The Invasion Read online

‘You told me to!’

  ‘I told you it was possible. And now I’ll tell you this, which you ought to have known. Nobody who eats the food of Fairyland can ever return home.’

  ‘You’re wrong!’ She must have shouted, because the laughter of the enemy increases whenever she does that. The last time was when she woke from a doze to find the priest licking his lips and sneaking towards her face.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she repeats, more quietly. ‘I’ll go back to normal when I get out of the Grey Land.’

  He shakes his head, filling her with so much anger that flame dribbles from the tips of her fingers.

  ‘I’ll find a way home, priest. You’ll see. I’ll head back to the beach where I came in. People arrive by sea all the time. I bet there’s a way out there too.’

  He sighs a tiny sigh. ‘If that’s your plan, why don’t we start walking towards the coast?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Haven’t you noticed? I just need to keep that mountain at my back.’

  ‘And yet,’ he says, ‘it grows no smaller.’

  She swallows, feeling the grit in her throat that never leaves her here. ‘That … that must be an illusion. We’ve been walking and walking …’

  ‘Oh, dear child …’ His splinted wing flutters. ‘God does not listen to us in hell. He never heard my prayers when the devils first caught me and turned me into a horse for their sport. Or again, later, when they transformed me into this pitiful wretch you see before you. The pain, my child! The pain! That was the only answer I got. But … but I tell you this: I pray every day that my wing heals before we pass beyond that mountain, because … because …’

  He starts to weep. At least she thinks that’s what he’s doing; it’s hard to hear.

  ‘You don’t need to worry,’ she tells him gently. ‘We’re not going there. I’ll never bring you anywhere near there.’

  ‘Ah, you foolish girl!’ he cries, all bitterness now. ‘You … have … promised. To see Dagda. Don’t you understand anything? There is no getting out of it. You will see him.’

  ‘I would kill myself first!’

  ‘No. You won’t. You can die, of course, if a boulder falls on you, or a whipper catches you just right … But you can’t choose death for yourself until your obligations are completed. You can’t kill yourself any more than I can.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It is part of our making, we creatures of hell, that we must always seek to preserve this wretched existence for as long as we can. It’s why I begged you to kill me and then begged you to stop. Do you remember? I don’t have it the worst. God help me, I know that. You should see the dogs! Some of our masters’ clothing is even alive. For ever! Oh, the pain! The pain!’

  He is breathing dangerously fast. ‘You,’ he says, ‘will travel to see Dagda.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she whispers.

  ‘You will. And he will turn you into something beyond terrible. Because he’s the most evil of them all. He is Lucifer himself. He designs his creations especially to suffer. To hunger for the agony of others.’

  Don’t listen to him! Megan hisses. He’s not worth wiping your arse on!

  Nessa staggers away from him. She looks towards the crow’s beak mountain. Is it true? Is it pulling her closer with every step? She experiments, turning first one way and then the other. She feels no attraction whatsoever. Nothing. The relief of it! Her heart steadies; her breathing slows.

  ‘You scared me, Fr Ambrosio,’ she says, finding her first smile in this place. She lifts him up into the crook of her arm. ‘But we’re going to be OK. Come on.’

  She turns her back to the mountain and strides forward, fire at the ready in case her tormentors should show themselves. She waves away flecks of ash that fall in her eyes, wheezing only a little in the burning air. It’s easy! Along the way she fills her belly with roots, before setting off again.

  ‘Is it night or day?’ she asks her passenger.

  He shrugs, as if to say, I’ve done my talking.

  ‘I just thought you might know.’ Again a shrug. ‘We’ll sleep here,’ she decides. ‘We can hide among those boulders and continue when we wake.’

  She looks back towards the crow’s beak, to reassure herself that it still lies behind her, that she hasn’t been going the wrong way these last few hours. She smiles to see that all is as it should be. ‘I’m sorry,’ she tells Fr Ambrosio. ‘I’m going to have to put you between a pair of rocks so I can get some sleep. I like my eyeballs just where they are.’

  He shakes his tiny head, and then, with a voice full of genuine pity, he says, ‘You do realize, you poor girl, that you have walked no more than a dozen steps?’

