Vince leaned on the spear. It puckered the Nephilim’s skin and he drew in a sharp breath, and held it.

“I could kill you now.”

“It’ll take a lot more than a sliver of wood to kill me.”

Vince eased back and stepped away. Mallian smiled.

“Whatever you’re trying to do won’t work,” Vince said.

“I’m looking at the sky. Relaxing here. Waiting for the darkness to fall. That’s work enough for now.”

Vince left the Nephilim and returned along the river to his cave. Since his first day trapped in the Fold it had felt progressively more alien to him, that he was the odd one here, the being that didn’t belong. The whole landscape was observing him, and hidden away across the meadows and hillsides, and in the forests, were Kin watching his every move.

9

9

In the darkness he returns, and Mallian welcomes him with a smile.

“It’s a good thing you’ve done,” Mallian says. He can see the rucksack slung over Markus’s left shoulder. “And there’s plenty more to do. I knew you wouldn’t fail me.”

“I’ve had it for a while,” Markus says, dropping the rucksack beside the Nephilim. “I’ve looked in there. I know what some of these things are. Others, I’m not so sure.”

“They’re tools,” Mallian says. “They’re a way out of here.”

“How can bits and pieces of dead things offer a way out of this place?” The pombero sounds like a human, his mind closed and admitting no entry to wonder. Mallian feels the urge to reach out and snap his neck, tear it from his head, and feel the weak mongrel blood spatter across his hand. If he could have, he would have. But if he could do that, he would not have required the half-Kin’s help in the first place.

“There’s so much you don’t know,” Mallian says. “How old are you?”

“Fifty-seven.”

“Just a child. You came here as a denier, and you’ve grown since then, but there’s still so much you don’t understand about the Kin. And for someone like you, so much you’ll never know.”

“I want to learn!” he says. “I’m one of you now, I always have been, and coming here opened my eyes.”

Mallian closes his own eyes in response and breathes in deeply to compose himself. His anger is rising. It is simmering just below the surface—it always has been, because that is the nature of who he was—but he is in no position to submit to his anger now. He has to rule it, rather than the other way around.

“Tell me!” Markus says. “Teach me!”