Copyright

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2015

Published in this edition 2017

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is:

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Shane Hegarty 2015

Illustrations copyright © James de la Rue 2015

Shane Hegarty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

James de la Rue asserts the moral right to be identified as the 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: 9780007545612

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780007545780

Version: 2017-02-03

For Maeve, who made the adventure possible.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 2 …

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 3 …

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

From the publisher’s introduction to the final section of The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters …

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 5 …

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 6 …

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 7 …

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Thank Yous

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Books by Shane Hegarty

About the Publisher

Map

The town of Darkmouth appears on few maps because very few people want to find it. When it is marked on one, its location is always wrong. It’ll be a bit north of where it’s supposed to be, or a bit south. A little left or a little right. A bit off.

Always.

Which means that visitors to Darkmouth invariably arrive having taken a wrong turn, soon convinced they’ll reach only a dead end. They drive through a canopy of trees, whose branches reach from either side to clasp ever tighter overhead, becoming thicker with every mile until the dappled light is choked off and the road is dark even on the brightest of days. Then, just as the wood is almost scraping the paint from their car, and it seems that the road itself is going to be suffocated, the visitors travel through a short tunnel and emerge on to a roundabout filled with blossoming flowers and featuring a sign that reads:

The next line has been updated by hand a couple of times:

On a wall lining the road there is large striking graffiti. It says only this:

Except the last S forms a serpent, with mouth wide and teeth jagged. Visitors peer at it and wonder, Is that a …? Could it be a …?

Yes, that snake really is swallowing a child.

The travellers – by now a bit desperate in their search – have finally reached Darkmouth. Their next thought is this: Let’s get out of here.

So they go right round the roundabout and head back the way they came. Which is a shame, because if they were to stay they would realise that Darkmouth is actually quite a nice place. It has a colourful little ice-cream shop on the harbour, benches dotted along the strand, picnic tables and fun climbing frames for the kids.

And no one has been eaten by a monster for some time.

In fact, they aren’t really monsters at all. They might look monstrous, and the locals might refer to them as monsters, but, strictly speaking, they are Legends. Myths. Fables. They once shared the Earth with humans, only to grow envious, then violent, so that a war raged through the world’s Blighted Villages for centuries.

Now Darkmouth is the last of these Blighted Villages. And Legends show up only occasionally.

This morning just happens to be one of those occasions.

Thinking back on it all later, Finn identified that morning as the time when things began to go badly wrong.

Thinking on it a little bit more, he realised he could identify just about any morning of his first twelve years as when things began to go wrong. At the time, though, he wasn’t doing much thinking. Instead, he was running. As hard as he could. In a clanking armoured suit and heavy helmet. In the rain. Away from a Minotaur.

Five minutes earlier, everything had seemed to be going a bit more to plan, even if Finn wasn’t entirely sure what that plan was.

Then it had been Finn doing the chasing, carrying a Desiccator, a fat silver rifle with a cylinder hanging in front of the trigger. He was the Hunter, lumbering through the maze of Darkmouth’s backstreets in a black helmet and fighting suit – small dull squares of metal knitted together clumsily – so that when he moved it sounded like a bag of forks falling downstairs.

It was oversized because his parents had told him he should leave room to grow into it. It rattled because he had made it himself.

From somewhere in the near distance, about two laneways away, he had heard the sound of glass being mashed into stone, or maybe stone being pounded into glass. Either way, it was followed by the scream of a car alarm and the even louder scream of a person.

Darkmouth was a town of dead ends and blind alleys, with high walls that were lined with broken glass, sharp stones and blades. The layout was designed to confuse Legends, block their progress, shepherd them towards dead ends. But Finn knew where to go.

He followed the Legend’s dusty trail, emerging on to Broken Road, Darkmouth’s main street, where vehicles had screeched to a halt at wrong angles, and those townspeople who hadn’t scarpered were cowering in still-closed shop doorways.

