by Tim Lebbon
Almost, because Grace was a vision of age and wisdom, power and grace. She might have been a god. Shorter than them all though she was, slighter in stature, her diminutive build projected only strength. Her limbs were slender and supple, her body clothed in a finely woven one-piece dress. Her long silver hair was braided over one shoulder, and on her feet she wore seamless, laceless boots made of a material Sammi could not identify. If it was leather or hide, it was from a creature she did not know.
The fairy’s face was delicate yet stern, her eyes a rich sparkling blue, deep with the weight of endless memories and ancient times. Sammi could look at Grace and fall in love, though she exuded nothing resembling Lilou’s more basic animal allure.
“You can’t have her,” Angela said again.
“She’s not yours to keep,” Grace said. Her voice was surprisingly low, the words accented and awkward, as if she rarely spoke.
“I’m not yours to take,” Sammi said. She felt some of the strange energy inside surging, and her left arm tingled as the lightning-strike patterns glowed.
Grace smiled. It did not reach her eyes. “Child,” she said, “I take what I want.”
Sammi felt the power roaring and raging, and yet surrounding it all, like endless space nursing a neutron star, was an infinity of hopelessness. She had never felt such a surge of despair. It brought tears to her eyes and a weakness to her muscles, and she knew without a shadow of doubt that she was utterly helpless in the face of this exotic, terrifying creature.
As Grace stepped forward her smile faded, her eyes dulled, and her mouth drooped open. She staggered two more steps and then stopped, as if she had forgotten how to walk. She became motionless.
“Oh, no,” Vince said, voice quivering with fear. “Oh, no... he has her. Mallian has her.”
Past Grace and across the valley floor, a tall, triumphant shape stepped out of the portal.
19
Lilou’s stomach dropped and her heart hammered in her chest once, twice, three hard times, as if seeking to finish her there and then. So much was happening she could barely keep track of events. After two years spent wandering the woods, and wondering what vague destiny fate had in store for her now that Mallian was gone, the future was coming to her. It was happening now, and she felt the pressure of every small decision she was about to make.
Mallian was back. And though she had betrayed him and she feared him more than anything in the world—more than the fairy, more than death—she also loved him. Theirs had been an unconventional romance, a deep respect and love for each other that had rarely manifested as physical. Though brash and superior, she also knew that the Nephilim had needed her, and valued her company for the long, long years they had known each other. Her decision to go against him and his plans for Ascent must have hit him hard.
She doubted he had forgiven her.
To her left, Bone stood close to the partially buried cooler room, hunkered down by the door as if to hide from everyone. Closer in front of her, Angela, Vince and Sammi hugged, and she had never seen a sight so right. The three of them were family. If the whole world and all its troubles were to envelop them now, they would still have each other, and their bond would keep them safe. She envied their closeness. However hard she had tried to help and protect them, she knew that she would always be an outsider.
Her own family was across the grey landscape and emerging from the portal that Grace had forced into the world. He seemed somehow diminished. Thinner than before, shoulders drooped, he was a withered husk of what he had once been, and Lilou wondered what the hell the fairy had been doing to him.
At least he’s still alive, she thought. Vince also looked changed. The two of them would have stories to tell, but she didn’t think they would ever tell them together.
Mallian had control of the fairy, which meant that his glamour had worked. From Vince’s wide-eyed expression, she thought he might have been struggling against Mallian all this time.
The Nephilim strode out into the dusky sunlight and rolled his shoulders, clenching and unclenching his big hands as if reloading or rebooting himself. His gait was strange, uncertain. Perhaps he had not walked far for some time.
As he approached, Lilou caught a whiff of his body odour. Some of it was familiar, most not. There was dirt and filth and decay there, smothering his more familiar scents. She felt so sad for him.
Even though he smiled, she knew he had been through so much. Mallian was proud, and he would not take torture or mistreatment lightly.
Lilou walked past Angela, Vince and Sammi, skirted around Grace where she stood frozen to the spot, and stepped out to meet Mallian.
“Lilou,” Vince said. “Don’t mess with him.”
She didn’t reply. Vince was a friend, but she and Mallian had such deep history that the humans behind her seemed little more than smudges on time, fleeting patterns of thought and shape that would be gone with the next moon. She and Mallian were more permanent. They were part of the landscape, and this was a continuation of their long story.
“Mallian,” she said as they drew close. “You’ve looked better.”
“You never have,” he said. “My sweet Lilou.” She had never heard such affection in his voice.
“What did she do to you in there?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Lilou frowned.
“She treated me as if I didn’t exist,” he continued. He looked past Lilou at the fairy, and grinned. “She knows different now. Watch this.” He closed his eyes, frowning a little, and raised his chin.
Lilou sensed movement behind her. She glanced back and saw the fairy contorted, twisting in pain, her limbs drawn in and then hands slapping at the air around her head. Two shapes parted from her back with a delicate ripping sound, and Grace screamed.
