Completely Folk'd Read online

  Between the terrors of the unknown in the street outside or being crushed to death, Cal would have chosen the unknown any day.

  He was thrown unceremoniously onto the pavement outside, landing on his arse – hardly surprising given the circumstances – and immediately gloried in the ability to move. Alice, still surfing the crowd, cried out for help and he scrambled back to help her down.

  In the chaos a middle-aged man, who had clearly lost it, punched him in the face. Cal fell back, his hand in Alice’s, and managed to pull her free with his backward momentum. She landed with a thump on top of him. They finally had a few feet of space in which to breathe, which would have seemed unthinkable only moments ago. He breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe they could actually make it out of this.

  On his back, facing the wrong way, the first hint of the danger behind came from Alice. She screamed.

  Cal got to his feet and forced himself to face what was coming. On first sight, he was almost relieved – they looked like people. Okay, oddly dressed, menacingly-advancing people, but people. Compared to large wolves and nightmarish insect-things, surely a step up?

  The streetlights, flickering on and off intermittently, came on again, and his initial cautious optimism withered and died. Something was deeply, deeply wrong with the figures coming toward them. Oh, they were people all right. Or at least they had been.

  His brain sensed their wrongness as much as his eyes saw it. Meanwhile, the awful certainty that a painful death loomed in his near future bypassed the brain entirely and went straight for the soul.

  Somehow, though, by some fluke of evolution or chance, Calvin McDermott was one of those people who finds hitherto unknown reserves of courage in the face of a crisis – the meek little cubicle dweller who blinks dazedly into the camera lens as he tries to fathom how he pulled those people from the rubble.

  ‘Come on,’ he turned to the panicking hordes behind him, waving his arms like a maniacal orchestra conductor. ‘There’s fuckin’ hundreds of us! There’s only a few of these cunts! Let’s fuckin’ NAIL ’em!’

  His words rang out across the penned-in humans and, for a wonder, the crowd ceased its relentless retreat. Looks were exchanged. A ripple of almost-intent passed through them as they looked to their new, unlikely trailblazer.

  Cal knew he almost had them. He needed something more: A symbol, a battle cry.

  Alice pressed something into his palm. A piece of the doorframe. Large, blunt and heavy. The approaching horde was only ten feet or so from the doors now. He could see a long silver string of drool escaping from one creature’s mouth as it regarded the humans trapped inside with nothing but murderous hunger.

  Cal lifted the club and unleashed his call to arms, a cry that rent the night sky asunder and ignited the fires of courage in his makeshift army. It was his Gettysburg Address, his Million Man speech, his ‘One giant leap’.

  ‘STATE O’ YER FUCKIN’ BALLIX!’ he roared lustily, and charged.

  With an answering Belfast-born howl of approval, the crowd surged forward, streaming out through the doors. Humans being humans, those who were in danger of being crushed in the retreat soon stood at serious risk of being crushed in the advance. The danger soon abated when, after one too many impacts, the main front windows smashed outward and the crowd was released.

  The former Tuatha, freshly awakened and confused by this turn of events, and now unsettled by the sudden drop in delicious fear their human quarry were exhibiting, hesitated for a moment.

  A moment in which, from behind them, Steve and Larka attacked.

  To the side, a fresh wave of the Named crashed into the former Tuatha. Huge jaws snapped, Steve swung the flail this way and that with deadly intent, and humans, with far less finesse but making up for it in sheer weight of numbers, served to distract the ex-Tuatha long enough for their more powerful four-legged allies to bite and swipe.

  Humans in the adjoining buildings, until now hiding in terror, saw what was happening. A Mexican wave of violence began to spread as shop-fronts burst open and the refugees inside flowed back onto the streets. The former Tuatha and the various faerie abominations found themselves under sustained attack for the first time.

  Larka was gone, launched into the fray. There were people, creatures and the Named surrounding Steve. He saw a hellish shape detach itself from the eaves of one building and engulf a luckless woman below. Raising the flail, he moved towards the creature, wondering how to aim for a vital organ in something that seemed to lack structure or definition.

