The Unearthing (Book I of the Tebel Chronicles)

Prologue

The silence of the winter night was interrupted by the sound of roadworks starting up a few streets away. Sleeping lumps lay scattered under newspapers and jackets in the doorways and deserted cars. Not even the dark hid the smashed windows and boarded-up buildings. Two men huddled over a fire under one of the few working streetlights of the ghetto. While the city slept in the worst night of winter, they were waiting.

The moon slid behind the last of the night's clouds and concealed the suburb. Yet above, the Brooklyn Bridge was just emerging from the starless sky as the grey of the early morning hailed another icy day.

'Finally,' one of the men said, looking up at the skyscrapers forming a silhouetted canvas across the horizon over the bridge. 'Where is she?'

His cultured voice was out of place with the tramp clothes he was wearing.

His companion shrugged, staring despondently at the fire.

'I hate this place, Zan!' the man snapped. He threw another log into the fire, the force ejecting ash and cinders into the swirling smoke. 'I want to go home. This needs to end now.'

Zan waited long enough to seem to be ignoring him. 'Patience, Evandor,' he said, as his companion was about to speak again. 'It will happen soon.'

'I think you're lying. You just don't want me to find her. I will though. Here or there.'

'It's immaterial. Even if I told you where she is, you won't get to her first. Not before he turns.'

'I will stop her, you know. She won't kill me.'

'You can try, Brother.'

'What about him?'

'I don't know where he is,' said Zan. 'But I can already feel his presence. He's arrived in New York. Seems no matter what she does, he won't leave without her.'

'Will she be able to stop him?'

Zan shrugged. 'Not this time. Not here.'

'So she won't even know what's happened to her.'

'No.'

A jolt beneath them made them start.

'So it begins.'

Zan nodded, looking sad. 'Again.'