“He’ll be fighting,” Bone said. “Will you help me?”

“We have to help each other,” Angela said. “Grace first, and then stopping Mallian. Everything else is secondary.”

“Even if the infected Kin escape the valley?” Bone asked.

“While there’s still a fight here, they won’t,” Sammi said, but none of them could know that for sure. Even after all this time, none of them really knew anything.

“So we’re going back towards that?” Bone asked, pointing behind him. The fighting was taking place uphill from them in the woods, past the blazing scattered remains of the crashed ’copter in the dark and shadowy places that Kin called home.

“We are,” Sammi said. She nursed the relics wrapped in the coat in her arms, felt their warmth, and when she blinked she imagined what it would be like to try and cast the spell.

It was going to hurt.

* * *

In the end, Mallian found them.

Vince saw the shadow just as it burst from a copse of trees. Time slowed down. Panic bit in, and fear, but also a sense of relief that the confrontation had been brought to them here, and now, and that their future would be decided soon. He turned and raised his spear one-handed, looking up at the looming shape.

Mallian waved one arm and swept him aside. Winded, Vince hit the ground and rolled, crying out when his wounded arm folded beneath him. He lurched over onto his back and Mallian was above him, blotting out the moon and ready to stomp on him one last time.

Dastion swung his pike and slammed it into Mallian’s leg. The Nephilim grunted and overbalanced, going down on one knee not two metres from Vince’s head.

Vince grabbed up his spear and rolled again, prepared for the white-hot agony consuming his arm. He cried out but kept rolling, because now Mallian meant to kill him, and against the Nephilim there would be no second chance.

As he struck a tree and pulled himself upright, he saw Grace in the darkness beneath the trees behind Mallian. She was touched by starlight, slack-jawed and staring, her eyes out of focus, body and limbs slumped as if there was a single invisible thread holding her upright.

This might be their only chance.

“Sammi!” he shouted.

Sammi had already sensed their arrival. She knelt and placed the wrapped bundle on the ground before her, pulling the jacket open and exposing the relics to the night.

Mallian’s attention went from Vince to Sammi, and then to the relics displayed before her. His eyes went wide. Grace had seen too, and now her vacant stare was not quite so vacant, her stance no longer that of a puppet. She took a small step in Sammi’s direction, then froze, her face a rictus of pain. Mallian’s hold over her was total.

The Nephilim rose and turned towards Sammi.