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Hero Rising
Shane Hegarty
The edge-of-your-seat, monstrously-exciting, laugh-out-loud adventures of the most unfortunate monster-hunter ever to don armour… continue.Things can’t get any worse. Legends are running riot. Half-hunters are out of control. Darkmouth has been taken away from Finn and Emmie, and Finn’s dad Hugo – proud Legend Hunter – is washing dogs for a living.But something even more terrifying lurks beneath the surface: an ancient horror threatening both our world and the Infested Side.So scratch that. Things can get worse. Much worse.More than ever, Darkmouth is going to need a hero…Sadly, all it’s got is Finn.
First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is:
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright В© Shane Hegarty 2017
Illustrations copyright В© James de la Rue 2017
Cover design copyright В© HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Character illustration copyright В© James de la Rue 2017
Monster footprint illustration copyright В© Peter Crowther 2017
Shane Hegarty and James de la Rue assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008165673
Ebook Edition В© 2017 ISBN: 9780007545667
Version: 2017-04-05
For Aisling & Laoise
Contents
Cover (#ucc09fed5-2a5d-5bfe-97ac-bd7cbf0adf45)
Title Page (#u3a7ebcd9-dd84-5d55-a36a-82e20a9834ee)
Copyright (#u58afbaac-e8c7-5103-bc04-c24e55543078)
Dedication (#ud3154aee-30af-592f-872f-7539fb555370)
Maps (#ub5b8385b-8edc-513f-8a3c-5b3e7bf0304c)
Previously in Darkmouth (#u61f7afb4-be6a-5169-b953-69ba9ebbf0f8)
Chapter 1 (#u21e1fdfb-7cb4-5b23-9fe3-75604b268ee6)
Chapter 2 (#uf2d469bf-6eb3-56cc-bfc5-b68ef3c9c7be)
Chapter 3 (#u10213767-d09d-5f27-a951-8d149eeb7242)
Chapter 4 (#ubd58469c-c6a9-5ded-84d5-cf3ee119296b)
Chapter 5 (#u90f25483-24b6-5600-a769-f915e3cbb0e7)
Chapter 6 (#ub1d15c90-5a6a-5de0-8fee-2453fc245684)
Chapter 7 (#u20f25bc0-b675-5f7c-a216-5e0dcaf6db61)
Chapter 8 (#u49277d7f-f208-58fe-bc9e-9bf7ae00c221)
Chapter 9 (#u5346934f-3397-5ab2-bf50-9ff1d3ba34ca)
Chapter 10 (#u9bb2211d-b8bd-55ca-8e20-eca4938d7621)
Chapter 11 (#u0fc0eea1-3124-525b-8bbd-a52cbf6a5dde)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Meanwhile (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Thank Yous (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Shane Hegarty (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps (#ulink_62e7fd39-d413-5bdf-99f3-d667cdbd80d8)
PREVIOUSLY IN DARKMOUTH (#ulink_3a4ba66f-6a43-56aa-914a-5fec044024cd)
(How it was won. And lost.)
They had won the battle but lost Darkmouth.
There had been an invasion, a fight, death, victory … and when it was all over Finn was accused of being a traitor.
When this shocking reversal began to sink in, Finn’s mother, Clara, suggested that the awful situation should force them to do something they’d not done before.
“Let’s go on a holiday,” she said.
Worse than that, she thought she knew exactly where they should go.
“Let’s go to Smoofyland.”
Smoofyland was a theme park based on a popular TV unicorn she kept telling Finn he loved. It was fifty miles up the road from Darkmouth and yet, because Legends kept getting in the way of their plans, they’d never been.
“You would love Smoofyland,” Clara told Finn.
“I would not,” Finn insisted.
“You love Smoofy,” Clara told him.
“I do not,” he said, deeply unamused by the very suggestion.
“Well, you used to,” she said.
“When I was a baby,” he conceded.
“You had a Smoofy cake for your ninth birthday,” Clara reminded him.
“You promised not to mention that again,” said Finn.
“You used to love the Smoofy the Magic Unicorn TV show theme tune,” his mother said, before bursting into song.
“Who’s the sparkly unicorn with magic in his mane?
“Smoofy! That’s who.”
“If you sing one more line—” Finn warned.
Clara sang two more lines.
“Who’s the flying unicorn who’s friends with a rainbow train?
“Smoofy! That’s who.”
Finn did not want to hear the Smoofy theme tune. He did not want to go to Smoofyland. He did not want a holiday at all.
He wanted Darkmouth back. For his family. For his dad. For himself.
They had saved the town from an invasion by Fomorians led by the particularly brutish Gantrua, who had brought with him a house-crushing Hydra. They had rescued a group of Half-Hunters, including Emmie’s father Steve, who had been trapped between worlds by the spectral traitor Mr Glad. This had occurred on Finn’s birthday, when he was supposed to be made a proper Legend Hunter. But that did not happen because a man called Lucien had turned up, and stolen Darkmouth from them.
An assistant to the Legend Hunters’ leaders, Lucien had seemingly spent too long in a small office in a narrow corridor in a tall building in Liechtenstein, and wanted some proper action for once. He had struck lucky when all those leaders – the Council of Twelve – were desiccated at the same time.
It cleared the way for him to give orders and take control of the shell-shocked and confused Half-Hunters who had survived the Darkmouth invasion, and who didn’t know who to believe. Lucien pointed out that a boy who had spent time palling around with Legends should be the last one to trust.
Estravon Oakbound, the rule-obsessed assistant who had once journeyed with them to the Infested Side, agreed.
That sealed Finn’s fate.
Lucien captured Broonie the Hogboon and took him away for Desiccation. He stripped Finn and his father Hugo of their right to defend Darkmouth and forced them to move into a small house with Emmie and Steve.
In the weeks that followed, that house saw disappointment, anger, bewilderment, and several arguments about who ate the last of the biscuits.
What happened next? Steve was sent to Liechtenstein to report back on his strange experiences. The Half-Hunters had gone home too, as the threat was over for now – besides, most of them had to go back to their jobs as accountants or washing-machine repair technicians or balloon-animal makers and the like.
Lucien stayed in Darkmouth though, bringing loyal assistants with him. He claimed to be looking for the truth of what happened. But nothing about Lucien rang true.
It was clear to Finn and Emmie that Steve had been sent to Liechtenstein not just for information but to get him out of the way. It was even clearer that there had been a conspiracy to take Darkmouth for the assistants. Knowing how to reveal this truth was another matter.
Finn would not let it go, though. He would fight to get Darkmouth back.
There would be no holiday yet.
“You really would love Smoofyland,” his mother kept insisting. “You know it’s in Slotterton? It was an old Blighted Village, once filled with Legends, so you never know what might happen.”
“I’ll be bored and embarrassed, that’s what’ll happen,” said Finn.
“Smoofyland has a rollercoaster.” She smiled. “The sparkliest rollercoaster ever built.”
“Exactly,” said Finn.
(#ulink_b407f858-1cb1-5b6e-805b-bf8f73c7b557)
“Hello,” Finn said as he passed a man sponging down a car.
“Hello,” said the man from Bubble Blast Car Wash.
If Finn had stopped to think about it for a moment, he might have noticed that the Bubble Blast Car Wash man was washing the same part of the car over and over. And that he wasn’t really washing it too well anyway, just sort of waving a hand over a windscreen that looked shiny enough as it was.
But Finn was distracted. Firstly because he had managed to get a glob of Squishy Bar stuck between his teeth, which required trying to dislodge it with his finger. Secondly because he was following two people through the many back lanes of Darkmouth while trying not to be seen. Or heard.
Hanging back, with a baseball cap pulled low, he dialled a number on his phone. It was quickly answered.
“They’re talking about cakes, I think,” he whispered down the line.
“Cakes?” asked Emmie’s voice loudly.
“Cakes,” replied Finn.
Ahead of him, two assistants were walking purposefully towards some unknown destination. They wore the greyest of grey, as if someone had designed it specifically to be the least interesting colour ever invented. There were too many of these suits, and the assistants wearing them, around Darkmouth these days. Finn had begun to recognise these two, though. She was Scarlett. He was Greyson. Finn had made it his business to find out what they were up to.
Scarlett and Greyson stopped.
Finn nipped behind a bin, pressed in tight against the wall, and listened.
“Why hasn’t it worked?” Greyson asked. “It should have worked.”
“We can’t talk about this in public,” said Scarlett.
“We’ve added the sherbet,” replied Greyson, tapping his head as if hoping an answer would fall out. “We’ve added chocolate. We’ve even experimented with custard.”
“Please, we can’t—”
“And no one likes wasting custard.”
“Stop,” Scarlett ordered him, looking around to see if anyone was listening.
Finn was so close to them, crouched behind a bin, hardly breathing for fear of being caught. He pressed a hand against his mouth to stop himself making any noise.
