by Tim Lebbon
The army had never confronted an enemy like this. By the time the arrogant colonel realised that traditional combat rules must change, this first contact would be over.
Bone reached the grey and edged left to avoid Longford and the area where Mallian and the fairy might still be. He realised that his father was possibly already employed in the fight, controlled and sent by Mallian. He hated the idea. His father had not exactly been a creature of peace, but he had been fair, a creature concerned with the wellbeing of others and the differences between right and wrong. Now he was being used to fight innocent humans.
He felt like he was floundering, rushing around blind with no real plan. He’d come here looking for signs of his father, and had found a deadly infection that might spread if it escaped the valley, and a conflict the likes of which he had never imagined. In many ways, Mallian and his Ascent mirrored Mohserran and the contagion he carried. Both offered a terrible threat to humanity. Neither could be allowed to escape—or be captured and taken—beyond Longford and its dead valley.
Events were now much larger than him. His had become a private affair in an increasingly public incident, and he had to return to the only people he thought might help. With all that was happening, he could no longer find and confront Mohserran himself.
* * *
“He’s moving forward for the fight,” Sammi said. “He must be, because I sense Grace going forward too. It has to be now. We have to go to them now!”
“You’re ready?” Vince asked.
“We’ll soon know,” Sammi said. “Come on!”
There was no doubt which direction they had to take. The initial scatter of gunfire had increased, and the rattle of small arms echoed around the valley. Two more choppers were twisting and diving, venting long bursts of gunfire at enemies unseen. Sammi thought she caught a faint glimpse of a winged thing, but it might have been a shade in her eye, a shadow crossing the stars.
Dastion took the lead, his heavy pike held across his chest. Sammi felt bad for him, because Grace had taken him to the Fold for one thing only. Now he was still helping them save a Kin who had taken bites out of him. She didn’t understand how such madness could have overtaken a creature with so much power.
I only have a little of it, she thought. There’s no saying how much more there is, but maybe I’ll learn, and maybe I’ll have no choice. Maybe it’ll drive me mad too.
The sound of the battle changed. An engine coughed, roared louder and spluttered, and a second helicopter spun down in a crazy spiral, spitting flames from its engine and lashing at the air with its traumatised rotors.
“Everyone down!” Vince shouted, and Sammi realised the plunging shape was far closer than she’d thought. They hit the ground just where silt gave way to grass, and seconds later the stricken aircraft made impact in the woods above them. Trees snapped and shattered with a deafening crunch, then the helicopter exploded, the detonation thumping up through the ground and winding her. A chunk of debris—perhaps a spinning rotor—smashed through the trees above and around them, showering them with fragments of split wood and bark. A wave of heat washed over Sammi and she squeezed her eyes closed, curling into a ball and thinking, I just heard people die.
Every second that passed, every moment between now and her freeing the fairy, might doom more people and Kin to a fiery death.
Screams came from ahead. A shape emerged from the shadows, running at them, and Dastion raised his pike.
Vince caught the dwarf’s arm at the last moment, and Bone skidded to a halt before them.
“We have to get close to Mallian and Grace,” Vince said. “She can help.” He pointed to Sammi, but Bone barely glanced her way.
“They’ve come to capture them,” he said. “The three infected Kin. The army’s no idea how dangerous they are, and they’ve come here to catch them, take them away.”
“Only two now,” Dastion said. “Fer killed one of them.”
Bone’s eyes went wide.
“The werewolf, not Mohserran,” Vince said. “He’s still out there somewhere.”
“He’ll be fighting,” Bone said. “Will you help me?”
“We have to help each other,” Angela said. “Grace first, and then stopping Mallian. Everything else is secondary.”
“Even if the infected Kin escape the valley?” Bone asked.
“While there’s still a fight here, they won’t,” Sammi said, but none of them could know that for sure. Even after all this time, none of them really knew anything.
