by Tim Lebbon
“Not with them. Not with the Kovo. It stays in the valley and we put it down. If we don’t, Mallian and his cronies will mean nothing. If this infection gets out...”
“What about us?” he asked. Fer was dead now, still impaled on the end of his spear. Its blood had splashed his hand. He wiped it on his jeans, knowing how ineffectual the gesture was.
“Fer had that poor thing’s blood in its mouth.” She nodded at the dead werewolf, a shrivelled and skeletal thing. “Her saliva was in its wounds. And... I think that’s something we worry about if and when the time comes. Don’t you?”
Vince nodded, but the truth was already out there. Last time the powers that be needed to cover up the infection they had released, they gassed the whole valley and then flooded it to keep it hidden away. What they would do this time was anyone’s guess.
And the army was on its way.
“Mallian,” Sammi said. “He’s close, and coming closer.”
“How near are you?” Vince asked, nodding at the bundle in her arms.
“I could try,” she said, but her doubt was obvious.
“Not yet,” Angela said. “We have to be sure, Sammi.”
“Maybe we should hide, then?” Vince said.
“Fuck hiding,” Dastion said. “I think we’re long past that.”
Vince tugged the spear from the dead shapeshifter, stuck it into the ground a couple of times to try and clean some of the blood from the wood, and looked around at the people he loved and the dwarf he’d grown to like. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them.
From the direction of the river another dull explosion rang out, and a geyser rose and spread in the moonlight. Three more followed, and they were like strange trees blooming in this alien, desolate landscape.
“Looks like Shashahanna wasn’t the one doing the screaming,” Angela said.
From closer, footsteps approached. Vince expected Mallian to emerge from the darkness, and he crouched down with spear at the ready. Had they made a foolish mistake coming here too soon? Preventing Mallian from leaving the valley had seemed a priority, but breaking his hold over Grace was much more important. If they lost Sammi now—if Mallian came through them and took her—then everything was lost.
The footsteps halted. Nothing appeared.
“Where?” Angela whispered.
“Can’t see,” Vince said.
“Quiet,” Sammi said. “Low... quiet... still. I’ll make us sleek and unseen. Like your friend Bone.”
Bone? Vince thought. His confusion could wait. Sammi was doing something, dipping into her fledgling powers once more, and as he, Dastion and Angela crouched down together, with the bodies of Fer and the infected werewolf close by, he felt the world moving away from them. It was a strange sensation. He was still fully connected to his surroundings—he could feel the ground beneath his feet and knees and the cool kiss of the night air, and he could smell the death and blood, and the bodily aromas from Dastion and his own unwashed, rain-soaked clothes—but he knew from outside he was barely part of the world anymore. Dastion was kneeling ten feet from him but he was less than a shadow, like a memory of once being there. Even Angela, so close that he could touch her, was a ghost.
The darkness came to life and Mallian appeared. In the night he seemed taller and more solid than before, stronger, as if he had never spent two years trapped against the rocky ground to wither and waste away. He was the size of a mountain, and Vince remembered the agony of the Nephilim stepping down to crush his arm. His broken bone and bruised flesh roared in sympathy.
Mallian had others with him. One small shape was familiar, and Vince felt a renewed anger at Thorn, the pixie who he had seen cause so much pain.
They paused close to where Vince and the others crouched, hidden by Sammi’s growing fairy powers.
If Grace is with them she’ll know, he thought. Sammi was taking a dangerous risk.
They were all taking risks.
29
If she’s with him I’m going to try, Sammi thought. I think I’m ready. I can’t tell them yet, because I’m not sure I can take the weight of their expectation. Everything I’ve learned is too precarious. It’s like a bridge made of glass, or cotton, or dreams, so weak and thin that it’ll break under one false step.
She didn’t like keeping secrets from the people who loved her and were risking their lives to protect her, but she also recognised the reality of this fresh, strange existence. She was building delicate and precious pathways between the new parts of her and the old, and she had to ensure they remained as strong and stable as possible.
I’m sure I’m ready... but she needs to be with him. To break the bridge between the Nephilim and the fairy, I have to be able to see it and touch it.
Mallian was less than twenty metres from them, standing tall and proud and letting the moonlight reveal him like a living statue. He was shameless in his nudity. She would not see him hunched down low again. He was free and ready to ascend, rise to the might he thought he deserved in the eyes of the world, both human and Kin. She couldn’t help but admire that.
She could also hate him for it. That was easier. He had killed her friend Lilou. And even though it was the fairy who had killed her father and ripped her life apart, it was Mallian who sought to keep it torn.
If he had his way, he would take her under his control as well. He would make her his soldier, stand her alongside Grace and force her to slaughter, destroy, paint the grey land red. Sammi would never accept that. She’d die before it happened.
She had no intention of dying.
Grace was not with Mallian. But as he stood there close to them—sniffing the air, suspecting some subterfuge, but not seeing through her small fairy spell—she took in the measure of him. Being so close helped her prepare herself even more for what was to come. The relics wrapped in her jacket grew warm at his nearness, and she fed on that warmth and let it propagate the spell she needed to cast.
