“We never really do, do we?” Vince held her with his good arm and buried his face against her damp neck. He wished more than anything that the rest of the world would go away, and that they could stand like that forever.

21

21

Bone soon lost track of the other three as they ran. Instead he aimed up out of the valley, hitting the green line and continuing without pause. Being amongst colour again felt good. The greyness of the revealed valley had seeped into his soul, discolouring his vision of the future.

He knew that he had done wrong. Releasing Mohserran, the gargoyle and the werewolf Francine had been a stupid error, something a man with no sense would do, a man with no true path. After doing it, he could not recall his reasons. Was it really in the hope that they would attack Mallian and stop him doing whatever it was he had planned? Or was it simply because one of the infected was his father? His mind was fractured. Usually if he found Kin it was a simple matter of protecting their secret and letting them go again. Mohserran and the others were not a simple matter.

Fleeing through trees and grass, with bushes snatching at his clothing and startled birds taking flight around him, he might have been in another world. He still carried valley mud on his boots and lower trouser legs, and the dust of drying silt was thick at the back of his throat and in his eyes. He also bore the memory of the murder he had witnessed. He had seen violence before, and perpetrated it himself from time to time, but he’d never seen anything so brutal and inhuman.

Inhuman is what it’s all about, he thought. He’d never thought of himself in such terms, because he had never allowed that strange, non-human part of him to come to the fore. He did not want that for himself.

He wasn’t sure what he wanted, other than to know his father was at peace. Now, out of the valley, he realised that he should have listened to Angela and the dead nymph, understood what they were trying to do. In killing his father and those other tortured beasts, they were seeking the same as him.

Reaching a clearing and climbing a steep rocky slope, he stood and looked back down into the valley, and realised what he had to do.

He half expected the phone signal to be ineffective. The valley looked like another world, and what he’d seen today was not of the world he knew. But the buttons beeped with a familiar sound, and the ringing at the other end was answered within three tones.

“Jordan.”

“It’s me.”

“I know who it is.”

“I’m in Longford.”

“And?”