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  The Otherworld, which until now had continued to pendulum from modern-day Ireland and back, anchored. The arrhythmia of a magical world and a human world was dispelled. Millennia of separation was no more. Thanks to Danny Morrigan, and to her own baby boy, the Merging was complete.

  She lowered the child to the ground and watched as he flowered and grew once more, now imbued with the power she had channelled through herself. More years fell upon him like leaves. His frame broadened, his shoulders filled out. He screamed in agony as his body went through hyper-accelerated ageing – bones cracking and muscles knotting.

  ‘Mitéra,’ he moaned, reaching for her, but she had already turned her back. It was as she hoped – the barriers holding her in place within the standing stones were no more. She was free to roam, to explore her new domain.

  But there was no need to travel just yet. Everything she wanted would be coming to her soon enough. She sat down on her throne and glanced at the youth doubled-over in pain on the ground at her feet.

  The trap was set.

  IRELAND / OTHERWORLD, NOW

  Like petrol on a flame, Carman’s use of Danny’s powers caused the Merging to spread far beyond the confines of Belfast, the Otherworld expanding to encompass the whole island of Ireland.

  In rural areas, places that legends and tittle-tattle had spoken of for generations as ‘fairy rings’ or suchlike crossed the line from harmless local curiosity to something much more deadly. As the Otherworld and the human world blended in a way they had not done in thousands of years, such places became doorways.

  Through these doorways, Carman’s children streamed. Hideous, terrible things – some animal shaped, some without shape at all. They ran, they flew, they crawled, they oozed from those doorways toward the nearest signs of human life.

  Urban areas, possessed of less in the way of ancient sites, fared better than their rural counterparts. The same Lircom network that had, unknown to the populace of course, powered the melding of worlds had also kept the telecommunication lines alive. So long as the call began and ended in Ireland, the phones worked perfectly. Emergency services were swamped within minutes, hopelessly deluged with more calls and cries for help than a force a thousand times their number could have dealt with.

  Families called one another. People were terrified, under attack and under siege – children called parents and begged for help. The lines stayed open. Terror flowed down the Lircom network like blood through a circulatory system and, in her circle of standing stones, where all of the leylines crossed, Carman sat and drank and drank.

  In parts of Belfast, however, things were a little different. The orgy of faerie triumph and human death was not going completely to plan.

  The Named were hunting.

  They moved from street to street, systematically targeting all other faerie life-forms and ripping them apart with an efficiency that only terrified the humans they were rescuing a little bit more.

  One wolf amongst the multitude had a rider. Veins coursing with adrenalin, terror-deadened due to determination and no small measure of painkillers, the rider was proving himself to be every bit a terror to the monsters stalking the city’s streets as the wolves themselves.

  Whipping the barbed stinger above his head, Steve brought it down hard on the head of what looked like the bastard child of a slug and a cockroach.

  ‘Smell that fer a hairy doot, Cunty McBallix!’ Steve whooped. Beneath him, Larka had pinned another formless nightmare to the pavement and was severing its head from where it would have had shoulders. Judging from the thing’s choked-off screams, its particular species found decapitation no less fatal than more terrestrial life-forms.

  Rider and mount took a moment to survey their surroundings. They were on Royal Avenue, the main shopping thoroughfare in Belfast city centre. The nearby Castle Court shopping centre’s upper levels were thronged with humans, herded successfully there by the Named. The three entrances to the centre were under constant attack from faeries but thanks, in no small part to the efforts of Steve and Larka, this particular entrance was currently clear.

  There were people in a nearby doorway, lying with their backs up against the glass, trembling. Steve felt he should say something to them, little realising that, a bloodstained bedraggled figure holding a disembodied spiked tail and sitting atop a giant wolf was unlikely to provide much comfort at this point in time.

  ‘And I’d give up forever to touch you …’

  He started. Larka turned her head around to look at him with a remarkably quizzical expression.