And at the top of the street, glancing over its shoulder, was the Minotaur. It was part human, part bull, all terrifying. Finn’s heart skipped a beat, hammered three more in quick succession. He took a shuddering breath. He had spent his childhood looking at drawings of such creatures, which were always depicted as mighty, almost noble, Legends. Seeing one in the flesh, Finn realised they had captured its strength, but had not really conveyed any sense of just how rabid it looked.

From where its jutting, crooked horns met its great bull’s head, it was covered in the mangy hair of a mongrel. As it looked back, slobber dripped from its great teeth and ran through the contours of muscles bulging along its back, past its waist down to patches of skin as cracked as baked clay. It stood on two legs that tapered down to menacing claws instead of hooves.

The Minotaur was worse than Finn had ever imagined it could be. And he had imagined it to be pretty bad.

It was looking straight at him.

He ducked into a doorway. A woman was already hiding there, her back pressed against the door, a dog pulled close. Her face was tight with fear.

“Don’t worry, Mrs Bright,” Finn told her, his voice muffled by the helmet. “You and Yappy will soon be safe, won’t you, boy?” He petted the dog, a basset hound, with his free hand. It sneezed on him.

The woman nodded with unconvincing gratitude, then paused. “Where’s your father, young man? Shouldn’t he be—?”

There was a smash further up the street. The Minotaur had disappeared round the turn at the top of Broken Road. Finn took another deep breath and moved on after it.

From the other side of a wall, there was a thud so forceful it sent a shudder from Finn’s feet to his brain, which interpreted it as a signal to run screaming in the opposite direction.

But Finn didn’t run. He had trained for this. He had been born into it. He knew what was expected of him, what he needed to do. Besides, if he ran now, his dad would be disappointed in him. Again.

I’ll be there when you need me, Finn’s father had told him that morning.

Pressing a radio button on the side of his helmet, Finn whispered, “Dad? Are you there?”

The only response was the uncaring crackle of static.

A dark, looming hulk crossed an intersecting laneway, tearing along its narrow walls. Finn raised his Desiccator and followed. At the corner, he crouched and peered round. The Minotaur had paused no more than twenty metres away. Its great shoulders heaved under angry, growling breaths as it figured out which way to go next.

It was all up to Finn now. He recalled his training. Focused on what he had been taught. Thought about his father’s expert words. Carefully, he aimed his stocky silver weapon, steadied himself, exhaled.

At that exact moment, the Minotaur turned to face him, its eyes like black pools gouged beneath scarred horns. Froth dripped from chipped and jagged tusks. For a second, Finn was distracted by the way drool, blood and rain clung to a crystal ring wedged through the Legend’s nose.

The Minotaur roared. Finn squeezed the trigger.

The force of the shot sent Finn tripping backwards. A sparkling, spinning blue ball flew from the barrel of the Desiccator, unfurling into a glowing net as it was propelled towards where the Minotaur had stood only a moment before … and wrapped itself round a parked car.

Finn groaned.

With a flash and a stifled whooop, half the car collapsed in on itself with the anguished scrunch of a ton of metal being sucked into a shape no bigger than a soda can.

Finn looked for the Minotaur. It was gone.

He pressed his radio switch. “Erm, Dad?”

Still nothing.

He paused, calmed his babbling mind as much as he could and moved off again through the laneways. Using the ancient methods handed down to him, Finn began carefully tracking the trail of the Minotaur.

He needn’t have bothered. The Minotaur got to him first.

Naturally, Finn fled.

As he did, several thoughts went through his head, mainly to do with whether he should turn and shoot, or find a hiding spot, or whether he had time to stop and fling aside his clattering armour.

For its part, as it chased him, the Minotaur had only a single thought in its head. Finn was better off not knowing just how many times the word ‘gouge’ featured in it.

Finn ran down the laneway as fast as his rattling fighting suit would allow, his breath hot inside the helmet, his weapon flailing from a strap round his wrist. He spotted a gap and turned into it just before the Minotaur reached him. The creature smashed into a dead end, throwing up a cloud of brick, dust and drool.

Finn pushed on, darting across alleys, stumbling round corners, squeezing through gaps, until it occurred to him that the only sound he could hear above the noise of his suit was that of his own panting.

