—it drove into a frenzy.”
“And you?”
“He fought against it for me. Gave me his last breath to escape. He’s a good Kin. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
Sammi and the others looked at the metal door. It showed no signs of moving or bowing, but it was now mostly free of silt where the impacts had shaken it away. With the sun beating down on the metal surface, what had once been a walk-in fridge would quickly become an oven.
Sammi tried to extend her senses to feel the three Kin trapped inside. There was nothing there. She could close her eyes and sense Lilou and Bone, both of them in slightly different ways. Lilou, who was full Kin, was like a glowing red brand in her mind, seared onto her perception. Bone was more of a smudge, like heat haze in darkness, still there but very difficult to see.
The three Kin were blank spaces. Not even hollows, but pure absences. As if they were dead.
“They’re not coming back,” she said, and the adults all turned to her. “I’m sorry, Bone, or whatever your name is. Your father’s not there anymore.”
Bone blinked, then dashed to the door. He didn’t quite touch it.
“I won’t let you kill them. I’ve spent my life working to protect Kin. The agency I work for thinks I hunt them, and it’s the best cover to ensure they’re hidden away, kept secret. But this is personal, and I won’t let you kill them.”