by Tim Lebbon
“We might have more than them to worry about soon.”
“What do you mean?” Bone asked. “Who? What?”
Lilou looked around them at the valley, as if seeking something in the sunlight. There was nothing out of place, nothing abnormal, and yet Sammi could feel a change on the air.
“You really think she’ll come?” she asked quietly.
“I think she’ll try, if she knows what happened here,” Lilou said.
“You have to scare her like that?” Angela asked Lilou.
“Would you rather I just not say anything?” Lilou asked. “She’s over being treated like a kid, Angela. Sorry, Sammi, I know it’s not your choice, but I’m just telling it like it is. You have fairy blood in you from somewhere down the line, and however diluted, its power is glowing through. That thing you just did might only be the start of it. Magic like that leaves a mark, a scar, like those lightning strikes left patterns on your arm. And Grace might see and feel those scars. If she does there’s no telling...”
Lilou’s voice started to fade. Sammi blinked, her vision blurring, as a distance grew between her own solid core and everything else. Reality seemed to be drifting away. She reached for it but could not lift her hands. She cried out, but did not even hear her own voice, and could not be certain that she had spoken at all.
Even the intermittent banging of the trapped Kin trying to escape quietened to less than an echo.
Where is everything going? she wondered. And then a more terrifying thought came. Where am I going?
In the distance, past the blurred place where Angela and the others stood, something very clear began to coalesce. It was another solid core, something with a weight and heft that fixed it to the world—past, present and future—but which was very different from Sammi’s own mass. This core was much, much older than her, and much more powerful. It was a black hole to her moon, and as soon as it appeared, she began to fear she would never be able to escape its pull.
She’s here, she thought, and the idea made the fine trace-work of scars across her arm and shoulder sizzle and spit, as if Grace was once again casting down lightning to find her.
Sammi tried to cry out, but her voice was silent. She attempted to roll out of the way, but her muscles were locked in place, and however far she might move the alien presence would track her. It saw and marked her, and soon it would come for her.
With a supreme effort, Sammi ripped herself away from its gaze.
Before she stopped breathing and passed out she managed to say, “She’s coming.”
* * *
Lilou had confronted many dangers in her life, and many monsters—more recently of the human kind. Gregor the Kin-killer had been driven mad in his quest, and Mary Rock’s cool purpose had been even more chilling. The murderous satyr Ballus bore his own insanity.
Grace was a whole new world, and now she was coming.
“What can we do?” Angela asked desperately. She was kneeling next to her unconscious niece, her eyes wide and pleading, and Lilou had no words of comfort for her.
“Nothing,” she said. “You’ve seen what Grace can do. She wants something, she’ll take it.”
Angela’s expression didn’t change for a few seconds. Then her eyes narrowed and she stood to face Lilou. “Fuck you.”
“Huh?”
“For bringing us here, putting Sammi in danger, and then for giving up hope. I never have! She might come for Sammi, but I’ll fight back. I’m not just going to lie down and give in.”
Lilou laughed out loud. She couldn’t help it.
“Don’t mock me.”
“I’m not mocking you, Angela. It’s just... you have no idea what she is. She’s a god to you and your kind. She’s a god to my kind.”
“So in that case what is Sammi?”
Lilou didn’t answer. She shook her head.
“Anyway, I don’t care.” Angela looked down at Sammi. “I don’t care.”
“He might still be alive,” Lilou said, more quietly. She meant Vince, but she also thought of Mallian. It was still rare that she didn’t think of him.
“I know.”
“Who might?” Bone asked.
“And she’ll kill those things, at least,” Lilou said, nodding at the metal door. The banging was slightly less insistent.
“Can you feel that?” Angela asked. She was looking up and away from Sammi, towards nowhere in particular.
“Yeah,” Lilou said.
“What the actual fuck is that?” Bone was backing away from them, looking around, and he started waving his hands as if under assault from invisible flies.
