“So we need to get back to the world and try to disrupt Mallian, stop him from leaving,” Dastion said. “And the only way back is through a new portal, formed by the fairy that he now controls, and which will likely drop us all right into the hands of Mallian and his forces.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Vince said. “I figure we run out fighting.”

“And die.” Dastion rubbed his beard. “Well, I’ll throw this out there for starters—I’ve found something deep down I think might help us.”

“Found what?” Angela asked.

Dastion smiled for the first time, and it lit up his face. His beard lifted and parted, his eyes squinted tight, and his ruddy cheeks peered through their hairy camouflage.

“Maybe another way.”

25

25

Bone waited on the borders of green and grey for Mallian to rise, for death to come. He had always existed on the fringes, knowing he was different, sired by a creature few humans would understand or even believe in. From his traumatic childhood onwards he had never known how to handle that, so he had spent his life searching for similar creatures. As a child he had known three, so as he grew older he held onto the logic that where there were three there were thirty, and three hundred, and maybe many, many more.

When he found such creatures he never told the people he worked for of the encounter. A few times, knowing how dangerous the Kin were, he had killed them. Given freedom, they might eventually have been captured or revealed, and then the world of the Kin would have become a much more public affair. He didn’t like what he had done, wasn’t proud. He’d spent his life ensuring that they remained a secret, so that his own troubling, strange powers remained a secret also. It was ironic that to protect these creatures he’d had to kill a few of them, to keep humans safe from them, and to keep the world of the Kin a secret.

He hadn’t told his handlers of those occasions, either.

He fed Jordan an occasional lead, sent her a relic here and there, collected eyewitness statements and accounts. He made sure that each year of his employ he gave them something, but never enough. Working for them gave him the freedom and funding to travel and search, but he always ensured that the truth eluded them. Once they knew for sure of the existence of living Kin, it would only be a matter of time before they came after him.

With Mallian, everything had changed. Bone had never seen anything like him. Even the most dangerous Kin he had ever come across were shadowy figures, perpetuating myth and legend and living beneath the radar of human perception, their murders spread out and irregular.

Mallian was something very different, and very dangerous.