Completely Folk'd Page 4

  Regardless of her mobile features, she looked every inch the queen – proud, fierce, tough as nails. With Dub looming behind her, however, it perhaps wasn’t surprising she looked confident. That fucker was so big he practically had snow on his shoulders.

  ‘Be silent, witch.’

  As imposing as Carman looked, the Morrigan was every bit her equal. The energies of battle had not wearied her as they had, fatally, some of her kin – instead, it was as if she’d been feeding from the carnage on all sides. Power seemed to crackle from her skin, earthing itself into the grass around her feet. Her words, like Carman’s, easily carried across the distances to be heard by the assembled combatants.

  ‘You call for respite because you realise this battle is not the foregone conclusion you assumed it would be. Your creatures are no match for true warriors. Go back to Athens and resume begging the gods of Greece to notice you.’

  When the words true warriors had passed her lips she had nodded, almost imperceptibly, to indicate her own sons. Glon and Gaim, realising they were being cited in their mother’s speech, straightened their backs and hefted their axes, faces encrusted with faerie blood.

  Yet Danny still saw in them the two messy little urchins that had jumped with abandon onto their mother’s back in that washing-pool. It had been a different lifetime, a different existence, but buried under the Tuatha lineage, under all the myth and the pomp, some part of those two little boys in the muddy pool remained.

  Danny was surprised to find himself suddenly angry. Was this really any life for two wee fellas? War and death? He thought back to Caderyn, the Morrigan’s human husband, and his insistence that she would not take their youngest son, little Coscar, too. The man had been right.

  Carman regarded her battlefield rival and smiled the slowest, cruellest smile Danny had ever witnessed. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘The mighty Goddess of War lectures me on begging. Does your expertise come from your desperate pleas for your human husband to take you back?’

  As one, tens of thousands of hardened Tuatha warriors and faerie monstrosities retreated a step. Danny had been around his own ma long enough to recognise the look on the Morrigan’s face. ‘Ohhhhh fuck,’ he said softly.

  ‘I will possess this lovely island,’ Carman went on as if the Morrigan were unworthy of further discourse. ‘Every blade of grass, every fortress, every stream. Just as you took it from the Formorians, so I shall take it from you,’ again, there was that smile. ‘You have simply met your superior.’

  ‘Then,’ the Morrigan hissed, ‘we have nothing further to discuss.’

  Her body tensed as if to spring and Danny could sense the moment in the battlefield around him. Hands tightened on weapons, claws were readied, muscles tensed as if some great finger was about to press ‘play’ again and unpause the panorama of butchery.

  ‘Wait!’ Carman said. ‘I tire of slaughter. There is a more civilised option. Nominate a champion and I will fight them, to the death. Winner take all.’

  Of course. This battle – this entire war, immense in scale though it was – was, essentially, a sideshow. It was always going to come down to this.

  The Morrigan did not reply right away. Silence descended, and to fill the time Danny found himself wandering closer to where his sometime companion, sometime tormentor stood, unblinking, before Carman. The old ‘if looks could kill’ adage was so insufficient to describe the intensity of the staredown between the two women it was laughable.

  ‘She’s going to cheat,’ he said.

  ‘No shit,’ the Morrigan murmured right back.

  He recovered from this particular shock rather quickly. The surprises had been coming so thick and fast just recently that he was becoming practised at it.

  ‘You can see me?’

  ‘My memories. My rules.’

  So someone had pressed pause. It made sense now. He looked back at Carman, awaiting the response, and then back at the Morrigan. ‘You accepted, didn’t you? It’s what you were hoping for anyway, right? Back to your warrior days. Back to the Goddess of War, with your sons at your side, and now a free crack at the bitch-queen fuckin’ about with the entire island? You must’ve been ecstatic.’

  He was surprised to see her shoulders sag, before reminding himself that this was, after all, a simulation, and not how the real event had unfolded.

  ‘At this point,’ she admitted, ‘all I was thinking about was my husband. The night before this battle, Nuada had expected me to come into his tent. To lie with him.’

  ‘Lie with–?’