“We have to be careful,” said Scarlett. “The walls have ears.”
Greyson examined the wall, ran his hand along it.
“I don’t mean they actually have ears,” said Scarlett. “Come on, let’s go.”
“If it doesn’t work at the cliff today, we should try rainbow sprinkles.”
“What did I just say?” Scarlett asked, exasperated.
They resumed their walk again. From behind the bin, squeezed into the darkness of the narrowest of gaps between buildings, Finn breathed again, mightily relieved they hadn’t heard Emmie on the far end of the phone asking repeatedly, “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” answered Finn, because he didn’t. All he knew was that something was going on. Something had been going on for a while now. Something strange. He’d spotted assistants moving suspiciously in and out and around the town. These two especially.
“They’re heading for the cliffs. Meet me there,” he said and hung up.
Using his local advantage over the assistants, Finn ducked into the laneways that criss-crossed Darkmouth. He knew that if he dipped in at Scrapers Lane there would be a shortcut to Red Alley. And if he nipped into the gap between two houses off Red Alley it would bring him to Stump Street, which in turn would allow him a quick route to Limpers Rock.
He emerged at the beach road ahead of the assistants. At the same time, Emmie arrived from another of the narrow lanes.
“Hey,” she said. “What do you think those assistants are doing? And why are you wearing a baseball cap that says �Cool Dude’?”
Finn took her elbow and pulled her around to face a shop window.
Scarlett and Greyson approached along the path. Hunched, with his baseball cap pulled down, Finn hoped they hadn’t noticed himself and Emmie or that the two of them were looking in a shop window long empty except for dead flies and dirt.
“They’re up to something,” Finn said after the assistants walked past. “They’ve been up to something for a while. We need to find out what.”
Emmie kept looking at his hat.
“And the best disguise I could do at short notice was this dumb baseball cap, OK?”
“You should have grown a moustache or something.” She smiled.
“This is serious,” Finn said. “Whatever they’re doing, we need to find out what it is so we can have our old lives back. Do you like sharing one toilet with loads of people every morning?”
“Good point,” she said. “Come on.”
The assistants climbed a path towards what remained of Darkmouth’s cliffs, a slumped mass of rock and earth on which grass grew and trees clung at precarious angles. They had collapsed when Finn’s grandfather Niall Blacktongue had returned from the Infested Side and exploded in a cave below the cliffs to destroy an army of invading Legends. During that adventure, Finn had also turned into a walking bomb and while he’d had a few explosive moments since, in the months since Gantrua’s invasion he was beginning to feel like the strange energy had finally dissipated, that he had gradually returned to something like normal. The cliff, though, would never be the same again.
Finn and Emmie took another shortcut, dashing along the stone shore, carefully making their way across the narrow strip of shingle squeezed between the soil and the sea. They clambered up the long, steep slope of weeds and grass just as the assistants arrived from the other direction. The breeze carried their curses as briars caught at their suit trousers, as they stumbled over ground that had come crashing down in one terrific, almost catastrophic implosion.
The cave.
That’s why they’re here, thought Finn. That was what they were looking for. The Cave at the Beginning of the World, as it was once known. A place where crystals had grown, where gateways to the Infested Side had popped open and shut.
But it had been destroyed, pulverised by the exploding Niall Blacktongue. Hadn’t it?
The assistants paused to look around them, and Finn and Emmie dropped behind the tendrils of a half-uprooted tree, still heavy with leaves, but its branches almost touching the ground on one side, as if it might topple fully at any moment.
They carefully manoeuvred themselves so that they were behind the web of roots that had been thrust into unwanted daylight and peered through them. The assistants were gone.
“Where are they?” asked Finn, pushing himself up for a better view.
“They just kind of dropped out of sight,” said Emmie.
They crept into the open again, carefully at first, presuming they’d see the assistants’ heads over the crest of the land. But there was no sign. They moved past a couple more lopsided trees, towards where they had last seen them, and Finn noticed a patch of ground that looked out of place, like a wig on a bald head.
He carefully pulled at it and the grass and dirt fell away like a kind of mat. It revealed a hole that, if he was to guess, was large enough to fit an adult with relative comfort.
“Is that a rope ladder just inside?” Emmie asked.
Finn knew every inch of Darkmouth – above ground and, more recently, the tunnels and caves below. “This was never here before,” he said.
From the collapsing trees angling behind them, birds sang, noisy. Something sticky landed on Finn’s neck, and he swatted at it while trying to concentrate on the voices he could hear rising from the hole in the ground.
“That didn’t work,” they heard Greyson say, and Emmie moved back instinctively, her feet pushing away a sliver of rocks and soil so they formed a tiny avalanche as they tumbled down the slope.
“We’ll try again,” they heard Scarlett reply from deep down below, in the ground.
Feeling a little braver, Finn stood higher, craned over the hole to listen better.
“Do we hold it this way, or that way?” Greyson asked.
“Well, we held it that way last time,” Scarlett replied, “so we should probably hold it this way this time and see what happens.”
Finn and Emmie looked at each other, frowning.
All went quiet. There was only the sound of the breeze and birds, and the pebbles sliding away from their feet. Finn began to wonder if the assistants had left the cave and headed out some other way.
Then a spark rose up from the darkness, a burst of light, lasting just a millisecond.
“What was that?” asked Finn.
It happened again.
And again.
“Again?” he heard Greyson ask.
“Again,” confirmed Scarlett.
There was another momentary burst of light.
Finn placed his hand on the bark of the tree to keep his balance as he leaned over the hole in the cliff, but its sap’s stickiness was enough to pull at his skin. The birds were making a lot of noise too, above them and across the trees scattered over the crumbled cliffs.
He stood to gather his thoughts, trying to pick the drying sap off his hands while figuring out exactly what to do now. “What do you think, Emmie?”
“I think there’s something very weird going on with that little bird over your head,” she said.
He looked up. A tiny finch was hanging upside down from a leaf, desperately pecking at the branch and beating its wings, unable to pull itself free.
Finn reached up to the branch and felt the sap covering the bird, and he realised it was seeping from every part of the tree. As gently as he could, he helped free the small bird. It did not fight him, its exhaustion overpowering its fear. He felt its heart beat at a panicked pulse, held it out delicately to show Emmie.
She took a bottle from her bag and gently squeezed water over the bird’s back and wings while he massaged it as carefully as he could, until the sap gradually eased out and, with a shake, the bird found freedom again in its wings.
Finn held the bird out on the palm of his hand, where it stayed for a little while longer, regaining its energy. Eventually, it spread its wings and flew, dropping low along the grass before picking up and rising higher as it disappeared across the hill towards the town. They followed its flight, Finn feeling pleased that they had freed it, saved it from certain death.
Until he realised that in every tree in sight there were birds fighting, struggling, failing to free themselves from the sap that oozed from the leaves and bark. He nudged Emmie and showed her.
“That’s weird,” said Emmie.
“Are you spying on us?” asked Scarlett, her head popping up through the hole in the ground.
“I think they were spying on you,” said Estravon, appearing behind them, flanked by two assistants, stocky men who filled their suits, thick necks spilling out over their collars. “And I’ve had to ruin a good pair of shoes spying on them. Come with me, you two. Lucien will not be happy.”
(#ulink_851d2b45-0ea2-5eaf-89fd-59d8e2f851de)
Lucien was annoyed with his kids. Lucien was always annoyed with his kids.
“Put down that head, Elektra,” Lucien ordered his daughter, an eight-year-old girl with seemingly inexhaustible batteries. She had an eye for trouble. And another eye for mayhem. Right now she was wandering around the wide, circular library of Finn’s house with a 250-year-old stuffed Minotaur head on her thin shoulders, wobbling and giggling, while her six-year-old brother Tiberius hit her with a large spear.
Finn and Emmie watched from where they stood in the long corridor, right beside the bare spot on the wall where Finn’s portrait was supposed to be hanging. Beside it was the square in which his father’s portrait was meant to be, and alongside it the dark rectangle from where his grandfather Niall Blacktongue had once gazed. He was gone too, considered the first bad apple in what Lucien had decided was a rotten crop.
“Put down that spear, Tiberius,” Lucien ordered his son.
Tiberius brought it swinging down on his sister’s head, and she staggered backwards into a shelf of ancient desiccated Legends.
From the hallway to the library, Lucien strode angrily to the door, gripped it with knuckle-whitening frustration, considered saying something, but reconsidered before slamming it shut just as Elektra hit the floor and Tiberius leaped on her tummy.
“They’ll get tired eventually,” he said.
From the other side of the door they heard the sound of a spear hitting a stuffed Minotaur head, followed by a muffled sound of pain.
Lucien drew a long, steadying breath and turned his attention to the other problematic young people in his life.
“You know the writer for The Most Great Lives is due to visit?” he said to Finn. The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters, from Ancient Times to the Modern Day was the most prestigious, popular and long encyclopaedia. Its publishers had waited years for Finn to become a proper Legend Hunter so they could print, and sell, a new version.
