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  The door closed. He fumbled for the radio to raise Heathrow, feeling a cavernous pit open in his stomach that threatened to dwarf the Ireland-shaped one hundreds of feet below. What if no one was out there? What if this plane was all that was left, doomed to fly the empty skies looking down at nothing but ocean and former landmasses now removed as simply and effectively as a child might pluck a jigsaw piece from a completed puzzle, until their fuel ran dry and they were forced to pitch into the raging sea …

  Fuck you, Stephen King, he thought, and made the call.

  DUBLIN HARBOUR, NOW

  We’re packed in like bloody sardines, Tom Beckett thought, glaring daggers at the rear spoiler of the people carrier in front of him and trying to ignore the the six-year-old brat in the back seat who was pulling the most ludicrously annoying face Tom had ever seen. This was the same kid who’d spent 90 per cent of the voyage over running pell-fucking-mell across the fucking ship while his useless fat parents had sat struggling to breathe as they choked down burgers and fries.

  Still. Another few minutes and the ship would be fully unloaded and he could leave that people carrier behind and start winding his way to Mullingar, where even now (according to the last text he’d received, anyway) his fiancée Suzie was browsing her extensive selection of Ann Summers lingerie, choosing the outfit she’d be wearing to greet him when he arrived at her door.

  His hands tightened on the wheel. Somehow, that thought wasn’t doing much to relieve his impatience with the unloading process …

  Ah! The cars were moving! He thanked God and edged forward, moving slowly from the massive ferry’s interior and into the Dublin night, greeted immediately by a spray of water from the wind whipping up the waters below.

  That little bastard ahead of him flicked him the V-sign. Tom debated whether to return the favour.

  It was then that the cars started moving faster. For a whole second, perhaps two, Tom thought that his ship had quite literally come in. He actually smiled.

  And then the screaming began.

  The people carrier in front of him vanished, allowing Tom to see what lay ahead.

  There was nothing beyond the exit ramp.

  He slammed on the brakes and the car stopped, briefly, but the untethered exit ramp, no longer anchored securely to the Dublin harbour, was swinging freely and he was unable to stop the vehicle’s forward momentum for long. As if to underline this, the white van behind him slammed into his back bumper, forcing him forward. He screamed as his car was pushed over the edge.

  He fell into the abyss.

  THE LIMELIGHT NIGHTCLUB, BELFAST, NOW

  ‘Decent music!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, decent music!’

  She shook her head happily and pointed to her ears. ‘Sorry! It’s just really loud!’

  ‘I SAID, THE MUSIC IS DECENT IN HERE!’

  ‘The music? Aye! Fuckin’ shit, isn’t it!’

  Cal considered his options for a moment before replying. ‘Aye! Shit!’

  As the wall of noise continued to pound around them, Alice leaned into him until she was practically nuzzling his ear. Cal felt a bolt of electricity go through him, and wondered at the strangeness of it – he’d had his share of experiences with the fairer sex, and yet the merest hint of a touch from Alice was making him tingly.

  ‘Do you want to get out of here?’ Alice bellowed into his ear.

  He paused to consider this for as long as would not seem desperately grateful, and then shrug-nodded in a nonchalant, if you fancy it fashion. She smiled and slipped her hand into his.

  She led him through the mass of bodies toward the exit doors and his mind raced. Oh my God. It’s going to happen. All those Lircom office rumours aren’t just going to be just rumours any more. And to think they were offering overtime at Lircom Tower tonight, and I was this close to taking them up on it …

  They were at the club exit doors now. It was early enough that most of the traffic was going the other way, so they had to wait for an opening to pass through. They smiled at each other, and Cal – he of the Withnail fixation and the perfect student-house setup and the friends who had sworn to one another that to get involved with anyone in a serious way would be stupidity on an epic scale – leaned in, turned Alice’s face towards his and saw the yes in her eyes. He kissed her –

  – and the world changed.