  She fixed him with a glare. ‘Do you need me to draw you a picture?’

  He coloured. Fair enough. ‘But why?’

  ‘It’s linked to my powers. At the moment of,’ and she paused, ‘clarity, I am able to divine a plan of battle that ensures victory to the side I favour. It becomes prophecy.’

  ‘Part of the whole Goddess of War thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said sardonically. ‘Part of that whole thing, yes.’

  ‘But not this time.’

  ‘Not this time. Not since my return.’

  ‘Because of Caderyn.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s …’ he floundered, at a loss for what was expected of him. ‘That’s good?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Good?’ the Morrigan bit back. ‘Good? Look around you. Look at the dead. My role, my duty, was to my people. Because of me, we had no battle plan beyond pointing and charging, and look where that got us.’

  ‘But,’ he said, confused now, ‘you did it out of love.’

  ‘Love?’ she spat. ‘Let me show you, Danny, what love is responsible for.’

  With that, she seemed to jerk out of her director’s commentary role and back into the feature presentation.

  ‘I accept,’ she snarled at Carman. ‘Name your time and place. It is,’ she looked physically ill, ‘your right.’

  ‘Tonight, at dusk. On the summit,’ Carman replied. If she was pleased that her plan to lure the Morrigan into single combat had worked, she betrayed no outward sign of pleasure.

  ‘Weapons?’

  Now Carman did smile. Danny rather preferred it when she didn’t.

  ‘Only what we take with us,’ she said.

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  ‘You? You’re not Carman.’

  Bea swung her attention to Tony. ‘Oh no?’ she said.

  Tony didn’t so much as flinch. ‘Not a fuckin’ chance,’ he said. ‘Carman’s trapped down there. That’s the whole reason for all of this, isn’t it?’

  Bea laughed. ‘Down there?’ she repeated mockingly, moving towards the floor-to-ceiling windows of Dother’s office. She gestured to the night sky outside. ‘Look.’

  Unable to help himself, Tony stepped towards the window, Ellie and Dermot following suit. Only later would he wonder if it really was his own curiosity that drove him forward or whether his body had no option but to comply with Bea’s order.

  ‘What are we supposed to be–’ Tony began, and then his voice caught in his throat, for he saw it. They all did.

  The moon had emerged from behind the clouds, huge and red. Bathed in its crimson light, Belfast looked like a city during wartime, besieged and aflame. The rippling waters of the harbour, themselves ruby-lit, only added to the hellish appearance; as though the Irish Sea had become the River Styx.

  Bea placed her hand against the glass and suddenly they could hear the sounds on the streets below. The screams.

  ‘What’s happening down there?’ Ellie was the first to speak.

  Bea smiled. She met Dother’s eyes and her smile was reflected in his own expression. Her gaze moved to Tony, just long enough to confirm that at least one human observer knew exactly what was going on.

  ‘Sport,’ she said.

  BELFAST CITY CENTRE, NOW

  ‘Keep running!’ Cal said. ‘Alice, we have to keep running!’

  ‘I can’t!’ Alice sobbed. ‘I can’t!’

  Her breath was coming in ragged gasps. She was pulli
ng more and more on his hand now, tugging him back. He could either cut her loose or stay with her, but there was no decision to be made – he stopped, pushed her into a doorway and placed his hand over her mouth as he tried to get his own ragged breathing under control, tried to stay quiet.

  They hadn’t moved fifty feet from the nightclub when it had become abundantly clear that something was very, very wrong.

  The first clue had been the screams. One had rung out, a few streets away and was upsetting to hear, but not exactly completely uncommon in Belfast in the wee hours. Cal’s hand had tightened around Alice’s and he had drawn her closer to him.

  The second scream caused them to stop walking. It was coming from directly ahead, around the next corner in fact. The third, forth, and fifth screams – at least two of which sounded as if they had come from men – came from behind them. They turned, still able to see the entrance to the nightclub, and saw a group of somethings move in a way that people couldn’t towards the nightclub entrance. The doormen there, to give them credit, stood their ground.

  It did them no good.

