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  The formless nothingness around him ignored his pleas.

  Carman was in a foul mood when Dother emerged from the pocket dimension within the Dagda’s Cauldron. Not that he was surprised. Greece had been an awful lot bigger than Ireland, and it had stifled her. Trapped here in an Otherworld which was smaller still had done nothing to improve her claustrophobia.

  ‘He doesn’t want to come out,’ he told her.

  ‘Perhaps you do not want to find him,’ rumbled Dub.

  ‘Oh, go hide underneath somebody’s bed,’ Dother spat.

  Dub exploded into a black cloud of wrath at the insult. Dother rolled his eyes. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘annihilate me. Pulling myself back together will pass the time for a few days. If I can remember what days are, that is.’

  Carman flung them both thirty feet apart with nothing more than a glance in their direction. The wind knocked from him from the impact, Dother could do nothing but glower impotently in his mother’s direction as she drew herself up, sucking power from the world they inhabited, rearing up like a cobra before funnelling her entire monstrous form into the throat of the Cauldron.

  Silence descended on the Otherworld in the wake of her departure. Dother and Dian moved cautiously towards the Cauldron.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’ Dub demanded.

  ‘Wondering where I could get a really big cork,’ Dother replied.

  Dub’s forehead creased. Given a few decades, he may even have come up with a response, but he never got the chance. From the Cauldron came more than a scream, more than a howl. It was the sound of raw bleeding pain, of an unwilling foetus ripped from a comfortable womb.

  A shockwave rippled out over the crimson-hued hills of the Otherworld, causing the various creatures that inhabited this wretched prison to slink to their knees and clasp what mangled excuses for hands, paws, claws (or whatever else they possessed) over their heads.

  Carman shot from the Cauldron at such speed that it was sent spinning end-over-end. She got to her feet, her arm outstretched, seemingly trying to throttle thin air.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she hissed, ‘if you don’t want to come back. You’re my son, and you’ll do your duty, understand? Your stubbornness has cost you a permanent form. Fine, roam this world as a restless spirit – just get the hell out of my sight!’

  A presence that was unmistakably their younger brother rocketed past Dub and Dother and out into the hills, gone in an instant.

  The two brothers very slowly turned to look at their mother, busy now retracting her extra limbs so as to appear relatively human once more.

  ‘Needy little shit,’ she said.

  HILL OF TARA, 1798 AD

  Free.

  Lurching away from the United Irishmen battlefield in the body of one of the fallen, Dian could barely contain his excitement.

  Centuries. Millennia. What meaning did years have, when you couldn’t really die? As a boy in Greece, he had lived in a land where magic had sloshed in abundance. Beginning as a human shaman, his mother had used her keen knowledge of herbs to heal the sick. Credited with magical powers in the minds of her peers, this belief had shaped reality and she had crossed the line from human to something more than human. Over time, this effect had extended to her sons.

  As their worshippers grew in number, however, they began to detract from the adoration of the ruling pantheon, the gods of Olympus. Only by a few hundred really, but it was enough for those powerful eyes to turn in their direction, and the gods were as creative as they were omnipotent. They sent tsunamis, diseases, terrible storms with spectacularly accurate lightning bolts – all designed to terrify the followers of any rival semi-deity.

  Under the weight of such an onslaught, Carman’s worshippers soon turned back to the big players – to Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Ares. Abandoned by her followers, her powers began to wither and she had raged against the slopes of Olympus. She stamped her feet and screamed and cried to be accepted – to ascend to those stratospheric heights and take her place amongst the elite. The gates had remained firmly shut. The gods had not even done her the courtesy of saying no, they had simply ignored her.

  Hearing the call for aid from Bres, hearing of a new land with a ruling pantheon in turmoil and a power vacuum at the top, his mother had not hesitated, and he and his brothers were forced to follow.

  They had had many names, Dian and his brothers. Dother had been called Olc for a time. The name still meant ‘Evil’ so you had to admire him for sticking with a theme, at least. It was the same with Dub – or Dubh – whatever way you wanted to spell it, the name still meant ‘Black’.