Unfortunately, The Most Great Lives had a section on traitors.
“They want to write an entry even though you are not yet a proper Legend Hunter,” continued Lucien, unblinking. “There is such demand for your story. Everyone wants to hear it. But the rumour is they have not yet decided if you should be among the heroes at the front, or the traitors hidden under black pages at the back of the book.”
Lucien rubbed a palm over his few wisps of hair. “So I wonder, young man, why you look so satisfied for somebody on the verge of destroying his family’s legacy?”
Letting that thought sit, Lucien set off down the corridor so that he and Emmie were forced to walk alongside him.
“How many times do you have to be told to stay out of things in Darkmouth?”
“Dunno,” Finn answered, as insolent as he could manage. “How many times has it been so far, Emmie?”
“Quite a lot,” she said.
Lucien stopped, and even though he was neither tall nor imposing, he radiated a menace that made Finn bristle all the same. He felt the hair prickle on his neck, hoped it hadn’t been noticed.
“You are a cocky young man these days,” Lucien said, his breath as sour as his mood. “You weren’t always like that. I know this from previous reports. From everything Estravon told me.”
“That was before you kicked us out of our home.” It hurt Finn to know he was only visiting his own house. He missed every part of it, and it all seemed so much sharper to his senses now he was hardly in it. The distinctive must of the corridor, of metal and wood and peeling portraits. The vinegary odour of Desiccator fluid that had leaked into the walls over the years.
Lucien’s kids had filled much of this place with their toys and clothes and stench. It made Finn nauseous to even contemplate it. But he needed to keep his mind focused on one job right now. Which was being really obnoxious to Lucien.
“I have been very lenient on you and your family given what you have done,” Lucien told him with a wave of his hand while walking on again.
“We’ve lost everything because of you,” said Finn.
“I have allowed you to stay at home here in Darkmouth.”
“The other house is not my home,” said Finn, unable to stay patient, and stepping in front of Lucien.
There was a thud and a wail from way behind them at the library door, as Elektra or Tiberius succumbed to some inevitable stuffed-Minotaur-related accident.
Lucien did not flinch. “I have allowed you to stay in Darkmouth while we examine exactly what happened, how and – most importantly – who was involved. You forget that I could have sent you and your parents to Liechtenstein HQ to be imprisoned. Or far worse.”
“Like how you sent Steve away,” said Finn.
Emmie’s face tightened at that.
“As someone who was trapped between worlds, he is helping us understand the threat we all face, that is all,” said Lucien.
“Or you’re getting one more problem out of Darkmouth,” said Finn.
“There are many worse things we could have done to your family. Many, many things that are allowed by the Legend Hunter punishment book.” Lucien paused, then called out. “Estravon?”
Estravon stuck his head out of a small training room off the corridor. “In 1867, Jan the Intolerable was made to eat forty rotten boiled eggs in under three minutes as punishment for his cowardice at the Battle of Little Death.” Estravon retreated back into the room to finish whatever he was up to in there.
“Something’s going on,” Finn said. “You’ve sent the Half-Hunters home. You’ve sent Steve to Liechtenstein. It’s almost like you want them all out of the way.”
“That’s clever. Exactly the kind of quick thinking I would want if I was, say, a traitor working for the Legends,” said Lucien, pausing at the top of the corridor at the first, and oldest, portrait of one of Finn’s ancestors. The painting itself was so ancient it was merely a square of varying brown blobs. A worn plaque beside it declared it to be of long-dead Legend Hunter Aodh the Handsome.
“You’re doing something in the cave,” said Emmie.
“It’s a place where incredibly important and dangerous crystals grow,” explained Lucien. “The only place on Earth, in fact. Those crystals have the power to spontaneously open gateways to the Infested Side. Of course we’re doing something. We’re looking into that strange phenomenon.”
Finn felt cornered, trapped by Lucien’s logic.
“You’re looking a little annoyed now,” Lucien said to him. “Be careful. I know you haven’t exploded in a while but I’ve only just had this door painted and I wouldn’t want you ruining it.”
“You can’t keep doing this,” Finn told him.
“This is your final warning,” said Lucien. “The next time you look like you’re spying on behalf of the Legends, your family will have to go. You. Your mother. Your father. All gone. No more Darkmouth. No more home.”
“You’re framing us,” said Finn.
“Emmie will be gone too. And it will be your fault.” Lucien looked at her. “I don’t even have to ask how upset you would be about that.”
Finn retreated into silence.
Lucien eyed him, pushed his glasses up his nose. “It doesn’t need to be this way. Think about that. Think about your future.”
He casually closed the front door after Finn and Emmie.
They walked down the street a bit, quietly furious, until they were at the corner to the house they now shared.
“We’ll go and check out the cave later,” Finn said. “We know how to get into it now. They’re up to something else, for sure.”
“You heard him, right?” Emmie said, sympathetic but reluctant. “We’re in danger of getting into worse trouble than we’re already in.”
“I remember when you were the one pushing me into things,” Finn said to her.
“And I remember when you were the sensible one,” she said, but he was already jogging on down the street.
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
“To see Dad at work,” Finn called back over his shoulder. “He’ll know what to do.”
So it was that, five minutes later, Finn was in the back of a shop called Woofy Wash, looking at a very grumpy Hugo giving a labradoodle a bath.
(#ulink_12bcd754-5fa2-52fb-9894-9b10e311b71f)
The labradoodle was shiny, its tongue hanging loose, its eyes covered by wringing-wet black curls, while Hugo – still officially the last and greatest Legend Hunter on Earth – cursed as he pulled a large comb through its sopping coat.
“This morning was a real mess,” Finn explained to his dad.
“Stupid, hairy, knotted mutt,” hissed Hugo, the comb tangled in doggy curls. “Why people don’t just shave their dogs bald, I don’t know.”
“Something’s up,” Finn continued, wincing at the sight of his father’s struggles. “And just because I tried to find out what it is, Lucien threatened to kick us out of Darkmouth altogether.”
“You have no idea how long it took to clean this animal’s paws,” Hugo griped without pause. “I think it walked through wet tar to get here, or something. I had to use a toothbrush to get in the gaps.”
He pulled again at the dog’s coat. The labradoodle yelped.
“Brush it first, before washing it,” said Finn.
Hugo stopped – the comb snagged in the dog’s newly shampooed hair – and looked hard at his son in a way that suggested he didn’t want advice but might have to take some anyway.
“You should brush dogs before washing them,” repeated Finn. “It makes it easier to comb them afterwards.”
At another time in his life, Finn had wanted to be a vet instead of a Legend Hunter. It wasn’t that he’d given up on that dream; it was just that for a while now he’d had no choice.
Silently, Hugo seemed to accept the advice and began to calmly untangle the comb from the dog’s coat, as if he’d had his rant and let off the required steam.
Hugo’s boss, Mr Green, passed behind and, without stopping, without even looking at Hugo, said, “You should have had that labradoodle polished up and out by now, Hugo. You’ve two cats to primp and a guinea-pig haircut to do, all before mid-morning break.”
This kicked Hugo back into grumpiness and he pulled a little hard on the comb, causing the poor dog to yelp again.
“And next time you should brush the dog before you wash it,” said Mr Green, disappearing into the front of the shop.
“I was in school with that jumped-up fool,” Hugo murmured so that only Finn could hear. “He never liked me. He’s loving every minute of this. The second I’m done with this job, I’m going to give him a soaking so strong it’ll shrink him to a size no bigger than this dog’s—”
He stopped, glancing at Finn.
“We could have done with you out there this morning,” Finn said. “We could do with you out there every time this happens.”
“I know that,” his father hissed. “I want to be out there, not here, up to my elbows in dog fleas. But without access to our own house, this is the only way we can get enough of the chemicals to make our own Desiccator fluid. Without this, when an invasion happens again – and it will happen – we’ll be fighting off Legends with nothing but guinea-pig hair clips. I just wish the right combination of chemicals could be found in, I don’t know, the ice cream shop or somewhere. Not here, with these poodledors—”
“Labradoodles,” Finn corrected him.
“Whatever they’re called,” said Hugo, pulling at the dog’s coat. “Either way, these things have … Too … Many … Curls.”
The dog whimpered, but was finally free of the combing. Hugo let it down off the table to scamper to a basket and chew on a rubber bone.
Mr Green appeared once more in the washing area, again passing by without stopping. “A rabbit’s done its business on the shop counter,” he said. “Wipe it up before you move on to Killer.”
“Killer?” asked Hugo.
“The guinea pig.”
Hugo looked like he might swing a fist, or maybe an entire labradoodle, at his boss.
“But we had better get Darkmouth back soon,” Hugo said. “If I have to wash another mutt’s you-know-what, I’ll go insane. More insane than I am now anyway.”
