Taylor raised a hand. ‘Happy travels. I’ll be right here when you get back.’

I filled my lungs, breathing in the fresh Scottish Highland air. The faint scent of heather clung to the back of my throat. This was my home and I’d be back soon.

‘See you,’ I said quietly. And I pivoted and plunged in.

My skin prickled with a thousand shots of pain. Individually, each one felt like nothing more than a light pinch but, combined, they made my whole body judder. It felt as if my very bones were crackling. Holding my breath, and keeping my head down, I forced my way forward. I was already starting to regret trying this. I squeezed my eyes shut. Come on, Integrity. Come on. I pushed ahead, one foot after the other.

The relief when I passed through the barrier of the Veil was overwhelming. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying to rid myself of the last of the painful tingling, and looked around. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting but if I’d thought about it, it would have been pretty much like this. The sky was dark grey and the ground underfoot didn’t contain any evidence of plant life. In fact, there wasn’t evidence of life anywhere. The earth was hard and compacted and, while I could still see evidence of the Scotland I knew with its dark hills and mountains, this was a scarred and troubled landscape.

The one good thing was that I knew exactly where I was going. I’d chosen my entry point carefully as the nearest point from the Veil to what had once been Glasgow. I had less than fifteen miles to cross before I reached the fringes of the city. If I kept up a good pace and didn’t have to hide to avoid any Fomori, I’d be there in less than three hours. I adjusted my watch and set the stopwatch to keep track of time – who knew how things worked in this part of the world – and set off.

There wasn’t a trail as such but it didn’t matter. The ground was so hard that I could have been running on concrete. There weren’t any roots or holes to avoid and though the air was both clammier and staler than that which I’d left behind, it didn’t hamper my progress.

I kept going in a straight line, looking for anything which suggested life ‒ or danger. There were no lights, no creatures and no demons. Perhaps all the Fomori eschewed a rural life and were city dwellers; if so, they were city dwellers who enjoyed the dark. Before too long I could make out the shapes of the buildings in Glasgow but there wasn’t a single light to illuminate them.

Unlike Aberdeen – or even Oban – the structures were low-lying. The Fomori hadn’t spent the last three hundred years matching the rest of the world’s bid to create cloud-reaching skyscrapers. When I reached the edges of the city, it was even clearer that this was a place caught in a time warp. I half expected William Wallace himself to come charging out from the ramshackle stone houses, kilt flying up around him and swinging a vast broadsword in my direction. There was nothing. The city was as silent as the countryside had been.