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  ‘What did you do?’ Tony Morrigan wheezed.

  ‘I’ll tell you what he did,’ a new voice sounded from behind them. ‘Started without me, is what he did.’

  As one, they turned and beheld the figure standing between the two guards at the office’s entrance.

  ‘Mother,’ said Dother.

  ‘Mother?’ Ellie choked, staring at the figure before her in disbelief. ‘But … but you can’t be!’

  HILL OF TARA, 46 AD

  The scale of the battle was almost beyond his comprehension.

  In approaching the circle of standing stones in the Otherworld, he had passed through what seemed like untold throngs of faeries. Five times that number now swarmed all over the Hill of Tara and the surrounding countryside – too many shapes and sizes to catalogue, not all of which even had an easily identifiable analogue in the animal kingdom.

  Some, the worst, seemed to spring straight from nightmares – the ones we do not remember clearly; the formless shapes we cannot quite re-coalesce into a cogent shape when we emerge from sleep. They are the creatures that are without form, without purpose. They are the things we should not remember; if we did, they would begin to consume our every thought.

  Horrors like these had sprung from the same cauldron his own dismembered corpse had been tossed into. The Morrigan’s words came back to him – she had spoken of earning the right to return from death unscathed by the Ordeal. Fail to do so … and this is what emerged.

  The odds were stacked, steep, unforgiving. For every ten faeries, one Tuatha. Danny saw more than a few Formorians in there too, fighting alongside the Tuatha. As monstrous as the Formorians had been, he saw clearly the distinction between them and the faeries. The Formorians may have been murdering bastards, but they were a people, a race. The faeries were nothing more than the instruments of their Queen’s will. Living weapons. An ancient form of genetic experimentation, with dark magic taking the place of high science. Teeth and claws and fangs to be pointed and expended as necessary.

  Expended they were, in their thousands. The Tuatha and Formorians were hopelessly outnumbered, but they were by far the superior warriors. The majority of the faerie gains were made through sheer weight of bodies. He saw two Tuatha surrounded by about fifteen wolf-faeries and watched as the two dispensed faerie after faerie with their massive broadswords. With each swing they grew slower, more fatigued, until the final five wolf-shapes leapt, knocking their swords to the earth. Their screams turned to gurgles as the grass ran red.

  Danny was, quite literally, now knee-deep in the dead. Everywhere he looked, corpses were piled high. He couldn’t see a single blade of grass from one horizon to the other that wasn’t occupied by the dead, those locked in mortal combat, or stained crimson from the slaughter. The stench was overpowering.

  Through it all, there she was. The Morrigan – so far from the washerwoman in the human village as to be unrecognisable. Gaim on her left side and Glon on her right, the three formed a triangle of whirling iron that cut through the faerie ranks, felling them with scarcely a pause or flicker of effort, a tornado of death making directly for the centre of the faerie army and the witch at its heart.

  Straight for Carman.

  At some unwitnessed signal, the crowds of faeries parted to allow the Morrigan and her sons unopposed access. Whether this was Carman’s attempt to spare the lives of her troops or a way to hasten the inevitable confrontation, Danny didn’t know, although he suspected the latter.

  It took little effort for him, insubstantial as a ghost, to move through the armies and follow the Morrigan. He was there when the final few faeries either fell upon her sword or fell away altogether and the Morrigan and her elder sons faced their enemy.

  Danny had his first good look at Carman then. Back in the Otherworld, just trying to glance at her face had almost caused his brain to leak out his ears, but here, either due to his partially-there status or to his developing grasp of his powers, Carman projected no such field of confusion around her features.

  Without much fuss, Danny’s legs went from under him. He fell on his spectral arse, unable to comprehend the implications of what he was seeing.

  Who he was seeing.

  NEWCASTLE, COUNTY DOWN, 58 YEARS AGO

  They said it was a black dog. A big, black dog with eyes full of fire and gleaming white teeth, like a shark’s mouth. That was the conclusion drawn by the chittering girls in her class at school, the rhyme they chanted as they played skip-rope.