With some effort, he persuaded his legs to stop running.

Crouching at a corner, he looked around for any sign of the Minotaur. There was none. He sank down, feeling the rivulets of sweat running down his cheeks, the itchiness of the suit and the thump of his heart in his chest.

There was a rustle close by. The briefest flicker of a shadow.

“Dad?”

The Minotaur burst through a wall in front of Finn, collapsing with dreadful force into the laneway, its horns scraping and sparking off the concrete, before righting itself and looming over him. Finn raised his Desiccator, but the Minotaur reached out a huge arm and swiped it from his hands.

Backed up against the brick, Finn could taste the deathly sourness of the Minotaur’s breath and see the deep blackness of its mouth. He was briefly mesmerised by the radiance of that fat diamond ring lodged in the Legend’s nose.

Finn tried to think of a way out, of a fighting move his father had taught him, a plan, an escape route, anything other than just giving in to the inevitable pounding thought that he was about to die.

As it poised to strike, the Minotaur still had just one thought in its head, although it had evolved to include repeated use of the word ‘maim’.

If this Legend had been a little less single-minded, however, it might have realised that the sliver of time it took to move in for the kill was long enough for a shadow to pass above it and the boy; for that shadow to grow larger, darker; for it to become solid as it bounded across the creature’s great shoulders and landed behind it.

The Minotaur turned. The armour on this new human shimmered; it was hard to focus on. He seemed to be there yet not there. The figure carried a weapon similar to the boy’s, but larger. And the Minotaur knew instantly who it now faced.

This was not a Legend Hunter. This was the Legend Hunter.

The Minotaur had moved barely a centimetre in attack before it was struck by the glowing net of the Legend Hunter’s weapon. For the briefest of moments, it was frozen in an all-enveloping web of sparkling blue. Then, with a stifled whooop, the Minotaur imploded. All that was left was a solid, hairy sphere no bigger than a tennis ball.

The Legend Hunter remained steady, a thin wisp of blue smoke drifting from the barrel of his weapon. “Bullseye,” he said, popping open his visor to reveal a face as solid as the helmet and an obvious delight at his quip.

Finn picked himself up off the ground and glared at him. “Where were you, Dad?”

Like other Blighted Villages around the world – with names such as Worldsend, Hellsgate, Bloodrock, Leviatown and Carnage – Darkmouth had been home to generations of Legend Hunters, families who swore to protect the world against the unending attacks from what they called the Infested Side.

Except the attacks did end.

Mostly.

Each year had brought fewer reports of humans captured or killed by Legends – and of Legends captured or killed by Legend Hunters.

In Blighted Village after Blighted Village, the attacks had slowly died out. For the first time in thousands of years, our world appeared sealed off from the realm of Legends. After many generations of war, the Legend Hunters could stand down.

Except for one village. One family.

“You were fine,” said Finn’s dad, breezily. “I had you covered the whole time.”

“That thing almost killed me.”

“You know I would never let that happen.”

“It didn’t feel like that.”

“Look, Finn, don’t be so hard on yourself. You did well. A little loose in parts maybe, but you weren’t exactly chasing after a chicken there. And don’t be so sour. Most twelve-year-olds would die for a chance to run around chasing Legends.”

“Die?” said Finn.

“You know what I mean.”

Finn’s father held his gaze for another moment before giving his son a gentle punch on the arm and picking up the desiccated remains of the Minotaur.

Wearily, Finn unhooked the container from his belt and entered a code into a keypad on its side. The lid hissed open, releasing a small cloud of blue gas and the faint tang of what smelled like orange juice. His father placed the round object in the box and pressed the lid shut. “It’ll have a ball in there,” he said.

Finn shook his head in mild disdain.

“Oh, suit yourself,” said his dad as he grabbed the container and began to walk out of the alley. “Get out of that gear and I’ll drive you to school.”

“School? Seriously? How am I supposed to go to school after that? I’m not going. I’m just not.”

