Relics--The Folded Land

by Tim Lebbon

  “Partly?”

  “More of a traveling companion,” she said. “I haven’t left these shores in a very long time.”

  “How long?”

  She smiled. “Longer than anyone in this place would believe.”

  “I’d believe.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  Lilou could see that she’d tweaked his pride. He would go with her, of that she had no doubt. She also had to remember what a dangerous man he was. That, she must never forget.

  “I thought you’d never come back,” he said. There was a tone to his voice, a need that might have been perceived as weakness, and he’d never have revealed that to her before. He was a different man now.

  “I know you’ve been looking for us,” she said.

  “Of course I have. You think I could forget?”

  “No,” she said. “But what about your business? Your world?”

  Fat Frederick Meloy, perhaps London’s most feared gangster, shrugged.

  “I have people who can take care of things. For me, it was only ever about the relics.”

  “And now it’s about us.”

  He did not reply, because the truth was obvious. His world had once been guns and drugs, women and money, and then he’d caught a glimpse of something wider and more fantastic, more wonderful. His collection of relics had been his most precious thing, and had become his primary reason for being.

  Then he had seen a whole lot more.

  “You’ll come?” she asked.

  “As if you need to ask.” He stared at her, like a boy at his first love. “Even if I said no you’d make me.”

  “No,” Lilou said. “This has to be all you.”

  “It’s all me.”

  “Good. We’ll be needing two plane tickets.”

  “For that, I’ll need a name and a passport.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” she said. She was growing tired. It took a lot of energy, spending so long reining in her natural aura. She finished her coffee and stood to go.

  “When?” Meloy asked, reaching out, not quite grasping her arm. She saw then that he was hers completely, and it was nothing to do with her being a nymph. It was simply because she was Kin. Whatever direction his life had followed before, now it was aiming somewhere else.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It has to be soon. I have your private number.”

  “You do?”

  “After what you did, what you saw, we know everything about you, Frederick.”

  She left without looking back, drawing herself in as she walked through the coffee shop and out into the Soho streets.

  Lilou felt his gaze on her every step of the way.

  * * *

  She could not remember a time when she and her like weren’t being persecuted, forcing them to hide, fade away from the world. Though comfortable in the occasional company of humans, she still mourned the fact that she had never known the Time, that period of history when humankind and Kin had existed alongside one another in relative peace.

  Mallian told tales of that era. He was one of the few Time-born still alive and sane enough to talk about it, and she had seen him embark on long, nostalgic recollections of how he and their like had walked the wilds unmolested and free, each living their own particular and peculiar lives, carving myths across the bare canvas of time and establishing their own legendary paths.

  She had never known that. Though inconceivably old by any human understanding, still her earliest memories were of conflict and pain.

  Sad though she was, she never held a grudge against the humans. Time existed to flow from past to future. There had been Kin who could bend time and place to their own wills, and rumor had it a few still existed in the darkest places of the Earth. She was content, however, to ride the days, weeks, and years as they drifted by, continuing her own inevitable journey toward the great darkness that awaited one and all.

  Although she had hardly known any different, she still did not feel a true part of the human world. It was ironic, really, that the safest place for them to hide was in one of that world’s strongest beating hearts.

  London had been her home for many years. Its roots as a human settlement were as old as Lilou, and her memories weaved in and around its establishment, its growth, and the remarkable changes it had undergone throughout its millennia-long history.

  As she walked through the city now toward one of the few safe places left, a familiar feeling washed over her, a sense of history forming around her and trailing behind like a shadow. This often happened when her interaction with humans was intense. And it had been the case since Vince had rescued her from Mary Rock’s killers, all those months ago.

  Lilou had a long, deep past, and compared to her these humans were mere whispers in the breeze, carried away to nothing almost as soon as they were created. Sometimes their brief lives were lived brightly, but more often they bloomed like weak flowers, hardly ever approaching full potential before their autumns came and rotted them away.

  The vagaries of time fascinated her. To humans she would appear almost immortal. To them her memories of the city— from when it was little more than a collection of hovels along the great river that would come to be called the Thames—would appear remarkable, almost supernatural. But even her own long life was nothing compared to the heartbeat of the world they lived upon, and beneath.

  She often looked down on men and women because of their ignorance, yet sometimes that ignorance was a blessing.

  She scanned her route constantly, all the way back to the safe place. Mary Rock was dead and gone, but there were still those who sought the Kin, and likely some who would hunt them, given the chance. The Kin-killer across the great ocean was simply one they knew about. There would be more, biding their time.

  That was Mallian’s argument. He called his cause Ascent because it involved the rise of the Kin to take their place once again beside or above humanity, like the grand, triumphant beings of old. If they did nothing, he posited—if he and his kind continued to exist in the shadows—then a time would come when memories were all they would be.

  There were some among the Kin who were fine with that. Their time had been and gone, they said. Entropy carried them away, and what would be would be.

