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  The reanimated corpse in front of him said nothing for a moment. Eventually, it nodded. ‘Yes, son. It’s all gonna be grand. Now please, do that for me.’

  In a rush, Dermot came forward and hugged him, though the coldness of his father’s skin must have been hard to take. ‘I’m your wee man, am’pten I?’ he said, in a small voice.

  ‘Always.’

  Then Dermot was gone, vanishing into the crowd of children like a fish re-entering the shoal.

  Too quickly, the man stood before the place that had been his home. He closed the front door behind him, such an unusual act in the communal Belfast streets that the click of the latch caused his wife to come from the kitchen to investigate. Her face lit up when she saw him, until she took in his appearance.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ she cried. ‘Dermot was right! What in God’s name’d they do to you?’ She threw her arms around him to embrace him–

  And froze. When she pulled back, pulled away, he could see that her concern had been replaced by all-out alarm.

  ‘You’re so cold,’ she said.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ he told her.

  She grabbed his hand in hers as if to test its temperature. ‘Your hands!’ she babbled.

  He moved her to the nearest armchair. She was turning his hands over in hers and her skin felt so warm, so incredibly warm and inviting and full of life. Every time she touched him it was as if she was bringing him back to life, but briefly, much too briefly.

  ‘Maria,’ he said, gathering every scrap of strength he had. ‘You have to listen to me. You have to listen to everything.’

  ‘I’m gettin’ Dr Blackwell,’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard. ‘Did they lock you in a freezer? Why you? You’re not involved in anythin’? You’ve never said. Oh Jesus God look at your fingers. Maybe we should go straight to the hospital – yes, yes, I’ll go and rap wee Mrs Bradley and ask her to feed the boys at her house and we’ll go to the Royal and get you sorted.’

  He closed his fingers – what remained of them, anyway – around her wrist, not tightly enough to cause pain, but enough to get her attention. Slowly, he brought her hand up to his chest, placed her palm directly over his heart.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sssh.’

  For a few moments they sat there, her hand on his chest. He watched her expression cycle from puzzled to alarmed to terrified to uncomprehending, until it was all she could do to stare at him.

  Looking at her, at how beautiful she was, he couldn’t help but remember the very first time he’d seen her, back when she was Maria Quinn. He’d known he wanted her.

  This was it. This was his one chance. His last chance.

  ‘Maria, I’m dead,’ he said. ‘I’m not human. In truth, I never was. The men who came here last night, they knew that. Do you understand? I’m not a man, Maria. Not completely, at any rate. I lost my permanent body a very, very long time ago. Ever since I have had to move from one body to another. Possessing, I suppose you’d call it. I did that for centuries.

  ‘Then, forty years ago, I possessed a doctor working in the Royal. One day they brought in a wee boy who’d fallen on his head. His brain was gone, and his body was shutting down. He was empty, Maria, do you see?’

  She was so warm, so beautiful. He almost felt as though his heart would beat again, sitting so close to her. He paused. ‘I took him, Maria and I’ve lived his life ever since – a human life. I’ve grown old, I’ve lived, I fell in love – so in love – with you. I’ve had children.’

  She said nothing, she didn’t move. He pressed on. What did he have to lose?

  ‘This body is dead now. It’ll start to decay. It’s already started. I want to go to the hospital, with you, now, as you suggested. To the coma ward. Find someone there my age, someone brain-dead like the wee boy was, and take him. This body will die, but I’ll live on, and maybe’ – he sighed, knowing how unlikely this was – ‘I know it’ll take time, months, a few years, I don’t know, maybe with enough time, we can be together again, you and me. Our kids. They mean so much to me, Maria. More than you can imagine. They’ll need me to guide them when they grow up. Someday we can tell them the truth about their lineage. We’ll be …’

  He stopped. His wife still hadn’t moved. Hadn’t even blinked.

  ‘… a family,’ he finished, the words empty.

  He released her hand from his chest. She began to shiver at once, as though dipped into liquid nitrogen. Her arms and legs jerked spasmodically. Her lips were blue.

