them, and he just had time to throw himself to the ground and cover his head before a murder of crows blazed out of the sky to attack the gang.
Blood spattered all around. The birds darted in, tearing flesh with beak and talon, their dark wings smashing against faces and throats. The gang scattered, some screaming with eyes missing, others terrified and cursing. The corvids didn’t relent until only Mallory remained in the centre of the lane. As quickly as they had come, they flapped away to lose themselves in the fields and trees.
As Mallory scrambled to his feet, he looked around for the familiar face. And there she was, her long brown hair flowing behind her as she strode through the tall grass of the nearest field, her eyes blazing, her hippie dress swirling with the determined motion of her legs. Mallory could see her irritation, but the fire in her only made her more attractive to him.
‘You are such a moron,’ Sophie snapped when she reached the stile.
‘Me? I could have lost an eye in that bird attack.’
‘A “thank you” would be nice for saving your worthless life.’ She stepped lithely over the stile. ‘I told you to approach the village with caution.’
‘Sorry. I forgot you were queen of the whole bloody world.’
‘Stupid bugger.’
Mallory grabbed her; she play-resisted before overpowering him with a passionate kiss.
‘But you still haven’t got this role thing down,’ Mallory said when they broke. ‘I’m the knight, the trained killing machine — I’m the one who’s supposed to be protecting you.’
‘In your dreams.’ Her warm smile eased the dull throb of the aches and pains he had developed on their long, hard journey from Salisbury — battles with looters and self-styled law-enforcement officers, potential rapists and horse-stealers, and all the nightmarish things that crawled out of the dark in the lonely stretches of countryside they’d crossed. Oddly, he found it easier to deal with all the supernatural predators than with seeing his fellow man preparing to commit some inhuman act.
‘They weren’t your average looters,’ she said.
Mallory stared past her to the now furiously burning village. ‘I didn’t think they were. We’ve seen them all over. I thought they were just some sort of movement — like the Celtic Nation — trying to fill the void in society. But that V on their shirts — you know what it stands for? Veitch.’
Sophie stiffened in his arms, kept her face pressed into his shoulder. ‘Ryan Veitch?’
‘It’s like they worship him… some sort of saviour who’s going to come back and make everything all right.’
Sophie pushed herself away from him, uneasy now. ‘There are myths building up around all of the Five.’
‘But the wrong ones are building up around Veitch. He was the traitor, sold all the others out. Jack Churchill, the leader, died because of what Veitch did. These morons think that’s some kind of plan for living.’
‘Then that only shows what a responsibility we have. Existence, the universe… God, the Goddess… whatever you want to call it — it selects five people to be the champions of life at any one time. Five people from all the multitude. The last Five saved us from extinction after the Fall-’
‘And now we’ve got the job.’
Sophie heard the familiar note in his voice. ‘You still don’t want it?’
‘It’s not as if I have a choice. But it would have been nice to have been asked.’
Salisbury still preyed on Mallory’s mind even though he had left it behind six months ago. His time there at the cathedral had been one of hardship and suffering, as the Church desperately attempted to cling on in a world that had grown largely immune to its teachings. When he had arrived at the cathedral gates, a mercenary looking for employment in the newly formed Knights Templar, Mallory hadn’t believed in anything. The Church leaders had accepted him eagerly, and his training had made him hard, but he had still been directionless. It was his meeting with Sophie and his recognition of his feelings for her that had given meaning to his life. Sophie was not only his moral compass in a world where the distinction between right and wrong was increasingly blurred, but also the sole thing that mattered to him. He knew that she loved him, but he suspected that she had no idea how much he loved and needed her in return.
Discovering that they were a Brother and Sister of Dragons had only strengthened the bond between them. They were united by some great power that coursed through the earth and everything on it, a blazing blue energy that had entered both of them. Mallory didn’t care that it meant they were both champions of life. To him, it was a sign that he and Sophie were meant to be.
And so he had agreed to follow her when she had insisted on embarking on a quest to find the remaining Brothers and Sisters of Dragons and to discover what their destiny really was. She spoke of responsibilities and obligations and a higher calling. Mallory only heard her voice.
But despite the inner peace he was feeling for the first time in his life, Mallory knew that all was not right. The emptiness in his life that Sophie had filled still echoed somewhere in the deepest part of him. It was characterised by an image that haunted his nights and was always there on the periphery of his thoughts during the day: a flash of fire in the dark. He knew in some way that it signified his death, but rather than being a premonition, it appeared to be some fragmented memory. How could that be?
Sophie had helped him come to terms with it at Salisbury, and for a while he thought he had put it behind him. But in recent weeks it had returned in force, the ghost that refused to let him forget but would not let him remember, either.
Fire in the dark, and death. What did it mean? Why wouldn’t it leave him alone to enjoy Sophie’s love and his life with her? What was the terrible secret that he knew lay just behind that unsettling image?
In the late afternoon sun, Cadbury Hill cast an enormous shadow across the Somerset lowlands. Majestic in scale, the terraces and cuttings of the Iron Age hill-fort hinted at hidden mysteries, artificiality layered over the natural so that it was impossible to see where one ended and the other began. Mallory and Sophie stood on the edge of the umbra and surveyed the wooded slopes where birdsong echoed pleasingly. Wild flowers grew all around — wood spurge and spurge laurel — the scent of summer promise.
‘It’s bigger than I thought it would be,’ Mallory said.
‘You can see why it’s been identified with Camelot for more than six hundred years,’ Sophie replied. ‘It inspired the medieval romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Galahad and the Holy Grail. Can’t you feel it? There’s something in the air itself, as if it’s radiating out of the heart of the hill.’
‘So it’s the right place?’
‘It has to be.’ Sophie took a deep, soothing breath, finally happy to be at the destination that had plagued her ever since they had left Salisbury at Christmas. The first hint had come in a dream, an imposing hill in a green landscape, a crow telling her to take heed. It had all the hallmarks of a communication from the Invisible World and the image had stayed with her potently for days. When she had used her Craft to commune with the Higher Powers for answers, the response had been cryptic and teasing, as always. But as the weeks and months passed, the clues had mounted, finally leading them here.
‘It’s not just the feeling,’ she continued. ‘The mythic symbolism is perfect. We know that the Arthurian legends are a code. They all identify places of power where the walls that divide dimensions are thin, where there’s a doorway to the Otherworld… T’ir n’a n’Og.’
‘The Land of Always Summer. You see, I was listening when you were telling me about your crazy religious beliefs.’
‘King Arthur is a code for-’
‘The energy that runs through all things. The Blue Fire,’ Mallory chanted with mock-weariness. ‘The Pendragon Spirit.’
Mallory tried to pretend it was all a joke, but he’d seen the evidence of the power, felt its euphoric effect. It was the thing that linked the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons across millennia and though he would never have mentioned it to Sophie, he was humbled to be a part of it.
‘So what exactly are we looking for?’ he asked.
‘Something important. Something that ties in to the whole reason why we were chosen.’ Her eyes were filled with passion and just the briefest hint of apprehension.
They spent the next half-hour fighting their way through the wildly overgrown lower reaches of the hill. It didn’t look as though anyone had been there since the Fall. The largest butterflies Mallory had ever seen in his life flitted in and out of the trees, and there was an abundance of wildlife — rabbits that were almost tame, even a fox