  They broke the kiss, and he saw the wow reflected on her face. She felt it too, he thought. Jesus Christ. I’ve never felt a kiss like that in my entire life. And then, inevitably, hard on the heels of that thought and panting excitedly like a Tex Avery cartoon wolf, if that’s what a kiss with her feels like …

  There was an opening in the oncoming crowd and they both charged through, hand in hand, neither one noticing that the stomach-dropping sensation they had experienced during the kiss had not been exclusive to them and had, in fact, been shared by everyone.

  As they left the nightclub, so enraptured were Cal and Alice by one another that they completely failed to notice the groups of people standing around – some slightly dazed and holding onto walls or one another for support, some looking to the skies above.

  Had they looked up, they would have seen that the sky – clear when they had entered the club – was now streaked with thin clouds that crossed the horizon like a thousand skeletal fingers, and which only partially blocked out the moon.

  Not a normal moon. Not a pale circle of milky white light, a shining coin in the celestial wishing well. This was a moon not seen on Earth for thousands of years. It was too big, too close.

  And it was red. Red as blood.

  OTHERWORLD, NOW

  The hill playing host to the huge pack of oversized, unearthly wolves began to shift. For a moment it looked as though someone had crudely superimposed a picture of a building onto the skyline – a picture sketched on a balloon that was still expanding, causing the ghostly outline of the building to explode outward in all directions.

  The centre of this expansion was not the hill upon which the wolves were gathered, but a circle of astoundingly massive standing stones about four miles away that made Stonehenge look like something from Spinal Tap.

  As the wolves watched, the mighty monoliths seemed to liquefy into one another, solidifying into the image of a huge skyscraper – one that any resident of Belfast would immediately have recognised as Lircom Tower – before morphing partway back to the standing stones. The oscillation began again, a symphony of topographical mutation, ebbing and flowing, enough to make more fragile mortal minds creak under the strain. The grass beneath the wolves’ feet hardened and grew cold and gray.

  Like the 9.45 express from Reality, the human world was colliding with the Otherworld.

  ‘Prepare yourselves for the hunt,’ the largest wolf, only recently named Wily, called to his fellow pack members. Howls of excitement rang out from all around him. These were the soldiers of the Otherworld, the standing army of Queen Carman’s faerie realm. They had gone nameless for millennia until the passing through their lands of a single man.

  Danny Morrigan. One of the Morrigans. The ancient enemy. Yet he had entered these lands, talked Wily out of eating him, ridden the great wolf over their hills. More than any of this, he had given Wily his name, and the capacity to name others. Like a flame, the desire to claim an identity had spread among their number.

  They were the Named now.

  The world had changed and it was time to demonstrate exactly how much.

  ‘Show no mercy,’ Wily said, as the pack spread throughout the streets of Belfast.

  NOWHERE

  Even in the formless ether, the between-space he was by now almost accustomed to that signalled his transition between times and places, Danny Morrigan sensed it. A change had been made, like the change he’d performed himself at his father’s cottage twelve years in the past, but on an unimaginably bigger scale.

  For what seemed like centuries now – and fuck knew, he had been a formless body drifting in a b
lank slate proto-universe where time didn’t even exist, so perhaps it had been centuries – he had journeyed. To an ancient Ireland he’d thought only existed in legends, to an Otherworld he’d thought was nothing more than myth. To his own recent past to make the kind of peace with his father he’d never considered possible.

  Everything he thought he knew about his father, about his life, had been shot to shit. He was part of an ancient bloodline, charged with protecting Ireland from being overrun by a race of beings who had come to be known as – ha! – faeries. Wee green tunic-wearing girls pissing about with Peter Pan? If fuckin’ only.

  He’d seen first hand the size of some of those faeries – giant wolves so big he’d been able to ride one like a horse; things that looked like enormous wasps, all wings and mandibles, poison dripping from stingers; creatures that oozed along the ground like massive slugs – it was as though Carman, from her throne in Otherworld HQ, had taken everything that walked or scuttled or slimed and had twisted them to resemble the stuff of nightmares. They were huge, merciless, and worst of all, intelligent.