I’m ready now, she thought. Definitely now.
Mallian stared down at the two dead Kin and his anger was rich and bloody in the colourless shades of night. He kicked at the ground, as if suspicious of her spell and searching for them. Sammi held her breath. But the kicking was simply an expression of his rage, and he, Thorn, and two other Kin who had come with them turned and stalked back into the shadowy remains of Longford.
Sammi felt her glass bridges strengthening, her power settling, and the void around the small core of what she had once been grew denser and more complicated than ever before.
I’ll take everything from you, Mallian, she thought, but at the same time she knew that in doing so, she would be taking every good thing from herself.
* * *
Bone had imagined them coming to the valley with a great show of force. Chinooks whacka-whackaing across the countryside towards Longford, searchlights splashing the ground ahead of them, bellies full of troops and armour. Smaller helicopter gunships escorting them, low and quiet and ready to unleash hell. Ground troops in transporters, deployed at speed and with complete efficiency. Tanks, troop carriers, trucks, field artillery set up at a distance and zeroed in using laser spotters, jets flashing high overhead with heavy ordnance ready to drop at a moment’s notice. He’d never seen anything like that, but he expected it. If he were Jordan, that’s what he would have sent.
Instead, a single car approached him along the road that followed the ridge line to the west of Longford valley. It was a Toyota, big but not ostentatious, and if he’d not received a call from Colonel Miles telling him where to meet and when, he might have hidden away and let the car drive by.
It slowed to a halt, and Bone only revealed himself when the colonel stepped from the back seat. He was an average-sized man, grey hair, and though he wore a uniform, he didn’t seem like a military man on duty. He gave the impression that he’d just woken up, one that was reinforced by a yawn. Bone went to shake his hand but the man did not offer his to be shaken.
“I thought
the army was coming?” Bone asked.
The man appraised him with narrowed eyes. It might have been thirty seconds until he spoke.
“Colonel Miles, 3rd Group out of Fort Bragg. You Bone?”
“Yes.” He had the pressing desire to salute. “Yes, sir.” The colonel’s eyes bore into him, sharp points of light in the darkness, as if they gathered starlight and fired it back.
“You’ve seen these creatures?”
“I have. They’re... very powerful.”
“So am I,” Miles said. “Your superior put a lot of faith in you, Bone. I’ve seen the footage, and quite frankly it’s hard to believe, but believing’s not my job. Containing the threat is, and retrieving as many of the items as possible.”
“Retrieving?” Bone asked. He was confused. Which items was the colonel talking about?
“You know the lie of the land, so I’m told, so I’ll want you to brief my logistics team.”
“Sorry, which items?”
“The threats,” the colonel said. “I’m instructed to use lethal force only if absolutely necessary.”
“You’re here to capture them?”
The colonel frowned, his first sign of not being in control.
“You can’t capture these things!” Bone said. “You said you’ve seen the footage. Don’t you understand how dangerous they are?”
“How many are there?”
“The one you saw is Mallian. Tore a man in half with his bare hands.”
“Let him try doing that to a Humvee.”
“There are others worse than him. Three of them, they’re infected with some sort of virus or nerve agent, something that—”
“I know about the infected,” Miles said. “They should be dead. If they are still on their feet they’ll be weak and ineffective.”
Bone shook his head, snorting laughter. “You don’t understand. None of you understand.”
“I understand that I’m here with orders, and you’re here because you know what these things are.”
“Yes, and I know what they aren’t. They aren’t just target practice for you. They aren’t creatures that will come quietly, or sit by while you coax them into cages. They aren’t anything you’ve ever seen or imagined before. They have a fairy that—”
“A fairy?” Miles said, and his bright eyes sparkled with laughter. Bone also heard someone in the Toyota chuckling.
“Oh, God,” Bone said quietly.
“Look, your superior said you were here to assess and keep tabs on what was happening, and I’m sure you’ve done that to your full ability. Now the army’s here.”
“Where?” Bone asked. “I see you and a car!”
Miles smiled, a lifeless expression that didn’t touch his eyes. Bone realised they were actually the same height, even though he’d first assumed the colonel to be a few inches taller than him.
“They’re coming,” he said. He looked past Bone, and for a second Bone thought the Kin had made themselves known, following him up out of the valley, stalking him, and now they would pounce and make a show of slaughtering this blinkered military man just as they’d killed the poor cop who’d come on ahead. But the colonel smiled again and slapped Bone’s shoulder a couple of times. “In fact, they’re here.”
Bone felt it first—a low, gentle vibration in the ground, transmitted up through his feet into his legs. Then he heard it, a rumble in the distance, almost too low to perceive. Way behind the colonel and across the windswept hilltop, the sky lit up. Moments later the first set of lights appeared over the ridge and dipped down as they followed the narrow road into the valley. Behind them, higher up, clouds began to glow as the aerial contingents of Colonel Miles’s force made themselves known.
Bone should have been pleased. Here was power and might, the finest of America’s military come to face up to the strangest, most obscure threat they had ever known. He should have felt some form of comfort.
All he experienced was dread.
“I need you to talk to my people,” Miles said.