Lilou felt her surroundings changing, filling with potential, as the world took in and held a huge breath. She was nervous of what was to come, but also felt a surge of excitement. She’d been adrift for two years, spending most of her time in vast forests, avoiding human contact and meeting only the occasional lone Kin. She had felt adrift in this vast country, and with Mallian gone it was, strangely, Angela to whom she felt closest. A human.
The return of Grace would mean some excitement entering her life once more.
An explosion rang out across the valley, a sonic boom, reverberating through the ground and setting Lilou’s bones singing. She gasped and saw Angela drop to her knees. Bone became motionless, as if turned to stone by the blast.
Stirring, Sammi started to cry.
The boom was closely followed by a silent shockwave passing through the air and ground. Lilou’s vision blurred as the dust shimmered, throwing up a haze that rose around her lower legs, knocking chunks of drying mud from the few standing walls, and instigating a resounding, hollow thud from the buried cooler room.
Lilou staggered, her sense of balance upset by the boom and the shifting ground and rising dust. Explosions echoed back and forth across the valley like giants calling to each other, and then finally faded away with a sigh.
“She’s here,” Sammi said. She was the only one not looking around, Lilou noticed, instead she knelt, staring at the ground between her legs. Perhaps it was resignation.
“Sammi, we should run,” Angela said. “Get out of the valley and away from here, as quickly as possible.”
“She won’t let you,” Lilou said.
“She’ll have to catch us first. Sammi, now!”
“No point,” Sammi said. She looked up, past Bone and the cooler, past the remains of the building, and out across what used to be the town of Longford.
“Sammi!”
“No point, Angela.” She pointed at a shape in the distance, and Lilou saw an uncertain shimmer across the valley floor, like heat haze or a cloud of dust. A hole in the world. “She’s here.”
17
Hope reignited would be the hardest to lose again. He thought that as he ran towards the light. He was a child in this place, he knew nothing, and yet the first moment he’d seen sunlight bursting out from nowhere to light the darkness, Vince had hoped it was a way back to the world.
It’s a crack in the Fold, somewhere she didn’t enclose quite well enough. It’s a secret route to and from the world, which she’s kept open for her own reasons. It’s someone or something entering from outside, and that’s why she’s rushing towards it, ready to defend or maybe greet them.
It’s someone escaping.
He considered diverting from his course to make sure Mallian was still secure in his holding place on the ground by the river, but that would take too long. His memory of the doorway from the world into the Fold was confused, but he could recall how quickly it had slammed shut when Grace decided the time was right.
One second to the next might mean the difference between escape, and eternal damnation. Hope kept him going and gave him speed, and the potential of hope being snatched away once more gave him strength. He loped uphill, spear in one hand and water skin over his shoulder, and though he felt better than he had in years, he still hated the place with a passion.
The effect of sunlight blazing through a rip in the world was
strange, casting countless spears of light across the night-time landscape. He thought Grace must have reached the portal by now and gone through, so the fact that it was still open meant that she wanted it open. That was good for him.
No way she’d want the Kin to escape, he thought, and that slowed his forward motion. He didn’t believe the fairy hadn’t thought through whatever she was doing, but the fact that the doorway out of this world and into another was still open seemed strange.
“Fuck it,” he said, and he accelerated again.
The shape came out of nowhere. He sensed the weight of it first as the shadow parted from behind a pile of rocks and came at him. He brought the spear up to defend himself and it was plucked from his hand. He heard the wood snap as it was discarded. He fell and rolled, hoping to jump up again and run, but the shadow came with him, mirroring his movement, filling his field of vision even though he could not see what it was.
But he could smell it. The air was filled with the rancid sweet tang, and as he pushed himself away and tried to stand he puked, warm vomit running down his chin and splashing on his hands braced against the ground.
