by Tim Lebbon
“Dastion went deeper into the hills, looking for somewhere to start a new mine, I guess. He’ll mix in well enough until he finds the right place. He still remembers what it was like to be human.”
“Mallian? The other Kin?”
“She took Mallian through with her,” Vince said. He shivered. “I hate the son of a bitch, but the thought of what’ll be happening to him—”
“Deserved,” Angela said. “Every bite, earned.”
“The military have got a couple of dead ones,” Vince continued. “Plenty of images have leaked online and the news is all over it. I can pretty much guarantee it’s on a channel somewhere...” He picked up a TV remote from beside her bed and pointed it at the screen up in a corner of her room.
It opened on a rolling news report about the Longford lake of fire. It was an incredible sight, and though the military was attempting to secure the area, the boundary between the blazing lake and the surrounding hillsides ran for more than twenty miles. Various experts spouted opinions about what was happening, but the news anchor kept referring back to the several clips of film they had managed to procure of soldiers fighting strange, unknown creatures, some of them very humanoid in nature. One of them was impossibly tall and monstrous. It was daytime TV and the warnings came thick and fast, but within minutes of turning on the TV they were presented with a clip of Mallian ripping the cop in half.
“Do they really need to show that?” Angela asked.
“Of course not, but they’ll keep showing it again and again.” Vince surfed the channels. “Hang on, let me find the Pentagon guy. They’re showing this clip on a loop, too.” He settled on a channel with an amused-looking presenter and a grey-haired man on the screen in the corner. The spokesman from the Pentagon chuckled at the stories put to him and said they were dealing with a mass delusion brought on by electrical discharges following a seismic event.
The interviewer responded by playing footage of a chopper brought down by a winged humanoid creature, and asked if camera technology was also susceptible to mass delusion.
And so it went on, and on, and would go on for a long, long time. Footage of Mallian killing the cop and other stuff from the attack and the fight on the hillside. Choppers going down, soldiers being killed and killing. The dead things that no one could explain.
“And there’s the lake of fire,” Angela said when the footage ended and returned to what looked like rolling coverage. “Grace’s constant reminder of the power of the Kin, and why we should leave them alone.”
“It’s a good warning,” Vince said.
“Yeah, but humans are inquisitive. We’ve always been tempted to play with fire.”
They watched for a couple more minutes, then Angela reached out—groaning when pain bit in all across her torso—and fumbled for the remote. She turned the TV off. She’d seen it all first-hand, and hearing so-called experts arguing and offering theories, and military spokesmen calling it fake news, did nothing to detract from the ordeal she and the ones she loved had been through.
Were still going through.
“Sammi,” she said. “She’ll be staying with us?”
Vince looked aside, then back at Angela. “I think she’ll be gone soon. I don’t think she can stay with us, do you?”
Angela didn’t reply. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t know if she even wanted the girl, the young fairy, to be part of their lives. Not after what she’d seen her do, and not after what they’d all seen Grace become.
“I’ll get some food and coffee,” Vince said. Angela grasped his good hand before he could stand.
“No!” she said.
“Hey, I’m only going to the restaurant. I’m here to look after you—forever.”
“Stay with me just for now,” Angela said. “And promise to never leave me ever again, and I won’t leave you. Ever again.”
Vince sat down and held her hand. He smiled and said, “Deal.”
* * *
Later, when Angela was asleep, Vince slipped outside to see Sammi. The girl was curled up on a chair in the waiting room, eyes closed but not asleep.
“I’ll be leaving later,” she said as Vince sat beside her. “I’ll be back to help her, but I have to help myself first.”
“She’ll want to see you before you go.”
Sammi opened her eyes. Their shade had changed, and their shape, as if to take in the view of a wider world.
“I’ll go in now,” she said. “You need to make that call.”
“Sure. And, Sammi?”
She looked at him.
“Take care of yourself.”
“You know I will.”
“No, I mean... I know you’re going out there to take care of others. Kin like you, and maybe Kin who don’t even know who or what they are yet. But you have to take care of yourself, too.”
Sammi’s eyes softened as she understood what he meant. She smiled, and for a while she looked the old Sammi again. “I’ll be fine. I might even look in on you from time to time.”