  ‘Cos I know that you feel me somehow…’

  He reached inside what remained of his jacket, and pulled out a mobile phone. The world had gone to hell, had been invaded by monsters, but he was still getting full signal. Hooray. Maybe when he had a quiet minute from dealing death on top of this talking wolf he’d be able to check the Champions League scores.

  That ringtone … he’d set it in a moment of romantic foolishness, in what seemed like a lifetime ago now. As he flipped the phone open to take the call, he felt his mouth dry up.

  ‘Maggie?’ he said.

  He listened for a few minutes. Larka padded this way and that, checking the perimeter. She had time to communicate to a few of her fellows that this was their station now. They acknowledged the command. Nothing save the Named and the humans they were herding would get past.

  Steve closed the phone. Larka fancied that her new friend, ill though he already was, had grown a shade or two paler in the time it had taken for him to speak. She tensed her muscles for fast travel, anticipating what was coming next.

  ‘We need to go,’ he said. ‘We need to go now.’

  BELFAST CITY CENTRE, NOW

  A few hundred yards from where Steve and Larka had just made a fast exit, fresh from herding a group of humans into a secured building, a single crow landed in the midst of a group of the Named.

  ‘Honoured are the Named,’ the bird said.

  ‘Morrigan,’ Wily said in greeting, emerging from the midst of the group.

  The bird and the wolf faced one another. ‘You’re going a little off-script, aren’t you?’ the Morrigan observed. ‘Protecting humans?’

  ‘We owe your descendent a debt. We protect the humans as part of that debt, and also,’ Wily added, giving the crow a long look, ‘because we now know it is the right thing to do.’

  The crow’s head darted this way and that, taking in the ranks of the wolves assembled around her, clearly liking what she saw. ‘Had quite an effect on you, didn’t he?’

  ‘He shared his humanity with us. In a way, he is our father and our creator,’ Wily replied.

  ‘I don’t believe he meant to create you. But then,’ she added drily, ‘he does have a history with that type of thing. So what do you think of your god?’

  Wily took a second to ponder this. ‘He swears a lot,’ he said.

  It was then that the blinding flash of white light flared across the city. Wily and his wolves turned away from it, but the crow did not. It fluttered in that ungainly way crows have, hopped up into the air as the wave of light broke across them. For a moment the bird was silhouetted, a tiny black speck against a silent blast wave of white.

  When the wolves had regained their sight in the aftermath of the flash, they saw that the crow was gone. In its place was a woman, resplendent and shining, clad from head to toe in green battledress and with flowing black hair cascading down her shoulders.

  The Goddess of War had returned. She was magnificent. She was glorious. She stood proudly and held up her arms aloft in trium–

  ‘Oww-oww-oww! My bastard neck,’ she complained, aborting the triumphant stance to wince and rub at the offending part of her body. The wolves watched as the goddess stretched every inch of her imposing frame, as if working out some long-standing kinks. ‘I’ve spent nearly two thousand years as a bird. Cramp is a bitch,’ she offered by way of explanation.

  Thirty feet away, right in front of the main gates of Belfast
City Hall, another, smaller flash of light signalled the appearance of a small stone statue. A second appeared only a few feet away from the first, and a third an equal distance to the opposite side. With a succession of flashes, stone statues had soon formed an orderly perimeter around the grand old building, ringing it in a perfect rectangle of mini monoliths.

  ‘The payment,’ the Morrigan whispered, her eyes shining with tears.

  *

  Carman raised her head, as if listening. Her entire body pulsed with power. The world outside the circle was solidified now, a perfect fusion of old and new, ancient and modern. Only Lircom Tower was holding on to its dual identities; phasing in and out of existence, perfectly within the boundaries of the stone circle as though the building had been designed with this eventual destiny in mind.

  ‘Ah yes, the payment,’ she echoed, laughing as she looked across the city. ‘Old friend, consider it paid in full.’