Something big slammed against his back and drove him into the ground. Winded, he tried to draw a breath in past the puke filling his mouth, inhaling it, choking, coughing and hacking as he attempted to draw in air once again. He kicked and crawled, because he knew that this was the moment when he was destined to die, and he would not go without a fight.
Mallian! he thought, and confusion swallowed him up, just as a different sun was swallowing the night of the Fold.
His leg was grabbed, squeezed so tight he cried out at the pain. He was lifted from the ground, hung upside down, and then he saw the face, distorted, the wrong way up.
Mallian, free from his bonds and upright once again. He looked even worse now than he had when tied to the ground, his face drawn and thin, skin and flesh hanging down. He was smaller, his bulk less defined, reduced by months of poor food and inactivity. But his eyes were wide and bright, shimmering with madness and filled with delight at being free.
“Vince,” Mallian spat. Vince had never heard his name uttered with such contempt.
He writhed and struggled but Mallian held him fast, arm up, his dangling head level with the Nephilim’s stomach. Mallian had been crushed down wearing his usual short skirt and shorts, but they had soon disintegrated when his body functions rotted them, and he’d convinced one of the roving Kin to rip the remainder away. Now he was naked, and the terrible sores across his body from malnutrition and being kept in the same position for so long were obvious. Wounds wept, and Vince could smell rot as well as filth.
Mallian lifted him higher, so their faces were almost level. Upside down he looked more monstrous and furious than ever before.
“Hi,” Vince said. “Nice to see you up and around.”
Mallian roared. The blast of sick, moisture-laden breath in his face almost made Vince pass out, and then he was moving, the world spinning around him, and he knew for sure that he was being swung down onto a rock. He hoped he would not feel his head coming apart. One second I’m Vince, the next I’m nothing—my history and thoughts, my loves and hates, and every single precious memory of Angela gone.
Then Mallian stopped swinging and let go.
Vince tucked into a ball just as he hit the ground. The breath was knocked from him, and his left arm struck a rock so hard that he heard the bone snap. He cried out loud, and Mallian kicked him with such force that bones ground. He rolled onto his back, doing his best not to scream again and failing.
Mallian leapt and landed astride him, then lowered himself so that his naked groin and behind were pressed against Vince’s chest and stomach. He pushed down a little more, and more, until it was hard to breathe.
“Just fucking kill me, you vicious bastard!” Vince gasped.
“Why would I want to kill you?” Mallian said. His teeth were gritted, one of his incisors rotten and black. Vince wondered why he hadn’t noticed such deterioration in the Nephilim before. “If I wanted to just kill you I’d have done it long ago. I’ve always had uses for you, human.”
“Dropping berries and nuts into your mouth.”
“That, and more.”
Mallian’s head and torso were silhouetted by the brash sunlight bursting into the Fold from somewhere else. Vince felt a terrible desperation to get to that doorway and launch himself through, whatever might be on the other side. Even if he died doing so, at least then he’d die taking action, doing what he could to escape. He didn’t want to die like this, with Mallian’s naked sex organs resting on his chest, the giant’s arse crushing his stomach down.
He supposed in Mallian’s eyes he deserved much worse than this.
“How did you get free?” he asked.
“Where are my relics?”
“I don’t know. Did she let you go?”
“You do know. You stole them, and you’re a fool, so you’ll have kept them close. You’re a weak fucking human, you wouldn’t have been able to resist keeping them somewhere you can peek at them from time to time. Things more amazing than you’ll ever be.”
“Things a human killed and stole to acquire.”
“Your kind occasionally serves a purpose. Now where are they?”
Vince closed his eyes.
The punch around the face was like being hit by a train. His teeth crunched, his neck jarred, and his head pounded. At least it smothered the pain of his left arm, if only for a while.
“Look at me,” Mallian hissed. Vince looked. Mallian didn’t even have his hand fisted. He’d barely tapped Vince. If he truly punched, Vince would lose his head. He’d seen Mallian kill people with his bare hands—crushing, ripping, tearing. The Nephilim was as furious now as he’d ever seen him. Vince was a heartbeat from death, and any wrong move, any wrong answer, would be his last.
