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By Root 1075 0

the knife hissing back and forth against the woody fibres. The light from the sky falls on Keir’s face, and now I can see the boy under the skin of the man, the soft features under the leaner planes, the bruised eyes that are the same, I remember now, too bloody late, as they always were, uncertain, trying to stifle panic, a child permanently on the verge of tears. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the darkness, the honeysuckle trusses stand out against the pale stone as a set of crisscrossing lines. The note of the sawing becomes harsher, the knife grating against the stone, and then snap, one of the lines parts and whips away under the blade. I flinch, expecting to see the megalith above me topple or at least jerk forward, but the dark bulk remains steady.

Keir jumps down into the pit beside me, outlined against the silvery ripples of cloud, a length of honeysuckle in his hand to bind my legs, leaning over me so I can no longer see the reflection of the sky in those teary eyes.

But he can see it in mine.

‘You awake, Ind?’

I come up so fast he doesn’t have time to react, smashing the side of my head into his nose. Keir goes over backwards, landing with an oof against the side of the pit in the shadow of the bound megalith, and I’m glad, hope he’s broken his fucking neck, the bastard, for what he did to Frannie. The knife clatters against stone, somewhere at the other end where, with luck, I won’t have to worry about it. He still has the bronze dagger on him, but I can’t think about that–my head’s ringing, dizzy from the impact with his. Thunder inside my skull is building and building until I can hardly stand it. A tiny chip of waning moon slips over the shoulder of the stone, so like a knife in the blue shivering sky that I instinctively raise my bound hands to reach for it—

—and she pours out of the sky into me, all glistening power and thunder so that every nerve in my body jolts at the same moment and the ripples in the sky run up and down my skin in a tingle that will never, ever end, scalp to fingertip, toe to groin, my heart exploding, the blood fizzing along the veins because I am me but I am also the Goddess, this is real, this is what they mean by magic, this is drawing down the moon and taking the vortex and running it in swirls round the boy so he can’t move, the thunder pinning him to the ground—

—because the thunder’s out of my head and in the air. Felt as much as heard, the beat of wings–no, rotors. Above us is a dark, bulbous shape, two flashing lights, one red, one white. The helicopter arrives overhead so fast it seems it’s risen straight up over the henge banks, out of a pit of hell located under the trees of Tolemac–but, no, that must be an illusion created by the strange things a bowl-shaped landscape does to sound.

Keir is cringing as it sweeps over us, so low I instinctively duck and he presses himself against the ground. It’s a huge black insectoid beast that has erupted from nowhere, a dark creature that flies over circles in cornfields, attended by men in black and unmarked vans. But it’s also Ed, only Ed, on his way home with a payload of tired and emotional racing trainers and owners. The whump-whump-whump is making my innards vibrate, shaking pictures from the memory crystals: Frannie on the hall floor, my mother dancing against the sunrise, the windscreen smashing and poor bloody Keir-as-he-was picking glass out of my hair, our van on fire and the smell of all my toys burning, Steve’s dead eyes under the red-lipped dent in his head. The sound is destruction. It’s the dinosaur bird, overhead, claws unfurled.

‘Back off,’ I yell, over the cacophony. There’s no way Ed could see us, surely, but he seems to know we’re underneath, and is holding the helicopter in a tight hover. It’s not him I’m shouting at, though.

‘Go away,’ I snarl at Keir, sprawled on the ground. ‘I’m not your goddess. I KILLED YOUR DAD.’

You keep your mouth shut, darlin’

I was the one who told where those boys were camping in the derelict farmhouse.

Where’s the party, Ind?

Riz, who came to my bunk in the van.

Don