  ‘Maria, no!’ he cried.

  In his chest, his heart beat. Just once. Enough for him to cough up blood and catch it in his hand. The warmth he’d been feeling, it hadn’t been his imagination. He’d been leeching life from his wife’s body, transferring it to his, like some grotesque vampire, like–

  A monster.

  Desperately, not daring to touch her, he sought out blankets and wrapped them around her. He stoked the living-room fire drawing on the remnants of his powers to feed it. The room temperature increased. He checked on Maria. The blue tinge to her lips had receded, but she was still staring blankly ahead.

  He waved a hand in front of her eyes. No reaction.

  For a while – maybe minutes, perhaps as long as half an hour – he sat there with his wife, knowing that it was going to be the last time he ever did so and not wanting it to end, not ever.

  He had to go, had to leave her. He stood up, moved into the hallway and opened the front door. Dermot rushed in seconds later, ravenous as a wolf, rushing straight to the kitchen table. He leapt out of the little boy’s way, afraid to touch his own son.

  He stepped out into the street.

  ‘Da? You goin’?’ It was Michael speaking now. There was strength in the boy, ambition unbounded. He probably got that from his grandmother. The man just hoped there would be compassion too. He had been determined to see that there would be.

  ‘Yeah,’ he told the boy.

  Michael frowned, taking in his da’s odd appearance and voice. ‘Where you away?’

  ‘Look after them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look after them,’ he repeated harshly.

  Michael recoiled back as if stung. ‘Da?’ he said, the pitch of his voice now significantly higher, betraying his confusion. He reached out as though to grab his father’s arm and pull him back–

  ‘Go back to the house,’ Dian said, pulling away from the boy’s outstretched fingers. ‘Wait for me there, I’ll be home soon, son.’

  Michael never forgave his father for that last lie.

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  ‘We’ve got two Morrigans, not just one,’ Danny said.

  His father smiled. ‘Dub’s about to get his hole handed to him.’

  Dermot Scully only wished he felt as confident in pat little sound bites. At least when Dother’s minions had held them under siege earlier that night he’d been on home territory, able to fashion some form of mystical defence, no matter how improvised.

  He thought of his brother’s surprise victory against the spider-thing that had attacked them during that siege – he’d been so proud of Michael at that moment. His whole life, it seemed, his big brother had viewed him as a burden, as a badge of shame. Dermot had watched his brother’s grip on empathy, always tenuous, ebb away as the years progressed. But there, in the basement, wielding that golf club in defence of his daughter and brother, he had found redemption.

  All too briefly.

  Michael was dead. The very people he had died trying to protect had been taken anyway. His big brother had died for nothing.

  A creature from nightmares was on its way to finish them off and the only weapon they had was a sword – granted it was the Sword of Nuada, but Dermot wasn’t convinced that it would be enough. Even Dian, their unexpected saviour, was losing his grip on Dother’s body. He had fallen to the ground, eyes flashing red just before every single source of light died in the office, plunging them all into darkness.

  It w
as at that point, just as the lights went out, that Dermot Scully’s head exploded. Agonising waves of pain smashed into his conscious mind. He fell to his knees as the darkness around them was banished by the Sword in Danny’s hand.

  He wasn’t alone in his head.

  Desperately, he tried to cry out for help. The noises died in his throat, strangled by a competing series of instructions being sent to his body, as if he had grown a second consciousness that had a veto over anything his body performed. All he was able to do was to half-sit, half-slump on the office floor, convulsing quietly. They were all ignoring him anyway.

  He saw Dub’s giant fist smash Dother out of the window and knew that Dian was no longer resident in the latter’s body, because it was Dian who now had a timeshare in his cerebrum. He didn’t know where his own mind ended and Dian’s began – his memories pooled. He had a human life, his own, and another life which had lasted centuries, and he could access every memory simultaneously.

  Dermot was there the night his father had begged, in vain, for his life.

  He was there on the car journey as his father was driven to his place of execution.