Bone nodded and forced a smile, but already he was planning his escape back down into the valley. The time for talk was long gone, and nothing would persuade the colonel from his mission.
Bone had to find his father and end his unnatural existence himself.
* * *
“Up there,” Angela said. “What’s that?”
“That’s war,” Vince replied.
“The military. Bone really did get them to come.”
“You doubted him?”
“I wasn’t sure what to make of him,” Angela said. “He’s strange.”
“He’s Kin, like me,” Sammi said. “Half human, half Kin, still finding his way.”
Angela was hardly surprised.
“So what happens now?” Dastion asked.
Angela and the others looked uphill towards the ridge where lights played through the darkness, cutting swaths across the hillside and down into the valley. She counted a dozen vehicles, maybe more, and there were at least six separate helicopters buzzing above them, describing wide circles over the valley, probably scanning the terrain with radar, or heat-sensitive equipment, or whatever the hell else those things carried.
“Now Mallian gets what he wants,” Angela said. “War between Kin and humanity.” She turned to Sammi, and the change in the girl shocked her. Just ten minutes ago they’d been huddled down together while Mallian stalked nearby. She had kept them silent and hidden from his view, but still seemed nervous and afraid. Now, Sammi was something else. There was a confidence in her eyes, a power, that had never been there before. There was also a weight of sadness, as if they had already lost.
“Sammi?”
“I’m ready to try,” she said. “I have to be close.”
“We just were close,” Vince said.
“Close to Grace,” Sammi said, and Angela realised where the sadness came from. To free Grace from Mallian’s control was to put herself at risk. Grace had sought out Sammi to drag her into the Fold, to be with her forever, and now Sammi would be presenting herself at the fairy’s feet.
Angela also recognised that there was no choice, and seeing that realisation in Sammi’s eyes made her so, so proud.
“Then let’s move,” Angela said. “All of us, together. If we reach them before the army does, maybe we can end this before it’s really begun.”
Vince nodded, and Dastion wielded his pike.
Angela was the first of them to rise and follow the route Mallian and the other Kin had so recently taken. The valley came alive to the sound of motors and helicopters. Lights flashed through darkness.
From somewhere ahead of them she heard a deep, ground-shaking roar of triumph.
* * *
Mallian’s throat hurts but he continues to shout.
“Go!” he commands. “Kill them! Let them see you. No hiding, no scampering in the dark. Be yourselves, and then kill them all!”
From around him come growls, howls and shouts as Kin launch themselves through the darkness and towards the lights closing in on them. Thorn the pixie dashes away into the shadows, ready to commit his own acts of violent mischief. The harpy that brought several Kin here, making fast, silent trips through the night carrying them in her clawed feet, launches herself up towards the stars. A gremlin runs, a smoke-ghost flows, a leprechaun scampers and a chupacabra sprints, and all of them have their blood up. All of them share his blood and his desire to live in the open once again, triumphant and in control.
This is everything he has ever wanted.
Grace is beside him, small and shivering. Power radiates from her like a constrained sun, and he concentrates, dips in, touches that power and uses it to exert his control over the two infected Kin. The third has gone and not come back, its body lying not too far away, and he suspects the humans and the fairy girl are also back in the valley, come to cause him trouble. He is not concerned. He will finish what he began with Vince and crush him into the ground. He will pull Angela in two in front of her
niece. And the girl Sammi will fall under his command. First, Grace will be controlling her and then, when this first battle is over, he will cast a similar glamour to make her his own.
He is prepared to launch the fairy at the forces coming for them, but he’s going to hold her back for a while. First, he wants his Kin comrades to blood themselves, redden their hands, sink their teeth into flesh to ignite their taste for humanity.
Then, when he’s prepared himself mentally and is ready for the concentration and effort required, he will unleash Grace.
There is not a future he can see where he is not triumphant.
Mallian shouts again, and he hears his voice go up against the echoes of engines and man-made things, and win.
30
As Bone returned to the valley, he heard the first explosive gunshots from behind and above him. They were too heavy for small-arms fire, and glancing back he saw a bright tracer arcing across the valley from one of the helicopters. He wondered what it was shooting at. Its flight path was erratic, engine sounding strained. Moments later there was a snapping, whistling sound, and the dark shape shuddered and dived into a violent spin. The shooting ended, but the sound of the struggling rotors reverberated across the slopes.
Bone knew he should be running, but he could only stand and watch as the aircraft’s deadly plummet ended in a shattering crash and explosion. It shook the ground, sending a fiery mushroom boiling into the night sky and illuminating the hillside for hundreds of metres in every direction. The sudden action and almost immediate explosion had ripped the night apart and changed the valley to a place of noisy chaos.
Bone gasped in shock and ducked down low, then when the initial fireball faded he continued his flight downhill.
Now Colonel Miles and the others knew what they were up against. And once that fairy entered the fight...
More shooting erupted behind him, starting in several scattered locations and escalating until it seemed the whole hillside was on fire. Small arms joined in with the heavier, deeper sound of aircraft machine guns, and moments later he heard the screams and shouts of men, women, and maybe Kin dying.