Finn knew his father had sacrificed many things over the years in order to fulfil his duty as a Legend Hunter. He’d never holidayed. He’d never been able to relax during a rainstorm. He’d never stopped training, thinking, planning, day and night and next day again. But this seemed to be the greatest sacrifice of all. Swapping his dignity for a couple of bottles of doggy shampoo.
Hugo looked around to make sure Mr Green had gone, then pulled six small plastic bottles from under the table and pressed them into Finn’s schoolbag.
“That’s a couple of litres of Shampoodle,” he said. He then reached across for a box from the shelf. “And one packet of Fabulous Fish Fin Formula. They’ll shrink a jumbo jet when mixed right. Just don’t be seen leaving with them or I’ll lose my job.”
Hugo took a moment to contemplate that possibility, knowing being sacked would be a sweet release from the doggy drudgery.
“No,” he said. “I can’t think about losing my job. I must plough on. It’s the only way for now.”
“You keep saying that, Dad, but what’s changing?” said Finn, grabbing a towel and laying it over the labradoodle’s sodden back. “Nothing. It’s getting worse out there and you’re stuck in here.”
“Listen to me, Finn,” Hugo said. “Do you think I want to be here? Do you think my only plan is spending my life with pets whose toenails are out of control?”
“Then what is your plan?” Finn asked, frustration building. “Because I don’t see it.”
“I have it under control, Finn. You just need to be patient.”
“And while we wait,” Finn said, “we’re crammed into a small house, waiting for disaster, knowing they’re scheming something but we just can’t see what yet.” He was getting properly angry now.
His father stopped towelling the dog. “Please just go to school, play football, do whatever, but I need you to let me deal with this in case things really do get out of control.”
Mr Green shouted from outside the room, “Hugo! Rabbit poo! Now!”
Hugo gritted his teeth. Took a long, calming breath. “You need to understand, Finn,” he said before leaving. “The most effective way to grab victory is to first look like you’ve lost everything.”
“That makes no sense,” Finn muttered, alone now.
The labradoodle sneezed, covering Finn in flecks of water.
Wiping himself down, Finn stepped into the salty Darkmouth air. Things were definitely as bleak as they’d ever been. He could sense it. It was as if the world itself had darkened. Then Finn realised that it had. While he’d been in with his dad, a low, heavy cloud had dragged itself across the sky. The bright, cloudless blue of the day had given way to a near twilight.
A drop of rain splashed on to Finn’s shoulder. He put his hand out and caught two more.
It wasn’t supposed to rain today.
The rain fell heavier, stinging drops hopping off his head, bouncing off the road around him.
Rain meant Legends, breaking through.
Finn looked up, took a raindrop in the eye. He wiped it away, and when he did he realised that the ground around him was being lit by a growing golden glow.
Finn felt a tiny prick in his neck, like he’d been stung, smacked at his skin as he swung around to meet the chest of someone. Something. He looked up, saw an eye staring at him. One eye. No more.
“Sorry, kid,” the Legend said, voice deeper than hell. “You’re coming with us.”
(#ulink_53d1ee6c-30e5-5e15-9717-fd2472f62d10)
The gateway opened for a few seconds.
About three minutes later, four panting assistants finally arrived at the scene, carrying Desiccators awkwardly. They’d been delayed by an argument about which alley to run down. Half of them had said they should go right. Half said they should go left. They ended up going straight ahead which, by sheer luck, was exactly where they should have gone in the first place.
They burst into the dead end near the back of Woofy Wash, where the gateway had torn its way into our world.
But there was no gateway.
There were no Legends.
Even the rain had gone, stopping so suddenly it was as if someone had turned off the shower tap.
The assistants looked at each other with some bemusement.
“There’s nothing here,” said one of them.
“I told you we should have gone right,” said another.
“You said we should have gone left. I said we should go right,” said a third.
A noise startled them and the assistants lifted the Desiccators they’d brought.
But it was only Hugo, throwing out a basin of dirty, rabbit-poo-filled water.
They kept their weapons raised. He paused, liquid slopping about the edge of the basin.
The assistants lowered their weapons. Hugo threw the water along the ground, so that it lapped and splashed at their gleaming shoes, then returned inside.
As if a single entity, the assistants turned to clatter and bump their way away from the dead end back towards the main street, still arguing about which direction they should have gone in.
But someone else remained unseen. Emmie had followed their movements, knowing they’d be so wrapped up in the thought of catching Legends that she could shadow them easily.
She crouched to the ground, found a patch of dust, exactly the sort created when something comes through a gateway. But there was only one smattering, as if a large foot had been placed in this world, and immediately withdrawn. Otherwise, there was no sign of scratch marks on walls, or bite marks on bins.
Nothing.
She was about to leave the scene when something else caught her eye. A small bottle of Shampoodle rolling across the ground, spilling a dull blue chemical from its open top.
Emmie walked to it, rolled it with her foot and glanced back at the door of Woofy Wash.
Something was wrong, although she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Finn would know what to do, she decided.
She set off to find him.
(#ulink_556d23cf-a363-540c-bf3c-25905960bee3)
Finn woke.
He was trapped in a small space, so dark he could see nothing at all, not even the hand in front of his face.
Hold on, he thought, maybe my hand is missing.
No. He wiggled his fingers and it felt like they were all present and correct. But he still had no sight. No light. Only a sandpapery surface at his back and a gooey, ribbed roof he could feel inches from his face.
Panic grabbed him, even as his mind was slow to get moving, heavy, dopey, unable to quite fix on where he was or how he had got here. He tried to stay composed, to figure it out.
The sharp sting on his neck. Passing out. He must have been drugged, Finn thought, and dragged here. Wherever here was.
The smell was so deeply terrible it was invading every pore in his body. He would need a change of skin if he ever got out of here. He tasted it on his tongue, wanted to pull his tongue out in disgust.
It would be pointless trying to find a way to describe the stench in Earthly terms, because there was nothing on Earth like it. It was a smell that belonged only to one place.
The Infested Side.
Finn’s breath quickened. He groped for a wall either side of him, and found bars of some sort, surrounding him on at least three sides. And those bars were wedged into a hard but slippery surface. The fourth side was narrow and soft and his hand couldn’t quite find the wall.
It made his stomach crawl. Or maybe that was the movement he now realised he was feeling in jolts. He was moving. In fact the whole room was moving.
Up. Drop.
Up. Drop.
A damp breeze blasted through each time it rose, heating his ears. There was also a deep, unnerving gurgle from somewhere terribly close.
Finn wriggled on to his tummy, feeling the roughness against his face, giving him the shudders as he reached out and pushed his hands through the bars, whose dark outlines he could just make out against the redness of the walls.
He prised open a gap in his prison, working it wider with his fingers, just enough for grey light to pour into the space and show him the bars were, in fact, large fangs.
He was lying on a tongue.
A pink tongue, rough and pulsating with each of the breaths pushing up from the throat at which his feet dangled.
A giant tongue, in a giant mouth.
Finn allowed himself to panic some more. It had been a bad day already but now he was something’s lunch. Could this day get any worse?
Pushing his face towards the crack in the mouth of whatever creature was carrying him, Finn saw water rushing past outside, a blur of dark waves, getting closer. And closer. He retreated just before the creature hit the sea, brine leaking through the mouth as Finn breathed hard and shallow.
Yes.
His day could get worse.
Up. They were out of the water.
Drop. Whooosh. Back into it.
A few seconds later, the creature hit something hard, slid to a sudden halt. Finn gripped on to a long tooth to stop himself being thrown back into the deep cavern of the creature’s gullet.
Blurpp. A rumble was building from deep within the throat, getting louder, closer.
Oh no, thought Finn, at the precise moment a belch hit him.
The mouth opened and he was propelled into the grey light of the Infested Side.
He looked around, dazed. He was lying on a shoreline, a beach of smashed rock in the shadow of a looming mountain, chunks missing from its slopes and most of it swallowed by heavy cloud.
The sea creature retreated into the waters before Finn could even get a proper look at it. He was instead distracted by a huge figure approaching up the beach, feet stuffed into boots with three clawed toes stabbing through. It had granite hands, muscles popping from the wide shoulders. Glancing up, Finn realised this was the single-eyed giant, the Cyclops that had grabbed him from Darkmouth in the first place. This must be one of Gantrua’s goons, out for revenge.
It snarled something at him.
Finn jumped to his feet, his skin sticky with sea-creature saliva, his hair flattened and damp, his legs numb from being trapped in such a small space for … well, he didn’t know how long. But they had enough feeling left to help him scramble across cutting stones among which were scattered splintered and broken tools – axes, knives, picks, hammers.
He stumbled, saw the nearing shadow of the Legend. He needed a plan. Perhaps he had an expert move learned over many hours at training. Maybe he could threaten to explode, just as he had done before in this world – draw himself up and stare even the mightiest of them down with his power. Even if he didn’t really have it any more.
