Relics--The Folded Land

by Tim Lebbon

  If it weren’t for her old magic, over time the place would wither and die. Trees and shrubs, flowers and heathers, they would all go the way of the animals, but she does not wish that. She wants this place to be home, and for that it has to remind her of home. The old, ancient home where she was perhaps born, even though the mere concept of birth is so far in the past that it has become entirely abstract.

  Much like death.

  Yet she hopes that over time, this place will become more like the Time she left behind. Its plants will change to mirror the ancient world she once knew. Creatures will be birthed from the magic, and she will recognize them from long ago—winged things, crawling things, animals that hunt by heat and sound, glorious and dead for many millennia. Giving the Fold a hint of the old magic will also give it the facility to recreate aspects of the past. She hopes it will be wonderful.

  Once on the valley floor she crosses the flood plain toward the river, and soon reaches the area close to a bend in the flow where she plans to build her home. She hasn’t started yet, because she’s in no hurry, but she knows that this will be the perfect place. The river is narrower and faster here, and she likes the idea that her long, long life will be played out to its watery tones. Her intention is to form echoes of the Time in buildings, as well as in nature. The architectures of her memory will feed that intent, and over time she will build a low, fantastic structure of wood and glass, rock and soil, which will be reminiscent of the great ground-homes of her Kin from millennia past.

  She closes her mind and imagines everything this place will one day become. It is glorious. It’s everything she has wanted for many centuries, and even more so over the past couple of hundred years, when humanity has multiplied like a virus unchecked. Their presence smothers her, their noise deafens. Their civilization has tainted the world far beyond redemption.

  Yet for all her dissatisfaction with the world of Kin and human, she cannot be alone as she stares eternity in the face. This has caused her something of a dilemma—now that she has stepped out from the world, she cannot bear to enter it once more, even for something so important. So she is working on a solution. Soon, if those pathetic wraiths are effective and gather her selected companions, others will start to arrive.

  Then the time will come to close the Fold and forget about the world.

  The good, the bad, the humans, the Kin… all of it.

  This is her new world, and soon she will call it home.

  12

  They met at a roadside diner. There were several big trucks parked in the lot, a neon sign with a raised arm above the main doors exhorting people to come in, and a menu board advertising State’s Best Chili propped beside the entrance.

  It was almost dusk, and the lights inside showed that many window booths were taken up with individuals, couples, or families sampling the legendary chili or other food. The place was called Annie’s Good Rest, and as they walked toward the entrance, Angela only wished she could.

  The old gas station next door was abandoned and boarded up, and a car sat up on concrete blocks, rusting slowly into the ground. A loose shutter flapped in the breeze, letting out a regular thump, thump.

  “Which movie am I in?” Vince asked.

  “In your head, all of America’s a movie.”

  “Yeah, well, remember that time in New York when—”

  “You saw your first steaming manhole cover,” Angela said, smiling. They’d only been to the States together once— before now, at least—and they’d done many of the tourist things she’d never done on her own. She still recalled his delight as the taxi had driven them through the dark, rain-swept streets of Manhattan and they’d pulled up at a traffic light. The steaming manhole had been just along a side street. She’d told him there was a laundromat beneath the street, and he’d believed her until they checked into their hotel room.

  “This is a different movie,” he said. He pointed across to the darkened gas station. “That’s where the guy with the knife and hockey mask comes out.” Even though his idea was a dark one, Vince still seemed enlivened by what they were doing. Excited, even.

  Angela glanced at the door, fully expecting it to open and someone to emerge, but the person or thing she imagined didn’t carry a knife.

  Claws, perhaps. Or six-inch teeth.

  “Food,” she said. “What time are they due?”

  “She said they’d be here within the hour,” he said, glancing at his phone again.

  He has Lilou’s number, Angela thought. They text each other. She hated the cool jealousy that idea seeded in her, because jealousy was a base, useless emotion. She wished she could shed it and believe that Vince was hers and hers alone, and if Lilou was just another woman she could. But Lilou was supernatural.

  She walked on ahead, and Vince caught up and held her arm.

  “We’ll have to be careful,” he said. “I’ll go in first in case…” He let the sentence hang because they both knew what he meant. Angela had taken off her glasses and bought another baseball cap, discarding the I Love Albany cap because it recalled the scene of the crime. Claudette’s body had been found, meriting a mention on a couple of Internet news sites, but little more. One of the reports talked of an animal attack. Angela remembered those gremlins, vicious little creatures that had disappeared afterward into the trees.

  She wondered where they had gone.

  “She’ll know what to do, won’t she?” she asked as they approached the diner’s front door.

  “I hope so,” Vince said. “More than us, at least.”

  “So where’s Ahara?” She’d first noticed the wisp’s disappearance a couple of hours before, as they’d been driving southwest from Albany toward Danville.

  Vince remained silent. He reached for the door and pulled it open a crack, letting loose a hubbub of noise—voices, music, the clanging of cutlery and crockery.

  “Vince?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “She comes, she goes. It’s not often I know what’s happening.”

