by Tim Lebbon
She frowned. Becoming suspicious. He didn’t have much time.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Forty-two.”
“Always lived in Boston?”
“Born and bred. When’s this story going to run?”
“Are you Kin?”
“Huh?”
Her reaction was sincere—confusion, surprise. She didn’t know what he was talking about.
Gregor stood and took a couple of steps closer to the bedside. The woman didn’t look scared—not yet—but she was unsure.
“You want a photo of the markings?” she asked, and Gregor paused.
“Markings?”
She lifted her long hair from her neck and tilted her head so that he could see the patterns across her skin. A network of fine trails, like a river delta seen from orbit, or the fine tendrils of a feather.
Gregor lifted his phone and took a photograph.
“I thought you guys would be more interested in those who were hit twice.”
His pause was hardly long enough to notice. Nothing about that in the reports!
“Yeah, sure.” Admitting that he didn’t know what she was talking about might blow any cover he had left.
“Cop who interviewed me said they’re keeping it out of the news for as long as they can. Don’t want panic to spread, but that’s what I’m afraid of, tell the truth. Same cop told me most of those who’re struck a second time are dead. What if I walk out the door and… bam?”
Gregor slid his hand beneath his loose-hanging shirt, and rested it on the knife handle. He was certain now that she wasn’t Kin, but she was suspicious of him. To leave her alive might be risky. Yet to kill her would make him a murderer, and he had no way of disposing of her body. Hospitals were full of security cameras and potential witnesses.
As he turned to leave, she called after him.
“You gonna run the story?”
“When the police let me.” He left and closed the door behind him, cutting off another question he only partly heard. He had to move. Head down, walking quickly, he left the hospital the way he’d entered.
Once he was outside and away he lost himself in the streets until he found a small, sheltered park. People were lunching there, some in small groups and many alone, and he bought a bottle of water and a sandwich from a deli so that he didn’t look out of place. Then he pulled out his phone and started searching.
Now that he knew what he was looking for, he scanned social media rather than news sites. It didn’t take long. More than a hundred people had been struck by lightning twice in three days, in incidents scattered over the northeastern states from Bangor to Pittsburgh. Many of them had died, but a dozen or so survived.
Ten of those survivors were missing.
Gregor thought he knew how to find them.
7
“We’ve got to get out of the city.”
That was the priority. Everything else could wait.
“I missed you,” Angela replied.
“People saw Claudette and that prick chasing you,” Vince said. “They’ll find her body. It’s time to change…” He touched her short silvery hair, but he meant the whole package. It was time for Angela to re-imagine herself again. She had been so close to being caught, and if he hadn’t been there—frantic in his search for her, arriving at the very last moment—he couldn’t bear to think what might have happened.
This mad new world was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to him, but without Angela it would be no world at all.
“I wish this could end,” she said.
“I think a cab would be risky, and buses have security cameras. We’re best sticking to the streets, but off the main drags. Once we’re somewhere safer, I’ll steal a car.”
“Vince, can’t we take a moment?”
They paused on the busy sidewalk. Vince held her arm and edged her into the shadow of a bookshop’s front canopy. His body prickled with energy, but he knew that Angela would need time to absorb and adapt. He turned to her reflection. She hardly looked like Angela anymore, but he loved her more than ever.
He wished he could swallow the news he bore, and make it all go away. It wasn’t cowardice on his part, it was good sense. When they were away, quiet and as secure as they could ever be, then he would tell her. It was important that they moved quickly.
There was already a weight persisting between them, an unspoken tension caused by the different directions in which they found themselves pulled. Angela, toward some distant and safe anonymity that he knew could never exist. Vince, pulled along with the wonder and terror of the Kin. He hoped their relationship was strong enough to survive. He hoped their love would spring back to its former shape.
“I’ve missed you, too,” he said, “but we don’t have a moment. Claudette might have been found already, and every second counts.”
“We just killed someone, Vince.”
“No we didn’t.”
“Who sent her?”
“No one,” he said. “She was out on her own, looking for revenge. Against me.”
“But she came for me!”
“You were easier to find.”
“Because you’re with them.”
They locked gazes in the window reflection. He smiled, and he was pleased when she returned it. He’d missed her smile.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not all the time. But all that—everything else—can wait.”
“Everything else?”
“There’s plenty happening, and there’s lots to tell you, but not here and now.”
She nodded.
He turned and kissed her cheek. “If you want to stay alive, come with me.”
“Movie quotes, Vince? Really?” She laughed, and that suited her so much more. He could see the fear she carried, but so long as it remained buried for a while, that was good. There would be plenty of time to be afraid.
They held hands and moved along the street, taking the first junction that steered them away from the park and the site of Claudette’s death. Vince hadn’t even considered the fact that she was gone, but it hit him now, the knowledge that the brutal, vengeful woman from London was no longer a threat to them. A chill ran through him when he realized just how close she had got to Angela—a trigger-pull away from exacting her revenge, a few seconds and several feet in a time that had spanned months, a pursuit that had taken in thousands of miles.