“So we’re going back towards that?” Bone asked, pointing behind him. The fighting was taking place uphill from them in the woods, past the blazing scattered remains of the crashed ’copter in the dark and shadowy places that Kin called home.
“We are,” Sammi said. She nursed the relics wrapped in the coat in her arms, felt their warmth, and when she blinked she imagined what it would be like to try and cast the spell.
It was going to hurt.
* * *
In the end, Mallian found them.
Vince saw the shadow just as it burst from a copse of trees. Time slowed down. Panic bit in, and fear, but also a sense of relief that the confrontation had been brought to them here, and now, and that their future would be decided soon. He turned and raised his spear one-handed, looking up at the looming shape.
Mallian waved one arm and swept him aside. Winded, Vince hit the ground and rolled, crying out when his wounded arm folded beneath him. He lurched over onto his back and Mallian was above him, blotting out the moon and ready to stomp on him one last time.
Dastion swung his pike and slammed it into Mallian’s leg. The Nephilim grunted and overbalanced, going down on one knee not two metres from Vince’s head.
Vince grabbed up his spear and rolled again, prepared for the white-hot agony consuming his arm. He cried out but kept rolling, because now Mallian meant to kill him, and against the Nephilim there would be no second chance.
As he struck a tree and pulled himself upright, he saw Grace in the darkness beneath the trees behind Mallian. She was touched by starlight, slack-jawed and staring, her eyes out of focus, body and limbs slumped as if there was a single invisible thread holding her upright.
This might be their only chance.
“Sammi!” he shouted.
Sammi had already sensed their arrival. She knelt and placed the wrapped bundle on the ground before her, pulling the jacket open and exposing the relics to the night.
Mallian’s attention went from Vince to Sammi, and then to the relics displayed before her. His eyes went wide. Grace had seen too, and now her vacant stare was not quite so vacant, her stance no longer that of a puppet. She took a small step in Sammi’s direction, then froze, her face a rictus of pain. Mallian’s hold over her was total.
The Nephilim rose and turned towards Sammi.
Vince, hauling himself upright in turn, saw a flicker of movement to his right. Angela dashed beneath tree cover, and at first he thought she was going for Mallian. He wanted to scream at her to wait, hold back, because the Nephilim would kill any of them who went close enough, and he could not bear to see Angela killed.
Anyone but Angela.
As he opened his mouth to shout, she ran into the fairy and sent her sprawling in the long grass.
No, Vince thought, but then he realised what Angela had done, and why. Mallian froze and frowned, and as he turned back towards the fallen fairy, Sammi set to work kneeling amongst the relics.
“Hey!” Vince called, standing and waving his spear at Mallian. “Hey, you big ugly fuck!”
Mallian did not take the bait. He didn’t even glance back at Vince. Instead, all of his attention was on the fairy, and the woman wrapping her arms around her to hold her tight.
“No!” Vince shouted, and he ran. It felt like he was moving in slow motion, but his brain shifted at the speed of light. Bone crouched to his right, motionless and powerless. Dastion was beside Sammi with his pike raised, ready to protect her. Other shadows moved
beneath the trees and above them, Kin that were friend or foe. Further away were shouts and shooting, explosions and roars, screams.
None of that mattered now.
“Let go!” Vince shouted, and he and Angela locked eyes. “Let her go,” he said again, quieter, and he raised his spear.
He was ten metres from Mallian, and ten seconds too late.
The fairy seemed to pulse. It was a heavy, single throb, smacking through the ground and air with the power and impact of a giant heartbeat. Angela was thrown across the clearing, too fast for the movement to be followed.
Vince heard rather than saw her crash against a tree.
He shouted in rage and grief, a wordless scream, and closed on Mallian with his spear raised. The Nephilim must have been momentarily distracted by what he had done and the effort it had taken to control Grace. Vince plunged the spear into Mallian’s left side, shoving as hard as he could, feeling it grind against bone and then snap as Mallian roared and turned. He slammed one arm into Vince and sent him spinning, breathless, bouncing across the ground towards where Bone crouched in the shadows.