  For a time, in an isolated part of their new home, where he had pretended that his mother could not see him, Dian too had gone by another name – Calma. Unlike his brothers though, he had chosen a completely new theme. He had spent too many years as Dian – as ‘Violence’. Now, as Calma, he would be ‘Valiant’.

  In that place, which was no more than a few towns and pathetic little settlements, he had changed his appearance. He had helped the crops to grow, instead of sowing dissent and violence. He had blessed the union of couples, rather than being the whispering voice of jealousy in a husband’s ear. He had not sought worship from those uncomplicated little handful of humans. He had craved appreciation.

  He had become someone else to find himself.

  When Carman had finally tired of feigning ignorance over his little experiment, the things she had done to that little group of people …

  No. He forced himself to pull away from those memories.

  Ever since his mother had dragged his essence from the afterlife within the Dagda’s Cauldron, he had played the dutiful son – a task arduous beyond anything he had ever endured, but it was the only way to regain his mother’s trust. Ensuring it was he, and not Dub, who had been picked to accompany Dother to the surface had been the greatest trick he had ever pulled.

  And now he was free.

  The body he was occupying would not last much longer, but it would make it to the nearest human settlement. When it fell, so too would Dian, this he swore. He would be Calma once again.

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  ‘You possessed Dother when the phone rang?’ Tony guessed.

  ‘I’m a little surprised you didn’t recognise me, Tony,’ Dian replied.

  ‘Recognise you?’

  ‘We don’t have time,’ Dian waved a hand. ‘Yes, possession is one of my particular skills. Not so famous as my party trick of creating war out of peace, turning pacifists into berserkers. But I think, Danny excepted,’ and he gestured towards Ellie, ‘we’ve all seen that ability in action.’

  Everyone but Danny turned to look at Ellie who, feeling all eyes upon her, flushed red and cast a look over at something slumped by the windows. Something that looked an awful lot like a broken body.

  ‘I miss somethin’?’ Danny asked.

  OTHERWORLD, NOW

  In the midst of the standing stones, doubled over in pain, Carman roared in outrage and betrayal. Her elite creatures, the ones permitted access to the inner sanctum, shrank back and trembled in fear as her anger rolled over them.

  ‘Mother?’ Dub asked, for the tenth time it seemed. Save for one other, he was the only being within that inner circle brave or foolhardy enough to be within striking distance of the Queen. The other was immune to her rages. Dub had no such guarantee. Yet there was no fear in him – only concern, written all over his huge, uncomplicated features.

  ‘My host,’ she said. ‘Destroyed.’

  The old woman’s body had been her shell in the human world for almost forty years and it had been destroyed by something as mundane, something as miserable, as a punch from a human girl (well, a mostly human girl). Granted, that host body held only a fraction of the abilities that Carman possessed but the girl would pay for that.

  ‘The Morrigan?’ Dub asked, his massive hands folding into fists. ‘He survived the Cauldron?’

  ‘Of course he did,’ Carman said dismissi
vely, wishing once again that Dub was blessed with a tenth of the cunning of his younger brothers. She got to her feet, having tumbled off her throne when her human host had perished. ‘He was not the one who destroyed the host.’

  ‘Then who?’ and Dub scowled. It was a terrible thing to behold. Darkness crackled around his humanoid form. Parts of him dissolved into mist, became insubstantial, and then phased back again. ‘Dother?’

  The two brothers had despised each other all of their nigh-eternal lives. Carman saw the anger in her eldest son and wheels began to turn in her mind, wheels greased with centuries of lies.

  Ah, Dother – he was by far and away the most brilliant of her three children. Dian was shrewd all right and Dub was just a powerhouse – an all but invincible formless cloud of malevolence, so vacant that if you stood too close to him you could hear the ocean. But Dother had served her tirelessly and brilliantly. Without his scheming and planning, she knew she would not be standing here now, so close to the Merging, so close to her final victory. If anyone was going to take over her empire one day, it was Dother. He was her natural heir.