Instead, Finn did what he had so often done best.
He ran.
He heard the roars and shouts of other Legends joining the Cyclops. He didn’t look back. He needed to keep pushing along the shifting rock and broken tools of this beach, which sloped upwards now, away from the sea towards the scarred mountain and, he hoped, some sort of shelter. The Legends were closing. His legs burned with adrenalin. He needed to keep climbing this slope, to get somewhere safe.
Finn reached the top of the slope and went straight over a cliff.
(#ulink_370fbde1-e862-5e4c-8a2b-04b0969d1056)
Finn held on to a blackened, blasted tree root, one foot dangling over a sheer drop that a quick and frightening glance told him went down far enough that there were dark angry waves where the floor should be.
The sea. On both sides. He was on some sort of narrow cliff jutting perilously out over the waves.
And he had come within a Manticore’s whisker of falling straight off, had thrown a hand out just quick enough to save himself. For now.
He wrapped his arms around this lone root and prayed it would not break. He never wanted to let go.
Above him was dark cloud. Below him was darker sea. And behind him on the cliff, he realised, was a pair of boots bigger than his head. Three claws were sticking through one of them. The Cyclops.
“Don’t be trying to fly out of here,” said the deep-voiced Legend, offering a hand.
Finn’s grip slipped a little on the slimy root. He grunted with the effort of holding on, but he wouldn’t be able to for much longer. He felt dead either way.
Then a more familiar voice intruded.
“Accept that helping hand,” it said.
Finn saw four paws on the ledge now. Beside them, the lime-green arrowhead of a snake dropped into his eyeline.
“We need your help,” said Hiss, “and you won’t be much use if you’re dead.”
(#ulink_897c753d-2a41-5da6-8e26-9c9535fff255)
“The number you have dialled is either unavailable or—”
Emmie didn’t wait to let the message finish but ended the call, put the phone back in her pocket and continued her search for Finn. She’d tried contacting him several times in the couple of hours since the gateway appeared. There had been no answer yet.
She had also walked a good part of the town, head up, watching out for him, ignoring the usual glares of the fearful townspeople and the curiosity of the assistants infesting Darkmouth.
She had not found Finn, nor any sign of him. Nothing about this felt right. She broke into a run, rounded a badly bent signpost, ducked around a postbox with a dent punched in it, jumped across a puddle of rainwater and almost knocked Lucien over as they collided at a turn in the street.
“Take it easy there, young lady,” he said, stepping back and searching for something on the ground. He found his pen, picked it up, began to weave it through his fingers in a practised fashion. “I got this pen the day I graduated as an assistant. Writes with squid ink. Don’t want to lose it.”
She went to pass him.
“Where’s your friend?” he asked, causing her to stop.
Emmie loathed Lucien but there was the fact of his superior rank and she had to recognise that or it might make things far worse for her and her dad. And things were bad enough as they were.
Lucien sensed something amiss about her. “Is everything all right?” he said, pen tumbling through those long fingers. Across. Back again. “You seem in a great hurry.”
“I just want to get home,” she said, not wanting to look at him but hardly able to avoid seeing the swish of the pen. “In case it rains again.”
“Yes, the rain,” said Lucien, looking up, sniffing the air almost theatrically. “It wasn’t in the forecast. Strange.”
Even with her back to an open street, Emmie felt backed into a corner.
“So, no Finn? What’s he up to?”
“Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you,” she said, finally looking him in the eyes. She immediately regretted it – feeling like she’d given him a small victory.
“I wouldn’t expect you to tell me,” said Lucien, smiling. Or, at least, using a smile to cover over whatever was really going on in his mind. “It’s all part of the job to keep secrets, Emmie. Important to remain silent under questioning. To trust no one.”
“What job?” she replied, trying to be as rude as possible without giving away the nervous anger she really felt. “You took all this from us when you came in here and accused everyone of being a traitor.”
“I accused no one of anything,” said Lucien.
Emmie paah-ed at that idea.
“You might dismiss that, and you’d be wrong, but I don’t blame you. Maybe you’re a little young to appreciate the nuances of an investigation. I simply looked at the evidence and came to objective conclusions. Anyone else would have done the same. Once I saw the highly unusual events happening here, precautions were needed. After all, here we were in Darkmouth, with a boy and his family who had a habit of going to the Infested Side, fraternising with Legends, and bringing back trouble.”
“Finn was a hero,” insisted Emmie. “I saw it. I went to the Infested Side too.”
“So did Estravon, and like him you surely have to admit you don’t know what was really going on with Finn at all times.” He let that idea sink in before continuing. “I worry you’re getting dragged into whatever he’s up to.”
“Nobody’s dragging me into anything,” she said.
Lucien was still doing that thing with the pen. Through the fingers, across and back again. It was really beginning to bother Emmie. He noticed it. Stopped. Slipped it into his suit’s breast pocket.
“You’ve proven yourself an exceptional apprentice Legend Hunter,” he said to her. “Honestly, really exceptional. Steve, your father, must be very proud.”
Emmie shuffled, uncomfortable, and feeling alone now she was reminded that her dad was stuck so far away in Liechtenstein.
“You should have been next in line for Completion after Finn,” said Lucien. “You should be first in line now.”
“I need to go home,” she said, and tried again to move past Lucien.
He stayed where he was, simply loitering on the spot, looking skyward once again, examining the town around them as if he just hadn’t noticed her desire to get going.
“You could be the next Legend Hunter, the first in many years,” Lucien said, his eyes still on the surroundings. “I’m pretty sure that once the investigation is complete, you and your father will be free to get on with your lives, to claim your place among the Legend Hunters.”
Emmie squeezed past him, forced him to step aside to let her past, then turned to him, feeling her nails digging into her clenched palms. “I know you’re trying to turn me against Finn,” she told him, voice trembling with anger. “It won’t work.”
Lucien remained eerily unflappable. Somehow, he had another pen in his hand, was turning it too through his fingers. “You only have to ask yourself one simple question, Emmie,” he said. “Do you really know what Finn is up to?”
He thrust the pen into his breast pocket, turned and walked away.
(#ulink_a98cc5e1-63c3-56c9-a192-95578c876c32)
Cornelius was scratching. Hiss was complaining. It was exactly how Finn remembered the Orthrus, this strange hybrid of dog-body and snake-tail.
He had met them over thirty years ago. Or only a year ago. It depended on your perspective. Time travel had been involved. Headaches had resulted.
“After all our years together, I still pray you will satisfy that itch one of these days,” Hiss said to Cornelius as the canine adjusted himself and started a new round of intense scratching.
Finn had taken the hand of the one-eyed Legend and allowed himself to be hauled up to safety. He’d then been led back down the slope to the beach, huddling against the scraped rock wall at the base of the mountain. It looked like it had been hacked away, piece by piece, and its debris left to scatter the beach. Even the slope he had climbed he now saw to be a path made by hand, or claw.
And the tools littering the ground had a variety of handles and grips, to accommodate, he guessed, the variety of hands and paws and claws that had done the clearing.
The Cyclops chewed slowly on a cigar-shaped rock, rolling it across his mouth from one side to the other while he watched Finn, who couldn’t quite shake off his wariness bordering on fear. He’d studied Legends, read the guidebooks. The Cyclops was not supposed to exist. It was a myth even among Legends.
On the Cyclops’s shoulder perched a tiny Legend, no taller than Finn’s leg, with a squashed pink nose, wide eyes and rounded grey face, so that he looked not unlike a squirrel, but not entirely like a squirrel either. He was smiling with unfathomable excitement. Finn guessed he was a Sprite.
A fourth Legend lurked further along in the tall grooves of the rock face. Finn could not see much of this creature but for the eyes, black slits on yellow. Finn had seen eyes like that before, but couldn’t recall where. They flooded him with dread.
“What is this place?” Finn asked over the sound of the sea sucking at the stones like it was trying to steal them.
“You’ll have a lot of questions, kid,” said the Cyclops, “and we’ve very little time so pay attention. First, you’re on an island.”
“Tornclaw. In the middle of the Great Ocean of the Dead,” said the Sprite in a helium-high voice, smiling brightly as if delighted to see Finn. It scrambled down the Cyclops’s arm and around behind Finn to get a closer look at him.
“Those tools you see? They’re here because this whole island used to be a crystal quarry,” continued the Cyclops. “It once stretched all the way out into the sea there, but has been hacked away until only the mountain is left. There are no crystals any more, just the bones of those once forced to work here.”
“…” Finn started to say.
“How did you get here? We found you because the little guy …” he pointed at the Sprite lurking at Finn’s legs, “… traced you through an energy imprint you’re leaking since you exploded in this place all those years ago. He can see you through the invisible walls separating our worlds.”
“I can’t see you clearly, though.” The Sprite grinned. “You look more like an orange blob.”