  The feeling refused to go away. The world had changed.

  Something, he thought. Something … is different.

  Yes, the Morrigan confirmed, now just an incorporeal voice in his head. She had been there with him, curled up in his mind since this insane vision quest had begun, but back in the Otherworld she was currently trapped in the form of a crow; a mere shadow of her former glory as the Celtic Goddess of War. He had yet to discover what had diminished her powers so. Time’s running out, Danny.

  Where are we going? he asked her.

  One last thing you need to see.

  Images and sounds sped past him, a movie so accelerated that he would have once found it impossible to follow. Now, he knew how to use his synaesthesia to look with more than his eyes, to hear with more than his ears. In a sense, he had been doing so his whole life; he just hadn’t done anything with the data.

  He saw the Morrigan returning to the halls of the Tuatha Dé Danann with Glon and Gaim, her two sons. Separated from their human father and exposed to their Tuatha heritage, the two boys grew quickly. In only a few short years, they were as full-grown as human men and mighty warriors, revelling in their demi-god status, fighting alongside their mother with gusto and courage.

  And fight they had to. Bres had slowly been granting his Formorian kin more and more powers to lord themselves over their former Tuatha masters. Before long, all-out war erupted between the Tuatha and the Formorians. Danny watched one battle as the massed lines on each side came together with the unmistakable crunch of armour on armour, sword on sword.

  I recognise this place, he realised. I know this battlefield.

  It was more than a sense of physical place. When magical beings battled each other on this scale, they distorted such mundane concepts as mere geography. We’ve been here before, she confirmed. This is Mag Tuired.

  Unlike his first visit here, when the assembled Tuatha Dé Danann – prior to their foolish decision to crown Bres as their King – had massacred the Formorian hordes, he was not standing amongst the fighting. The outcome of the battle, however, was much the same as before. With the Morrigan returned to their ranks, the Tuatha turned on the Formorians and secured their freedom. Bres was deposed as King and Nuada reinstated, his severed hand first replaced with silver and then, through magic, with flesh.

  A happy ending? Danny dared to guess.

  The Morrigan’s voice was there, as ever. No. Bres lived. And in his rage at defeat, his humiliation at being beaten and stripped of his rule, he reached out beyond the borders of Ireland. He made a call for help across the world and there was one who heeded it.

  Carman, witch-queen of Athens, had answered Bres’ call.

  To cross the seas between Greece and Ireland, Carman and her sons had turned their attentions to the skies above. Dub had blackened them. Dian had given them violence. Dother had granted them a dark purpose. On ships made of thunder, Carman and her sons made landfall on Irish shores.

  Carman’s first step onto Irish soil had caused every piece of fruit, every vegetable pulled from the earth to perish, and those remaining under the soil to shrivel. On her second step, all of Ireland’s livestock sickened and died, their carcasses swarming with maggots.

  On her third step, she’d stepped on a truly massive cowpat. The legends were largely silent on this bit.

  Her three sons accompanyed her on this journey – Dub, the warrior, a massive and unstoppable force of darkness; Dother, the strategist and the very essence of malevolence, was able to outmanoeuvre the cleverest of the Tuatha, turning overwhelming odds against him into stunning victories on the battlefield; and the youngest son, Dian, the enigma. Where he went, previously harmonious villages erupted into orgies of violence and hatred. Neighbour turned on neighbour, husband on wife, mother on children.

  Faced with no food, attacked from all sides by enemies they could not yet comprehend, the Tuatha had converged en masse at the Hill of Tara where the treasures of the Tuatha were kept – the Lia Fáil, the throne of kings which would cry out beneath Ireland’s rightful ruler; the Claíomh Solais, the Sword of Light; and the Dagda’s Cauldron, which was now the only source of food for the Tuatha. It alone prevented them from succumbing to starvation.

  It could not produce enough. We were too many.

