Consciousness came slowly. Dow fought his way up from the depths of sleep. Rosy light filled a white room, and crisp sheets lay over him. His side hurt. Reaching down caused him to wince as he felt bandages tightening around the wound … the chainsaw … he had been exposed to the tainted blood of the Twisted! He was infected!
Fear almost paralysed him. Then he realised that he was coherent and clean. He was still alive. Slowly he relaxed and looked around. Grímnir sat in a chair at his bedside, apparently asleep. His hair was clean and pulled back in a ponytail, his beard braided correctly. He was wearing a fresh pair of faded jeans and the leather jacket he had left in the armoury. The tattoos around his neck stretched down across his bare chest. Ink had covered his wounds. At his side rested the chainsaw, polished and looking quite new.
Dow tried to speak but only a croak came out. It was enough to wake the Jötnar, who opened his eyes and smiled at the Elf. ‘Welcome back to the land of the living.’
‘The poison?’
Grímnir’s face clouded for a second. ‘It has been a little over ten hours. We do not know yet. The Tower’s best healers have done all they can. Master Creachmhaoil saw to it personally. They think I got the poison out, but only time will tell.’
Dow changed the subject. ‘So, we are back then? This is the top of The Tower?’
‘Yes, my friend, we made it.’
Dow held his hand up and Grímnir clutched it. ‘Thank you,’ the Elf said.
Another form appeared at the doorway. ‘Come, Grímnir Vafthrúdnir, young Dow needs his rest.’ Master Creachmhaoil stepped into the room, and Dow smiled at his old mentor.
‘It is good to see you, Master. I am afraid we failed you. We failed to find the Maiden.’
‘Nonsense, my boy. You brought Grímnir Vafthrúdnir back to us, and that was all you were required to do. Although, he is needed elsewhere. He would not leave your side until he had seen you awake.’ Master Creachmhaoil turned back to the Jötnar. ‘Are you satisfied now that he is in good hands?’
‘I am.’
‘And are you satisfied that the Maiden is lost to us?’
‘I am satisfied that the dark ways are too perilous, and too many, for me to find her quickly.’
‘Then you must come with me and speak with the council. We must find another way to defeat Cú Roí.’
‘The magic of my tattoos will not help your cause.’
Master Creachmhaoil waved a hand as if to bat the suggestion away. ‘I am not asking for your permission to take the magic from you anymore, Grímnir Vafthrúdnir. I just want you to come with me. To help me. To help us: your strength and knowledge are essential in the fight against the Miracle Child.’
Grímnir looked at Dow who smiled at him weakly. ‘Go with him, my friend – I’m safe enough here.’
Rowan’s dreams were fitful, full of creeping things that dripped slime and leered disturbingly through serrated teeth. Tabby was in them, first running from the monsters and then becoming one, her slight frame buckling and swelling, slave to an internal evil that eventually burst from her in blood and screams. Thankfully, he didn’t remember much more.
Wakefulness did not bring respite. The news channels talked with morbid glee of another murder. Last night, a man in the city centre had fallen prey to the most celebrated serial killer since Peter Sutcliffe. They were looping shaky footage of a tired-looking detective at the scene of the killing.
'Inspector! Inspector!’ a female voice shouted. ‘This is the fifth murder in two days. They're calling the killer a vampire! They say there was no blood in any of the bodies!'
'Of course there wasn't any blood in the bodies,’ the detective answered irritably. ‘It was all over the floor. He's a cannibalistic psychopath, but there's nothing supernatural about it.'
There’s a good chance that man is going to lose his job, Rowan thought. He turned the television off with a grimace of disgust, amazed once again by how his race could relish the gory details of another person’s bloody and vicious demise. They had no idea what was coming, he thought to himself grimly.
Rowan, and the odd assortment of fairies and humans he had fallen in with, stayed the night at Manannán’s apartment. Only Sergei insisted on going across the road to a hotel. He let himself out, saying he would be back at five o’clock the following morning. It was now six and there was no sign of Sergei. Rowan wouldn’t have blamed him if he never came back.
Jason and Jim were in the kitchen brewing strong coffee. The door to the guest room where Cam and the Tattooist slept was firmly shut. Rowan didn’t fancy opening it, just in case he woke them suddenly and a rogue thought left him flash-fried, or believing he was a chicken. Manannán’s door was open and his bed was neat, as if it hadn’t been slept in.