  Skip skip jump skip! Down St. John’s by night

  Jump jump skip skip! You’ll get an awful fright

  Big black hound, come to play

  You can’t skip or jump away

  They were fools. This was no hound. She knew a wolf when she saw one.

  Run back home, fast as you dare

  Makes no odds, you won’t get there

  For your every step, the hound takes four

  You won’t be going home no more

  Entirely unafraid, she sat cross-legged on the cool grass as it padded toward her. It wasn’t going to chase her; no, she was certain of that. It wasn’t going to eat her.

  ‘You are a very special little girl, aren’t you,’ the wolf said, in a lady’s voice.

  ‘I dreamed of you,’ said the girl.

  ‘I heard you crying.’

  ‘I want him to go away.’

  The wolf stopped, as though considering its options. She wanted to giggle, but she knew the wolf would not like this, no, not at all. ‘I will take his years from him and give them to you,’ it said eventually.

  The girl considered this. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘He is seven and you are nine. I will remove his years and he will … go away. You will have his years. You will be sixteen.’

  Her heart leapt. ‘I will be … grown up?’ she repeated. She would be old enough to escape the morons in her class, old enough to escape her parents’ home. She would have to pretend to be interested in some boy or other to do so. I can do that, she thought.

  ‘Is this desirable to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will want something from you in return, little one,’ the wolf said, now no more than three feet from her. They had been right about the eyes, if nothing else. She ached to stroke the wolf’s muzzle, but some tiny sense of self-preservation prevented her from acting on this urge.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked it.

  The wolf cocked its head to the side. ‘When you are old and tired, I will come for you. I will eat you all up.’

  ‘I don’t want you to eat me all up.’

  She expected the wolf to growl or to pounce on her, but instead it almost smiled. ‘Child,’ it said, ‘I promise you this – I will not eat you until you are willing to be eaten. How does that sound?’

  The child mulled it over. She could never imagine a time when she would want the big black wolf with the voice of a lady to eat her, so it seemed like a very good deal indeed. Seeing her nod, the wolf did growl, but the little girl somehow knew it was from satisfaction and not anger.

  ‘Bring your little brother to the circle. Bring me little Colm and I will take him away.’

  ‘Will it hurt him?’

  The wolf was silent a moment. ‘Do you want it to?’

  She thought of him, little Colm, the long-awaited son and heir her da had rejoiced to hold, and how he would smile and stamp and get what he wanted, and how ever since he could walk he had been nothing but cruel and spiteful to her without hint of reproach from her ma and da. Seven days ago, tired of him, she had pushed him and, clumsy and fat little thing that he was, he had fallen and broken his arm.

  How he’d howled. In the split-second before the cries erupted from him, however, his eyes had met hers and, even as they filled with tears and pain, there had been a glimmer of satisfaction evident, some small nugget of certainty in his countenance. You hurt me, and how you’re going to pay, big sister.

  She bore the bruises from the beating
her da had given her, a beating Colm had worn a broad, fat-faced smile of satisfaction to witness.

  The wolf licked the big bruise on her leg, and it vanished.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘Yes, make it hurt.’

  COUNTY ARMAGH, 1975 AD

  ‘Tell me,’ Dother asked Sarah, still in her monstrous spider form. ‘How are your typing skills?’

  He did not get to hear her reply; the silver Sword of Nuada blazed with light in his hands, illuminating the hilltop on which they stood and the unconscious body of Tony Morrigan at their feet.

  ‘It seems your mother is very pleased,’ Sarah observed.

  But Dother’s good humour had gone as even he was forced to shield his eyes from the Sword’s light.

  ‘So soon?’ he spluttered, as though to thin air. The light flickered in response, pulsing rhythmically – Morse code between the planes of existence itself. ‘But you have no-one up here to …’ and he trailed off as the Sword beat out a tattoo of light.