  There was only one slight problem with that, of course. Carman was eternal. Carman was forever. She was her own heir. Plus, there was the small matter of his denying her revenge against the Morrigan all those years ago. She had promised him she would not forget that and the debt was now due.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Dother has betrayed me. Destroy him, Dub. Go forth. I cannot leave the circle until the Merging completes.’

  She glanced around the standing stone prison – for such it was – and what she saw lifted her mood slightly; the Merging was happening faster than she dared hope. The red-lit hilltops and valleys of the Otherworld were being overlaid with something decidedly more metropolitan as modern-day Belfast phased into being. Within the circle, the massive outline of a glass-and-concrete behemoth – what the humans called, with their typical sense of grandeur, a skyscraper – was forming itself from the ether.

  The Tuatha had congratulated themselves on the totality of the protective spells they had woven into her prison, but they had failed to foresee that she was quite happy to remain in the Otherworld … so long as the mortal land, her land, could be quite literally brought down to her level.

  Soon enough, the Merging would be complete, and her confinement within these standing stones would be over. Carman would be free to walk the lands once more, and her many thousands of faerie children would have more humans than they ever could have dreamt of to entertain themselves with.

  Until then …

  ‘I will find him,’ Dub promised.

  ‘Bring the Morrigan to me,’ she ordered him. ‘Alive.’

  He imploded into darkness and dissipated in an instant. He knew exactly where to find his brother, and the phasing of realities around him would prove no barrier. He was darkness itself, and darkness can lurk everywhere.

  ‘Alive?’ came a voice from beside her.

  She looked in surprise at the speaker. ‘So quickly you grow. Before long you’ll be a man.’

  ‘And then I’ll be ready?’ the voice was eager now.

  ‘Yes. And then? Will you do what’s necessary? Will you do it for me, little one?’

  ‘I will, Mitéra,’ the child responded, using the Greek word for mama.

  She reached across and ruffled the child’s hair, ostensibly a loving gesture, but in actuality a way to gauge the power radiating from within him. Yes, he was almost ready, and when the time came, he would prove to be the ultimate weapon.

  ‘You’re my good boy, Luke,’ she said. ‘You make your Mitéra proud.’

  LIRCOM TOWER, BELFAST, NOW

  Danny looked from Ellie, to the dead body, back to Ellie again. This wasn’t how heroic showdowns went in the movies, he reflected. John McClane didn’t storm the top of Nakatomi Plaza to find Holly had done in Hans Gruber with her stiletto heel. At the same time, though – wow.

  ‘But how?’ he asked out loud. ‘How did you …?’

  Dian, still in Dother’s body, was the one to answer. ‘The old woman was just a host body. Probably died years ago. Carman has been reanimating her ever since.’

  Danny looked at Ellie triumphantly. ‘Fuckin’ told ye she smelt like death, didn’t I!’ he said.

  ‘I thought Carman was trapped? Down below?’ Tony spoke up.

  ‘She is. Most of her. This,’ and Dian indicated the body, ‘this was a puppet she used to pull your strings. That’s why Xena Warrior Princess here was able to lay her out. Well,’ he amended, looking at Ellie and, oddly, at Dermot Scully with what seemed like an expression of sadness, ‘… mostly.’

  ‘Something’s coming.’

  As one, everyone turned to look at Tony. He was standing by the windows, pointing out at the city.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Danny asked him, suddenly wondering if there was anything his father was hiding from him, any other big secrets lurking in his past.

  You could just take it from him. Whatever the secret is. Just reach in and pluck it out.

  He pushed away the thought with a shudder, astonished that it had even surfaced. No longer in the Otherworld, no longer surfing the celestial planes, being back in reality – or at least, as close as this particular version of Ireland got to it – was akin to spending all night drinking in a bar and imagining himself fairly sober until walking outside. He felt intoxicated. Connected.