Pain sang in from all directions—his broken arm flopped against his stomach and side, he heard a crunch from his ribs, bruises and cuts rose and bled. His head felt like a solid metal chunk that had been pounded and bent out of shape. Bone grabbed him and helped him sit up.
“Angela,” Vince whispered.
“Sammi,” Bone said. “Look.”
Sammi was on her knees and bent almost double over the relics. She was shivering, and Vince was sure there was a gentle glow emanating from her head and hair. Either that or his vision was damaged, his eyes shaken by the violence inflicted upon him.
He looked for Angela and saw her twisted and motionless at the base of the tree. Oh God, he thought. If she was dead then so was he.
* * *
Sammi shoved and felt the glass bridges beginning to break. It hurt her to push, but she could also now sense the agonies being endured by Grace, and they were far, far worse.
As links began to fracture, she saw the great shadow of Mallian towering above her. Coming for her, not Grace. Knowing that she was the danger.
She took in a deep breath and pushed one last time.
* * *
Angela, barely conscious, saw her niece become the centre of things, and felt the power thrumming out from her. They all did. Even Mallian, standing over her with hands raised and Vince’s broken spear still sticking from his side.
She blinked, and an eternity seemed to pass before she opened her eyes again. Her senses were distant and vague. Pain bit in from everywhere, so intense that it became one raging fire.
Her pain did not matter. The moment when everything changed was all that mattered. She saw that moment, when Grace came back to herself. The fairy stood taller, shook like a dog shedding itself of water droplets, then glared at her surroundings as if seeing them for the first time.
Her gaze fell on Mallian. Her expression changed from one of confusion, to utter, outright fury.
“Be with me,” Mallian said to the fairy. The first time it sounded like an order, but when he spoke the words a second time they were a plea, and they might have come from the mouth of a child. “Be with me.”
Sammi slumped over the relics, and Vince grabbed her by one arm and dragged her away. He groaned with each step. Angela could hear him above the gunfire and shouting coming from further away, and in his voice she heard her own pain also. We’re losing each other here and now, she thought, and though she tried with all her strength to hang on, darkness came and took her away.
The last thing she heard was the fairy, speaking furious words she did not know in a voice she hoped she would never hear again.
* * *
“We’ll rise ascendant,” Mallian says. “We’ll be special again! I was going to release you, soon, when you realised that standing against the humans alongside me is the way. The only way.”
Grace glares at him, and speaks those words again. He does not understand them—she’s speaking in the old fairy tongue, and he hasn’t heard it for aeons—but he does recognise the look in her eyes. He’s felt such rage in his own expression many times before.
“Please,” he says, and he’s aware that he is begging. All around him are the sounds and sights of his plan only just beginning—gunfire and fighting, and human cries of pain as they die beneath the hands, claws and teeth of things they do not yet understand; the triumphant roars and songs of brave Kin finding their footing in the world once again; humans scattered at his feet, broken and afraid. It is all he’s ever wanted. It’s all within his grasp.
“Please,” he says, taking two strides towards the fairy.
She raises her hand, whispers more words in her old tongue, and Mallian freezes to the spot. Every muscle vibrates, knotting into cramps that bring a muted roar of pain from his constricted throat. He shivers as he tries to tear loose of her hold, and knowing what her power over him entails—he had two years held pressed to the damp ground to consider it—he directs every ounce of his strength into ripping free.
He is a butterfly pinned to a board.
He feels the eyes of the humans upon him, and some Kin as well, traitors to their kind.
“I... never... lose,” Mallian says, and then the world around him blurs, blackness falls, and when he next opens his eyes it is raining, and the Fold has him once again in its grasp.
The fairy is there as well. She lets him fall free and slump to the ground, his muscles settling and strength returning. When he looks up again she is gone, and there’s only him.
She didn’t bind me to the ground, he thinks, but there is no comfort in that realisation. He looks around the Fold and sees only what he has seen before—the same views, the same skies, the same alien stars.