  Slam. He was thrown to the right and a spiked tail missed his head by inches – the impact had saved his life. Blood spattered over his face. Not his own. He wiped it away and, without time to do anything else, brought the flail down into the head of a misshapen being trying to pull apart a middle-aged man. The head partially exploded with the impact, and he was forced to wipe more goo, and who knew what else, from his eyes.

  Something grabbed his right leg, knocking him to the ground, and he was dragged along the pavement. He felt a breath on his leg, as if a huge mouth was about to close …

  He swung desperately with the flail. There was a choking, guttering gurgle and he was able to stand. To his relief, he had not in fact brained his Named rescuer but the amorphous horror he had set out to tackle in the first place. Rather than having the good grace to fuck off and die, it seemed to turn itself inside out before emitting a rasping, slurping noise.

  Something like a tongue lashed out of the thing and wrapped itself around Steve’s arm, dislodging the flail and yanking him forward. Instinctively – and truthfully, out of sheer dumb luck – Steve’s other hand managed to snag the flail even as it tumbled and he brought it up, over his shoulder and down–

  This time, the creature stayed still.

  A shapeless mass landed at his feet. He stiffened his flail arm, relaxing only when he saw that it was a former Tuatha’s mangled corpse, dropped carefully from Larka’s jaws. She looked at him with the faint air of a cat expecting praise for bringing its master a mouse. He didn’t get a chance to oblige; within seconds more assailants had set upon them and it was time to dodge and swing once more.

  He could never quite piece together the order of what happened next. He knew they moved further away from City Hall, shop by shop, retaking the centre of the city as they went. Reinforcements from both sides were forthcoming at several points, renewing the battle and threatening to tip the balance, but the momentum was with the humans and the Named from the start and they were not about to let it go.

  At some point the human army must have raided an outdoor goods store and a sports store because he started seeing people swinging camping axes and hurley sticks. His arms ached beyond reason, but even through the fog of adrenalin he remembered thinking they didn’t hurt as much as they should. He wasn’t this fit. He wasn’t this good at fighting. Yet here they all stood, these motley humans, engaged in pitched battle with creatures out of nightmares. Anything less than full slaughter would have been a miracle, and yet they seemed to be winning …

  Who knew how much later, he was finally able to stop swinging the flail. He looked for a target or for someone to assist, but all he could see was the fluid shapes of the Named and other exhausted humans looking back at him, some bent double, some bleeding.

  Many were not moving at all.

  *

  ’Alice …?’ Cal said, unsteadily, walking toward her. His face was deathly pale. Blood dripped from his fingertips onto the asphalt below.

  She smiled back at him, and tried to respond, tried to say his name, but found that she could make only a grating noise with her throat. Touching her hand to her neck, her fingers came away dark and wet.

  The crowd melted away to let him pass as he half-ran, half-staggered to her. She collapsed before he could get to her, impacting hard. He gathered her up, put her head in the crook of his arm. Blood was everywhere. Something had slashed her from collarbone to chin. She opened her eyes.

  A shadow fell across
him. He heard a wolf’s heavy breathing and a young, male human voice.

  ‘Please,’ Cal sobbed. ‘Help us.’

  ‘Larka?’ Steve asked.

  Larka swung her head to look at Steve. There was sadness in her huge eyes. ‘Perhaps,’ was all she would say.

  ‘You can bring her back?’ Cal croaked.

  ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘Do it! Just do it, please!’

  Larka’s head dipped to the wounded girl in Cal’s arms. She opened her mouth and for one heart-stopping moment Steve worried that helping this girl meant consuming her, but no. Something, some spark, some hint of life, passed from Larka’s mouth to Alice beneath her, entering the girl’s mouth and causing her to dissolve into a fit of violent coughing. As Steve watched in disbelief, the huge wound in her throat shimmered and began to close – the blood covering the boy holding her started to pool and return in little rivulets to the wound.

