“Two days,” Vince said. “You’ve also fractured some ribs, bruised your kidneys, and you’ve got cuts and scrapes and a minor concussion.”

“Did I break any nails?”

Vince snorted laughter. It was good to hear, and good to inspire.

“What about the others?”

He pulled back from her and wiped his eyes. The old Vince—the Vince of London, before she knew he was working for Fat Frederick Meloy and mixing with creatures she could never have imagined—would have been embarrassed at those tears. This new Vince was unashamed.

“Dastion went deeper into the hills, looking for somewhere to start a new mine, I guess. He’ll mix in well enough until he finds the right place. He still remembers what it was like to be human.”

“Mallian? The other Kin?”

“She took Mallian through with her,” Vince said. He shivered. “I hate the son of a bitch, but the thought of what’ll be happening to him—”

“Deserved,” Angela said. “Every bite, earned.”

“The military have got a couple of dead ones,” Vince continued. “Plenty of images have leaked online and the news is all over it. I can pretty much guarantee it’s on a channel somewhere...” He picked up a TV remote from beside her bed and pointed it at the screen up in a corner of her room.

It opened on a rolling news report about the Longford lake of fire. It was an incredible sight, and though the military was attempting to secure the area, the boundary between the blazing lake and the surrounding hillsides ran for more than twenty miles. Various experts spouted opinions about what was happening, but the news anchor kept referring back to the several clips of film they had managed to procure of soldiers fighting strange, unknown creatures, some of them very humanoid in nature. One of them was impossibly tall and monstrous. It was daytime TV and the warnings came thick and fast, but within minutes of turning on the TV they were presented with a clip of Mallian ripping the cop in half.

“Do they really need to show that?” Angela asked.

“Of course not, but they’ll keep showing it again and again.” Vince surfed the channels. “Hang on, let me find the Pentagon guy. They’re showing this clip on a loop, too.” He settled on a channel with an amused-looking presenter and a grey-haired man on the screen in the corner. The spokesman from the Pentagon chuckled at the stories put to him and said they were dealing with a mass delusion brought on by electrical discharges following a seismic event.

The interviewer responded by playing footage of a chopper brought down by a winged humanoid creature, and asked if camera technology was also susceptible to mass delusion.