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  Cradling his father’s body in his arms, Danny didn’t even notice the first tremors that shook Lircom Tower. A second tremor was hard on its heels, this one stronger than the first, and coming from the opposite corner of the building. An incredible rumbling began, like a freight train coming at them from the floors below. A portion of the office ceiling crashed down around them. Cracks fractured jaggedly across the windows, the floor.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ellie shouted desperately. She hung onto Dother’s desk for support. Only Danny seemed unaffected by the quakes. He remained stock still, holding his father’s body, his eyes closed. He hardly seemed to be breathing.

  ‘The Merging is complete. All save this building.’ It was Dub’s voice. No longer disembodied. He stood in the centre of the office, huge and clad in the robes of an ancient King.

  Ellie noted the surprise in his expression, as if he were still trying to figure out how he’d transformed from dark mist to physical being.

  A third quake, and then a fourth. The roaring became so loud it was hard to think, and now the building began rocking from side to side. The ceiling above them dropped by about a foot, the pressure blowing out the floor-to-ceiling windows all around them with a huge report of smashing glass.

  Ellie, having moved closer to the windows in order to see what was happening outside, threw herself backwards to avoid the fragments, but thankfully most of the glass had shot outwards into the Belfast night. She crawled over to Danny as the floor below them began to sag.

  ‘Danny,’ she gasped, blood trickling down her face from where a few shards of glass had caught her. ‘There are four stone pillars. They’re coming up straight through the building!’

  At the rear of the office, a section of the floor fell away to nothingness below, cascading downward and smashing through the lower floors like dominos. The roof above their heads slipped once more, and she shook Danny by the shoulders, trying to get through to him.

  ‘Danny!’ she said. ‘Danny, we have to go!’

  He opened his eyes. He was close to losing it, she could see that. ‘He’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she replied, tears streaming down her cheeks – she had gone through the exact same ordeal only hours ago. ‘I know, remember? But we’re still here, Danny.’

  He blinked, seemingly oblivious to the danger they were in. Nothing mattered to him except the body in his arms. ‘Dermot was meant to be his friend …’

  Ellie looked wretched beyond belief. ‘I know,’ was all she said.

  A huge shadow fell across them. Danny looked up, and up, and up.

  ‘Not enough time to leave,’ Dub said, knowing every word counted. ‘The Sword – use it. Now. Or we die.’

  ‘Use it how?’ Danny said.

  The roof above them finally collapsed. Ellie had time to scream and raise her arms above her head in what was sure to be a futile gesture before being crushed.

  Dub grunted, every massive sinew in his gargantuan neck standing out like ropes as he supported the weight of tons of concrete above his head, stopping it crushing every single one of them.

  ‘Make … something … up,’ he managed.

  The building was history. It was a miracle that the thin strip of floor they had gathered on was still mostly intact. Ellie watched in horrified fascination as the four great stone pillars moved inexorably upward, pulverising the modern steel and concrete of Lircom Tower as though it was nothing. She felt the entire superstructure lurch to the right, and then back, as if the whole thing was a giant Jenga construct and some idiot had removed the wrong brick.

  ‘We’re going over,’ Dub said. ‘This is it.’

  Silver light washed over them.

  The tower collapsed in a matter of seconds.

  Those who saw it from miles away braced themselves for the rumble underfoot. Those who were within its enormous shadow, sheltering in adjoining buildings or running for their lives along the city centre streets, covered their heads with their arms, or stood, helpless, watching the gargantuan behemoth of concrete and steel topple over – flies ready to be swatted into nothingness by a monstrous hand.

  It was not to be.

  Somewhere between vertical and horizontal, the tower lost any semblance of physical presence. By the time it would have impacted the surface, it was no more than a ghost, a whisper. Those in its path could only cower and bear witness as phantom walls and floors, many thousands of tons of them, swept through them where they stood.