  Carman had come to the Hill of Tara under a flag of truce and presented her ransom demand – Ireland’s food supply would be restored, and she and her sons would leave the island … in return for the Dagda’s Cauldron.

  They had faced each other for the first time then, the Morrigan and Carman. Despite her starring role in the second battle of Mag Tuired, the Tuatha were not to be ruled by a woman. So the Morrigan was relegated to an advisory capacity behind her king, Nuada, as he considered the offer.

  As a gesture of good faith, Carman produced a gift for the assembled Tuatha, rolling Bres’ head to a stop at the Morrigan’s feet. His dead eyes stared up into the face of his old nemesis.

  For what seemed like centuries, the Morrigan and Carman had stared one another down. Bres had, indirectly but no less deliberately, caused the dissolution of the Morrigan’s happy existence amongst humans when he had ordered Formorians to attack the human settlement she had lived in with her husband Caderyn and her sons.

  Almost the entire village – all except her own family – had been killed that day. Not at the hands of the Formorians or the Tuatha. When, in the aftermath of the Formorian attack, Glon, her oldest boy was fatally injured by one of the human villagers, the Morrigan had slaughtered every man, woman and child herself.

  Afterward, having witnessed his wife’s true self, and horrified at her brutality, Caderyn’s love for her had been the final casualty.

  Bres had caused all of it. He had been hers to kill. Carman had taken that from her.

  Nuada accepted the terms and our food supply did return, so Carman and her sons were allowed to proceed back to their ships.

  Contrary to her promise, Carman and her sons did not leave Ireland. She had not taken possession of an artefact as powerful as the Dagda’s Cauldron for anything so mundane as producing food or drink.

  Instead, she perverted its magic to create an army of twisted beings. The remains of the Formorians; Ireland’s native fauna, its wolves, spiders and wasps; shadows of the dark powers she and her own sons possessed – all of these things went into the Dagda’s Cauldron. Out came her creations in their thousands – mindless, evil and utterly devoted to her. They were the legions of faerie.

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  Her son and partner were missing. She’d just left an alternate reality where she was with someone she normally couldn’t stand and mother to a baby who had turned out to be a changeling. She’d watched that horrible little monster save her life from a wolf the size of a pony. She’d been a passenger in a car which had been thrown through the front of a house – she was pretty sure a few ribs were broken, her breathing w
as too wet and, even now, when she brought her hand to her mouth, it came away bloody. A giant spider had tried to kill her and her father – her father! – had fought it off and slain it with, of all things, a golf club before he had been run through with a glowing silver sword, dead almost as soon as he hit the ground.

  And then Steve …

  Steven Anderson, Danny’s best friend and her Bizarro-world beau. She had made a life with him, if only for a few confusing days. Had even shared a bed with him. When they (both) came to their senses, they had shared their first real moment of understanding – veiled through guilt, of course – about what made the other tick.

  But Steve was dead now too. Already nursing serious injuries from the car crash earlier, he had been callously tossed from a moving limo on the way to Lircom Tower. ‘Unnecessary baggage’ Dother had deemed him, laughing. How long before she gained the same status? What made her and Danny’s father Tony and her own uncle Dermot essential enough that they had been kidnapped and brought here, to Dother’s lair?

  She had lost so much over the past few days that she could have just given in to the grief that was threatening to swallow her whole … instead Ellie Quinn chose strength.

  She had taunted Dother over the death of his minion, Sarah, the spider-girl, remembering the anger with which he had run her father – no don’t think of it – through with the sword. And it had worked; Dother had blustered about plans and last-minute rescues before activating a hidden panel in the wall which opened to reveal the same silver sword that had killed her father.

  ‘I think,’ Dother said softly, as they shielded their eyes from the majesty of the Sword of Nuada. ‘To hell with the way the story’s supposed to go. Let’s do this right now, shall we?’

  He reached out and grasped the sword.

  Ellie felt as though she were in a lift that had plunged down a floor or two before stopping itself. The building around them did not so much as tremble but every single human present in the office gasped and clutched at their stomachs at the sensation.