“You thought me immune?” Dastion lifted his arm to display a pattern of deep, ragged indentations along his left underarm. “I believed I was safe down there, and it took her a long time to come after me. Maybe she’d grown tired of the hunt up here.” He frowned, eyes distant and haunted. “Foolish of me to believe I might ever be safe from her. So we’re here, all of us, in the hope that you can help us.”

“Me?” Vince asked.

“Sure. We help each other, right? You’ve talked to most of us over the past couple of years, helped some after she took bites out of us.”

“You know what Mallian plans?” Angela asked.

“I’ve heard whispers. We all have.”

“So?” Angela asked. It was such a loaded word that Vince held his breath. If they sided with Mallian they’d instantly become enemies, and he didn’t like the idea of going up against Dastion.

“So, none of us has any love for the fairy. She drew us here, gave us our freedom, and most of us have embraced that, despite everything we left behind. But then she started eating us. That’s no saviour. We want freedom from the fairy, but freedom in the world too, not conflict and pain. We all left people behind.” He frowned and looked past Vince, as if searching for a way back to whoever he’d left when Grace had marked him and struck him down with lightning. “It’s strange, we’ve left them now, and moved on, and found the existence we were made for. But none of us wants harm to come to those we left behind. If Mallian has his way, they will come to harm.”

“So we all want the same thing,” Vince said.

“Peace for the ones we love,” Angela said.

Dastion nodded. Behind him the mermaid Shashahanna emerged from a copse of trees, seeming to flow with the rain and make it her own. A fox followed, walking on two feet and flickering behind the downpour, features blurring uncertainly between human and animal. Fer, the shapeshifter, was also with them.

“Good,” Vince said, although he wasn’t sure just how good any of this might be. Could he trust them? Did they really all want the same thing? He didn’t have the luxury of time in which to find out.

“So what’s the plan?” Dastion asked.

“That’s what we’ve got to come up with,” Vince said. He glanced at Angela, and she gave him a nervous look.

“My niece is... she has certain fledgling powers, and she might be able to break Mallian’s hold over the fairy,” Angela said.

“What powers? Where is she?”

“Just back past those trees,” Angela said. “She’s one of you, struck by lightning, marked and brought here by Grace, but we rescued her before the Fold closed.”