  With a shriek, Alice regained consciousness, her arms and legs jerking spasmodically. Cal held her tightly, reassuring her through his tears that she was all right.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The voice belonged to another wolf, another of the Named. He was huge, easily the biggest Steve had seen. The way he carried himself instantly marked him out as the pack leader. Upon his entrance, Larka instantly adopted a posture of subservience, which, strangely, rankled with Steve a little bit.

  ‘I am sorry. I saw no other choice.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Steve said. He faced down the new wolf with as much courage as he could muster – not easy, given the sheer size of the fucker. ‘Why should she apologise for saving lives?’

  Wily merely turned to look at Larka. She could not meet his eyes.

  ‘My wife,’ someone called from nearby. ‘My wife is dying too. Please, help her.’

  The call was taken up by many. There was a carpet of the dead around them, no shortage of corpses or almost-corpses. Larka growled and whined simultaneously, and Wily made a noise that neither Steve nor anyone else present had a hope of comprehending or translating.

  Finally, Wily’s head seemed to dip. He looked defeated. ‘The Named will assist,’ he said quietly, and without another word, many of his fellow wolves spread themselves out among the human casualties. Steve watched as the process that he had witnessed with Alice was repeated over and over. Death was chased away. The humans rose again, blinking, disbelieving. There were embraces, tears and expressions of thanks toward the Named, but Steve didn’t take his eyes off Wily and he grew only more troubled by what he saw.

  ‘We must move the humans,’ Wily rumbled, looking to where, not so long ago, Lircom Tower had stood, growling softly even as he spoke. ‘The Tuatha are gone, but there are other dangers.’

  ‘Wait,’ Steve said. More than anything he wanted to ask what they were hiding about this miraculous process of resurrection, but he forced himself to wait. ‘We have to help Danny.’

  ‘Danny?’ That got Wily’s attention all right. ‘You know the Morrigan?’

  ‘I’m his best friend.’

  Wily gave him an appraising glance, taking in the flail, the bloodstains, the dead Tuatha-creatures at his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said approvingly. ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  Absurdly, Steve flushed. He’d anticipated being eviscerated by one of these fairytale creatures tonight, not validated. He took a moment, though, to glance down at himself and to take in what had happened over the last few hours. He’d gone from being thrown out of a moving car as a piece of excess baggage, to a knight on wolfback, to an impromptu battlefield commander.

  All of the self-doubt that had plagued him, made worse by the head-fuck of the trip into parallel-land where his ‘son’ had turned out to be a monster and his parenting skills had been found sorely wanting, seemed a long time ago now.

  Wily issued orders. Steve made sure one of the strongest of the Named was assigned to look after Maggie, and then he, Larka and Wily split from the group, making straight for the four immense stone pillars that occupied the space previously taken up by Lircom Tower.

  BELFAST / OTHERWORLD, NOW

  The last time Danny had been here, the area had been filled with the worst of Carman’s creations. He had been terrified almost out of his mind, barely able to perceive her. He’d been ripped apart at a single gesture from Dub, unable to do so much as squawk in protest before they’d dismembered him and begun his journey back to life through the Cauldron.

  Passing through the stone arch, he sensed immediately that no matter what the rest of Belfast looked like, inside those four great pillars was still old-world Otherworld. Not a sign of technological progress. Grass underfoot. Even the clouds above looked different, as though they belonged to a different sky to the rest of the city.

  The Belfast skyline should have been easily visible through the stone arches. It wasn’t. If you squinted, if you strained, you could, perhaps, hazard a guess that outside the standing stones lay a city. It was as though when you left the perimeter you entered a different place altogether.

  He felt the transition as they moved inside. Ellie must have done so too – her hand tightened around his at the exact moment the sensation washed over him. He squeezed back. She looked at him and he realised that, with Dother’s revelations, she hadn’t responded to his clumsy declaration of love. Somehow, this didn’t seem quite the time either.

  Things were different inside now. The elite creatures that had thronged the innerspace were gone. Sent out to enjoy themselves, perhaps. And Dub … well, Dub wasn’t going to be there, for obvious reasons. That left only Carman, and–

  ‘Oh my God,’ Ellie said softly.