  Lircom Tower was no more. Its destruction and fall, an act that should have spawned a crater a hundred feet wide, caused neighbouring buildings to collapse, created a disastrous surge in the Lagan that would have swept over the riverbank, instead caused none of these things.

  In the tower’s place, four enormous stone monoliths had risen into the Belfast night, each one taller than the building they had chewed through in their violent birth. And just outside these four giant pillars, a small group had phased into existence sometime between the tower crumbling and fading. Anyone looking closely enough at the two events would have observed that the moment the group appeared, the tower lost its physical presence.

  It was safe to say none of the available witnesses were looking that closely. Mostly, they were finishing the process of thoroughly shitting themselves.

  ‘You did it,’ Dub said, looking at Danny with unabashed relief.

  Danny ignored him. Only he, Dub, and Ellie were present. Tony’s body was not with them. ‘My da,’ he said. ‘Where’d he go?’

  Ellie hadn’t quite recovered from the eleventh hour reprieve. ‘I don’t know, Danny,’ she said, steadying herself by reaching out and holding onto his free arm, the one not holding the Sword.

  ‘Where’d he go?’ Danny demanded, holding the Sword against Dub’s Adam’s apple, which in Dub’s case made an actual apple look about the size of a grape.

  ‘He was dead,’ he offered. ‘Perhaps that is why he was not transported.’

  Danny pressed harder with the Sword and a line of blood appeared on Dub’s throat.

  ‘My mother may know more,’ he added.

  ‘What happened to big shadow-cloud unstoppable darkness guy, by the way?’ Danny asked him, not retracting the Sword by so much as a millimetre. ‘One minute you’re the smoke monster from Lost and knocking your brother out a top storey window, and the next you’re Mr Agreeable, begging me to save you?’

  Dub’s eyes were wide with alarm. He said nothing.

  Danny went back over the events in the penthouse office. Dub had been an insubstantial cloud of darkness until … of course!

  ‘The light.’

  Rather than reply, Dub pointed with an arm like a gunboat to the interior of the stone pillars,the message behind the gesture clear. Answers in there.

  Carman lay within. Once Danny went inside, he knew there was no going back. He wished the thought of this journey ending was more reassuring. He still had no idea what to expect in there. Only that Carman had his son and for that reason, if no other, he knew he would have to go i
nside. He had lost so much already, too much to think about. Steve. His father. He would not lose his son.

  The loss of his father ate away at him, threatened to consume him. Every time he tried to focus on the task ahead, the awful memory of Scully striking him down reared its head. It was all he could do not to curl into a foetal ball.

  He’d skipped through time and space, through death and rebirth, and had finally understood why his father had done what he’d done. Had finally grasped what it truly meant to be a Morrigan. Only for his father to be taken from him moments after he’d been able to return those crucial memories.

  Ellie’s hand found his, and squeezed. He looked into her eyes and felt ashamed – he was not the only one going through the searing pain of seeing a parent die. Michael Quinn had died to protect his daughter and no matter what his role in all of this had been, that deserved respect. He had made the ultimate sacrifice–

  Wait. Wait a fucking minute. What was he thinking? This wasn’t the human world. A quick glance at the huge blood-red moon hanging overhead would readily confirm that, if the unearthly creatures flapping and buzzing through the night weren’t enough of a clue.

  This was a world of magic now. A world where magic cauldrons could return the dead to life, and where a sword – a fucking magic fucking sword – could spare a city from the catastrophic collapse of its tallest building. The world had gone to shit. Every notion of what was normal or right had been swept away. Christ, he himself had been torn apart, ripped limb from limb, and now here he stood, alive and well.

  ‘Ellie, I’m going to get them back,’ he promised, foolishly, stupidly, but not caring. ‘I don’t know how, but I will. Your father. My father. Steve. Everyone.’

  She just nodded. He wasn’t sure whether she actually believed him, or whether she was humouring him because he needed her to do so, but at some level he realised it didn’t matter.