Nikolai Volkov let his rifle drop to the floor. As his end approached, he could think of only one thing to say. It fell from his lips with no particular recipient in mind and it was to be the last three words that he would ever speak.
“Magic and monsters.”
He’d lost count of the hotels and motels they’d stayed in. Never staying for more than a day at a time because of what they were searching for, and what – or rather who – was searching for them. As far as Ned could tell, everyone was looking for the Armstrongs, and on both sides of the Veil.
Backpacks, T-shirts, jeans and jumpers – holiday gear for the perfect “happy family”. Only, the Armstrongs hadn’t been truly happy for quite some time. “Happy” was for families that weren’t on the world’s most wanted list. “Happy” was for people who had the time to buy an ice cream and sit in the sun. And herein lay the problem – the Armstrongs and the world that they lived in had run out of time.
The Darkening King was on the brink of rising.
They now stood on a street corner outside Mavis’s Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, est. 2012. It was the sort you find dotted about the villages of England, particularly ones frequented by tourists. What was not known was that Mavis’s Tea Shoppe was in fact a safe house for the Hidden, especially those who had run out of places to hide. It was one of her rarer and more nocturnal patrons that the Armstrongs had arranged to come and see.
“Whiskers?” called out Ned’s dad.
There was a muffled squeak from somewhere in Ned’s backpack.
“Remember everyone on the other side knows about Ned and his mouse – that means you, furball. Not a squeak out of you till we get back to the caravan park, or you’ll blow our cover.”
The backpack remained deathly quiet.
“What’s he doing?”
“Err, I think he’s following orders, Dad.”
“Right. Good. Now, son, wait here. Me and your mum need to check the place out first.”
“Just a tick, darling, and don’t talk to any strangers,” added his mum.
Ned’s eyes rolled and his parents opened the door to the welcoming ding of a bell. “Don’t talk to strangers” was what you told a six-year-old – not someone who had saved the world. Twice. But it was always the same now, wherever they went. And the truth was – they had every right to worry. Ned’s ring no longer listened to him when he tried to use his powers, and his mum and dad had become so protective that he was barely allowed to do anything any more, except sit and wait with his shadow and his wind-up mouse.
He slumped on to the steps of the tea shop. Across the street he saw an old man in a tweed jacket, huffing and puffing with a Zimmer frame to steady his balance. He was tall and spider-leg thin, with barely any remaining white hair and a long reddish nose that seemed to be attached to the rest of his face with a criss-cross pattern of wrinkles.
He was struggling across the road towards Mavis’s and when he looked towards Ned he smiled between great rasping breaths. The poor old dear either thought that he knew Ned, or that Ned might be able to help him on his way, which of course Ned would. Stranger or not, the man needed help.
“Hello. Are you all right?” Ned asked.
Now almost on the other side, the old man grinned at Ned, revealing quite the most extraordinary set of teeth. They all pointed in different directions. Some were grey or brown, others chipped or missing, and one looked as though it would have been more at home in the mouth of a dog.
“I will be, young man, with a little assistance,” he rasped.
But Ned couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s teeth.
“Might I bend your ear for a moment?”
As he spoke, a small device in Ned’s pocket began to shake. It was the perometer that his great friend George had given him a few months earlier, when the Armstrongs had had to leave the Circus of Marvels and go on the run. The device could sense danger, and as it began to shake, Ned stumbled to his feet. The old man let go of his Zimmer frame, his bony fingers instead reaching into his jacket pocket. When they came out again he was holding a thin-bladed dagger, and his eyes shone black.
“Gor-balin!” spat Ned.
“Yes, boy! Been watching Mavis’s for weeks, I have. End of the road for you, my friend.”
Gor-balins were not uncommon amongst Darklings and were often sent on missions across the Veil’s borders, due to their more human size and shape. But as the creature’s glamour began to fade, Ned was reminded that that was where the similarities ended. The creature walked upright and easily now, the whites of his eyes turned black and his skin darkened to a wet, mottled grey. His nose grew more crooked, the tips of his ears longer, and his bony fingers now ended with claws.
“I wouldn’t come any closer if I were you,” stammered Ned.
“Why, what you gonna do about it?” jeered the gor-balin. “Not much, is what I heard …”
Ned raised his hand and focused on the band of metal at his finger – the same band of metal that had flattened a whole host of the creatures on the rooftops of St Clotilde’s. But that had been a different time and a very different Ned. He thought of ice and the air around his finger shimmered with intent. As he pictured the atoms in his mind coming together and growing still, he could feel the ring’s tendrils hum under the pores of his skin. And for a moment, just a fraction of a moment, he thought his powers had finally returned.
“Please,” he whispered.
The air crackled with the brief sparking of atoms and then, just as it had a hundred times before, his ring grew quiet and the air stilled.
“I said, don’t come any closer!” said Ned, trying to sound braver than he felt.
The dark hollows of the gob’s eyes shone and his lips broke into a smile. He walked forward, slowly now, relishing every second as Ned backed away further down the alleyway that ran alongside Mavis’s tea shop.
“So it’s true … Not the boy you was then, are you? You ain’t nothin’ without your mum and dad.”
The creature was right. But even now, powerless as he was, Ned wasn’t alone, not quite.
“To be fair, I did try and warn you. Gorrn?” he breathed.
Ned’s shadow – his slovenly familiar – did not make tea, or do the dishes. In fact, there were relatively few things the creature did well, except for fighting and biting.
“Arr,” said the shadow, and the smug grin on the gor-balin’s face was promptly removed as the darker recesses of the alley began to shift.
The shadow that was Gorrn raised himself up from the ground as a wall of toothy darkness, thickening and darkening as he stretched to fill the width