  “Oh, great.” She pushed past him and entered the diner. Instantly the smells inside reminded her how hungry she was. They found an empty booth past the counter in a corner toward the restrooms, and a waitress came to take their drinks orders. Although she craved something stronger Angela stuck with coffee, while Vince took a beer.

  “Sammi’s not Kin,” she said.

  “You don’t know that for sure.” He stared at her, and she felt a flush of surprise, and realization. He knew, of course, as did she, but it wasn’t often she let herself even remember the fact that Sally wasn’t her flesh and blood. They had grown up together, their parents treated them both alike, and as her only sibling Sally had been an important part of her childhood. She couldn’t even remember the moment when knowledge had dawned that her sister had been adopted, because it meant so little. Their drifting apart as they’d grown older had nothing to do with blood. Angela had never had reason to question her sister’s true past. Until now.

  “We’d have known,” she said. “I’d have known.”

  “How?”

  Angela frowned and thought about her little niece.

  “What would you have looked for?” Vince was pushing and she didn’t like it.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Why would the fairy come after her? It makes no sense.”

  “Not much does,” he said. “Not anymore.” He spilled some sugar and swirled it around with his fingers, making patterns on the tabletop. He tapped the tabletop, eyes flickering around the diner. At first Angela thought he was nervous, but then she realized it wasn’t that. Lilou was coming. He was excited.

  She looked around. A family across from them were biting into burgers and vat-sized colas. In the booth beside them, two big men ate pie and drank coffee, guffawing at unheard jokes. Other customers continued in blissful ignorance of the real world, safe within their own, and Angela wished for the thousandth time that she had never heard of the Kin. Knowledge of them had ruined her life, and though it
was her choice to accept the task of protecting them, it had set her on the run as a wanted woman.

  It was Vince’s fault, really, but she would never allow herself to blame him.

  “I found you,” she said. “I’ll find Sammi, too.”

  Vince reached out and grasped her hands, and she was surprised to see tears in his eyes. Maybe he was remembering Ballus and what that mad satyr had done to him. He still carried the physical scars, and the mental ones bled screams when he was asleep. Of the few nights they’d spent with each other since coming to the States, she had felt and heard Ballus haunting his nightmares during most of them.

  “We’ll find her!” he said. “Lilou will help. That’s why she’s coming.”

  “I thought she was coming to find another Kin-killer,” Angela said, unable to hold back the bitterness from her voice.

  “She’ll help,” he insisted. “It’s all linked. The lightning strikes, the Kin-killer. She said there are patterns.”

  “You think she’ll tell us what they are?”

  “Yes.”

  The waitress came with their drinks and took their food orders. She didn’t even catch Angela’s eye, and as she hurried away Angela sipped at her coffee. It was good, hot and strong, but she couldn’t relax.

  “We shouldn’t just be sitting here,” she said. Guilt urged her to get up and run outside, but run where? She could walk this country for a thousand years and never see the same place or person twice. She’d found Vince when he was missing in London, true, but she’d had clues to follow, and it had been a place she knew so well. Here, in the country where she’d been born, she felt lost.

  “This will be our best chance,” Vince said. “You know that. Follow the trail, right?” She’d used that phrase a few times before everything had gone to shit, when she’d spent long days studying in their maisonette while Vince went out to work. Sometimes Vince would text during the day and ask what she was up to, and she’d reply, Following the trail. Researching a particular point or event sometimes felt like that, especially online research where one page led to others, one click to more. It was like building new synapses in the giant brain of the world. Digital trails, though nebulous, were just as easy to follow as physical ones.

  The front doors opened and Angela glanced up. Then froze.

  “What the fuck?”

  Vince turned around. “Oh. Right. I didn’t expect that.”

  Lilou walked into the diner. She saw them right away and headed for them, head lowered, and Angela knew that she was trying to hold herself back. Dressed in loose trousers and a shapeless shirt, still she cut an imposing figure, and many sets of eyes followed.

  The person behind her attracted even more attention.

  “Angela,” he said, standing close to the head of their table. “Vince.”

  “Boss,” Vince said.

  That cut through the tension, and made Angela laugh.

  * * *

  Lilou told them everything she had told Meloy about Gregor, the Kin-killer. She talked about the patterns he followed and left behind, and how the murders of the lightning-strike survivors were undoubtedly attributable to him.

  “So we just tell the police,” Vince said.

  “Much as I’ve no love of the law, I suggested that one,” Meloy said.

  “We can’t do that,” Lilou said. “They’re involved enough as it is. If we set them on the trail we have to follow, it becomes too crowded. Too messy.” She looked from Angela to Vince and back again. Vince’s eyes were wider than normal, pupils dilated, brow unlined. Angela looked worried and nervous. They were the reactions she’d expected from them both. She was becoming adept at reading humans.

  “So when do we get on the trail?” Angela asked. “That’s my niece missing somewhere out there.”

  “Yes, about that—” Lilou said.

  “She’s not Kin.”

  “She survived two lightning strikes.”

  “So did four people who were subsequently murdered,” Angela said.

  “And they were Kin,” Meloy said.

