Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) by Mark Wilson

safely below the folds of her sleeping bag before her stony expression had broken into a joyful smile and the tears had flowed.
     
    Moving her mind from these events, Alys considered Uncle James’s words. She, of course, hadn’t said anything about her meeting with Fiona’s former husband to any of her family. Too many questions lay in revealing his presence and the intelligence he’d brought her. Aside from that, they’d considered James to be dead. Expelled with the rest of the men, James never learned he had a daughter as Aunt Fiona had been only weeks pregnant at the time. Alys didn’t know how to break the news to Fiona or to her cousin. James’s appearance and his alliance with Somna’s Exalted also raised the question of whether her own father was alive and with the group of killers. She hadn’t dared to ask James, but now the need to know was acid in her heart.
    Joey was at Suzy Wheels’ place in Craigleith, hopefully discovering what the flash drive his mother had died to give to Jock contained. Alys was expected there the next day and then the two of them would come back to The Gardens. She figured that his presence whilst she told her mother about James and of Somna’s imminent invasion – as well as detailing her plan to prepare for his tribe of killers – would be easier for her mother to accept if she had Joey to focus her anger on. He had a knack for annoying Alys’s mother, but she could tell that Jennifer respected her best friend, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
    The seed of a plan began to germinate in Alys’s mind prompting a sardonic grin to tug at the corners of her lips.
    Tomorrow, she thought. Joey and I will speak to her tomorrow.
     
    Alys rose, performing a series of habitual stretches designed to keep her muscles and limbs loose and ready. As she rolled her head around on her neck, enjoying the pop of vertebrae, she noticed Aunt Fiona rushing into Jennifer’s tent, a panicked expression on her face.
    Alys descended the steep slope and ran across the green pasture into her mother’s tent. Fiona was in her sister’s arms, a pained expression on Jennifer’s face as she patted the woman awkwardly on her back.
    “We’ll find her, Fiona, I promise. She can’t have travelled far.”
    Alys’s heart lurched in her chest.
    Steph!
     
     
     
     

Interlude
     
    This is how it feels to be Stephanie
     
    My cousin, Alys, and my friend, Joey MacLeod, have returned from the south. They found no cure and almost killed the madman who took my eye. Almost… Such a small, limiting word with such infinite potential. Alys, tired from her journey and debriefing, is asleep in another tent. Joey has gone to seek help from a friend. Lying surrounded by dozens of strong, highly-trained women I’ve known my whole life, I’ve never felt so desperately separate. But I feel good too.
    I feel alert, clear.
    My legs are swift and strong as I slip silently from my tent. My mother lies sleeping soundlessly, confident in the security of her home, The Gardens. These delusions of contentment she taught me, that made me so weak. I’m done with them.
      I crouch in the darkness of the early winter hours. Closing my eye, I increase my awareness of every little sound in The Gardens. Joey taught me to do this.
    Focus on one sense at a time. Close off the others and the one you need amplifies the world. I’ll never have the innate skill Joey has. He forged his senses over a decade and a half living in the infinite blackness of Mary King’s Close. But I do well enough.
    I listen to the guards patrolling their regular routes around the fences and gates. The rattle of the East Gate tells me where Magda is. A crunch at the bottom of the north slope gives Helen away. Five other Ranger guards broadcast their presence to me. I open my eyes and move silently on the balls of my feet, dancing between their sounds in the arms of the winter wind. Slipping through a gap between Helen and Samantha, I spider-crawl, low and