  It can’t be true. It can’t. But there, just behind her, lies the blackened shape of the last fire she made.

  ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘No.’ Her weak left leg gives way, leaving her on her knees, her face in her hands.

  And now the laughter increases. It comes from behind bushes and rocks; from dips in the ground hidden by puffs of steam drifting out of volcanic vents. The enemy have seen her abject failure to escape her fate.

  One by one, they rise from their hiding places. Only four, it seems: three women in glittering costumes of spider silk and metal; one prince, too lovely to exist even in a movie.

  ‘You have learned,’ he says. ‘How wonderful! You will keep your promise. Our only wish is to have the joy of escorting you. To see—’

  He halts, mouth hanging open, as Nessa raises her gaze to his. He must have expected despair. Instead the human girl is laughing at him, laughing at all of them. He cocks his head. Pleased, but puzzled.

  She sets a bush alight with a wave of her hand, before touching it again and absorbing its heat.

  ‘I am grateful to you,’ she tells the prince. ‘I was running from my promise.’

  The four Sídhe exchange smiles with each other.

  ‘That was stupid of me,’ Nessa says, ‘because the answer was obvious all along.’

  ‘What answer?’ he asks.

  ‘Your invasion of the Many-Coloured Land has already begun, has it not?’

  They nod, delighted, eager.

  ‘Well –’ she smiles back at them – ‘that means you must have opened a door. A door that will take me home.’

  The prince shakes his head. They all do. ‘There is no escape, sweet thief. For you will have to see Dagda first. And then Conor will—’

  She need only point to set him on fire, and that’s what she does. She burns the prince. She burns all of them.

  ‘Not the heads!’ screams Fr Ambrosio. ‘Curse you! I don’t like them cooked!’

  And later, when they’re walking again, this time directly towards that terrible mountain, with all its lightning and other horrors, the priest says, ‘Those devils were right, you know? When Dagda sees you—’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘But your—’

  ‘The Sídhe gave me the answer, the fools. I’ll just do what they did. I’ll spy on him from a distance. I’ll see Dagda all right. But he won’t see me. And I’m making another promise, a new one—’

  ‘Don’t!’ he says. ‘My child! Don’t be foolish!’

  ‘I am, Father, but it’s a promise to myself, and to God or the gods or whoever’s listening. I have decided to win. I’m promising that I will beat this place and that I will see Anto. Do you hear me? I, Nessa Doherty, promise that I’m going home!’

  There’s no shiver in the air such as accompanied her first promise, but she feels one inside her chest that is every bit as powerful.

  Morris

  For all of Taaft’s eagerness, she won’t let them move faster than a steady jog.

  ‘Whoever the defenders are,’ she says, ‘they’ll hold out a few more minutes. We’ve got to be smart in helping them.’

  Anto is struggling to keep up. His back burns with agony, his breath puffs in front of his face and all he can hear is the crunch of everybody’s boots in the snow. Determination pushes him
on. That, and the fairy limb, throbbing with the urge to pound and smash.

  You’ll get your chance, he tells it.

  Liz Sweeney stalks at his side like the pale goddess of war. Andrea holds her rifle away from her body as though she’s more afraid of it than of the enemy. And probably she should be.

  Ahead of them, the siege is heating up. An angel swoops out of the clouds overhead, smoke and light pouring from whatever it grips in its tendrils.

  The monster drops out of sight behind some nearby trees. Gunfire follows. The creature struggles back into the air, and then falls to earth over the far side of the road. But in its wake it has left behind … fire!

  ‘Never seen them bomb things before,’ breathes Liz Sweeney.

  And now they hear the sudden roaring of sniffers. The shouts of giants and the noise of a dozen guns all firing at once, even as the flames seem to increase. Somebody is shouting in English. ‘Fight, curse ye! Fight!’

  ‘Let’s go!’ Taaft calls, and everybody surges forward at once, towards danger and death. Even Nabil seems to have forgotten he’s there to protect the children. The gentleness of his scarred face has fallen away to reveal whatever it was that drove him to Ireland in the first place. The thing he was and never wanted to be again.