  Amending his father’s memories in the cottage had taken considerable effort. Restoring them here had been accomplished almost before he’d even realised what he was doing. He would need that power, of course; would likely need every last joule of it if he had any hope of doing whatever the hell he needed to do in order to…

  To what? Get Luke back? Obviously that was the first priority, yes – but what if getting Luke back solved nothing else? He had bigger responsibilities now, didn’t he? Wasn’t that what his extended whistle-stop tour of pocket dimensions and ancient Ireland was intended to teach him?

  ‘Look,’ Tony said. He pointed out at the Lagan. At first, Danny didn’t see it.

  ‘In the water,’ Ellie said softly.

  ‘What am I looking for?’ Danny asked, frustrated.

  ‘The lights,’ his father said, the pitch of his voice going up another octave. ‘Look at the fuckin’ lights!’

  He looked. Lircom Tower cast a long reflection in the river – it was a twenty-four-hour workplace and so was always illuminated. For motorists driving into the city it was the first visible sign that they had arrived in the heart of Belfast. But, floor by floor, the lights of Lircom Tower were going out.

  ‘What is it?’ Tony asked Danny, as if expecting him to have all the answers.

  Unfortunately, he was right. Danny knew exactly what was coming for them. He remembered the Morrigan–Carman face-off on the Hill of Tara and the flowing, encompassing darkness that had attacked the Morrigan’s warrior sons.

  ‘Dub,’ he said.

  ‘My big brother,’ Dian explained, for the benefit of a baffled Ellie. ‘A cloud of living darkness.’

  ‘A fuckin’ cloud of fucking’ living darkness?’ Ellie said. ‘Seriously? Your family’s fuckin’ shite, you know that?’

  ‘Think so?’ Dian replied with evident amusement. ‘We have another problem. Dub loathes Dother. He always has.’

  ‘But you’re in Dother’s body–’ Danny began.

  ‘Not for much longer.’

  ‘Why?’ Danny asked.

  Dian looked pained. ‘Because,’ he said, clutching his chest and staggering. ‘Possession of a dead human is one thing. Possession of a live faerie princeling is another. Dother wants his body back.’

  ‘So,’ said Danny. ‘We’re trapped at the top of a skyscraper in the middle of a city overrun with monsters, we’ve got a cloud of unstoppable living darkness rising to meet us from below, and a mighty fucked-off faerie prince about to reclaim his body and discover one of us has killed his ma. That about sum it up, aye?’

  ‘Not qui
te,’ Tony said. ‘We’ve got you.’

  The quiet pride in Tony’s voice startled Danny. His father had complete and utter faith in him.

  ‘We’ve got two Morrigans, not just one,’ Danny returned.

  Tony nodded. ‘Dub’s about to get his hole handed to him.’

  ‘You also have this …’ Dian said, activating the secret panel behind Dother’s desk and extracting the silver Sword of Nuada from its compartment. Suddenly, he clutched his hands to his head and emitted a short howl of pain, before waving away Danny’s offer to assist. For a moment, just a moment, his eyes flashed red and his expression changed–

  ‘Take it!’ he gasped at Danny. ‘Use it!’

  With that Dian fell to his knees, using the last of his strength to toss the Sword to Danny. As it left his hand, the silver light it was emitting faded; the glow only seemed to exist when the Sword was in someone’s grasp.

  As one, every single source of light in the office died, plunging them into darkness as the final floor of Lircom Tower succumbed to the encroaching shadow.

  Every source save one.

  The silver Sword, caught securely in Danny’s grasp, was now shining with a glow so incandescent it caused all save Danny to shield their eyes against the glare.

  ‘Morrigan …’ a voice in the shadows rumbled.

  ‘Dub,’ Danny returned, hefting the Sword in his hand experimentally. It was heavy and unwieldy and his half-baked assumption that somehow his heritage would grant him instant Jedi-like abilities was proving to be optimistic to say the least.

  Dother stood up, Dian no longer.

  ‘Danny?’ Dother said, taking in the scene around him. His gaze fell on the crumpled shape of Carman’s human host.

  ‘What have you done?’ he demanded, his human features rippling and revealing the demonic countenance beneath, his teeth elongating into fangs, his ears growing to points, his stance changing to that of a beast ready to pounce.