Vince nodded, stood, and went outside to make his call. He wasn’t at all sure he’d want her to do that.
* * *
After speaking to Jay and ensuring he and Angela could return to the cabin in the woods, he went back inside. When he realised Sammi was not in the waiting room he expected to see her sitting beside Angela’s bed, both of them saying their goodbyes.
But Angela was asleep again, and there was no sign of Sammi.
As if she’d never been.
* * *
In her Fold, closed off from the world forevermore, she takes stock. She brought the Nephilim through with her and for now she lets him run wild. He’s no threat to her anymore. He’s raging and raving, but she stays away from him, lets him work that rage from his system. Over the days and weeks to come he’ll calm a little, and then he’ll start considering his position. He’ll drink from the river. He’ll eat. He’ll start to fatten up.
She also brought a handful of other Kin through with her, before she blasted fire back through the portal and then closed it forever. None of them are the ones she brought here originally—they are all dead, or gone back into the world—and that frustrates her. But on the other hand, these new Kin are mostly pure, and she senses that one or two of them are very, very old. Perhaps she will approach some of them and converse. She might even pass time with them.
When her hunger returns, they will provide much better game.
One of the Kin troubled her the moment it came through, and she knows it is from the drowned village. The gargoyle is wild and animalistic, not like Kin at all, and she also senses a dangerous human taint on and in it. An infection, still simmering even after it has spent a long, long time beneath standing waters.
It’s unnatural. It’s undesirable, and possibly even dangerous, if not to her then to the other new inhabitants of the Fold.
It is this gargoyle that she deals with first. She will never again open a portal back into the world, and she is already forcing herself to forget how to do so. There is one place in the Fold, however, where she believes it will be safe.
She herds it before her, using subtle glamours to steer the way. It scampers and runs across grasslands and up the valley side, leaping from rock to rock, running before her even though in its mind it is actually on the hunt. She edges it towards the caves where Dastion the dwarf once made his home.
The infected Kin darts into the cave mouth and she holds back. It takes some concentration, but after a few heartbeats the ground around the caves begins to shake, crack and tumble.
She senses it going far deeper, fleeing the rockfalls that seal off the tunnels behind them. The ground ruptures, and half the hillside falls into the network of tunnels and halls that Dastion spent his time hollowing out beneath the Fold.
She searches, sending her senses out wide. She’s content that there is no way for the gargoyle to return to the surface. It will remain down there, that Kin with human stains, for as long as she remains up here, and as lo
ng as the Fold persists. Perhaps over time it will stop wandering those deep tunnels and sit down to die, or maybe it will persist, becoming motionless but still extant, still infected with the dangerous contamination that even she wants no part of.
Whatever happens, it will be safe.
There’s no way out.
* * *
He sees her coming again and there’s nothing he can do. Sometimes she lets him run, and he does so, because over the time he’s been trapped in the Fold—months, maybe years—Mallian has never shaken the belief that one day he will better her. So he runs, and she hunts him, and after hours or days of cat and mouse, she always catches him.
One day, though...
Although this time, as she casts her glamour and freezes him against an old tree, the first doubts begin to sprout.
He struggles but cannot move. He can’t even squirm. His heart beats, but at her behest. His blood flows, but only because she wants to taste it.
The fairy peruses his body, looking for a part that is not too knotted with the scars of healing bites. There aren’t many. She finally settles on his left thigh, crouching down beside him and exposing her small, sharp teeth.
She looks up and locks eyes with him before she clamps her teeth onto his flesh. That’s what he hates the most. She waits until he’s looking so that he can see her pleasure in every bite.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I couldn’t have written the Relics trilogy without the help and support of Team Titan, and special thanks go out to DEO Steve Saffel and Editor-at-Large Cath Trechman.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TIM LEBBON is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had over forty novels published to date, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. His latest novel is Blood of the Four (with Christopher Golden), and other recent releases include Relics, The Family Man, The Silence, and The Rage War trilogy.
He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild, and Shirley Jackson awards.
A movie of his novel The Silence, starring Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, was released on Netflix in early 2019, and the movie of his story Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released in 2015. Several other projects are in development for television and the big screen.
Find out more about Tim at his website
www.timlebbon.net
and follow him on Twitter
@timlebbon.
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