  ‘I see,’ he said. Beckoning to Sarah, he indicated Tony Morrigan’s body. ‘Grab him and get out of direct line of sight. Quickly.’

  ‘We’re saving him?’ Sarah asked disbelievingly. ‘He’s the Morr–’

  ‘Now!’ was the snapped response.

  His most trusted lieutenant did not question him further. She effortlessly wrapped Tony Morrigan’s body in spun silken thread and in barely ten heartbeats, Dother stood alone.

  ‘This will drain you,’ he warned the night. ‘Maintaining a physical presence here won’t be easy, even for you.’

  It was useless to argue. He held the Sword aloft. It flared like a small nuclear blast, one line of plasma arcing itself deep within the earth, the other searing up to the heavens. Dother screamed soundlessly, his flesh burning and bubbling, even as he felt his mother’s presence emerge from every blade of grass, every shrivelling insect and dying earthworm for three square miles around him, sucking down the thousands of little deaths like a banquet.

  The light died. Dother’s body fell, a blackened mockery of a shape, a rasher of bacon cooked at gas mark supernova. Sarah would find him like that, and she would carry him back home as gently as a mother carrying her young. It would take Dother many weeks of agonising regeneration to recover.

  His real mother, meanwhile, was long gone. She had an appointment to keep.

  REGENT STREET, BELFAST, 1975 AD

  Blood spattered the sink below as she coughed, the spasms wracking her entire body. She could do nothing but wait and let them run their course, before wearily beginning to swab and clean the blood. It was the same routine.

  A flicker of movement from the plughole caught her attention. A spider leg was emerging. Now a second. The rest of the little beastie heaved itself into her sink, having somehow survived the deluge of water, blood and Christ knew what else she was hacking up these days. It would probably outlive her, at this rate.

  It scuttled towards her. She had no great fear of spiders, but she pulled her hand away and ran the taps all the same, watching as it was caught up and washed back down from where it had emerged.

  ‘Sorry,’ she wheezed. ‘You don’t want to be near me, little thing.’

  She turned–

  The walls of her bathroom were black with them. A seething mass of spiders, emerging from every nook and crevice, every tiny pinhole gap. The ceiling above was the same – a black carpet of spiders, many now dangling from delicate threads to suspend themselves before her face, their legs pulsing. On every surface, they clambered over one another, some losing their grip and falling in that gentle lazy way spiders fall, as though caught by some caring hand. Those who reached the floor oriented themselves and made for her bare and uncovered feet.

  She did not scream, or run. The spiders reached her feet and seemed to pause. Then, at some unseen signal, they parted like the Red Sea, creating an arachnid-free channel for her to walk through. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them now, all shapes and sizes – some she swore were not native to Ireland, or perhaps even to this world. The bigger ones trampled over their tinier cousins. One gloriously impossible specimen, with a carapace as black as night, was the size of a small dog.

  Passing through her kitchen on her way to her favourite chair for what she was sure was the last time, she was confronted by the smell. The spiders had avoided the fruit in her bowl, and for good reason. It had been fine mere moments ago; now, it had spoiled worse than anything she had ever seen. Strange blue-purple growths had taken hold and the stench was indescribably bad, but she had no more disgust left to give.

  ‘Let me sit,’ she said, quietly, and the creatures covering her chair obliged. She lowered herself carefully, wincing at the pain that blossomed, but she forced herself to sit up as alertly as she could manage.

  ‘Knew you’d come,’ she said into the swarm.

  It is time.

  It wasn’t the spiders who spoke, because that would have been impossible. And yet, in every way that mattered, the words came from them. She could sense it now; a presence, hovering in the air, nourished by the mass of eight-legged life infesting her house.

  ‘Why did you let me remember?’

  Suspended before her, in the tiny stinking little room she called home, the presence with the lady’s voice did not answer.

  ‘My da …’ she wheezed. ‘Without Colm, he was different.’

  He did not beat you.