  Something carried across the chill evening air. Not a scream this time, a growl. Low, animalistic, guttural. Hungry.

  The young couple had been paralysed for a moment, not knowing what to do, what to think, where to run to … and then the moon had emerged from behind the clouds, and the world had been painted in scarlet hues, and from around the next corner a dark pool had begun to seep.

  They had run. How far they had moved before something had begun to give chase Cal wasn’t sure. He knew only that they’d been joined in their flight by other refugees of the chaos. He had met the eyes of one young guy, a few years younger than he, and seen the terror there as something had sailed through the air from behind him as he’d passed the mouth of an alleyway. He’d gone down screaming and been pulled backwards into the darkness, crying out for someone, anyone, please to stop and help him–

  Cal ran without looking back.

  Now, sandwiched in the doorway with Alice, screams punctuating the night air every few seconds, peppered in-between times with the occasional low growl that signified the endless movement of the things that were out there, hunting.

  A growl sounded. Close. Alice’s chest, which had only just stopped heaving from the exertion of the sprinting they’d done, began to rise and fall rapidly again next to him. Not so long ago, he would have been thrilled to have felt that. Now, all he could think about was survival.

  He bent down, picked up a piece of loose masonry from his feet. It was little more than a pebble. Against these things, it would be less than useless. Another growl sounded, this one closer. It was toying with them.

  He leaned in close, just as she had done in the nightclub. ‘When I say run, you run,’ he hissed.

  Something in his face, his voice, negated the possibility of argument. She nodded.

  He emerged from the doorway and faced the thing that was stalking them.

  At first, it seemed almost human-shaped. Cal blinked, and like one of those old lady / young woman optical illusions, now it was anything but. It was a massive bug, segmented, with a head that could pivot in a full circle, and eyes that took up half of its head – compound eyes in which he could see his own terrified face reflected. The bug-thing opened its mouth and issued a rapid series of clak-hiss noises, even as viscous goop slavered from its fang-laden mouth.

  It was going to attack. Cal hefted his rock and bellowed to Alice to run, run, RUN! The thing leapt, and as time stretched some small part of Cal’s brain registered that aside from this thing’s clak-hiss noises; he could hear an animalistic growling.

  The wolf came out of nowhere.

  One perfectly timed leap, one precise snap of its jaws, and it was all over.

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  Bea removed her hand from the glass and, like a curtain falling, the silence descended once more, the screams from below cut off abruptly.

  On Dother’s desk, his phone rang. It was such a domestic, everyday occurrence that it seemed jarringly out of place with the events unfolding. As such, it attracted all of their attention.

  ‘The phones still work?’ Bea said, surprised.

  ‘Lircom have won several customer service awards, Mother,’ Dother said, wounded by the query. ‘Besides,’ he added, perhaps seeing his mother’s expression darken, ‘how do you think we’re harvesting the fear of the humans? The first thing they do now when presented with an event of any kind is to reach for their smartphones.’

  ‘To call for help,’ Bea nodded, smiling with understanding. ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Call? Oh good God no,’ Dother replied, aghast. ‘The older ones maybe, but anyone under the age of thirty will be social media-ing like a maniac right now. Update to Facebook: Argh! I’m being mauled alive by a giant wasp!’ he chuckled. ‘Lircom, of course, will Like this immediately.’

  ‘My son, you’ve been up here too long,’ Bea observed.

  Dother shrugged. ‘After a few hundred years, it grows on you.’

  ‘So long as it hasn’t made you soft.’

  Dother’s phone rang again. Bea glanced up in obvious annoyance. Dother shrugged in a What am I supposed to do? way. He reached down and with one casual yank ripped the phone out of its wall socket.

  ‘You’re right,’ Bea turned her attention to Tony. ‘My power was trapped down there, in that prison. The safeguards placed against me escaping were fiendishly clever. But thanks to my clever boy,’ she nodded to Dother, who accepted the accolade with a slight incline of his head, ‘I was able to extend my influence …’ she sighed, ‘… on the surface …’ she sighed again, louder, ‘… and live in your world … Fuck’s sake will someone answer that fucking phone?’

