“Clouds are slipping out of the oil bright sky, but where the planes soar, they all stutter in flight. Buildings ripple in the wind. The barefoot Lady Of Pale stalks across the tarmac with a storm in her eyes and graceless cats left in her wake.”

Fiona has always had vivid dreams,

“Here she comes, lips stolen out from under kisses.”

But this is from the waking world, her expression blank, gaze vacant.

“Distant jet engines give up and go mute.”

Suddenly Fiona is blonde, the warmth goes out from her cheeks.

“Her whispers fill the sky.”

Her voice is at once hushed and howling.

McCarron, the preacher, spits in his palm and brings it down on the girl’s forehead fast enough to level oxen. There is a flash of light, and the girl we know is left untouched, brunette, sat upright and blinking. That moment, that echoing exhalation of alien breath, that’s when we know for sure that something is deeply, deeply, wrong. That a thousand miles away, the Lady of Pale comes stalking, stealing light for her skin, and flame for her hair.