But his dad didn’t stop, so Finn reluctantly picked up his Desiccator and started to follow. A glint of light in the rubble caught his eye, a tight curve of crystal lying where the Minotaur had been desiccated. It looked like the diamond that had been in the creature’s nose.

Odd.

Finn picked it up and examined its jagged beauty. He began to call after his father, but stopped himself. If he was being forced to go to school after all of that, then he wanted a reward.

He slipped the diamond into his pocket before jogging clumsily on, his suit clattering all the way.

They drove through Darkmouth, their car a large black metal block on wheels, its seats torn out to make room for lines of weapons and tools of various shapes and sizes and sharpness.

There were a few people on the streets now, though most had their heads buried in hoods, their faces down, protecting themselves from the drizzle, looking like the last place on Earth they wanted to be was the last place on Earth where Legends still invaded. It didn’t exactly help their mood that Legends always brought rain with them.

“It’s always the same when a gate opens,” Finn’s dad observed. “At least a small gateway means only a light shower. There was a time when the bigger gateways brought terrible storms. The old stories blamed them on the gods. As if, eh?”

Finn didn’t answer. His father tutted. The car swung right.

Before jumping into the passenger seat, Finn had thrown his suit into the rear of the car. On his lap were his schoolbag and his Desiccator. He held the canister in front of his face and gave it a rattle.

“It never ceases to amaze me, that trick,” said his father.

Finn felt a spark of sympathy for the creature trapped in there. From the outside, the only evidence that a Desiccator net’s victim might once have been something living was the way the exterior of the resulting ball was coated in whatever the creature had been wrapped in originally: fur, scales, skin, leather trousers.

“Doesn’t it seem a bit cruel to do this to them, Dad?”

“Maybe you’d prefer to tickle the next Minotaur into submission. Or pet him and offer him a biscuit. Seriously, Finn.” He glanced across at his son and noticed his scowl. “OK, so this morning didn’t go too perfectly.”

“Neither did the last time,” said Finn, grimacing.

“Yes, but—”

“Or the time before that.”

“My point, Finn, is that you are learning,” said his dad. “I was the same when I was your age. Did I ever tell you about the time I—?”

“Yes,” said Finn with a sigh.

“And the day I—?”

“That too. All I ever hear about are the great things you did when you were my age. You defeated this Legend. You invented that weapon. Unless you’ve a story that ends with you falling down a toilet or something, you’re not going to make me feel any better right now.”

The car pulled up at the school. Finn didn’t move.

His father shifted a little, the armour of his fighting suit creaking in the car seat.

“It’s not all bad news,” he started.

“How is this not bad?” interrupted Finn, dismay in his voice. “My Completion Ceremony is only a year away, Dad.”

“When did you turn twelve?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“So, the ceremony is eleven and a half months away to be accurate, but plenty of time still.”

“What about this morning – did you not see?” said Finn, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Finn, our family has defended Darkmouth for forty-two generations.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

“But you will,” said his dad. “You’re going to be generation number forty-three.”

“I won’t be ready.”

“Darkmouth is going to be your responsibility.”

“It can’t be,” protested Finn.

“It has to be.”

His father let a hush settle in the vehicle before continuing.

“Anyway, the Council of Twelve has been in touch,” he said. “They have good news.”

“Does it have to do with me?” asked Finn.

“No. Well, yes. Kind of.” His father paused. “The Twelve have offered me a place on the Council. Forty-two generations, Finn, and not one of our family has ever been invited to become one of the leaders of the world’s Legend Hunters. Sure, most of the world’s Legend Hunters are sitting at home getting fat right now, but still, it’s a huge thing for us, a big honour, and—”

“Hold on,” said Finn. “You’ll be on the Council of Twelve?”

“Yes, isn’t that excellent?”

“Aren’t they based in—?”

“Liechtenstein. Small place with big mountains.”

“So, you’ll be out of Darkmouth?” asked Finn.

“Yes,” said his dad. “Sometimes.”

“And me?”

“No.”