  Dother, by now extremely puzzled, reached down to the freshly-disconnected phone which was indeed ringing once more. He lifted it to his ear, raised an eyebrow, shrugged, and replaced the handset.

  ‘Wrong number?’ Bea asked, barely keeping her voice under control.

  ‘Dead line,’ Dother replied.

  ‘As I was saying,’ Bea went on, sending one final look at her son, ‘to borrow a human phrase: if you cannot go to the mountain, then merge two dimensions together at a metaphysical crossroads. I could not leave the Otherworld – at least not completely – so I had your world brought to me.’

  ‘You lived in my street. You wanted to do my tea leaves,’ Ellie said. She sounded as if she were speaking in slow motion. ‘Last week you gave me a recipe for soda bread.’

  Bea paused in her monologuing. ‘Ach, so I did. Did you get a chance to make any?’

  ‘No,’ Ellie said, still sounding like a robot. ‘I didn’t have any buttermilk.’

  ‘Ach, you should have said. I’d a carton of it in the fridge. Doesn’t go off til next Tuesday.’

  Dother coughed significantly. Bea glanced at him.

  ‘Soft?’ was all he said.

  Bea’s face darkened. ‘Be careful how you speak to m–’

  To his last breath, Tony Morrigan swore he never saw Ellie move. One minute she had been standing dumbly with the rest of them talking about her bitterly disappointing lack of buttermilk, and the next, she had crossed the room and, fist moving like the wrath of God, had laid one right on the old lady.

  The body of Beatrice O’Malley rocketed backwards from the blow and her head hit the window with a wet crack before she slid down to crumpled heap on the floor.

  The whole world, blood-red moon and all, seemed to take a sharp intake of breath.

  Ellie Quinn, fist still clenched, looked at the haphazardly sprawled body of the old-age-pensioner-slash-demonic-witch-entity she had just laid out. She was trembling like a leaf, her cheeks flushed, her eyes narrowed, focused on the seemingly-frail figure. When she spoke, it was not a shout, it was not a screech. It was a simple statement of how things were going to be.

  ‘You will give me my baby. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you are. I don’t care where we are,
why we’re here, or how many centuries this has been foretold. Give me my little boy. And if so much as an eyelash has been nicked, I will kiss him and I will put him somewhere safe, and then I will come for you. I will come for Every. Single. Fucking. One of you. And it won’t matter what’s been foretold in what prophecy, what grand plans you’ve made, what magic you’ve performed, none of it will matter because nothing will keep me from you. You killed Steve. You killed my daddy. You took Danny from me, you took Luke from me. It stops, now. It ends, now. Give me my baby.’

  Tony felt like punching the air, or punching one of the hulking guards, or punching Dother in his smug face. Right then he felt like he could have taken on the lot of them. Danny you lucky bastard.

  ‘Lovely speech,’ Dother commented. ‘Just one problem,’ and he walked to where Bea lay crumpled against the glass. He lifted her head from her chest in a move that Tony first imagined was intended to rouse her from the impact but when Dother let go, Bea’s head lolled to the side, eyes wide and staring in a final snapshot of surprise. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ was all Ellie said.

  The huge, hulking guards began to close in on the group. Dother straightened up, homicidal intent on his face. There was nowhere to run, nothing to fight with. Tony searched desperately for a weapon – anything. He tried to lift the chair he’d been standing beside. It was bolted to the floor. Though, even if he had lifted it, it looked as if nothing short of an RPG round would dent the huge fuckers approaching them. If they were amazed at the death of their Queen, their anger had quickly covered that up.

  ‘Yip, we’re pretty fucked,’ Tony said.

  Ellie glanced at him. She knew it too. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry? Ellie, love, don’t you dare be sorry,’ Tony was grinning from ear to ear. ‘I have never been more proud of anyone in my entire life.’

  She found the time to smile weakly back at him before, with a bestial snarl that belied his respectable businessman veneer, Dother launched himself forward. Tony tried to defend himself, tried to push Ellie behind him, but it was irrelevant.