Outside it was still dark. The winter sucked all the life from the city, leaving it a stark and barren place. Sparkling frost, lit beneath the streetlamps, covered everything. The first signs of life were beginning to appear – menial workers going to cleaning jobs, and lonely cars drifting into town from Trinity Way. Rowan rubbed his tired eyes. The few hours’ sleep he managed to snatch would not be nearly enough for the day ahead. Time was at a premium though, and it was all he could afford.
Behind him a door opened, and he turned to find the Tattooist stepping into the lounge area. Cam staggered out behind him, half naked and half asleep. The Elf didn’t even look up; he just wandered towards the bathroom, scratching at his crotch in a very un-Elflike manner. Rowan turned and smiled at the Tattooist, thinking to share the strange sight. The Ifrit’s face might have been carved from stone for all the response he got. Flaming orbs sputtered in his direction, and after a second Rowan turned away, feeling uneasy.
Jason called across the room to the Tattooist. ‘Tea, isn’t it? Milk, two sugars?’
This time the Tattooist did smile. ‘Most civil of you, yes,’ he rumbled as he stalked across to the breakfast bar. Jason handed him a mug, and the Tattooist sat himself down on a stool. Bemused, Rowan shook his head and made his way over. He poured himself a cup of coffee. They drank in silence.
The sound of a key scraping in its hole was loud in the relative quiet of the lounge. The front door opened, and Manannán walked in carrying two large duffel bags. They bulged and clinked ominously. He dropped them in the centre of the room, next to the bag of ammunition Rowan had brought up from the car after they had finished talking the night before.
‘More guns,’ the Elf said. Rowan stared at the bags for a moment and then looked down into his mug and thought of his sister.
The Sylph was a creation of will and shadow, little more than a dream of its Master, imbued of its Master’s desire. Though autonomous and possessed of basic intelligence, its small life was an extension of the Prince of Rattlesnake’s, and as such, it lived solely to obey him.
Its mission was twofold. The priority: to discover the location of Cú Roí and return to its Master with the information. Its secondary task, when the time was right, was to destroy Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha and any other sentient life that knew of the Miracle Child’s return.
The Sylph was cunning. It knew its best hope of finding Cú Roí was through the Elf. With this firmly entrenched in what passed for its mind, it had stuck to the shadows, following the Elf and its new companions and waiting to see what it could learn.
When the small party had split up, with the dour human leaving the rooms of this small tower, the Sylph stayed with Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha. This had been a simple choice: Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha was the target. It must not lose the target.
It had lurked in the corners of the room as they slept. Its form consisted of nothing but motes of darkness hanging in shadow; its ability to hide in this manner was inherited from its Master. When it skittered out into soft moonlight that crept through an uncurtained window, its body solidified against its will as the illumination forced its ethereal body into tangible mass.
As it hung over Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha like a giant spider, one of its eight limbs stretched out into a spiny barb that hovered over the sleeping Elf’s eye. The Sylph fought the insane desire to kill. For a second, the young Elf’s life hung in the balance, as instruction nearly gave way to murderous rage, and then it skittered back into a corner. Out of the light, its form faded to nothingness.
Now it lay dormant in the dark space under a sofa in the lounge, patiently listening to the group, absorbing their plans and waiting for the moment it could reveal itself. Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha would die, as would all the creatures in this tiny tower. They would die in shrieking agony, but not until they had led the Sylph to the Miracle Child.
A knock on the door roused Cam from where he rummaged through the bags of guns and ammunition. He was looking for something to complement the Remington. He had become quite fond of the shotgun and still had plenty of shells left for it, but he felt that under the circumstances, he couldn’t really go wrong with more firepower. Eighties action-movie firepower – the sort of ridiculous personal armament Arnold Schwarzenegger might strap on to single-handedly invade Russia. Nothing caught his eye though, and the weaponry really was rather heavy when all was said and done. Cam stood up and stretched. His back cracked in pleasant pain. The knock came again.
He glanced around as he walked over to the door. Rowan was loading some sort of big machine gun – an assault rifle perhaps. Jason and Jim had both grabbed similar weapons, and the snick of bolts and the click of magazines filled the room. His father was sharpening a sword. The Tattooist watched disdainfully, sipping his third cup of tea. His two evil-looking meat cleavers rested on the breakfast bar next to him.
On the other side of the peephole was a pale, drawn face. Cam began to smile when he saw that it was Sergei. He pulled open the door. ‘Finally managed to drag yourself back up here, then? I didn’t think you’d show – this is some wild …’ The words petered out as he realised there were other figures in the hall with Sergei. Only one was bipedal.
