“Under me,” Mallian said, and he had to let Vince go and arch upwards so that the human could reach the rucksack hidden beneath the Nephilim’s back.

Vince could feel Mallian’s heat, smell his rank odour, and as he reached beneath his back he felt the hardened nubs and ridges where there had once been wings. He wondered at Mallian’s real, deep story, the true tale of his time on Earth and elsewhere, and he feared that to know would drive him mad.

Then he felt the rough material of the rucksack. He curled his forefinger through one strap and pulled, slowly, not wishing to startle the Nephilim with any sudden movements.

Even then he worried that he was being played with, a mouse to Mallian’s ferocious cat.

“I have it,” Vince said. “You can lie back down. You won’t be there for much longer.”

That final untruth gave him the couple of seconds he needed. He rolled back, stood, stumbled backwards some more, and only then did he allow himself to look at Mallian.

Mallian glared back at Vince with murder in his eyes. “No,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Vince said, though he really was not.

“No,” Mallian said again.

“You know I can’t let you do it. Maybe you are fading away, losing touch. You’d have never believed me before.”

Mallian was shaking. There was no more talk in him, no pleading, not even any threats. As Vince turned around and ran, the fallen angel roared so loud that he feared the Fold might fall apart beneath the scream.

Vince ran, and ran, losing himself so that he lost anyone or anything else coming after him. Then he started hiding the relics from the rucksack. There were thirteen in total, the ones gathered by Gregor—he assumed that Mallian held onto the fresh pombero’s tongue in one of his hands—and Vince dropped them at random, kicking them beneath rocks, wedging them down cracks in the ground, lobbing one into a pond and another into the flowing river. In his fear, there was no way he’d be able to remember where each one was, even if Mallian managed to escape, capture him, and torture him for their whereabouts. With each relic he hid away, he felt the reality of Angela becoming less and less solid, until the woman he loved was as faded and obscured as the landscape around him.

He’d never really held any hope of ever seeing her again.

Now, he had made sure.

* * *

Perhaps the human is right. Maybe he is fading away and growing vague. There is no way he would have been fooled like that if he possessed all his faculties.