  ‘He did worse,’ she said, hugging herself tightly. ‘I was sixteen, I always had been sixteen, to everyone else, but in my head I was still just a child!’

  I promised you your brother’s years. Nothing more, nothing less.

  ‘The pain,’ the woman coughed, and kept on coughing. She was just thirty-seven years old, but looked twice that, at least. ‘You did this to me?’

  I did not make you sick.

  ‘Cancer!’ the little figure in the chair managed to say, between the spasms that plagued her.

  I do not know this word.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ the woman spat, trying to stand, and failing. She pointed a quaking finger at the presence all around her, circling her in a decreasing spiral, a spider circling the plughole. ‘How can a fish not know the word for water?’

  Little girl, it is time.

  ‘I’m not even forty–’

  You are old, and you are tired. It is time for me to eat you all up. Is it not?

  The woman thought of the days and nights of pain, and of the dreams that plagued her every time she slept. ‘Yes,’ she sobbed. ‘Yes, it’s time.’

  Good.

  ‘Will it hurt me?’

  Do you want it to?

  ‘Yes,’ Bea O’Malley managed. ‘Yes, make it hurt.’

  With that, the order was given, the dam was released, and the last thing she ever felt was the sensation of millions of spiders climbing her body, biting, biting, biting as they went. They were on her legs and her breasts and on her face and now they were biting her eyes and going into her mouth …

  Consider it granted, Carman said, over her screams.

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  ‘Bea?’ Ellie managed.

  Bea smiled. As she did so, the image she projected, of the frail little old woman who had lived a few doors down from Ellie and Danny with no life to speak of beyond tea drinking and curtain twitching, that image rippled, as if someone had skimmed a stone across its surface, distorting it for fractions of a second, allowing them to glimpse beneath.

  Below that projection lurked something ancient, and immeasurably dangerous.

  HILL OF TARA, 46 AD

  Carman raised a hand. As one, the faerie army ceased to fight.

  ‘It can’t be,’ Danny kept spluttering, as if the words themselves would rewrite reality and make everything all right again. Bea? Bea was Carman? BEA?

  A pulse of quiet descended over the battlefield. Carman’s orders extended only to her faerie kin, but so thrown by this sudden ceasefire (and, he couldn’t help but notice, so gr
ateful for it) were the combined ranks of the Tuatha and Formorians that they, too, stopped whatever duels they were engaged in.

  Feeling faintly ridiculous, Danny got to his feet on legs that were still slightly unsteady. All of the confidence that had been building in him was draining away, and quickly. How could this be? How could Carman – Carman the witch, Carman the unstoppable force – how could she be the little old woman from a few doors up the street? The same little old woman who had … first mentioned faeries, and the supernatural … had a bowl on her kitchen table with fruit that had rotted away to filth … been unaffected by the changes the Sword had made to the world … brought him to the gateway to the Otherworld … Satan probably has his da check under the bed to make sure she isn’t under there …

  ‘She wanted me in the Otherworld,’ he said softly, feeling like the world’s biggest dickhead. ‘She wanted me there all along.’

  ‘Hear me!’ Carman was saying, her hand still held aloft, her words carrying across the massive battlefield. Now that he was over his initial shock, he could begin to take in the rest of her appearance. She was Bea, there was no doubt about it, but she looked a good twenty to twenty-five years younger than the tea-obsessed version of herself she’d used to masquerade as a geriatric Regent Street resident.

  Yet, as in the circle of standing stones in which he’d first laid eyes on her, Carman’s features suddenly flowed and rippled, and the likeness of Bea retreated like the tide to be replaced by one, ten, a hundred other visages.

  Danny realised the truth. Yes, Carman was Bea, or at least had been possessing the body of a woman who called herself Bea, but that no more forced Carman to resemble that woman than water poured into a jug would forever retain the shape of the jug itself. His newly-sharpened synaesthetic abilities had merely illuminated the truth and, now that he no longer needed the revelation, Carman’s features flowed once more, never truly settling.