Yet he also experienced a measure of relief at the woman’s death. If it weren’t for information and help from the Kin, he would have never reached Angela in time.
Glancing across the street, he scanned the flow of pedestrians going about their business, the cars stopping and starting in heavy traffic, patrons sitting inside and outside cafés and bars. He looked for the wisp Ahara. If she didn’t want to be seen, however, he would not see her. No one would.
“What are you looking for?” Angela asked.
“Just being careful,” he said. Get out of the city, he thought. Get away, find safety, go to ground… and then I can tell her everything. About Sammi and her father Jim, and the Kin’s fears. About Lilou.
That was it, he knew. Lilou was the reason why he was putting off telling Angela the truth. The nymph was coming, and he felt a rush of anticipation at her arrival. And a flush of guilt at his excitement. He loved Angela first and foremost, above everyone and everything else…
But he still dreamed of Lilou.
The fact that he dreamed of her wasn’t fair, and neither was his guilt. He was only human.
There was no sign of Ahara, but Vince knew that she was close. She was strange, even for Kin, a visage most of the time, less than a shadow, but when she did manifest and become something closer to his world, she was still a deep mystery. They could communicate well enough, though when she spoke her mouth moved just out of sync with her voice, like a badly dubbed movie. He sometimes wondered whether she actually spoke at all, or if her true voice was a whisper inside his mind.
“In here,” Vinc
e said. They ducked into a store and bought an I Love Albany baseball cap. Angela tugged it down over her dyed hair. It wouldn’t be enough, but he’d grab every chance they had to make it out of the city.
In the four weeks since he had last seen Angela, he had learned much more about their situation. His earlier fantasy—that he could spring her from police custody and then make both of them vanish into the vastness of the United States—appeared to be just that. A fantasy.
Contacted by Lilou and instructed to keep him hidden and safe, Ahara and two other Kin had found him upon his arrival Stateside. They knew well enough how to hide, as did all Kin. But he and Angela were not like them. They were humans, and they could not avoid thinking and acting like humans.
There lay their potential downfall.
“Forget her,” Ahara had whispered during his first long, lonely night in the basement of a derelict house close to Boston’s docklands. Generations of immigrants had passed through those buildings during Boston’s early years. Countless people might have spent their first night in America sleeping in that same place. Some had died there.
“I can never forget her!” Vince had replied. The mere thought was abhorrent to him. Ahara’s smile, perhaps mocking, had made him even more determined.
He and Angela were both wanted by the authorities. For several days the massacre at Mary Rock’s house in London had made headlines around the world. The dead had included a disgraced MP, a footballer who had once played at international level, and at least two businessmen who might have been called public figures. Rumors had built around the shockingly brutal murders and the burning of the big house, perpetuated and exaggerated rapidly across social media. They veered from reports of a sinister death-cult for the mega-rich, to a perverted swinging party gone wrong, to more imaginative tales featuring slave traders, mystical drug-fueled seances, and suicide pacts.
None of the speculation had touched on the truth.
Vince still wasn’t quite sure why Mallian hadn’t begun feeding the speculation with rumors of the Kin. More than any of them, the Nephilim wanted exposure for his kind and a rise to their previous status in the world, a movement they called Ascent. In the wider Kin civilization, Vince knew, the general belief was that Mallian was mad, yet there were some allied with his cause—a core of supporters back in London, and scattered believers in other locations where the Kin persisted. Support for Ascent was growing every day.
The fact that Mallian hadn’t used the attack on Mary Rock’s house to begin the process of exposure meant he did not yet think it was time. That indicated to Vince that he wasn’t mad, and that, in turn, meant that he was serious, determined. In a way that was more terrifying.
They passed into a network of back streets, busy commercial and residential areas where strangers passing by didn’t attract attention. The further they moved out from the city center, however, the more they would be noticed. That was the last thing Vince wanted.
When they reached a large car park outside a massive strip mall, Vince grabbed Angela’s arm.
“I’m going to steal a car,” he said, keeping his voice low. “We’ll drive out of the city, dump the car, then continue on foot.”
“To where?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“And where’s that, Vince?”
He saw movement behind Angela and smiled.
“I want you to meet a friend.”
Angela glanced behind her and saw the shape, formed of sunlight like the glowing memory of a person.
“We’ve met… in the police station,” she said. “Hello.”
“Angela,” Ahara said. She became more solid.
“Ahara helped me find you in time,” Vince said. “We knew Claudette was closing in, but she was even better than we were at staying unseen.”
Angela nodded. Vince thought he saw the memory of the woman’s death reflected in her eyes.
“It was her or us,” Vince said.
“I know.”
“I’ll find a suitable vehicle,” Ahara said, and she faded away again, little more than a floating glow drifting ahead of them toward the first line of cars.