  There with his father as, having waited for James Morrigan to finish filling the grave dug for him, he began the slow and agonising process of clawing his way back to the surface.

  A million miles away, Danny and Ellie were having a conversation.

  ‘Bub,’ Dermot managed to say. ‘Bub …’

  Rage boiled within him. Rage like he’d never felt. After his father’s disappearance, his mother had become little more than a zombie and little Dermot had been utterly convinced something supernatural was going on. He had been mocked by his peers, by his own brother, for this belief, but with his eyes and ears open, he had begun to notice other strange things.

  Two years later, Tony Morrigan had tracked him down. He’d claimed to have heard about this little boy who saw things. So their lifelong partnership had begun. Except it had been a lie. Tony had known all along who Dermot was, how he’d lost his father, and had never had the balls to admit it.

  All these years he’d been working with these bastards. He’d risked his fucking life to help Tony Morrigan have the son he never should have had, the son that had brought about all of this madness in the first fucking place. He’d watched his brother die because of it.

  Just like that, he had control of his body once more. He staggered forward, his eyes trained on Tony Morrigan. The letter opener was in his hands. It felt solid, heavy. It felt right.

  Tony saw him coming. He even saw the blade of the letter opener glinting in the silver light cast by the Sword. Realisation dawned on his face at what was about to befall him.

  ‘Murdering bastard!’ Dermot spat out as he thrust the sharp end of the letter opener into Tony’s chest. His aim was straight and true.

  As the light went out of his former best friend’s eyes, Dermot felt the presence in his mind recede and vanish, a snake uncurling itself from his cerebral cortex. He stared down at his blood-covered hands. At the corpse of Tony Morrigan, and at the expression on Danny’s face as, silver Sword in hand, he beheld the man who had just murdered his father. The weight of what he’d just done pressed down on Dermot. All of the righteous fire was gone from him. The letter opener – the murder weapon – clattered from his numb fingers to the floor. He had to explain.

  ‘My father,’ he managed to croak. ‘My father …’

  He got no further. A supernova of silver light, fuelled by Danny’s scream of grief, struck him full-on, tearing at every molecule of his body. He bore its impact for a fraction of a second before it overwhelmed him completely.

  When the tsunami of energy finally subsided, after it had lit the penthouse office suite of Lircom Tower like a lighthouse beacon, visible for miles all around, Dermot Scully was nowhere to be seen.

  REGENT STREET, BELFAST, TWO DAYS AGO

  Beatrice O’Malley let the curtains fall back into place, and pondered the man standing at her front door. She hobbled to answer the insistent knocking, apologising profusely for being old and weak and slow and God love ye and blah blah blah …

  The door opened.

  ‘You can cut that oul shit out, for a start,’ Dian said, through the mouth of a terrified Jehovah’s Witness.

  Bea reached forward, hooked her fingers around the man’s collar and, with superhuman strength, yanked him inside the house. The door slammed shut so hard behind him that it caused a painting in wee Mr Whitaker’s house next door to fall down.

  ‘Son,’ she said.

  ‘Ma,’ Dian returned, and produced a knife from his pocket.

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Free gift with subscriptions to Watchtower?’

  ‘Took it from his kitchen this morning,’ he said.

  She made a disappointed face. ‘Please tell me you’re not playing house again.’

  Pain etched across his face. ‘Don’t,’ he said warningly. ‘Don’t you ever talk about them!’

  ‘If you’re gonna stab me, stab me,’ Carman clucked, letting the Bea identity fall back over her like a shroud. ‘I’m away to stick a wee pot of tea on. I could murder a cup. Want one?’

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he said, following her into the kitchen.

  She tutted as she rummaged for the cups. ‘I do love it when you make time to visit your wee mummy,’ she said with a hint of rebuke.

  ‘I spoke to Dother last night. He asked me for help.’

  ‘And so you thought you’d come and stab me?’ she shrugged. ‘He must have been more direct than normal.’

  ‘He didn’t ask me to stab you.’

  She fixed him with the sort of crestfallen look only a mother can perfect. ‘Would it kill any of you to show some initiative?’ she said.

