Sammi’s eyes softened as she understood what he meant. She smiled, and for a while she looked the old Sammi again. “I’ll be fine. I might even look in on you from time to time.”

Vince nodded, stood, and went outside to make his call. He wasn’t at all sure he’d want her to do that.

* * *

After speaking to Jay and ensuring he and Angela could return to the cabin in the woods, he went back inside. When he realised Sammi was not in the waiting room he expected to see her sitting beside Angela’s bed, both of them saying their goodbyes.

But Angela was asleep again, and there was no sign of Sammi.

As if she’d never been.

* * *

In her Fold, closed off from the world forevermore, she takes stock. She brought the Nephilim through with her and for now she lets him run wild. He’s no threat to her anymore. He’s raging and raving, but she stays away from him, lets him work that rage from his system. Over the days and weeks to come he’ll calm a little, and then he’ll start considering his position. He’ll drink from the river. He’ll eat. He’ll start to fatten up.

She also brought a handful of other Kin through with her, before she blasted fire back through the portal and then closed it forever. None of them are the ones she brought here originally—they are all dead, or gone back into the world—and that frustrates her. But on the other hand, these new Kin are mostly pure, and she senses that one or two of them are very, very old. Perhaps she will approach some of them and converse. She might even pass time with them.

When her hunger returns, they will provide much better game.

One of the Kin troubled her the moment it came through, and she knows it is from the drowned village. The gargoyle is wild and animalistic, not like Kin at all, and she also senses a dangerous human taint on and in it. An infection, still simmering even after it has spent a long, long time beneath standing waters.

It’s unnatural. It’s undesirable, and possibly even dangerous, if not to her then to the other new inhabitants of the Fold.

It is this gargoyle that she deals with first. She will never again open a portal back into the world, and she is already forcing herself to forget how to do so. There is one place in the Fold, however, where she believes it will be safe.

She herds it before her, using subtle glamours to steer the way. It scampers and runs across grasslands and up the valley side, leaping from rock to rock, running before her even though in its mind it is actually on the hunt. She edges it towards the caves where Dastion the dwarf once made his home.