Cornelius was still scratching an itch while Hiss got out of the way.
The other, quiet Legend stayed half out of sight, except for those burning eyes.
“But most of all,” the Cyclops said to Finn, “you’re wondering, how are you talking to a Cyclops when they don’t exist in the first place?”
“That’s not what I was wondering,” Finn said, even though it was what he was wondering. Or at least, one of the things he was wondering.
The Cyclops leaned back, grinning. “Well, you’d be right to wonder.”
“If that’s what you were wondering,” clarified the Sprite, looking up at Finn while picking at the fabric of his jeans.
Finn swatted him away, and he backed off without complaint.
“We don’t exist,” said the non-existent Cyclops. “True, I have one eye. But it wasn’t always that way.” He paused and gave Finn a closer look at the scar circling an eye that appeared to have been pulled over across his face; around it was a patch of crooked, raised skin that looked like it had been carved with a stone and stitched back with that same stone. “I’m Fomorian, like Gantrua. But we had a little disagreement. This was the result. And now I work for your old pals here.”
Cornelius had finally stopped scratching, and Hiss was able to lift himself, curled and steady, to meet Finn’s gaze. “His name is Sulawan. Our tiny friend there is Beag. And I am sorry we had to grab you like that. It was the easiest way.”
“The easiest way?” exclaimed Finn. “You put me in the mouth of a sea creature.”
“A Leviathan, to be precise,” Sulawan the sort-of-Cyclops said.
“Which means that you, pal, got the luxury trip.”
“It didn’t smell like luxury,” said Finn.
“The rest of us had to rely on being flown here by Quetzalcóatl,” growled Sulawan. “They don’t like carrying me, and I sure as hell don’t like being carried.”
As if on cue, a shadow crossed the beach, a wing slicing through the cloud cover. Finn looked up and saw one of the Quetzalcóatls – a kind of enormous flying serpent that looked too broken to fly yet did so majestically. Some of them had led the resistance against Gantrua when Finn first came here, had controlled the Orthrus through some psychic trickery. But they had also been at war with serpents loyal to Gantrua. He had seen them fight in a great sky battle when rescuing his father from the Infested Side.
“Uncomfortable as it was, we are always in danger of attack in the skies so the Leviathan was about the best way to hide you and get you here to some sort of sanctuary. There is a lot we need to keep you safe from,” explained Hiss. “There is the danger of other Quetzalcóatls trying to grab you. And the Leviathan is big and tough enough to keep you hidden from some … other very dangerous threats.”
“Why?” asked Finn over the sound of the tide grinding on stone. “Gantrua is gone. I stopped him. Me and Emmie did.”
Sulawan took the rock from his mouth, worn almost to a stub. He decided there was a little more chewing in it. “Yeah, well, when you grabbed Gantrua you let loose something far worse.”
Cornelius whimpered, shook his heads; his ears whipped around.
Finn looked to Hiss. “I don’t understand. I thought with him gone, things would be better here.”
“They were,” said Hiss. “For a time.”
“But when you rip the head off a Hydra,” said Sulawan, “you shouldn’t be surprised when two more grow back.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m new to this,” argued Finn. “I’ve stared down the throats of a Hydra.”
“It’s a metaphor, kid,” said Sulawan, amused by his spirit. “And you might want to turn down the attitude a little. My friend over there doesn’t react too well to attitude.”
The hidden Legend remained in the shadows of the rock, eyes yellow, silent. It bothered Finn, although he was distracted by Beag the Sprite at his leg, staring up, delight glued on to his face.
“So, why bring me here?” Finn asked.
“To answer a question,” Hiss said. “Is Gantrua still alive?”
Finn considered this. They’d gone to all this trouble, and that was the question?
“Yes,” he answered. “Sort of. He was desiccated.”
A shudder ran through everyone. Finn sensed it even from the Legend in the shadows. Even the sea seemed to smack at the broken ground extra loudly.
“Where is he kept, kid?” asked Sulawan.
“In my house, I suppose. My old house. An assistant called Lucien took it from us.”
“So if you had to, you could get Gantrua back?” asked Hiss. Cornelius moaned a touch, shook the muscles beneath his sleek but weathered coat.
Finn was stunned by the idea of returning the Fomorian, had to replay the sentence in his head to make sure he’d heard it correctly. Once again a shadow passed overhead, darkness crossing Finn’s face and jolting him back into reality.
“Who would want to bring Gantrua back?” he asked.
No one answered.
“You want to bring Gantrua back?”
“Not really, kid,” said Sulawan, stubby rock crunching between his chipped teeth.
“But we have no choice,” said Hiss. “When he left this world, he left us a gift in case he ended up trapped in the Promised World. A sort of … insurance policy. To wreak devastation in the Infested Side.”
“What did he leave?” Finn asked.
A QuetzalcГіatl swung from the clouds, circled and shot out across the sea. They followed its path.
“It looks like we will be able to show you,” said Hiss.
With a whine, Cornelius stood and followed a narrow curve around the edge of the mountain, with Hiss swinging gently behind. Sulawan pushed up behind Finn, glaring at him with his one eye to encourage him to follow. Beag was scampering across too. Finn couldn’t quite see where the other, silent Legend had got to.
He almost tripped on the broken tools that scattered the entire beach.
“This island was once rich with crystals, and the mines were here for many years,” said Hiss sadly. “So many spent their lives here and gave their lives here. They hacked and hammered at this island in search of opportunities to open a way to the Promised World. Piece by piece, strike by strike, over so many years, so many lives, until most of the island itself was lost beneath the ocean.”
Finn walked carefully after the Orthrus. A new serpent appeared above them, where the mountain met cloud, and dived straight towards a point about one hundred metres out to sea. Finn could see that out there the ocean was bubbling, foaming.
“Out there in the depths are many bones, long covered over by the encroaching water,” continued Hiss. “But it turns out that Gantrua found a way to rouse the dead, wherever they lie in this world.”
“You call us Legends, kid,” said Sulawan, “but we have Legends in our world. And when they become real, they’re far scarier than anything you humans can imagine.”
Cornelius moaned, pitiful. They stopped and peered out at the frothing sea. Finn wasn’t sure what exactly he was looking at.
“Wherever there are dead, this creature finds life,” said Hiss. “And in this place, there are dead everywhere.”
“He left a creature to ravage this world, and there is only one way to stop it,” said Sulawan.
“A charm,” said Beag, flat nose twitching.
“He took it with him,” explained Hiss. “To Darkmouth. You see, he was wearing it. When he crossed over. When you desiccated him. We need that charm. Which means we need Gantrua too.”
One of the QuetzalcГіatls stopped circling, shot back towards where they stood on the beach. Hiss straightened, gripped in a psychic link with the creature, just as Finn had seen before.
“It is happening,” said Hiss, in a droning voice that sounded as if it came from someone else.
“What’s happening?” asked Finn.
Hiss stared ahead. “The dead are rising.”
(#ulink_edbc509b-2ac5-5ed5-80c7-85f73f8eda34)
The waves came at the shore in spiteful bursts, lifting themselves only to smash down hard. But even the waves seemed to avoid the circle of boiling water out in the depths.
“That thing forming in the deep is what they call Gashadokuro, or just the Bone Creature,” Hiss continued. “Millions of the tiniest of organisms come together, binding the bones so that the Gashadokuro rises and rampages anywhere in this world where there are bones to build from. The only way to stop it for good is with the emerald charm Gantrua carried with him to your world. He knew we would have to rescue him if we ever wanted to defeat the terrible creature he left behind.”
Finn watched the spitting sea, which was becoming more active by the second.
“Shouldn’t we … um … move?” he said.
“Don’t worry,” said Sulawan. “The sea is deep and the Bone Creature not so tall. Yet. We have time. But it is growing ever stronger. If you don’t find us Gantrua and his charm, then it will not be stopped until we are all dead and our bones joined with it.”
The circle of water was widening, darkening. Beag the Sprite hid behind Sulawan’s thick legs. For the first time Finn noticed the mysterious fourth Legend was still with them, but again pressed into the shadows of the rock wall. He couldn’t seem to see its shape, only its yellow eyes.
“Maybe we should g-get out of here,” stammered Beag. “You know, just in case.”
Finn looked at the Orthrus to see if Cornelius and Hiss were as fearful. Hiss appeared to be whispering something calming in Cornelius’s ear.
From the depths, the sound grew. It also appeared to be coming closer.
“The Gashadokuro has grown bigger with every visit, but has never reached this island,” said Sulawan. “We should be safe here.”
With an explosion of spray, something massive punched upwards, forcing a shock wave across the water. It frightened Finn enough that he stumbled back, lost his footing on the uneven ground and fell towards the cutting debris.
Sulawan grabbed him by the arm, held him as he dangled awkwardly, his view of the creature obscured by falling water and black seaweed. But he could make out a yellowed concoction of bones among the dark surf, a ghastly frame forming a makeshift skull with cavernous eye sockets hit by waves.