“Oh great,” said Finn, feeling a great weight settling on his shoulders. “You’ll be gone and the protection of Darkmouth will be up to—”

“You. Exactly. Won’t that be cool?”

Finn stared at him as his brain tried to process that notion.

“It doesn’t change anything, Finn,” said his father. “Not much anyway. You’re about to become the first true Legend Hunter to graduate in years. Darkmouth was always going to become your responsibility at some stage after that. And I won’t be going straight away. The Twelve say there’ll be a process, some checks.”

“What kind of checks?”

His dad shrugged. “I don’t know. Background stuff, subject to confirmation of rule 31, clause 14 of the whatever. You know, paperwork. The Twelve love their paperwork. Anyway, it’s happening.” He cleared his throat. “Just as soon as you become Complete.”

“And what if I’m not ready?”

With a squeak of his fighting suit on the car seat’s leather, his dad turned to look at him directly. “Finn, every Legend Hunter in this family had their Completion on their thirteenth birthday. Every single one, as far back as records go. They could have waited until they were fifteen or seventeen or even nineteen, like weaker families, but they didn’t. So, our family – past, present and future – needs you to be ready. I need you to be ready. This town needs you to be ready. You will be ready.”

Finn pushed open the car door and stepped out. “I feel so much better. Thanks, Dad.”

As he swung the door shut, Finn saw his reflection in the window. His hair was damp, his skin flushed. He opened his mouth to protest again about having to go to school, but his father cut him off. “We’ll talk about it later.”

Finn stood at the kerb with his bag slung over his shoulder, listening to the low growl of the car as it drove away. The drizzle tickled his forehead.

In his pocket, he felt the buzz of his phone. There was a message from his mother.

DEEP BREATHS. LOVE YOU.

He took a deep breath, then another, steeling himself for the next challenge.

School.

Finn was late. And he was sure that everyone knew why.

As he trudged up the corridor, Finn sensed a rising giddiness from each class he passed, lessons stopping so teachers and pupils could watch him.

“Was that a big fella this morning?” a voice called down the corridor after him.

“Any chance you got rid of them all this time, Finn?” asked another.

He ignored it all until he reached his own classroom, his arrival greeted with a frisson of excitement. He mumbled an apology to Mrs McDaid for being late and headed for the last available seat. Unfortunately, it was between Conn and Manus Savage, identical twin brothers except for one chewed-up ear on Conn, which he had always claimed was the result of a fight with a Dobermann. He also claimed that the dog had lost.

Finn wriggled into the seat between them, the metal legs screeching across the floor.

The twins looked a little confused for a moment as they grew aware of the ripe stench of sweat.

“Hey, monster boy,” whispered Conn out of the side of his mouth, “you forgot to change your nappy this morning.”

“Miss?” Manus asked the teacher. “Can we open a window?”

“Better make it two,” suggested his brother.

Finn wouldn’t ordinarily have been too bothered by them. He knew his place. As a Legend Hunter in training, he couldn’t really have friends. He practised with his dad. He studied. He ate. He slept. He didn’t have birthday parties or sleepovers. He didn’t have other kids just calling in. He didn’t get a chance to answer their awkward questions about, say, that three-headed dog his dad had just brought home. He was never able to say, in a casual, it’s-no-big-deal manner, “Oh, just ignore the Cerberus; its bark is worse than its bite.” Darkmouth’s parents were understandably not too keen to let their precious children run around a house like Finn’s.

His family had been in town for forty-two generations, but Finn would always be an outsider. There would always be whispers swirling around him. Questions with a hint of resentment. Rumours. Why Darkmouth was the only Blighted Village left in which Legends still attacked. Why more wasn’t being done to stop them.

He tuned out of it as much as he could, but it was hard to do that when it was coming at him in stereo.

“What did you do to scare the monster away this morning?” muttered Conn. “Breathe on him?”

“If you just waved your socks at them, maybe you’d finally get rid of them all,” added Manus.

Finn began to feel irritated. It was one thing being different because of what he was – that was part of his life, something he’d learned to live with. It was another to be picked on after trying to protect these people from being mauled by a mythical creature.

