The pombero sat propped against a tree, head tilted to one shoulder, his arms splayed to either side with hands on the ground and palms facing upward. He looked more human in death, not less. His eyes were open and staring past Vince at the sky, as if seeking some sort of saviour from the heavens, or perhaps a form of escape. Vince suspected he had found it.

His mouth hung open and his tongue was missing, bitten clean through. The stump was a bloodied, clotted thing, and blood had dried in globules against his teeth and around the outside of his mouth. Deep purple bruising stained his neck and throat. His hands were also covered in dried blood, and his fingers were thick with it.

It looked like he had bitten out his tongue, and then worked at the wound to prevent the blood from clotting. He had either bled to death or drowned in his own blood. Whichever, he had been determined to die.

There was no sign of the missing tongue.

Vince crouched before the pombero’s sad corpse, waving away the flies, flicking off beetles and ants that had gone to work on the drying blood. The small woodland was almost silent, as if in respect, or perhaps in shock at the death. The older wounds on his body were obvious, places where Grace’s fairy teeth had bitten in and taken chunks out of his flesh. Perhaps that was the reason he had chosen to end things.

But where’s his tongue?

It seemed like a difficult way to commit suicide. There were several places in the Fold where a drop from a cliff would be enough to kill yourself, a river to drown in, sharpened quartz shale to slice skin and vein. Biting out your own tongue and ensuring the blood kept flowing must have been an incredibly painful, wretched way to die.

“And where is the tongue?” Vince muttered. He looked around the corpse, stretched to see behind him, lifted his hands to make sure it wasn’t hidden beneath them. A carrion creature could have made away with it, he supposed, snatching a free warm meal moments after the poor creature had bitten it off and spat it out. Maybe he’d performed the bite somewhere else and stumbled here, choosing this peaceful glade as a good place to die.

Vince froze. It was so obvious. He muttered a curse and stood, staring down at the dead man and wondering who he had left behind. He’d spat the word human at Vince like it was something dirty, but until recently the pombero had lived as a human, perhaps aware of his strangeness, perhaps not. There might be a partner, children, friends, all missing him now that he had been struck by lightning and vanished. They would never see him again, and never know what had happened to him.