Sulawan jolted Finn back away from the sea. “That thing’s bigger than before,” he said to Hiss.
The Bone Creature started to push forward, forcing itself through the high waves.
“It shouldn’t be able to get to us,” said Hiss.
“Yet it is getting to us,” said Beag, jittery now and backing away behind the retreating Sulawan.
Where the sea grew shallower, the Bone Creature was slowly emerging now, its skull clearing the water, followed by shoulders made up of many layers of bones. It was accompanied by the sound of scraping through the earth, its feet crunching across the seabed. The shale and broken tools at Finn’s feet shifted.
“It is much bigger than before,” Hiss said to the other Legends. “We should—”
A great bone hand reached out from the sea.
“Run!” said Beag, leaping on to Sulawan’s shoulder.
Before Finn could take two steps, Sulawan swept him up under one armpit and began to stride hard along the uncertain ground.
Behind them a hand smashed down on the shore, a thump of splintering bones that fell like shrapnel around those fleeing.
The serpents dived from above, attacked the Bone Creature, but Finn couldn’t see if they were having any effect on it.
“Finn, we need to say goodbye now,” Hiss said. “Sulawan will explain your mission.”
Before Finn could ask anything else, the Legends broke off in different directions, Sulawan running with Finn under his arm.
The bone fist cracked the beach between them. Being shaken around half upside down, Finn made out only the blur of bone hitting rock, and the way the scattered splinters immediately swept back together and returned to the Bone Creature’s hand as it lifted it free, ready for another attack.
Sulawan pounded across the shore, Finn held solidly and helplessly in the crater of his armpit – his nose millimetres from being worn away to a nub on the rock wall.
Beag was clinging on to Sulawan’s shoulder with apparent ease despite the sharp turns and juddering speed.
They reached the part of the beach where Finn had first arrived on the island, the pathway running up to the cliff he’d almost fallen off. Sulawan slowed, and peering around his forearm Finn could see only glimpses of the Bone Creature swinging wildly at circling, dive-bombing serpents.
“Let go,” Finn just about managed to say.
Sulawan let go, dropping Finn on to stony ground.
“I didn’t mean let go like that,” said Finn, winded.
Sulawan grunted.
Above them, more serpents were appearing through the clouds to pour towards the creature.
“Call him,” Cyclops said to Beag.
The tiny Legend stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled so loudly that shrill, piercing sound still rang in Finn’s ears after he had stopped.
Above them, a serpent reappeared with the Orthrus in its jaws, taking Cornelius and Hiss to safety.
The mountain shook with the sound of battle.
“OK, kid, this is where you go home,” said Sulawan. “Next time I see you, you’ll have Gantrua in your pocket.”
“I can’t do that,” Finn told him. “That would be crazy.”
Leaning down and thrusting his single eye in Finn’s face, Sulawan snarled. “I hear old Cornelius and Hiss saved your life once. And your father’s. Maybe you should think about that before going all selfish on us.”
There was a stirring in the water, a blackness moving through the waves towards them.
“So, let’s say I decide to grab Gantrua,” asked Finn hurriedly. “What then? I just reanimate him, tell him it’s all been a big mistake, ask him for a charm and hope he doesn’t pull my head off?”
“You call us,” said Cyclops, and handed him a tube, a little longer than Finn’s open hand, and made of some kind of thick shell, ridged and lumpy on the outside but smooth inside its rim.
“In here are three of the crystals we smuggled out of this mine over the years and kept out of Gantrua’s hands. You push the end of this Gatemaker, a crystal will poke out the other end. It’ll be enough to punch a gateway open for a brief few seconds. We’ll know you’re ready then.”
Finn took the thing, felt a squirming within the thick shell.
“The crystals are attached to living scaldgrubs,” said Beag, “so they can survive the trip to your world.”
He saw the disgust on Finn’s face.
“Don’t worry, they’re only baby scaldgrubs,” said Sulawan. “Just don’t go putting your finger in there. They nibble.”
“I can’t steal Gantrua,” said Finn.
“You will. For some reason Hiss thinks you can be trusted with this job,” said Sulawan.
“Sulawan doesn’t trust anyone,” said Beag, smiling.
The noise from the other side of the cliff was of pure havoc, of serpents screeching, of the Bone Creature attacking.
“This is a crazy plan, you do realise that?” Finn said over the encroaching noise.
Sulawan thought about that. “Yeah,” he decided. “It is.”
The dark shadow in the sea rose, pushing up a humped film of water and creating a wave that raced away either side of it.
“One last question before you go,” said Sulawan. “Why have you humans been trying to open gateways into our world?”
Finn shook his head. “I didn’t. We haven’t been.”
“Well, someone has,” said Sulawan. “Someone on your side.”
Then Finn remembered what he’d seen at the cliff back home. The assistants. That’s what they must have been doing with the crystals, he realised. Trying to open gateways.
“Actually …” he said. “I think I know who that might be.” But it was madness. Why would they do that? Why would they deliberately try to open gateways to the Infested Side, in a town that had always tried desperately to protect against that very thing?
“Well, here’s some free advice. They’d better stop,” said Sulawan. “If they keep trying to punch a hole to our world, some day they’re going to open one they won’t be able to close.”
“He needs to get into the Leviathan now,” Beag said, watching the advancing form breaking through the churning waters.
“Back into that mouth?” asked Finn, aghast at the idea of being thrust into the slobbering jaws of a sea monster. “I can’t.”
“Would you prefer to be unconscious?” asked Beag. From somewhere, he had produced a needle of bone – a long serpent’s tooth perhaps. A glint of liquid dripped from the end of it.
“No!” screamed Finn.
Sulawan grabbed him, held his arms down. “The Leviathan will take you away from here. It’s quicker than the Bone Creature. Hopefully.”
Finn felt helpless in Sulawan’s grip. “You’re not putting me to sleep again,” he yelled over the racket.
They put him to sleep again.
Finn’s last memory was of the world tumbling as the jaws of a Leviathan rose from the ocean depths to swallow him.
(#ulink_975d78ae-0525-5f77-bb2a-29a556a75c23)
Finn woke on a stone beach, while being pecked at by a seagull.
It ate a touch of the dust that surrounded him, immediately regretted it, gagged as it flew away.
Shocked, Finn jumped to his feet, saw the outline of his body in dust on the shingle. The sea lapped at his feet, washed the dust away. He slapped the rest of it from himself, felt his head to make sure his mind was still there and briefly wondered if he had been in a dream.
But that smell couldn’t be imagined. He stank very badly – the stench of the Infested Side. Of sweat. Of the breath of a belching sea monster. He briefly considered jumping in the water to be free of it, and only then realised it was raining. Heavy drops, but already easing off.
The dust was also evidence that he had been on the Infested Side. He remembered one other thing, patted around his pocket until he found the shell tube attached to his leg. This was the Gatemaker, the way back to the Infested Side when he wanted it. Scaldgrubs squirmed inside. Finn’s stomach squirmed with them.
The task they’d given him was a crazy one. Should he do it? He reckoned he could pull it off. After all he’d done before, everything he’d been through, he thought he’d find a way. Somehow. He just wasn’t sure he should.
Finn started to move on up the beach, the loose shingle giving way beneath his feet, adding to his general exhaustion. He reached the grass between the beach and the road just as, from further up the coastline, he saw the arrival of three assistants. They must have been alerted by the brief flickering of the gateway that had released him back home.
He hid out of sight, crouched behind a wall as they passed. And once they were gone, he darted low across the road to an alleyway to start back to the house he still refused to call home.
“Where have you been all day, Finn?” said Emmie, appearing around a turn behind him. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. And Lucien was acting very weird, and he’s talking about kicking you out if there’s any more trouble, and me too, and what on Earth is that smell?” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
Finn didn’t quite know where to start.
The hours in the mouth of the Leviathan. The boiling sea. The mountain. Cornelius and Hiss. The Legends. The destruction. The attack. The kind-of-Cyclops. The Gatemaker hidden in his sopping jacket.
Being asked to steal Gantrua.
Any of these on their own was enough to have him banished from Darkmouth for good. And Emmie too.
“I just went for a big walk to clear my head but fell into the sea,” he told her. “Seaweed. Crabs. Fish heads, and all that.”
She looked at the back pocket of his trousers, saw a shell sticking from it, and seemed stuck between suspicion and trust.
“Fish heads?” she asked.
“And all that.”
He walked on, the lie burning in his throat.
(#ulink_bf3e5269-fcd0-5c8d-b0a4-33835094da32)
Finn sat over his bowl of Chocky-Flakes, spoon halfway to his mouth, the crazy request from the Infested Side running around his brain like a hamster on a wheel, and watched the business of the household. He surveyed the boxes of ornaments, clothes, books, stuff brought from their old home, still scattered about the small house. Two families living together, neither really wanting to believe they’d need to stay here for ever.