“I don’t know where they are,” he said.
Mallian growled.
“Really. You’re right, they do fascinate me, but I’ve changed since I’ve been in here. Angela is my be-all, end-all, and any way back to her I’ll take. I took those things from you to protect the world from you and your insane plans. But no, I didn’t keep them. I’m way beyond that now. I threw them away as I ran from you, and I’ll never be able to find them again.”
Mallian bore down more heavily on Vince until he could no longer breathe and he was afraid his ribs would give way. He tried to move and struggle, but all Mallian had to do was use his weight and Vince was helpless.
“I need those pieces!”
“Why... I threw them... away.”
“You will remember,” Mallian said. “Somewhere in that rudimentary jelly you call a brain you’ll remember. Let me show you how.”
This is not going to be good, Vince thought. Mallian shifted and he saw past him, up the hillside towards where the sunlight flowed in. Mallian saw him looking, paused, smiled.
“That’s right,” the Nephilim said. “Grace has opened a portal. There’s no reason it might be back to the world we came from, and not some other variation of it. But I think she’s going back for something, or someone, close to you. I saw the way she coveted the girl. Maybe she’s spent all her time here planning how to take her.”
“Angela’s not stupid,” Vince said. “They’ll be hiding away.”
“From a fairy?” Mallian laughed, and Vince felt hopeless. He knew how powerful Grace was. Hiding wouldn’t be enough.
“I need to follow her,” Mallian said. “You’ll help me.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m not asking.” Mallian reached down and closed his huge right hand around Vince’s left shoulder. With a shrug he flipped Vince onto his side. Vince cried out in agony, feeling his arm flop unnaturally under his body, trapped there by his own weight. The pain came in wave after terrible wave, and then Mallian pressed down on his other shoulder, crushing his wounded arm beneath him.
Vince shouted again and again. The agony and inability to e
scape made him desperate.
“I don’t know where they are!”
“Then remember.” Mallian eased away and allowed Vince to roll onto his back. His fractured arm remained trapped beneath him, and he took a breath and shifted further. He felt sick and distant, and he feared he might faint. He bit his lip and winced at the fresh taste of blood. The pain was beyond anything he’d ever experienced before, even when Ballus the mad satyr had strapped him to a chair and slashed and gouged him with the bones of decayed Kin.
“Even if I did know, you need them to control her. I’d never allow that.”
“Then I’ll follow her back without them,” Mallian said.
“And kill me first.”
“I thought so, for a while. I’ve had a long time to myself. And since you took the relics, I’ve been thinking up some very creative ways to make you pay.”
“I thought you probably would.” Vince was looking for any way to escape, a momentary distraction he could use to flee into the shadows across the hillside. But the shadows were shrunk by the sun he was so desperate to reach.
“I think killing you would be too kind. I’ll cripple you first. Maybe rip off both legs, or just one, so you can at least crawl. I’ll take your cock and balls and feed them to one of the hungry Kin. I’ll peel your limbs, but leave you alive, and then I’ll follow Grace back into our world. Leaving you here with the knowledge of what I’ll spend the next weeks, months or years doing. Tracking down the people you love. I’ll begin with Angela and Sammi. I’ll kill them slowly, terribly, in front of each other. Probably the girl first. I have all the time in the world, you know that. Then it will be the turn of my old friend Lilou, because I know you love her too.”
“Only Angela,” Vince said, and Mallian laughed.
“Everyone loves Lilou,” he said. “That’s why it’ll be harder for me to kill her. After that, who knows? You have extended family, yes? I’ll be their nightmare. I’ll be the shadow following them in the night, the shape glimpsed from the corner of their eye. For the children, I’ll be the monster under the bed.” He leaned in close and looked Vince in the eye. “And I really will be under the bed.”