  Lilou herself was on the fence. And with the two camps starting to polarize, the fence might soon be the most dangerous place of all.

  6

  Staring at his reflection in the water’s surface, Gregor saw a man that should not be.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, and hidden beneath the long locks he felt the nubs of horns stretching the skin of his scalp. Turning his face left and right, he bent lower to the water so that he could see the pale red irises of his eyes. His jawline was ridged and sharp beneath the skin, the contours partly hidden beneath his beard growth. Soon it would be time to shave his face and trim his hair, remove his shaded glasses, show the world who he really was.

  Soon.

  The riverbank was quiet, this tiny inlet hardly disturbed by the water’s flow. The hard-baked silty beach where he sat had been used before. A few empty beer cans were scattered around, as were the remains of a fire, food wrappers weighed down by a stone. A couple of used condoms lay like the shed skins of unknown water creatures. No one had been here for a while. He was safe, for the moment, to spend some time planning his day.

  On the river a few ducks squabbled, and insects buzzed and surfed the surface. There were no buildings to be seen from where he sat, and traffic noise was only faintly audible in the distance.

  The phone in his right hand picked up a signal, and chimed. There were no messages or texts, no voicemails, and if Gregor ever used social media it was only to lurk and watch, never to post, never to interact. He opened the Internet, accessed a search engine, and scanned for news sites. Clicking on a national site, he began scrolling.

  The Kin often revealed themselves in unusual patterns. Once, he had caught a werewolf in India by reading about t
he strange bleaching of trees in the area around a certain valley. Villagers had ascribed various theories to the markings, and the tale grew enough over the decades to merit appearance in an obscure volume about Indian legends. It had piqued Gregor’s interest, and when he went and investigated some of the markings, he believed they might have been related to the Kin.

  It was during the third full moon that he saw the beast. She was fully transformed, roaming the forests and leaving her scent sprayed on trees, marking the bark in elaborate patterns. In her wild monthly state, her caution was held at bay by pure moonlit instinct.

  In accordance with instructions from the Script, he carried the third claw from each of her back paws in his pack. They continued to change with the moons and tides. And at times, when the moon was full, he could still remember her screams as he pierced her with a heavy wooden pike and hacked off her limbs.

  Other patterns were less obvious. Whispers of sparkling shadows beneath a series of river bridges in the wild lands of Patagonia might have been elves, but six months of hunting had yielded nothing. Livestock stolen and found slaughtered around a riverside village in the Amazon might have been wild dogs or jaguar, but Gregor believed he had found the dwelling place of a chupacabra.

  Four weeks into that search, the killings of cattle suddenly ended. Three men and four women from the village were found gutted, beheaded, and hanging from a tree. The murders were blamed on a feud, yet Gregor recognized a warning in the grisly remains. With the chupacabra frightened off into the vastness of the Amazon basin, he’d gone in search of easier prey.

  He found it in Mexico City. A spate of disappearances amongst the city’s poorest families was blamed on government-sanctioned death squads wiping out street children, but Gregor saw a more unnatural pattern. When he started finding the children deep down beneath the city, clean and healthy and possessed of a newfound vigor, he suspected the presence of a pombero.

  When he found it and killed it, he felt not a moment’s guilt. He took its tongue, and it remained with him now, shriveled and hardened into a thumb-sized knot.

  His was not a simple life, nor an easy story. There were complexities. There was confusion. Only one thing settled his mind and heart, and that was the hunt.

  He remembered very little of his life from before. Sometimes he dreamed of unidentifiable trauma in his childhood, and when he allowed himself to muse upon it, he thought perhaps he had lost someone close to him. His mind shielded him from whatever painful truth dwelled in the past. The turning point was meeting Jace Tan. That was when he became the person he was now.

  Ever since Jace Tan, his life had been spent seeking, hunting, and killing. Gregor didn’t even know his own age. The years drifted by, and his travels back and forth across the globe left the seasons jumbled, so he couldn’t use them to judge the passing of time. Now, he used phones, the Internet, and other technology as much as he could, and he’d made sure that he was adept at digging his way through meaningless information to identify the patterns.

  Gregor didn’t waste time worrying about this lessening of his memory, this fog of history. He was an explorer of the future, not the past. A time would come soon when his current life meant nothing, and the endless years ahead of him would become his playground. Jace Tan had promised him that.

  Browsing the news site, he chewed on a hunk of bread and some cheese he’d bought from a delicatessen in the local town, and drank water from a bottle. He never drank anything else. Being a man of simple needs meant that he could devote himself more fully to the chase.

  In the year since he’d come up from South America, he had found and killed three Kin. That was a reasonable hit rate. His pack grew heavier, and the components he needed to fulfill the promises of the Script were being gathered. He wouldn’t need many more.