Cam lashed out with one foot, trying desperately to close the door. It was useless. A Barghest crunched past him, its wormy body writhing, its oval mouth gnashing and growling. Cam was knocked to the floor. He rolled to his feet and scurried towards his shotgun, scooping it up as he passed. The deafening staccato chatter of automatic gunfire sent his senses reeling.
The Barghest absorbed the bullets like a dog taking bee stings. It roared and leapt in the air, its body flaring out into a web of flailing tendrils. Its huge maw snapped left and right at its invisible tormentor, and then it settled back into itself, none the worse for wear but looking very, very angry.
Two more stalked into the room, followed by a tall, wiry man with dishevelled brown hair and a mad look in his eyes. ‘Sam,’ Rowan spat.
‘Hello, hello,’ Sam cried like a ringmaster, welcoming a paying crowd to his circus. ‘I hope you had a good breakfast, because it’s time to die!’
Rowan watched as the Tattooist tossed one of the Barghest through a window, smashing the double reinforced glass as if it were spun from sugar. Another Barghest threw itself onto the big Ifrit’s back. Rowan unleashed a stream of high-velocity bullets into its squirming flesh. It reared backwards, and the Tattooist managed to turn and slam a white-hot meat cleaver into the thing’s mouth.
The third Barghest was being kept at bay by Jason, Jim, and Cam, all firing into its body and making it twist and jerk like a marionette. Manannán faced Sam, his sword held out before him in a steady, business-like manner. There was no sign of Sergei, the traitorous bastard.
Rowan turned back to the Tattooist and saw that the Barghest had a string of tentacles wrapped around the Ifrit’s body and throat. The cleavers flashed out to sever them but more writhed out, until he was wrapped in the slimy mess. With a cry of fear and rage, Rowan jumped towards them and opened up with the assault rifle.
Cam had emptied eight shells into the first Barghest that came through the door. Though it twitched and screeched as bits of tentacles flew into corners of the room, it didn’t seem to make much difference. Jason and Jim had joined in the firefight, and together they had managed to keep it off balance, but it was still very much alive.
As Cam stepped back to reload, he took a quick look around. The Tattooist was wrestling with one of the Barghest next to a broken window, and Rowan was emptying a gun into its exposed side. His father was keeping the man called Sam at bay with his sword, the point flicking out expertly whenever the other man got in range. A scream made him turn back to the first Barghest. Cam watched, aghast, as it impaled Jim: one clawed tentacle rammed through his throat and dragged him towards the thing’s mouth. The massive, malleable jaw closed on Jim’s head, bursting it in a spray of blood and brains. Jason bellowed in rage and emptied his gun into the thing. Cam frantically reloaded his shotgun, but it was too late; Jason had left himself wide open, and three tentacles smashed into his body. The first impaled him through his sternum and exploded out of his back, whilst the second and third drove into his stomach together.
Jason opened his mouth, and a jet of blood fountained into the air. The tentacles in his stomach lashed from side to side, causing the man’s bowels to slide from his abdomen in a steaming heap. The Barghest roared in victory, spreading its tentacles around it like a peacock’s tail. The action tore Jason in half. His lower body flopped raggedly beside Jim’s decapitated corpse, and the top half of his torso slipped from the impaling tentacle onto the sofa and sat there propped up, for all the world as if Jason had sat down to tea.
Bellowing with horror and anger, Cam shot the next eight shells into the thing’s bloodstained mouth. It turned to face him as the breach clicked empty.
Sam was enjoying himself. One of the Barghest had taken an impromptu flying lesson, but other than that, things were going swimmingly. Two of the humans were already dead, and they’d only been in the room for thirty seconds. The big circus freak with the meat cleavers didn’t look to be doing so well, and Sam was about to kill a slim chap with a sword who was trying rather ineffectually to impale him. It would only be a second before the fop with the shotgun was well and truly eaten, and Sam decided that he would deal with Rowan himself.
Dodging the edge of the sword almost languidly, Sam turned his attention back to his opponent. He was quick and lithe, and handled the weapon as if it didn’t weigh a thing. Sam knew he could take him – knew he would kill him. He was just having a bit of trouble deciding exactly how.
The Sylph was confused. It did not know what the things that were attacking Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha were, but it knew that they must not kill the Elf. If the Sylph had been even a little more intelligent, it might have realised that the tentacled creatures and the man with them could take it directly to Cú Roí, but it was a simple thing, and as such, it reacted instinctively to the threat.
