“For now.” There’ll be more, he thinks. Much more. When the time comes for you to suffer for me, then we’ll see just how much you’ve embraced your Kin blood.

He watches the pombero dash away along the riverbank, back towards where the human has made his home in the small cave. Markus runs with an animal gait, and exudes a strength that no man can project on his own. Mallian thinks, Perhaps this mongrel is not so unnatural after all.

8

8

Not long after he arrived, Vince began mapping the Fold. He had no pens or pencils, and nothing to draw on even if he had, but his memory had always been good. It gave him some small sense of purpose. Rather than moving on through the days and weeks with little to occupy him other than striving to survive, it became a project. He didn’t walk its hills and forests every single day, but most days he went some way from the cave he used as home. Whether foraging for fruit and nuts, or simply trying to get to know the Fold better, he tracked his routes and remembered what he could of the landscape’s contours, twists and turns.

In doing so, he had come to understand a little of how the Kin brought there by Grace existed. Though some of them were humanoid—and several could have easily passed as completely human—others had fully adopted their Kin heritage and adapted accordingly. He’d witnessed from afar several strange metamorphoses as the deniers no longer denied, and the people they had been living as in the real world melted away to allow their true natures to the fore.

It was a disturbing process to witness. Every week that passed left Vince feeling more and more alone. The Fold grew stranger, not more familiar. Even though he was not averse to strangeness—he had spent some time as a relic hunter in London, seeking out peculiar objects wherever and whenever he could, and as such becoming au fait with many of London’s most obscure locations—he felt any semblance of his old life being steadily wiped away.

For the first few weeks he had seen other humans who often appeared just as lost as him. Now, he was the only human left. Even the shapeshifter Fer had not projected as human for a long time, instead choosing to live its life as creatures known or less familiar. To Vince, it felt as if the Fold was growing, expanding and moving on, and he was the single point keeping it locked into the past. He was becoming rare.