  His skin tingled at the thought. His senses sharpened, his heart hurried. Everything he had ever dreamed of came to this. He was almost tempted to remove the Script from its protective metal tube, safe in his jacket pocket, and read it one more time. But it was a fragile thing, and out here in the blazing sunlight wasn’t the place. Each time he handled or looked at it, he feared an accident might take it away from him.

  Every attempt to copy the Script had ended in failure. That alone was testimony to its provenance.

  Old Man Struck By Lightning

  At first he skimmed past the mention. It was unusual, but no more so than a hundred news items that never quite made the headlines, weird occurrences that possessed a twisted allure. He’d already moved on by the time his brain processed the headline. He scrolled back, read the article, and filed it away for future reference.

  Then, minutes later, on a different local news site, another headline brought him up short and froze the breath in his chest.

  Six Locals Struck

  by Lightning

  in Three Days

  The feature went on to post sad comments about one of the people who had died, and then explore the surprise at what was far from a normal occurrence. Especially when, some of the time, the lightning bolts appeared to have come from a clear blue sky. This pattern had Kin written all over it.

  It took digging to find names and locations, especially since some victims chose not to be identified. Yet there were always places to look. Social media was a foul stew of want and need, but for Gregor it was also a place where private information floated through the ether, just waiting for those with the know-how to pluck it away. He used optimum word searches, photographic filters, and a dozen other tricks to winnow down the names and addresses of some of the six victims. The dead one was easy to find and discount, the others only slightly more difficult.

  The nearest one, a woman, was still in a hospital in Boston.

  Gregor lay back in the sun and smiled. The familiar sense of a hunt settled around him, sharpening his senses and bringing the future closer. He had his backpack, containing as much of his history as he would ever need. He had the precious Script.

  He had his knife.

  * * *

  For someone who spent much of his time alone, Gregor knew a lot about human nature. It was often essential in achieving his aims, and he believed that existing at a distance from society—if not physically, then psychologically— provided an objective view that offered an advantage.

  As a result, he knew that the best way to act without drawing attention was to exhibit casual confidence.

  He entered the hospital through the main doors, passed through the large lobby, scanned the floor map beside the elevators, rode up to the fourth floor, and strolled along the wide corridor toward May Ward. It was visiting time, and the ward was already busy with family and friends come to sit with their loved ones. Even indoors he wore sunglasses and a baseball cap, and wouldn’t reveal his true self to his target until he knew who or what she was.

  His only problem now would be if she had visitors, but if that was the case he could always wait.

  Patience was something he’d grown to embrace. Sometimes, the long wait before the catch was the most pleasurable part of the hunt.

  The woman was in one of half a dozen small private rooms off the main corridor. She was sitting up in bed and reading from an e-reader, alone in the room. She was middle-aged, lean, and fit-looking. Gregor held back for a moment before entering, assessing what approach he’d take. Then, without glancing around—doing so might raise suspicions, if anyone was watching—he entered the room and shoved the door half-closed behind him.

  If he needed to, he could lock it shut later.

  Looking up at him, she raised an eyebrow, and took in his casual clothing and backpack. She blinked at the sight of the sunglasses and baseball cap.

  Gregor paused five paces from the bed, beside the door to the small en-suite shower room. He frowned. He usually had a good sense of whether or not someone was Kin, even if their outward appearance was human. In this case, he thought not.

  “Reporter?” the woman asked.

  “Herald,” he said.
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  “So I’m a big story now?” She sounded confident and in control. Her being at ease would make what he had to do that much simpler.

  “Part of one, perhaps,” he said. “Mind if I sit?”

  The woman shrugged and nodded toward the chair at the foot of her bed.

  Gregor sat and lowered the backpack between his feet. The knife handle dug at his hip. He could draw and use it in the space of a second, and he was one long step away from the woman. She wouldn’t have time to scream.

  “You’re Marianne Francis?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Mind if I ask you some questions?”

  She stared at him for a while, and in those few moments Gregor was uncertain just how this was going to go. She could press the call button beside her bed, and shout for help, but she’d only do that if she had something to hide.

  He didn’t think she did. There were no outward signs that she was Kin, and although he knew from experience that it wasn’t always obvious, in this case he thought that betrayed the truth. However, he had to be sure. If she wasn’t Kin, then there must be some reason why one of the Kin was using her. Six lightning strikes in such close proximity had to be connected, and he had an inkling of how.

  Over time he’d heard and learned many stories of the Kin, and some said that lightning bolts were a favored method of remote attack by fairies.

  “What did it feel like?”

  “You’re not going to write all this down?”

  “Good point.” Gregor smiled and opened a notes file on his phone.

  “It was weird,” she said, “like being punched really hard. A heavy, hard jolt. You ever touch an electric cattle fence? Bit like that, except a thousand times harder.”

  “Anything strange happen?”

  “Besides being struck by lightning?”

  “I mean anything you might not have expected.”