As the Barghest darted in towards Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha, the Sylph oozed from beneath the sofa. Where light hit the shifting weave of its form, it became solid. Its limbs thrashed wildly as it fought to completely emerge from the darkness.
Throwing the empty HK416 to one side, Rowan turned back to the centre of the room to look for something else to use against the seemingly unkillable Barghest. The Tattooist was still struggling with the thing, his immense strength and flaming eyes holding it in a snapping stalemate. Rowan found the bags of guns in the centre of the room by the sofas.
There – he leapt towards a flare gun that was lying beside a box of 5.56x45mm cartridges for the Heckler & Koch assault rifles. Even as he moved, Rowan realised something wasn’t right. The shadow beneath the sofa was too long … and it was moving.
Sam heard the unearthly cry of the Sylph and turned to face it without thinking. The werewolf saw something strange, even by the standards of the last few days.
A shadow was condensing into black fury. At first, he thought it was the third Barghest, for it looked similar with its thick body and the multitude of legs, which writhed around it without rhyme or physical reason. He quickly realised it was something different again.
It was more arachnid than cephalopod; its black limbs clawed furiously at the floor as it dragged itself from the impossibly narrow space beneath the couch. Its body was a globe of viscous black liquid held together by some unknown force; its surface rippled uncertainly as the powerful legs finally found purchase and brought it into the room. It was bigger than a Barghest. The joints of its long legs almost brushed the ceiling before sweeping down into squat, phallus-like tips that seared the floor where they touched. It was all black and featureless.
One limb elongated fluidly to touch the Barghest that was about to fall on the Elf with the shotgun. The black substance immediately rushed out to cover the Barghest in a thick tarry carapace. The black monstrosity skittered over and dropped onto the trapped monster, absorbing it and the limb with such speed, that Sam barely believed what he had seen.
Another limb sprouted from the back of the thing and hooked down to the floor. Of the Barghest there was no sign. Sam’s concentration was jerked back to his opponent when the tip of the Elf’s sword slammed into his back.
Cam stared at the creature, which had erupted from nowhere to save him, with a mixture of fear and relief. Although there was no way of telling where the thing was looking, Cam had the unpleasant sensation that it was looking at him, and that it did not like him very much.
Cam scampered backwards and began to load more shells into his shotgun.
Quickly getting over the sight in front of him – after all, what was one more terrifying impossibility – Rowan scooped up the flare gun and turned back to the Barghest that had the Tattooist wrapped in its tentacles. He fired, hitting the Barghest in the thick core of its body. The round burned red and began to smoke; the choking fog quickly filled the room. After that, things became confused.
Screeching, the Barghest released the Tattooist as the flare in its back began to flame in earnest. Rowan heard another cry and turned to see Manannán being mauled by a giant wolf thing. It had his head firmly clutched between its massive jaws. A sword jutted out of the wolf’s back, but it didn’t seem to care. The werewolf stabbed long talons into the Elf’s stomach and ripped them up to his chest. Manannán’s body briefly spasmed. Viscera slopped from his body cavity to the floor. Rowan knew that Manannán was dead: nobody could survive being gutted like that.
The monstrous black thing that had crawled from beneath the sofa skittered towards the werewolf. Sam saw it coming and released his grip on Manannán, who slumped lifelessly to the floor. Sam awkwardly clawed the sword from his body and threw it at the black thing before dodging past it and bounding out the door.
On the other side of the room, the flaming Barghest lashed out in a frenzy, and its tentacles ripped through the Tattooist. Fire erupted from the Ifrit’s wounds to engulf the monster. It tried to flee, charging straight into a wall where it collapsed and slowly burned.
Rowan looked around. The black thing was gone. Cam was cradling his father’s dead body. The Tattooist lay on the floor with a gaping hole in his stomach that smouldered dully. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Rowan said helplessly as he bent over the Ifrit. He tried to lift him, but he was too heavy.
‘No,’ the Ifrit growled. ‘I am finished.’
‘A little scratch like that? Nonsense. Now get to your feet.’
‘I am finished. The monster’s tentacles punctured deep. Its venom is eating me. The fire of my life is dying. Bring me the Elf before it is too late.’
‘Manannán’s dead.’
‘I know that, fool – bring me the other one. Bring me his son.’
Rowan went over to where Cam sat on the floor with his father’s corpse in his lap. His face was expressionless, his eyes dry. ‘The Tattooist is dying.’ Cam looked at him blankly. ‘He wants to speak with you, Cam.’