  ‘You sick, twisted old hag!’ Dian exploded, putting his fist through the nearest wall. He winced and held his head to the side. ‘Oh will you shut up?’ he hissed. ‘I know it’s broken. I’ll drop you off at the hospital.’

  ‘Trouble with the passenger, love?’ Bea said, leading him back in to the living room, a tray with two steaming cups and a plate of biscuits in her hands. ‘Sorry I’ve only a mint Kit-Kat. I know you like a jammy Wagon Wheel. You should just kill your host now. I’m hardly likely to let him walk out of here, am I, him being a witness to this wee conversation. Are you sure you won’t have the wee mint Kit-Kat?’

  Dian simply looked at her.

  ‘Too late, the flies are on it,’ she said, and began dipping it into the tea and sucking the melting chocolate with a noise that would have made Hercules wet himself. ‘Sit down, would ye, for God’s sake, you’re making me tired looking up at you.’

  ‘Stop the cutesy old woman bullshit!’ Dian exploded, kicking over the table and the spare cup. Bea had seemingly anticipated this outburst and had retracted her legs to safety, her own beverage and snack safely in her grasp. She watched impassively as Dian continued to rage and scream, dunking her chocolate biscuit into the tea.

  ‘Ach,’ was all she said after a few moments. ‘See what you done – wee Mr Whitaker’s his listening glass pressed to the wall.’

  She snapped her fingers. There was the faintest of thuds, undetectable to the human ear, but both she and Dian heard it clearly.

  ‘And him only over the last stroke,’ she said. ‘That’s him blind now, God love him. I must say to his wee Home Help. Lovely wee girl. Very big hands. Think she’s a lesbian.’

  Dian sat down. His legs were trembling. ‘Stop,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘You first,’ she said mildly.

  It was at this point that Dian began to cry. Thankfully he was too engrossed in this to see the truly epic eye-roll that this induced in his mother. She passed the time waiting for the sobs to subside by telephoning the ambulance for wee Mr Whitaker, telling the operator that she’d heard him calling for help. Which was true, in a way – his mind was rather screaming at the moment. She reached into his head to silence him and muddy the waters of his short-term memori
es. She had done this so often down the years that it was little wonder the oul fella could barely remember how to tie his shoes.

  ‘Now,’ she said cheerfully, setting Emmerdale to record. ‘What can your wee mummy do for her baby boy?’

  He looked at the knife, still grasped in his hand. ‘You could die,’ he said softly. ‘But I know that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘No, no it’s really not,’ she smiled. ‘But this is makin’ progress, son! We’re talking again. Now, how about it. Tell me what you’re after and we’ll see what we can do. Eh?’

  He sighed. ‘What I’m “after”, Mitéra? I want a life, or at least a semblance of one. I want to be able to leave this fucking hateful little island. You’re the one who put up the wall stopping me from possessing anyone who leaves; don’t bother denying it. I want to go to the other side of the world and live my days in peace, to have children again, a wife. I want free from all this bullshit – yours, my brothers’, the fucking Morrigans’. I want to be Calma again.’

  She smiled. ‘Done.’

  He studied her. He knew how this worked. ‘And in return?’ he asked warily. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘Only what I’ve always wanted,’ she said. ‘I want you to make me proud.’

  OTHERWORLD, NOW

  From her stone circle prison, Carman could sense the oncoming tsunami of light rippling outward from Lircom Tower.

  ‘To me, Luke! Quickly now!’ she said, holding out her hands. Without a flicker of hesitation the child ran into her arms. ‘Here it comes. Are you ready, my son?’

  This was the moment she had been waiting for.

  The light washed over them, over the circle. The power of a Morrigan’s rage, unleashed in full and amplified through the ancestral weapon of the Tuatha. Properly directed, it could have destroyed her, but there was nothing focussed about it – it was the frenzied thrashing of a baby crying, ripe for her to use as she saw fit. She felt it pulse through her body and she redirected every joule of power at the landscape around them.