Isaac backs away and thumps against solid rock. He’s inside a ring of tall standing stones that tower above his head. He braces his hand against the stone and his fingers find carvings, and some sort of niche or recess but he doesn’t reach inside. The cries and screams from the burning settlement grow, and suddenly animals—sheep, cows—stream past him, running random, wild-eyed and bawling, splashing into the muck of swamp and the night beyond.

The monsters—there are many—circle. They look like humans but fly on leathery wings. Their faces are exquisite, almost too beautiful, but also dreadful, for their teeth are sharp points and their eyes burn red. They bear down on the settlement, and it’s no longer a battle of human against human as they raise their axes and pikes in defense against this terror from above. But the monsters pluck away the weapons and carry the people off into the night sky, into the stars.

Isaac clutches the icy orb in his fist, and horror fills him as he watches one after another, men, women, and children, taken away into the night. He’s a witness to their end.

One of the monsters turns and looks in his direction, red eyes glaring, searching, and Isaac must close his own.

The hum begins again and a faint chime—like a bell—rings in his brain. He sinks to his knees and clutches his arms to his chest and without warning falls back into oblivion.

CHAPTER 10

Moloch’s Sluagh Hunter

The standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands are twice as tall as the tallest man. Thin and chiseled by millennia of rough weather, on a heathery piece of land surrounded by the sea, they point like accusing fingers, or the jutting teeth of a recumbent giant, to the sky. They are the remnants of worship—or perhaps they were put there to ward off evil (at which they failed)—by the ancient civilization whose homely ruins lie nearby, a complex society lost in the mists of deep time, whose collapse was sudden and complete.

Whose collapse has been witnessed by one boy in an awful time travel.

Now, in Isaac’s time, eons after those people vanished from the earth, on this night when a sliver of moon illuminates the stones, a creature glides overhead on black angel-wide wings. It lands atop the tallest of the stones like a bird of prey. But it is not a bird. It has eyes that can devour a soul. Eyes as red as blood.

This is Isaac’s nightmarish monster. And it is Moloch’s sluagh hunter, searching for the Guardian.

It has perched on the tower of the Charles Bridge.

It has been across Europe.

It has hovered over Orkney.