But he didn’t say anything. The Savage twins were more intimidating than some Legends. He did, however, make a mental note to stash some deodorant and soap in his bag from now on.

Mrs McDaid had resumed teaching and most of the class was paying attention to her again. Finn noticed there was a new girl sitting in the back corner, staring at him through a curtain of deep red hair.

A new girl? But there was never anyone new. You were either born here or you visited by mistake and didn’t come back again. No one moved to Darkmouth. Ever.

And yet there she was.

From behind her fringe, the new girl gave Finn the tiniest hint of a smile. Finn looked away. When he glanced back at her, her eyes were on the teacher.

Conn leaned in. “Fancy the new girl already?” he whispered.

“You never know,” added Manus in Finn’s other ear. “Maybe she likes Eau de Armpit.”

Finn imagined the twins being chased by the Minotaur, the looks of horror frozen on their faces as its claws lopped their heads clean off their necks. The image cheered him for about half a second until he slumped down for what he knew would be a thoroughly miserable day. Which it was. Thoroughly.

Finn walked home, the hood of his jacket pulled up to hide his face. The drizzle had cleared and the town was returning to normality – its own sort of normality at least. Not for the first time, Finn felt the pressure that came from knowing that the safety of this town would one day be entirely his responsibility.

Except now he’d been told the ‘one day’ was less than a year away, when his father would leave to join the Council. That revelation made it hard for Finn to even breathe.

He had grown up hearing stories of the world’s Legend Hunters, the defenders of each Blighted Village. The families in each town had passed down knowledge, techniques and weapons through generation after generation, each swearing to protect the people.

Except the world’s Legend Hunters weren’t needed any more. Their villages had grown quiet. The Hunters remained in their once Blighted Villages as a precaution – some even continued to train themselves and their children just in case – but most had moved on to other careers. That man stamping your ticket at the train station could be from a long line of Legend Hunters. So could that dance teacher, that weather presenter, that guy who’s come to fix your TV.

But not in Darkmouth. Finn’s family had been Legend Hunters as far back as the histories went. And as long as the Legends kept coming through, as long as they continued to attack Darkmouth, his family would be needed. As long as he was the only child of the only Legend Hunter, then Finn would be needed. And now that his father was moving up to the Council of Twelve, he would be needed to protect Darkmouth on his own.

Every bit of that responsibility weighed on him as he sulked home.

What made it worse was that he wasn’t ready. He had needed rescuing. Again. His third time on a hunt with his father. His third failure.

The first hunt, a few weeks ago, had been pure humiliation. The Legend in question had been a Basilisk, a particularly stupid, fat reptile with a beak. Basilisks were brought up to believe that a single stare was enough to kill a human being. When cornered, they stop, open their eyes wide and glare at an oncoming human. The only problem was that their stare was marginally less threatening than a baby’s giggle. A Hunter wouldn’t even break stride.

Only a particularly inexperienced or inept Legend Hunter could fail to capture such a creature. Finn happened to fit into both of those categories.

His father had strung the hunt out to show Finn how best to track a Legend using his own skills rather than any technology. “When their world meets our world, it creates a dust. Even the rain won’t wash it away. Follow those dust tracks. Know the streets. Go at an even pace …”

It was then that he noticed Finn wasn’t in his shadow any more. Instead, after quickly bagging the Basilisk, he found his son two lanes away, on his back, kicking his legs in the air like a stranded turtle. His dad’s fear had been that a Legend would fell Finn; instead, his son had been undone by the awkwardness of his own fighting suit and the not-exactly-famous fighting skills of a pavement.

There was an uncomfortable silence on the walk home.

The second hunt, just the previous week, had started well enough. Following a few modifications to his armour, Finn was even given his own Desiccator. His father stayed with him as they hunted the intruder. It was a small Manticore, with the body of a lion, the stubby wings of a dragon, a scorpion tail lined with poisonous darts and, most dangerous of all, an inability to shut up.