  “Huh?” Vince asked.

  “Deniers,” Lilou said. “Much more prevalent over here than in the UK, they’re Kin who have integrated into society and rejected their heritage.”

  “But… post mortems,” Angela said.

  “They’ll pass,” Lilou said. “I don’t know much more about them myself, only what Mallian told me when he sent me along this path. Long ago, Kin began mating with humans, shedding their past and looking to the future. Over the years their bloodline has been thinned. They still carry the history of Kin in their blood and bones, and in their collective memories, but on the surface they’re human. There are many descendants of deniers who don’t even know what their ancestors were.”

  “They must know somehow,” Angela said.

  “Probably they have strange dreams,” Lilou said. “Trouble fitting into society. I’m sure you know many troubled people.”

  “But surely not all of them are deniers.”

  “Probably not, but you understand how easy it would be for bloodlines to get watered down and eventually lost.”

  “So the fairy struck them with lightning and found them again,” Vince said. “What’s that all about?”

  “Something else I’m here to find out,” Lilou said. She hid the lie well, she thought. She was used to hiding things. Grace and her plans were all she was here for, really. Anything else was incidental.

  “And this Gregor scumbag is targeting them how?” Vince asked.

  “He has some way of tracking them.”

  “And now we need to find a way of tracking him,” Meloy said. “That’s where you come in, Angela.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure. You found this troublemaker, didn’t you?” He clipped Vince around the head, and although Vince smiled, there was something about the gesture Lilou didn’t like. It reminded her of someone ruffling a dog harshly behind the ear. It spoke of ownership.

  “Not alone.”

  “You’re not alone now,” Lilou said. “We’re here to help.”

  “You’re here to find Gregor,” Angela said, her voice cold.

  “Yes, but finding Sammi might lead us to him,” Lilou replied. “And you’re a friend.”

  Angela blinked, then smiled. Lilou felt a tension within her ease a little, because Angela believed what she had said.

  “We should get going,” Meloy said. “Places to go.” He stood, and Vince and Angela followed suit. Lilou stared at the big man’s back. She’d asked that he come with her as a form of protection, but she was beginning to worry about bringing him along. There was something about his attitude that had changed, somewhere over the Atlantic. He was still in awe of Lilou and her kind, but there was an eagerness about him now that she did not like. An impatience to get on the trail of the Kin-killer.

  Fat Frederick Meloy was still a collector of relics.

  13

  “We have to get there soon,” Sammi said. “My father will be worried. He’ll be home, waiting for me to go back. I went to get Chinese. He’ll be hungry.” She frowned.

  Deep down she knew that wasn’t right, because days had passed since she’d been struck down again and brought back up by Old Itch. She didn’t know how many days. One? Three? Surely not more.

  “He’ll be worried.”

  “Your father knows,” Old Itch said. “I’ve told you that.” Over the course of the morning she’d seen a change in Old Itch. He’d become more impatient, even angry. Whereas before he’d been simply a presence, steering her along their route to wherever, now it was as if he was a shadow growing into a whole person, taking on personality even as he became more solid. Before his touch had been like being kissed by the wind. Now she could feel his fingers pressed into her arm when he held onto her.

  “I want to speak with him.”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “What sort of person doesn’t carry a phone?”

  Old Itch glared at her, then sighed.
“You need to eat.”

  The thought of food made her stomach rumble and brought on hunger pangs, and she was thirsty, too. The sun was high and hot today, and it might well have been the hottest day of the summer so far. She should have been sunbathing out on their lawn, or running down to the river and along the wooden dock with her dad, racing each other to the end and seeing how far out they could jump. He usually won, because he had longer arms and legs. Then they’d have a “best leap” competition. She usually won that because she had more grace.

  Her mom had always won, too, because her dad said she was as graceful as they come. Like a gazelle, he’d said once as he and Sammi watched her mother swimming up the river, then down again, doing her daily mile. Like a swan. Like an angel.

  “Mom was an angel,” she said.

  “No she wasn’t!” Old Itch scoffed, as if she’d meant it for real.

  They were in a small town. She didn’t know its name. She’d seen a dozen places like this, and the anonymous main street had McDonalds, Arby’s, KFC, and Dairy Queen, but she homed in on a Starbucks. She wasn’t so keen on their coffee, but she liked the muffins they sold. Right then, the most important thing in the world was a muffin.

  Once inside she ordered, and when Old Itch went to pay she saw his hand pass over the contactless terminal. It beeped, the barista frowned, then she went to prepare her hot chocolate and cake. Old Itch hadn’t ordered anything.

  “How did you do that?” she asked when they’d taken a seat in a corner booth.

  “Do what?”

  “Pay with your hand?”

  “I need to see the map,” he said. He seemed agitated, uncomfortable being inside. He kept glancing around.

  “Where’s my mom?”

  “Soon. Near. Let me see.” He reached for her sleeve and tugged it up. She pulled away.

  “You said soon…” A while ago, she thought, but she wasn’t sure how long. That troubled her. Time seemed fluid, like the flow of tears.