  They’ve had a week of hiding. Of running away while their country and their families fought against the horror on their behalf. And now – for once! – they can do something good. Something right. They’ll rescue a few of their own or die in the attempt.

  Beyond a rotting fence lies a cluster of farmhouses. One whole wing burns while sniffers – a cross between a lion and an elephant with a blade for a trunk – stand silhouetted in front of it.

  ‘No further!’ roars Taaft. ‘Only a fool wants to get shot by their own side! Kneel and fire. Like you were taught. Take your time. Don’t waste your bullets.’ They spread out, pluming the cold air with their panting breath, rifles raised. Other than Liz Sweeney, none of the kids has fired a real bullet before. But they want this and they have Nabil and Taaft to stiffen the line. Neither of the instructors knows how to miss at this range.

  Anto still has a few grenades. He launches the first just as the others open up. In half a minute a dozen monsters fall. More go down before the enemy even realize that the bullets are coming from behind rather than from the trapped defenders.

  There’s a roaring inside one of the buildings. A giant emerges on fire, his scream high-pitched and pitiful, but even as he falls to his knees he manages to point out into the fields and that’s enough. Two of its fellows who have been tearing lumps off a wall with their bare hands turn now and come lumbering towards their new human attackers, each with a crow-woman flying overhead and urging it on.

  ‘The knees!’ shouts Nabil. ‘Go for the knees!’

  Thick plates of bone make the head a bad target, and more slabs of it cover the torso. A giant falls, weeping from the pain, so that everybody is raining fire on the remaining one, while its crow-woman guide shouts, ‘My boy! They’re murdering my boy!’

  ‘Look out!’ cries Krishnan. The first giant hasn’t given up. He has found a lump of rubble. Krishnan turns his gun on the beast, but he’s forgotten how to reload and now it’s too late. There’s a warm splash of blood and Andrea is simply gone.

  ‘Keep firing!’ shouts Taaft. The second giant goes down, but suddenly the sniffers are here. Their sinuous, feline bodies seem to squirt out of the glare of the flames.

  A sniffer’s trunk whips towards Anto’s face. Its sharpened edge shears through the hot barrel of the boy’s pistol, but then he catches it with his great fist. Oh, it feels good! No regrets! Power and more power. He hits again and again, shouting he knows not what.

  To his right, Liz Sweeney growls, half panicked, half furious, ‘Crom take you all!’ But her gun goes off.

  It’s mostly quiet after that. The whimpering of a giant. The crackle of flames. To Anto’s left, Niamh and Seán lie broken, empty eyes staring up as the moon emerges from the clouds. He wanted a fight, didn’t he? He needed it. They lost three of their own, but so what? This is the world now. As it is. As it always was.

  Taaft is grinning. The years have fallen away from her, her shoulders straighter than ever, and Nabil … Nabil can’t look at her, such is his anger. He never wanted to come. Not at the risk of the students’ lives.

  Taaft pays him no heed. ‘We need to check for survivors inside.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ says Liz Sweeney. Her smooth skin glistens with perspiration. ‘Come on, Anto. You’re coming with me.’

  He feels giddy. Like he’s clinging high up on the outside of a building, buffeted by winds, but knowing he’s strong enough to hold on. Cautiously they creep forward until a single shot brings them to a halt. ‘We’re human!’ Anto calls, careful to speak in English.

  ‘How do I know that?’ The speaker follows up his words with a fit of coughing.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Liz Sweeney. She rarely talks English. It makes her sound childish, or innocent somehow. ‘Come on out. What choice do you have anyway? You want to burn?’

  ‘Better than getting twisted! Oh, to hell with it. I’m coming. Relax the cacks.’

  A tall young man ducks out through the smoke, his eyes streaming, his body like that of a Greek statue. An earlier age would have made him a movie star, or a model at the very least.

  ‘Any others?’ asks Anto.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ His voice is resonant, despite the smoke, his grin confident.

  ‘It’s a simple enough question,’ Anto says, but Liz Sweeney has caught on quicker than Anto. She repeats the demand, but in English this time.

  ‘Ah! Well, I’m all on my lonesome, I’m afraid. The others preferred a bullet when they thought there was no way out.’ He grins. ‘You should have come an hour ago; you might have found them still in one piece.’

