Justin Fisher - The Darkening King

That had been days ago and here he was now, in the middle of a forest with the most highly trained pest control unit in the world.

“Magic and monsters,” he muttered, as the DT-30’s caterpillar tracks ground to an icy halt.

Bang, bang! came the pounding on the cabin’s hatch. “Captain Volkov, the transport can go no further.”

Volkov stepped out into an impossibly cold night. Even his gruelling training could not stop him from pausing to catch breath. It must have been -55°C at least. Surely not even a bear could withstand this cold? And anyway, didn’t bears hibernate in the winter months? In front and behind the forest lay black; their DT-30 had taken them as far as its tracks would allow.

“A curse on this cold, a curse on Siberia and a curse on this blasted mission!”

“Your orders, captain?”

His number two, though covered in extreme snow gear, was easy enough to recognise for the simple fact that he was the size of a bull. Galkin was younger by almost a decade but in Volkov’s opinion as able a leader as he was and Volkov was always glad of it.

“Take three men and scout the way forward; we’ll follow with the supplies.”

The bull saluted and paced on ahead.

Volkov never liked to walk through a forest at night. It made him feel as though the stars had been sucked out of the sky. After more than an hour, even the deep winter snow could no longer find its way through the taiga’s wooded canopy. There were no stars above and no snow below, just the ice-cold embrace of a pitch-black wood. As they trudged through the frozen mud and pines, Volkov’s gut started to twitch. His gut had never let him down. Like a dog sensing danger long before it arrives, Volkov’s gut always told him when trouble was brewing and the reindeer clearly agreed. The beasts came to a complete standstill, honking in their throats nervously, their hooves skittish on the ground.

“What’s got into them?” seethed the captain.

As a born and bred Siberian, no one knew more about reindeer than Volkov’s handler, not even the actual reindeer.

“I wish I knew, captain. I’ve never seen them like this, never.”

Volkov’s gut began to rumble more steadily. A quick gesture of his hand and his column of men pulled down their night-vision goggles. Everything turned to electric green and the reindeer stopped. As Yenotov and the other handlers pushed and prodded their now immobile animals, something through the trees moved with a flicker of dark green over black. Volkov raised his weapon and those not tending to the herd followed suit. The targeting dot from his laser slowed by a tree and something behind it moved.

“Six o’clock.”

“Eight.”

“Eleven.”

One by one his men called out movement in the trees, and seemingly from everywhere.

“Brace!” ordered Volkov.

The Spetsnaz dropped to one knee and prepared to fire.

All of a sudden, their supply column of reindeer broke free and fled from their handlers, all twelve animals with their heavy packs and Volkov’s much-needed supplies bolting as a feathered storm flew at the squad, a flapping of a hundred wings, magpies, pigeons, sparrows and hawks, swallows, barn owls, finches and crows, filling the air in a living squall, then just as suddenly parting.

Nothing.

Volkov and his bemused men got back to their feet and were trying to understand what had just happened when the first scream called through the darkness ahead of them.

Without a word, his men fanned out wide, running as best as they could through the undergrowth and straight to the sound of their screaming comrades. A little way forward something big was running towards them, crashing through branches with all the violent force of a crazed animal. It was Galkin, Volkov’s number two.

His helmet and scarf had come away, lost somewhere in his flight, and his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. The man was crazed with terror. Volkov had seen this before with new recruits, young soldiers that had no place with the Spetsnaz, but Galkin? The man was unbreakable, or at least had been until now.

“Galkin, calm yourself. What happened?”

“M-mmm–”

Volkov grabbed the man by the shoulders and shook him hard.

“What, man? What are you saying?”

“M-magic and … and m-monsters,” Galkin finally managed.

Two of the squadron stayed with their sobbing second in command, as Volkov led the others forward. Some way through the forest the trees began to thin till they came to a vast clearing. At its centre firepits bellowed and a great iron structure jutted out of the ground like an angry tooth. To Volkov it looked very much like the beginnings of some fortress. The Spetsnaz had grade one clearance – they would know of such a thing, surely? Why had he not been informed? And what had happened to the sky? At first he thought he was looking at a mirror, or that the world had turned upside down. The air was black with smoke from the firepits, and the stars – every one of them had fallen to the ground. They lay along the clearing, too many to count. A great wondrous carpet of yellow and white in all its shimmering glory. Volkov and his men removed their goggles.

And the stars roared.

What had looked like heaven quickly became hell. The stars were not stars at all but the eyes of a great horde, monsters from old wives’ tales suddenly made real. From the lick of orange light spewing out of the firepits, the Spetsnaz saw row upon row of hideous creatures, fanged, clawed, hoofed and winged, edging their way closer and preparing to strike.

Captain Nikolai Volkov let his rifle drop to the floor. As his end approached, he could think of only one thing to say. It fell from his lips with no particular recipient in mind and it was to be the last three words that he would ever speak.

“Magic and monsters.”

odshill on the Isle of Wight was as pretty a village as the Armstrongs could ever hope to find. Spring was finally rearing its head, bees buzzed along the thatched roofs of its ancient cottages, and a large medieval church at its centre could not have drawn a prettier picture. Ned and his little family had never found the time to go on holiday. He thought, as they walked down the road, how nice it might be to come back here one day, when they actually could. But here and now, like always, there was only the hunt, and the Armstrongs were in the unique position of being both predator and prey.

He’d lost count of the hotels and motels they’d stayed in. Never staying for more than a day at a time because of what they were searching for, and what – or rather who – was searching for them. As far as Ned could tell, everyone was looking for the Armstrongs, and on both sides of the Veil.

Backpacks, T-shirts, jeans and jumpers – holiday gear for the perfect “happy family”. Only, the Armstrongs hadn’t been truly happy for quite some time. “Happy” was for families that weren’t on the world’s most wanted list. “Happy” was for people who had the time to buy an ice cream and sit in the sun. And herein lay the problem – the Armstrongs and the world that they lived in had run out of time.

The Darkening King was on the brink of rising.

They now stood on a street corner outside Mavis’s Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, est. 2012. It was the sort you find dotted about the villages of England, particularly ones frequented by tourists. What was not known was that Mavis’s Tea Shoppe was in fact a safe house for the Hidden, especially those who had run out of places to hide. It was one of her rarer and more nocturnal patrons that the Armstrongs had arranged to come and see.

“Whiskers?” called out Ned’s dad.

There was a muffled squeak from somewhere in Ned’s backpack.