“What are you doing?” Lilou asked. Mallian did not acknowledge the question. He remained in concentration, and he smiled as the fairy’s tattered wings started flapping, creating first a swish-swish sound and then a light buzzing as her weight grew less and she lifted from her feet.
All the time, she was crying out.
“It’s hurting her!” Lilou said.
Mallian’s eyes snapped open and his smile turned into a grimace. “Good,” he said, and the fairy rose higher, five metres off the ground and describing an uneven circle in the air above Angela and the others.
“I don’t know what she did to you in there, but there’s no need for this.”
“There’s every need,” Mallian said. “And who are you to give me orders, Lilou?”
“I’m your friend.”
“Friend.” He blinked and the fairy fell to the ground. She landed softly, then staggered and fell onto her side. Then she was up again, as if hauled upright by invisible puppet strings. She swayed a little, wings tucking in against her back. She shivered, and the wings fluttered and shook as she pulled them close.
Lilou could not see her face.
“Yes,” Lilou said. “I always have been, you know that. I’ve only wanted what’s best for us, and for the Kin. Ascent isn’t for the best.”
He chuckled. It was a deep throaty sound, like something was broken inside. Lilou realised that even though he looked thin and malnourished, even though he smelled of filth and decay, Mallian was as strong as he’d been the day he was trapped in the Fold. Perhaps stronger. His mind endured, and with it his aims and ambitions, enriched and refined by his time away.
Now he had the fairy in his thrall, and the possibilities were horrific.
“I’m not going to beg you,” she said.
“Good.”
“Mallian, I’m appealing to you with the memory of all the time we’ve spent together, and all the things we’ve seen and done. You hate humans, but you also know their power and might.”
“Against her?” he said, nodding past her at Grace.
“A fairy who cries when she flies?”
“Pft!” He waved a hand at her. “Flying is just a trick. You know the thin
gs she can do, the powers she bears. They’re mine now. The only limit is my imagination.”
He’s right, Lilou thought. She tried not to show it. And he will never change his mind.
She looked back at Vince and the others, hoping to steer Mallian’s attention that way. As she did so she gripped the handle of the short knife in her belt.
“You betrayed me,” he said. “Left me trapped in there with her. You know what she was doing to the other Kin she drew in, the sad mongrels like the girl there? She was eating them, one piece at a time. Chewing off chunks of Kin meat, letting them heal, then hunting and eating them again. Imagine being eaten alive for eternity? That was her aim all along.”
“And you?” Lilou asked, trying to hide her shock.
“Maybe my old meat was too tough for her,” he said. “But that’s what the best of us, the most powerful, have come to. Eating each other. What do you think happens to the rest of the Kin if we do nothing to reassert our place in the world?”
“We fade away,” Lilou said. “We’ve had our time. That doesn’t mean you and I can’t remain civilised and enjoy the time we have left.”
“I was not born to fade away,” Mallian said, and she saw the look she had been waiting for, the hooded eyes, the dreamy distance as he considered his long, turbulent past and the many wonderful, amazing, terrible things he had seen and done.
Lilou drew on every dreg of her power, lowering all the masks and shields she lived with day to day in the world of the humans, and projected herself as she really was and always had been many centuries before, when hiding was not so important.
From behind her she heard a collective gasp as the humans fell under her spell.
In front of her, Mallian’s eyes went wide and his expression became open, almost childlike.
Lilou pulled the knife and stepped forward, sweeping the blade around towards Mallian’s throat. She would only have one strike, and it would have to be hard. The blade was keen. And although she hated the thought of it, and knew that his death would also be the end of her, it was the only thing left to do.
As the blade struck his throat it passed right through, and she stepped back from the imminent fountain of blood.
Mallian laughed.
In her hand, the blade had turned into a feather.
“Tickles,” he said. His laugh ended as if sliced in two, and there was no second chance. “No more, Lilou. No more.”
There was movement behind her, and in Mallian’s eyes she saw a reflection of the end.
* * *
Vince felt Angela’s hand close tighter around his own.
“No!” he shouted, tugging, struggling to get free so that he could run to Lilou’s aid, even though there was no help he could give. White-hot pain scorched in from his broken arm and he welcomed it. It was nothing compared to losing Lilou.
“No!” he screamed again, his throat raw.
He loved Lilou as well as Angela, and the emotional pain he felt was proof of that.
The fairy drifted closer to Lilou, reached out a hand, and white fire spurted from her palm. It broke around the nymph, then curled in and struck again and again, a blazing snake-like heat with a mind of its own.
Lilou barely had time to struggle. Her arms waved and she took a couple of steps to one side, but by then her beautiful hair was singed to nothing and her smooth skin blistered off, flesh aflame. Her scream was terrible but brief. She fell onto her side, glowing with blue fire as the fats in her body ignited. The flames shimmied and spat.
Grace lowered her hand and became motionless once again, a puppet awaiting its master.
Vince twisted and pulled, but Angela’s nails dug in, and her voice held him fast.
“Don’t leave me again.”