She left him free because there is nowhere for him to go.
31
Sammi was weak but conscious, and everything about her had changed. Vince didn’t want to touch her anymore. Once he’d dragged her back from Mallian he let her go, and they watched together and yet apart as Grace and Mallian slipped out of sight back through a portal the fairy created for less than the blink of an eye.
There, and then gone.
“So is that it?” Bone asked.
“They could have gone anywhere,” Dastion said.
“No,” Vince said. “We know where they’ve gone.” Battered and bleeding, hurting in a dozen different places, he staggered across the clearing to where Angela still lay slumped against the base of a tree. She was in a shape she should not make, arms and legs all wrong, head tilted to one side and resting on her shoulder. Blood leaked from her ear, nose and mouth. Moonlight painted it black, but the sun smeared the eastern horizon now, bringing some hint of dawn colour to the grey, dead valley. Mostly red.
He knelt beside Angela and reached for her, afraid to actually touch in case he found her too still, too cold. He couldn’t take that. Not now. It didn’t matter if they’d won or lost, didn’t matter that Mallian had gone and his Ascent forces were now fighting a battle with no leader. All that mattered was Angela.
Her eyelids fluttered. Vince’s heart did the same.
“Angela? Baby?”
Her left eye opened and swirled in its socket, until it focused on him. The panic left it, though not the pain. She lifted her left hand and reached for him, and he held her hand. Even his good arm hurt.
“She’ll live,” Sammi said. She was standing behind him, a presence he did not recognise.
“Who’s that?” Angela asked, and she frowned and closed her eyes. It broke Vince’s heart. She’d spent two years with Sammi, the only family she had left. Now she did not recognise her own niece.
“It’s me,” Sammi said, but even the girl’s own voice did not sound convinced at who she was. Vince saw her confused, troubled tears, and that also broke his heart. Was it possible that drawing together had driven them all so far apart?
He realised that the shooting and shout
ing from deeper in the woods had grown less intense, and instead there were cries of confusion. Helicopters circled above, sweeping the hillside and valley back and forth with powerful probing searchlights. Bursts of gunfire still chattered here and there. Shadows skittered through the trees nearby, and then fell still and silent.
A series of lights flickered on down on the valley floor, and the sound of engines broke through from a different direction. Shooting rattled through the dawn. Lights flashed left and right. Shadows darted, shapes stalked.
“What’s happening?” Bone asked. He held Dastion up, the dwarf favouring one leg and bleeding from a gash on his cheek.
“They’re leaving,” Sammi said. “They’re running. Now that their leader has gone they’re adrift.”
“They know he’s gone?” Vince asked.
“They must.” Sammi looked around, then focused on Vince and Angela again. “We should go. I don’t know what’s going to happen here, but none of it will be good.”
“We can’t let them capture the Kin,” Bone said. “Vince. You know what’ll happen.”
“Ascent, just in a different way,” Vince said.
“How’s that?” Dastion asked.
“Whatever happens now, this fight will go public,” Vince said. “Too much footage to keep secret. There’ll be leaks, and if they capture the Kin like Bone said they were aiming at... experimentation. Vivisection. Humans will know about the Kin, and we all know no good can come of that. We’re just not built that way.” He looked at Angela as he said this and her good eye was open. She shed a tear, because she knew he was right. However much he and Angela had tried to protect the Kin and keep their existence hidden—Bone too, if anything he said was to be believed—wider human nature would not be so benevolent.
“We can’t take on an army,” Vince said, but he’d already seen Bone glancing at Sammi several times. We can’t ask that of her, he thought, and he was about to say it when everything about Sammi changed.
She grew stiff and still, like a statue. Even her breathing stopped. Her glittering eyes were pale and static.
“What is it?” Vince asked. He began to panic, fearing that Mallian—or perhaps even Grace—had somehow taken control of her, and her next action might be something terrible.