“You need to tell me what’s going on,” Angela said. “I’ve spent months trying to figure out how to remove myself from all this. From them. And now you come back and…”
Vince took a deep breath. Now’s not the time, he thought yet again, but Angela deserved the truth, and he knew that she could take it. She was strong. Saying nothing felt akin to lying, and he had vowed never to lie to Angela again.
“Sammi’s been taken,” he said.
“Sammi?” Her eyes went wide.
“And that’s not all. Jim’s dead.”
Angela took a deep breath. For a split second, the anger Vince saw in her frightened him to the core.
* * *
“Who took her?” Angela asked. “What do you know? Tell me everything.”
They were driving along a Washington avenue toward I-787, which would take them away from the city. Her thoughts were a raw stew, but she had a logical, ordered mind, and by the time she asked who had taken Sammi, it had all fallen into place.
I have to find her. That was her first priority, followed closely by her greatest regret. We’ll never get away from the Kin. She believed that Vince was at peace with that dreadful truth, and even welcomed it. She wasn’t sure she ever could be.
“They think it’s the fairy,” he said. “They tell me her name is something no human could ever say or understand, so they call her Grace.”
“You mean the fairy we risked our lives to save?”
“They don’t know why she’s done it,” he said. “Sammi was one of scores of people struck by lightning over a three-day period, most of them twice. Lots died. Sammi was one of those who lived. Jim must have been close by the second time she was hit, and…” Vince trailed off. He was driving carefully, keeping below the speed limit and doing nothing to attract attention. The fact that the car was stolen would do that soon enough.
Angela knew they shouldn’t drive more than a few miles in a stolen vehicle. Highway cameras might pick up the license plate, and if the vehicle had already been reported stolen, an alert would go out to local police. If the system worked efficiently, she knew, no stolen vehicle would get more than a couple of miles once its report hit the wire.
The system rarely worked efficiently. In reality, they could probably drive all the way to the coast, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
“Poor Jim,” Angela said, and a deep wave of sadness washed through her. She hadn’t seen her brother-in-law in more than three years. She and her sister had never been close, and living in the UK had swallowed Angela’s time, months ticking by, and then years. All the while she’d intended to travel back to visit family, yet there had always been an excuse not to. Maybe she’d been selfish in that, but she’d also sent invitations to all of her family to come and visit her in London. For the price of a flight they’d have had free—although cramped—accommodation in her maisonette, and an opportunity to explore one of the world’s greatest cities.
None of them had ever taken her up on the invitation. There wasn’t any unpleasantness, but theirs was simply a family with loose ties, love but perhaps not much affection. They’d all taken their own directions in life.
Her sister had died soon after she fled Britain. She’d heard about Sally’s death several weeks after it occurred. Sitting in a cyber café, she foolishly Googled her family name. The stark words on the screen, a news snippet from their local paper, had smashed her like a hammer to the heart. She’d feigned illness to explain the sudden tears, drawing more attention to herself as she knocked a table and spilled drinks as she left.
That had been her darkest time. Lost and on the run in the country she’d once called home, she had tried to figure out how to contact her family, at the same time knowing it simply wasn’t possible. It had been awful, knowing they might believe the stories about her being a murderer. The need to tell them the truth was
almost overwhelming, but along with that came the certainty that if she did contact her mother, father, and sister, they would persuade her to meet, and that meeting would lead the authorities straight to her. Even if they didn’t give her up themselves, the police would be keeping a close eye on her family.
She and Vince had stayed together for a while, a dark, depressing time when everything she treasured in life was being dismantled and weathered away to nothing. Her home was gone, her friends were gone, her ambitions were little more than echoes of someone else’s past. Before Meloy, before the Kin, she’d been close to completing her doctorate. Now her research would be in the hands of the police as they investigated the massacre at Mary Rock’s house.
Angela hated the idea of them picking through her studies, writings, and musings on subcultural theories, trying to attach significance where there was none, perhaps discovering coincidences that would excite them for a time as they followed nonexistent trails. She was comfortable in the fact that she wasn’t a murderer, but knowing that others believed her to be one made her feel dirty, even guilty.
We can never give them up, she and Vince had sworn, and she was as committed to protecting the Kin as she had been on the day they left London. She understood their uniqueness, wonder, and splendor, but that didn’t mean that she had to like them. It didn’t prevent her from raging against their continued involvement in her life.
Everything she had understood about herself was in the past. Discovering her sister’s death—after the accident, after the funeral, and not being able to even mourn with her close family—had been the most awful experience of her life. She was still trying to mourn, and being removed from the world of family and normality made it that much harder.
She’d seen her niece Sammi six times, the first three during the first year of the girl’s life. She’d sent regular birthday and Christmas cards, and Sammi had always wanted to talk to “Aunty Angela” on those rare occasions when she and Sally chatted on the phone or online. A bright, gregarious child, last time they had met Sammi was already growing into a smart young woman. She was the love of Jim’s and Sally’s lives, and she’d had a bright future.