“She’s gone, Vince,” Sammi said through a blur of tears. He realised that she was holding onto him as well.
Lilou has gone.
Rage consumed him. Mallian looked down at the blazing, bubbling mess the nymph had become. His face was blank, and Vince so wished he could wipe that expression away.
“Bastard!” he shouted.
Mallian glanced up at him, then back down at Lilou’s burning remains. Parts of her skeleton were exposed now that some of her flesh and insides had burned away beneath the intense, unnatural fire. One arm stuck up and her fingers were twisted in towards her palm. A leg shifted and kicked as tendons heated and snapped.
Vince could not believe such a beautiful, ancient mind could have been erased so quickly and so thoroughly. Where were her memories now? The things she had done, the few men and women she had loved and the many, many more who had loved her?
“We need to go,” Angela said. “We need to get away from here now, while we still can.”
“I can’t,” Vince said. “I can’t leave her. Not like that.”
“There’s nothing left of her to leave,” Angela said into his ear. “Please, Vince. We’re together again, and it needs to be for however long we have left.”
“Not long,” he said. He saw Mallian for what he had become—a monster, a harbinger of hate. Lilou had known, and even through her love for the Nephilim she had tried to act against that. If only he could too. “We have to do something.”
“What can we do?”
Vince had no answer.
“Okay,” Angela said. She tucked his broken arm into his shirt, ignoring his groan, his cold sweat. “Okay, we will do something, but not here and now.”
As Vince took the first few steps away from the awful scene, he heard something strange. It sounded like drums, but then he saw Bone struggling to open a metal door.
“What’s he doing?” he asked.
“Oh, fuck,” Angela said. “Does it never end?”
* * *
Father will help me, Bone thought. Father will help all of us.
He could barely compute what he was seeing. He’d encountered Kin before, but fleetingly, never like this. The fairy thing, spewing fire from her hand. The tall beast that had emerged through the rip in the world.
And just what the fuck is that rip, doorway, thing? Where does it go? What more will come through?
As he watched, the steady tap-tap-tap from behind the door worked its way into his brain. Mohserran and the others had stopped banging and were now scratching, and it had the sound of something more deliberate. Maybe they were finding their minds again after waking, using their wiles, hollowing their way through to the outside.
Father can help us all against this.
Even as he worked at the metal chair leg securing the door shut he knew he was being foolish. They would still carry the Kovo, and perhaps they could spread it through bites, or saliva, or simply through exhaling the germ so that others could breathe it in.
He paused in his efforts, listened to the spitting of the burning body, then started again. He could smell cooking meat. It made his mouth water, and that made him retch, puke rising into his mouth. He turned and spat it out. It burned in his throat and around his tongue.
When he turned to the door something struck it hard from the other side. The metal chair leg, already twisted by him, bounced from the rusted hook and eye and clattered to the ground.
Bone stepped back and tripped over his own feet as the door burst open. He kicked back in the dust, heels digging in and throwing up dust as sunlight fell on one of the dark creatures inside. The werewolf Francine stood in the doorway, panting hard and squinting against the sun. Her pelt was burned on one side of her face.
She looked down at Bone.
“Francine,” he whispered.
“Back!” he heard behind him. “What the fucking hell are you thinking?”
“They can help,” he said. “Against that thing.” He nodded at the tall shape still standing close to the burning corpse. He’d heard it called Mallian. It seemed transfixed by what had happened, staring down at the flames for so long that its eyes reflected the fire and burned themselves.
The woman, Angela, grasped his arm. “With us. Now!
We’re not waiting.” She let go and he heard her and the girl and man start to run. He knew he should go with them.
Francine looked at him, then at the burning body. Mohserran appeared behind her, pushing forward out of the cooler, and behind him came the gargoyle. All three of them were shaking and sweating, their eyes yellow and alight, mouths slavering, and Bone knew that their madness was not something that would ever fade away.
Neither was their infection.
“What have I done?” he muttered.
His father, the creature Mohserran, fixed him with a stare.
“Oh, that’s just wonderful,” a deep voice said, and when Bone managed to rise and look behind him he saw Mallian standing close. He smelled of burning flesh. Beside him the fairy was swaying back and forth, her mouth slack.
“Grace,” Mallian said. She tilted her head and the three infected Kin filed from the cooler and stood close together. Their eyes dulled a little, and their stance became less aggressive. More submissive.
“They’re infected with—”
“They’re a good start,” Mallian said. “An army needs berserkers. They’ll be a magnificent front line.”
Bone started backing away. At any moment he expected the fairy to cast him down, burn him up, or slash him in half with a wave of her hand.
“Run,” Mallian said. “Hide, human. Ascent is here. You’ll know me soon. You’ll all grow to know me.”
Bone turned and ran, heading after the other three. He wished he was young again, and that his tree was still there, and he could find the hollow trunk and huddle away from the world forever. But he was no longer a child, and there were no hollow trees.
Everything here was exposed.
PART TWO
ASCENT