They moved quickly, Finn tracking the dust from the Infested Side, just as he had learned, until he cornered the Manticore in an alleyway. Then it all went wrong. When Finn tried to get his Desiccator the holster at his waist, he snagged his glove on his armour and couldn’t even raise his arm.

“Hold on a second,” he said to the Manticore.

This was a big mistake.

The first thing Legend Hunters in training are told about Manticores is: Never engage them in conversation. The Manticore will keep you there all day, talking almost exclusively in riddles. Bad riddles. You will eventually go quite mad.

Luckily, as the Legend opened its mouth to respond with a particularly devastating riddle, Finn’s father desiccated it.

He and Finn again walked home in a deeply awkward silence.

And then, of course, there was today.

In less than a year, Finn would be expected to Complete and become a full Legend Hunter. Among the criteria to even be considered were three verified, successful Legend hunts. Being cornered by the Minotaur that morning had instead completed a hat-trick of calamities.

He had caught the look on his father’s face as he got out of the car outside school, the disappointment furrowing his brow. Now, as Finn walked home, he had a greater understanding of how deep that disappointment ran. He faced two possibilities.

Either he would fail so spectacularly that he couldn’t become Complete, thereby preventing his father from being the only Darkmouth Legend Hunter in forty-two generations to bag every Legend Hunter’s dream job.

Or he would somehow succeed and be left with the responsibility of defending Darkmouth, and every soul in it, alone. Finn couldn’t decide which was the best outcome.

Or, more accurately, the worst.

Finn turned on to a street that featured a row of apparently derelict houses on one side, windows bricked up or boarded, some painted with childish images of flower boxes in an attempt to brighten them up a bit. A couple of trees sprouting from the pavement softened it a little, but a long blank wall on the other side of the street gave everything an inescapably austere look.

In a town with street names that spoke of Darkmouth’s violent past, this one had no name. Finn’s house was the last in the row, ordinary-looking and unremarkable.

As he approached, Finn could see a police car parked just behind his father’s. The front door to the house was open and he could make out the figure of the local sergeant just inside.

Finn scurried to the low wall that hemmed in the small patch of garden outside his house. Out of sight, he crouched and listened.

“You know we appreciate what you do, Hugo,” Sergeant Doyle was saying. “And we know you’ve got to teach the boy.” The sergeant was a large man who used to be barrel-chested, but that barrel had slumped into his belly with age. “But this is the third time in only a few weeks.” There was a pause. Finn peered over the wall into the open doorway and saw Sergeant Doyle flip open a notepad and begin reading. “Two walls pulverised in Fillet Lane. A car half destroyed by your boy at the Charmless Gap—”

“OK, Sergeant,” said Finn’s dad, raising his hands. “We’ll be sure to …”

“Two people treated for shock.”

“We can cover whatever costs …”

“The real cost is to you, Hugo. The people here are already scared stiff of the monsters; they don’t need to fear the people who are supposed to be protecting them.” Sergeant Doyle never looked pleased to be in Darkmouth. This day was no different.

“I have to train him, Sergeant—” began Finn’s dad.

“We know you need to teach the boy, but there must be a better way than giving him a weapon and letting him loose,” said Sergeant Doyle, stepping away from the door. Pressed against the wall, Finn felt the heat rise in his face. The sergeant walked right past Finn without noticing him, got into his car and rolled down the window. “Hugo, you and I both know people here wonder why Darkmouth is the last place left where these attacks still happen. They’re beginning to blame you. Some of them are even asking if you keep letting the monsters in deliberately to keep your job.”

“Ah now, Sergeant ….”

“There are people in Darkmouth who wonder if they might be better off dealing with this themselves. It’s the twenty-first century, Hugo. They think they can buy monster-killing kits on the internet.”

Finn’s dad sighed. “They’re called Legends.”

“What?”

“See you, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Doyle drove off. Finn’s dad watched him go. “Close the door on your way in, Finn,” he remarked as he re-entered the house.

Finn groaned. He should have known it was pretty much impossible for him to snoop on his dad. Even his childhood games of hide-and-seek had been ruined by his father’s inability to even pretend he didn’t know where his son was.