  ‘Don’t you … don’t you speak Sídhe?’

  ‘Not a word. My parents didn’t believe in survival colleges.’

  ‘And yet you … you lived through the Call?’

  ‘Ooh! Hashtag stating the obvious! Doh!’

  There’s something about him that puzzles Anto. It’s not that he got out of the Grey Land despite missing out on a college. Such things have happened before. Indeed, in the beginning, the tiny number of survivors had no other choice.

  Perhaps it’s just jealousy, he thinks, for the contrast between the man’s physical perfection and his own Sídhe-twisted arm. But he’ll have to think about that later. For now, even Liz Sweeney is too tired to probe for information. And Taaft will want them to get as far from this fire as possible, before something worse than the sniffers comes to check it out.

  But first they feed Niamh, Seán and Andrea to the flames. Nabil insists on it. He closes their eyes, more tender than any parent, hissing at anyone who treats the bodies roughly.

  ‘It’s not like they’re going to wake up!’ Liz Sweeney mutters. All she gets for her trouble are scowls.

  And then the group, along with the man they rescued, run back the way they came.

  The stranger keeps up effortlessly. He seems to be in his early twenties, athletic and handsome. ‘Call me Morris!’ he says. Morris’s eyes gleam with enthusiasm as though everything he looks at belongs to him and meets his approval.

  ‘You’re cheerful,’ Anto growls. ‘Didn’t you lose friends today too?’ He trips over the English. It’s just not the right language to use with somebody so close to him in age. And the response he gets in return is so full of bizarre words it barely makes any sense at all.

  ‘An absolute crap-tastrophe,’ Morris says. His grin is the whitest thing in the universe. ‘But I’m no snowflake. I’ve seen some real shitshows in my time.’

  Anto gives up trying to understand him, putting his head down until they get back to the shed and the others.

  It’s dark by then. Everyone is wrung out. Not just from the fighting but from half a night spent crouching in terror as shells rained down and
an army of monsters marched past. Everyone wants to throw themselves down to sleep, but Nabil drags them out again to find a proper house to hide in. Two more hours pass until he’s satisfied.

  They stumble inside, rifling through the cupboards for food, finding nothing.

  ‘I’ll get supplies,’ Nabil tells them. He’s still angry with Taaft, Anto thinks, and probably just wants to get away for a while. But she has other ideas. ‘Good. I’m with you, Froggy. Somebody, set a watch. You know what to do by now.’ And with that, the two instructors are gone.

  Liz Sweeney is already snoring on the only sofa, her gun perched dangerously against her face. Seán, Mitch and Krishnan all huddle together for warmth, their breathing beginning to slow.

  Anto feels the pull of sleep himself. He’s been half swallowed by the most comfortable armchair he’s ever seen, so that for the first time in weeks his back feels perfectly normal. And his arm … he senses that it too is satisfied. He has set it free, fed it on savagery, so that now all it needs is rest.

  But somebody is staring at him from the corner of the room. Aoife, her eyes glistening in the dark.

  ‘You must hate me,’ she whispers.

  It’s not Aoife’s fault she saw what she saw, but all he can manage to reassure her with is a clearing of the throat.

  ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I know how … how you feel. I do, because I was the same when Emma died. I just wanted to sleep and never have to face it and … and I begged Ms Breen back at school, I … I begged her for the pill.’

  Anto nods. He knows the pill she means and why she wanted it.

  ‘I was wrong, asking to die,’ Aoife says. ‘I didn’t know that until I was there. I didn’t understand the point of the whole thing.’

  ‘There is no point.’ Anto’s voice is a hideous growl that has Mitch whimpering in his sleep. ‘The Sídhe will win. You escaped the Grey Land, we both did, and it followed us home. You should have taken your pill.’ His arm flexes restlessly.

  ‘Sure,’ Aoife says. ‘The darkness wins in the end; I know that. But here’s the thing I realized: Emma died. My stepdad died. Babunia too. But not before they made me happy. For a while. For a bit. It wasn’t permanent, but sometimes it was so sweet. Gods, those kisses I had! Cakes too. And stories when I woke after a nightmare.’