“Please think about Smoofyland some more,” Clara said to Finn. “Slotterton isn’t that far away, really. And it’s better than sitting around here. We haven’t been anywhere in so long.”
Finn looked at her, brown milk dribbling from his spoon. If only she knew how far away he had just been. “No Smoofyland. Anywhere but Smoofyland,” he groaned.
Clara turned the tap, which spluttered and spat out sludgy, undrinkable water into her glass. She grimaced as she held it up to the light from the window. “That keeps happening,” she said. “I went to rinse Mrs Walsh’s teeth yesterday and almost made them blacker than when she came in. They were black enough to begin with.”
Emmie arrived down the stairs. Finn remembered when she had first arrived in Darkmouth: she had hardly been able to contain her excitement at being in the infamous Blighted Village, fizzing like the human version of a mint dropped into a bottle of cola. She’d been so eager for the life he led, even when he hadn’t wanted it. She would talk at one hundred kilometres an hour, and rush into trouble twice as fast.
She wasn’t like that so much any more. Instead, she was more often subdued, cautious and, he felt, suspicious.
Finn tried to shake off the idea that she was suspicious of him. They’d been through so much together, he wanted her to trust him. Even when he was lying to her. Even when he was holding on to a secret so big he could still smell it despite showering for so long last night his mother had banged on the door fearing he’d slipped and knocked himself out.
In his schoolbag, he had a half-living device that would open gateways to the Legends.
Of course Emmie should doubt him. He was beginning to doubt himself.
“Hey,” he said, Chocky-Flakes milk dribbling down his chin.
“Hey,” she replied, and popped two slices of bread into the toaster.
“Tell him Smoofyland will be great,” Clara asked her.
“That place in Slotterton with the sparkliest rollercoaster in the world?” asked Emmie.
“You’d think he doesn’t want to go on a holiday,” Clara said. “That he just wants to sit here waiting for whatever disaster lurks around the next corner.”
Finn felt a rush of panic, a tightening of his chest, an implosion. He caught his breath, blew out, drew in air steadily, calmed himself.
“You OK?” Emmie asked him.
He nodded and kept eating, watching the goldfish picking at the stones in its bowl, the silence broken only by the sound of toast springing up.
“Gotta go,” he said. “See you at school.”
He didn’t go straight to school, though. Instead he went to find his dad, who was already at work at Woofy Wash. Finn hurried, propelled by a rush of honesty. It was wrong to keep this secret. No matter the consequences, it would all have to come out. He should tell his dad everything. About the kidnapping. About going to the Infested Side. About the assistants being up to something strange in the remnants of the cave and what the Legends had said about people on this side trying to open gateways. About how dangerous it could be. About the flashes of light. About the Legends. About the request that he steal Gantrua. About the Orthrus. About everything.
“Dad—” he started as he walked into the shop.
“Good morning,” said Lucien, standing by the counter.
Hugo was behind it, apparently deeply unimpressed by Lucien’s mere presence.
Through the back, they could hear the sounds of cats, dogs, possibly a parrot, plus something that sounded like it was coughing up a squeaky toy.
Finn felt himself clam up again, the lid slamming shut on his honesty. He did his best to give Lucien a look that said he hated every single molecule in his body. Lucien, though, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction and instead addressed Hugo.
“I don’t want to delay you from whatever sort of emergency dog-washing scenario you might have going on,” he said, as if he meant it sincerely. He didn’t.
Finn fervently wanted to grab a bottle of Shampoodle off the shelf and make him drink it down until foam began to pour from his ears.
“Then make it quick, Lucien,” Hugo said, framed by wall posters of a cat having its teeth brushed and a gerbil being taken for a walk.
“It is clear that things are getting a little … how best to put it? Chaotic. Yes, chaotic.”
“Gateways?” guessed Hugo.
“Two of them. Only yesterday. One outside here, as it happens.” He looked at Finn, who instinctively looked away.
Finn didn’t want to reveal what he knew: that he had been pulled through one of those gateways, and pushed back home through the other.
“Not my place to interfere, right, Lucien?” said Hugo.
“Nothing came through that we could find,” Lucien continued, “but we have to believe the Legends are poised to return. Maybe your old enemy Mr Glad isn’t quite gone yet. These are great and mysterious worlds we deal with.”
Finn’s secret screamed in his head. He kept his mouth shut in case it escaped. In the back room, an animal squealed, so like a child that Finn wondered if it actually was a child.
“We may have stirred a viper’s nest,” Lucien continued. “Just because we have captured one of their leaders—”
“Just because Finn captured one of their leaders,” interjected Hugo.
Lucien barrelled on regardless. “… It does not mean this is the end. For all we know this is only the beginning. We have grown complacent and lazy over the years, as each Blighted Village has gone quiet. What happens when the Legends come back? What if that’s been their plan all along? These creatures live for many more years than us. What if they decided to use that to their advantage, to withdraw for a decade or three? That’s hardly the length of a lunch break as far as they’re concerned.”
The general noise of upset animals from the rear of the shop grew louder. Finn wished they’d quieten down so he could properly concentrate on figuring out what Lucien was building to. He fiddled with the bell on the desk.
“Hugo,” continued Lucien, “I’m not so blind that I can’t see how difficult this is for you to be stuck here, working this job, watching while all these out-of-towners come in and try and run Darkmouth for you.”
“Great,” said Finn. “Just give us the keys to our house and we’ll get things sorted again.”
“Finn,” said Hugo, with a hand out to quieten him. “Not now.”
“Not now?” asked Finn.
“It’s fine, Hugo,” said Lucien. “I understand the young man’s frustration. He was destined for great things and now here he is, as are you, watching while others decide when this ordeal must end.”
“Others?” said Hugo, sceptical. “You’re the only one making decisions.”
Lucien considered his response a moment. “Hugo, I want to get you involved with us again.”
Finn straightened up, wary but interested.
Hugo was silent, curious.
“It’s not right to have someone of your experience sitting here on the sidelines waiting for a result of the investigation,” said Lucien, “when it’s clear that we could use your knowledge of Darkmouth at times of difficulty.”
“Me too?” enquired Finn.
“Yes, why not?” Lucien said, like that was a fine idea. “Next time there is an invasion, or a gateway, or some enemy running through our streets we’d like you both there.”
Hugo’s face lifted.
“To direct the traffic,” concluded Lucien.
Hugo’s face fell.
“Traffic?” spluttered Finn, red rage coming over him. How could Lucien do this? How could his father sit there and take it?
“Not only to direct traffic, of course,” Lucien said brightly. “Crowd control too, if necessary. Reassuring the locals, the shopkeepers who own places such as—” he picked up a small clump of fur sitting on the counter, examined it before clapping it from his hands, “—this establishment.”
“Maybe we can give the Legends speeding tickets,” said Finn. “Ask them to wait at traffic lights while we desiccate them.”
Hugo didn’t quieten him this time.
“The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters is such an important book,” said Lucien, the change of focus abrupt and pointed. He folded his arms, ignoring the sounds of animals rising at the back of the shop. “It is the one they will look at for many generations to come. It is the book that defines a Legend Hunter’s reputation. Or a traitor’s. All they want to do is print a new version. Finn, you must know that if you don’t act properly, if you refuse to help, suspicions will grow. The Most Great Lives writer is due here any day now. You don’t want the black paper to fall over your family’s name.”
Woofy Wash’s owner, Mr Green, stuck his head from his office door. “It sounds like a zoo out back, Hugo. What’s going on?”
“Think about it, Hugo,” Lucien said, tapping his fingers on the counter. “That’s all I ask.”
“Oh, I’m thinking about it all right,” said Hugo.
Lucien was enjoying this. Finn knew it. He knew his father knew it. It was as clear as the shine on Lucien’s wispy-haired scalp that he had come simply to humiliate them under the guise of friendliness.
“Elektra! Tiberius!” Lucien called out.
His children appeared from the back of the shop, pushing rudely past a perplexed Mr Green. Elektra had a parrot feather in her hair. Tiberius had a writhing lump down his jumper.
“Hand it back,” Lucien ordered his son.
Tiberius reached down his sweater, pulled free a shivering gerbil and handed it to Mr Green before leaving with his sister and Lucien. Mr Green shook his head, drew a whistling breath through his clenched teeth and – with a writhing, slippery gerbil in hand – returned to his office.
Hugo had his head down. He took a long breath. When he spoke, it was with enormous control.
“You might think I’m doing nothing, Finn, but you would be very wrong,” he said. “I know what Lucien was up to. But I also know we have to be very careful and not give him any excuse to kick us out entirely. There’s no Council of Twelve to help us. No other Legend Hunters. The Half-Hunters are gone. But I do have some friends left. And I do have a plan, son.” He lifted his head. “So you’re not to do anything stupid, do you understand?”
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