  She’d instantly recognised the young man before them. Of course she had. Danny had seen this man once before, over a decade ago in a tiny cottage in the arsehole of nowhere. Then, he had been a visage adopted by one of Carman’s faeries, designed to destabilise Danny and draw him to his death.

  This was no vision. The man before them was flesh and blood. He was dressed in armour and fineries, as the Tuatha Dé Danann had been dressed in ancient times, as Glon and Gaim had been dressed.

  Behind him, sitting on her throne, Carman waited and watched. The queen on her throne. He took a moment to stare directly at her, ensuring that she saw him focus on her. Whether she had dropped her previous senses-scrambling defences or whether he had simply evolved beyond her ability to deflect him he couldn’t be sure. He hoped fervently it was the latter.

  ‘Luke?’ Ellie said, shaken to her core but somehow, through her astonishment and despite all that she’d been through, still thrilled beyond words. ‘Luke, it’s … it’s you, isn’t it? My baby?’

  The man before her did not move a muscle or say a word. If his chest hadn’t been gently rising and falling and the sword he was holding wasn’t twirling gently in his grasp, it would not have been hard to think of him as a statue.

  ‘Luke, it’s me. It’s your mummy.’

  Danny purposefully came to a halt about ten feet from his son. Ellie clearly wanted to keep walking. He gently but firmly kept his fingers interlaced with hers until she was forced to stop a pace in front of him. She looked back at him, need and anguish and confusion and love raging across her face. He ached to see it. He felt the same things, just as strongly. In strictly chronological terms it had been only a few days since he last held his baby in his arms. It had also been a lifetime.

  Hard as it was, he spoke not to Luke, but to Carman.

  ‘I have lived the Ordeal,’ he said. ‘Gone into the Cauldron and emerged from it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Nothing more.

  ‘I … we,’ he amended, ‘have come for our son.’

  He saw Luke narrow his eyes when he said that. He ignored it. Whatever process the child had gone through to make him a man in a matter of days was clearly magical in nature. That meant it could be reversed. It had to.

  ‘So you have,’ Carman said. She seemed quite calm.

  ‘So don’t try and stop us!’ Ellie burst
out, clearly unable to hold herself even a second longer. ‘I’ve killed you once tonight, you oul bastard. I’ll kill ye again!’

  Danny’s held his breath. He half-expected all hell to break loose; hordes of hitherto invisible horrifying monsters to burst upwards from the soil and attack them from all sides; Carman to stand up and unleash blue lightning at them, Emperor Palpatine style. He shot Ellie a look that was meant to be slightly rebuking, but when he met her eyes he saw only defiance, determination and love. Strangely, rather than frustrating him, that cheered him.

  ‘You’ve changed since we last met here,’ Carman said. ‘Stronger. Fiercer. Your family’s heritage running strongly within you.’

  ‘A wee bit,’ Danny said modestly.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ Carman snapped.

  The colour drained from Ellie’s face. ‘What?’ she said. ‘I wasn’t–’

  ‘Oh but you were,’ Carman purred. ‘You and your little boy, guests of mine. Only a few days ago.’

  Ellie staggered. Danny was there to catch her; the strength seemed to have fled from her limbs. She was breathing heavily, eyes wide. She looked at him with barely-concealed panic. ‘Danny,’ she whispered. ‘She’s in my head.’

  ‘I know,’ Danny said. He could feel it too; that pressure he’d felt in the Otherworld that had accompanied the senses-scrambling effect. The effect itself was gone, but the pressure remained. It was as though his mind were a web and Carman had just scuttled into the centre of it to sit, squatting, the way a spider could stay still for days at a time if it needed to.

  He reached out and touched Ellie’s face–

  The mobile. She had just wound it and Luke was lying gurgling up at it. The bottles were on the counter, the bath was running. Danny was coming home and she was going to tell him he needed to make a choice. She was tired of the way the pressure would build and build and then he would blow up and she would spend the day worrying that today was the last day. She needed to know.