Mark Chadbourn - The Burning Man

‘It’s a funny old world. We see everything around us, and we know what it’s like, but we always want something more. So we’re never able to rest, never happy.’ He kissed Ruth on the forehead. ‘I love you, darlin’. Always have and I always will. We’re setting off on a long road now. It’s not going to be pretty, but it’s the only way, right up to the bitter end. Ryan and Ruth, side by side against the world, like it was always meant to be.’

In Etain’s dead eyes, there was a faint glimmer, like the twinkling of a star in the furthest, coldest reaches of space. And the cold wind blew, and the snow fell, and silence lay across the land.

Black feathers gleamed across a vast arc around the hotel as if darkness was welling up out of the ground and across the pristine snow. Shavi watched the Morvren as he dabbed at the still-bleeding thorn marks on his temples.

‘The birds are responding to Church’s thoughts,’ he mused. ‘Almost an extension of his personality.’

‘He’s a bloody idiot.’ Tom rapped on the glass to try to scare the ravens away. Beady black eyes stared back at him unflinchingly. ‘He has a job to do and he’s mooning over some woman.’

‘We are all addicted to being in love. It is the human condition.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that, would I?’ Tom said sarcastically. ‘Ever since those so-called gods cut me up and put me back together, I’ve not been much of anything.’

Hunter came over, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘He’ll be all right. He’s a tough bloke.’

‘Why did she do it? It is not like Ruth,’ Shavi asked.

‘Something between the two of them,’ Hunter replied. ‘Don’t ask me — I don’t do all that relationship shit. But you’re right — it’s not like her, given the little I know of her, which leaves me thinking she’s still alive. Can you see anything?’ he said to Tom.

Concern briefly softened Tom’s harsh expression. ‘Nothing of her.’

‘But you are starting to see snatches of the future now?’ Shavi asked.

‘I’ve had a few flashes in the last half hour. As events happen, more and more falls into place. The future is becoming solid.’

‘And not good, by the look on your face,’ Hunter noted. ‘What happened here to make a bad outcome more likely?’ He brushed the question off instantly. ‘No point thinking about what might be. We need to find our target. Are you ready to locate him?’

‘I am ready to try,’ Shavi replied.

‘Not going to lose any more body parts, are you?’

Shavi smiled tightly. ‘I have the upper hand now.’

Dawn was breaking when they left the hotel in a four-wheel-drive. They had found several other people sacrificed to Tyr, hanging in their rooms. Hunter had been keen to burn the hotel to the ground to cover their tracks in what would be seen as another terrorist outrage, but Church was adamant that the bodies needed to be left intact for their relatives to claim.

‘You recovered now?’ Laura lounged in Shavi’s lap in the back. ‘You looked like shit when you came out of your little ritual room.’

‘It is becoming easier, but never easy. At least we now know where we are going.’

Church brooded in the front. His eyes flicked continually across the landscape, always searching. ‘Interpol’s going to be looking for us,’ he said. ‘This isn’t going to be easy.’

‘I know a few tricks,’ Hunter said as he steered onto the deserted main road.

Church allowed himself one last look for Ruth. Even after everything that had happened, he still had hope.

Behind them, the Morvren blackened the sky.

In the Court of the Soaring Spirit, the night was white with lightning flashes. The storm whirled ferociously around the foothills, bringing with it rain as hard as bullets and thunder so loud it shook the glass in the windows.

Mallory sat beside the bed in the room at the top of the tallest tower, where he had sat for most of the day. Rhiannon barely stirred. Occasionally her eyes would flicker as if she was in the throes of dramatic dreams, but she showed no sign of waking from the Sleep Like Death.

Caitlin slipped in. ‘Still nothing?’

‘Maybe I’m wasting my time. I keep hoping she might come round long enough to give us a hint as to what’s going on here.’

‘Sophie’s been in the ritual for hours. She looks exhausted.’

‘She found nothing?’

‘The Market of Wishful Spirit might as well have fallen off the edge of the world. That’s what she said.’

Mallory cursed under his breath. ‘Everyone’s counting on us.’

‘She’s doing her best. We all are.’

Mallory gently mopped Rhiannon’s forehead with a damp cloth; it appeared to soothe her. ‘I keep thinking there’s something staring me in the face and I can’t see it. The Brothers and Sisters of Dragons that Church rescued are missing. Lugh and Math and some of the other Tuatha De Danann are missing. The whole population’s terrified. And the Market of Wishful Spirit has gone into hiding. We just need to find the pattern that links it all together and then we’ll start getting somewhere.’

‘You think the Enemy’s already here in the court, undercover?’

‘I’m certain of it.’

Caitlin thoughtfully fingered the axe she now carried at her waist. Mallory was impressed by the transformation that had come over her; she appeared more together than at any time since he had met her.

‘I think we should start questioning people,’ she said. ‘They know something. We just have to find a way to make them talk.’

Mallory was acutely aware of her standing beside him. She had an odd but appealing musk, a hint of lime, which he guessed might be a byproduct of her troubled mental state affecting her body chemistry.

‘You holding it together okay?’ he asked

‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Give me an axe and the chance to chop something into bloody chunks and I’m a picture of mental health. How dysfunctional is that?’

‘I wouldn’t say any of us are pictures of stability.’

‘You seem okay.’

‘Yeah, I thought I was, until …’ He dried up. He could feel Caitlin’s eyes on him but she was too polite to prompt. ‘I did something really bad,’ he continued. ‘Killed somebody.’

‘They deserved it?’

‘No. The exact opposite. At the time I felt I didn’t have a choice. I was forced into it by some nasty people. But I wonder … if I’d been stronger … smarter …’

She rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. ‘We’ve all been through so much. Death is the catalyst that transforms normal people into what we are now.’

‘Whoever thought up that idea was a real sadist. So I murdered an innocent, and you lost your husband and son.’

Her voice grew unbearably fragile. ‘I’m glad my memory’s back so I can think about them again, but it also means I have to remember them passing. Is that one of the lessons we’re supposed to be learning: you can’t have the good without the bad?’

Another flash of lightning filled the room with white.

‘More like the value of things is defined by the loss of them. No potential loss, no value.’

‘You’re a bit of a philosopher, aren’t you, Mallory?’ she said wryly. Her hand was still on his shoulder.

‘Not me. I’m a man’s man. None of that thinking stuff.’

‘Before the Void got to me, I’d started to come to terms with my loss. I’d even begun to see someone else. Thackeray, that was his name. I wonder where he is now. I wish I could see him again.’