As Finn started towards his front door, he saw something out of the corner of his eye, a blur further back along the street, moving quickly from one doorway to another. It was smaller than him, but tall enough, and he caught a glimpse of what might be fur. Red, flaming fur. Either that or …

Finn hesitated, opened his mouth to call his dad, then decided against it.

He held his palm out but felt no rain, turned his head towards home but heard no alarm.

He looked at his house, then back towards the figure. Quick and deft, it disappeared round the corner.

This was one chase Finn needed to do himself.

He followed it.

As he turned the corner, Finn got a better glimpse of the figure he was pursuing.

He felt a shot of relief as it confirmed what he had hoped from the moment he saw it. He was confident now that he would not need any help, any armour, any weapon. Nor would he need any of the courage his father kept insisting he would one day find.

It wasn’t a Legend but a person. And, if a person was going to be sneaking around, a mass of blazing red hair wasn’t much use for blending in.

Arriving on to the next street, he saw her straight away. She hadn’t even attempted to hide, but instead appeared to be waiting for him, leaning against a wall, her eyes only half visible behind her hair. Finn had felt those eyes trained on the back of his head throughout the school day, but whenever he had glanced back at her she hadn’t been looking at him.

“What do you want?” he asked, realising he didn’t know the new girl’s name.

“You’re Finn, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Finn crossly. “And you are …?”

She didn’t answer.

“Why are you following me?” said Finn. “I mean, have you seen my street? We don’t exactly get many visitors.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“Then you should know that you’re better off staying away.” He took a deep breath so he could stand a bit taller. “I deal with a lot of things far worse than you every day of the week, and it usually doesn’t work out well for them.”

“That’s not what I heard either.”

Finn immediately deflated. “You seem to have heard everything then,” he said, betrayed by a squeak of hurt in his voice. “Now leave me alone.”

He turned and started marching away.

“Emmie!” she shouted after him. “My name’s Emmie. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. First-day nerves, I guess.”

“Yeah, well …” Finn paused, but he still didn’t know what to say.

“I mean, my dad moved here because of his job and I never thought I’d end up in a small town because, you know, I grew up in the city and I’ve never had to be the new girl, not that I had that many friends back home anyway, but I had a few and now they’re there and I’m here and this town is kind of weird because, you know, I wasn’t even allowed to bring Silver with us because he’d get hurt just climbing the walls because – oh, Silver’s my cat by the way – because of all the glass on them. I mean, what is the story with this place and its high walls and all the glass and these narrow mazy lanes? Do people actually like living like this? Because it seems like, I don’t know, kind of depressing. I mean, another few weeks and I’ll probably just go completely …”

Emmie stopped, suddenly aware of how much she had blurted at him.

Having been blurted at, Finn was a little stunned.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It’s to stop those, erm, things, isn’t it? I heard all about it. In school.”

She stepped forward, her hair parting a little to reveal green eyes that were wide with enthusiasm. “Tell me, do you see many of them? Did you see one this morning? Are they dangerous? What are they like? Have you ever killed one?”

Self-awareness reasserted itself and she stepped back, tucking her head down so that her face again retreated behind her hair. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be so nosy,” she said. “It’s just, well, it’s kind of cool.”

A flush burst across Finn’s cheeks. Emmie looked around, seeming a little uncomfortable. “I’ve blabbered on too much. I’d better go.”

“Oh,” said Finn, still a bit dazed by all of this.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said brightly.

“Whatever. At school, I suppose.”

“I’ll see you before that, on the way there.”

Emmie opened the door of the house they were standing in front of and disappeared inside.

Finn remained where he was, somewhat bemused by the encounter. He looked at the house for a few seconds. It was a standard mid-terrace, nothing special. His house was similar, of course – from the outside at least – so he knew how deceptive looks could be, but Emmie’s was on an ordinary street, lined with busy houses and cars and a sense of life. It wasn’t the ruin that his street appeared to be. He envied that.

Finn turned to make his way home. As he did, he noticed the twitch of a curtain in the downstairs window, but whoever was there was gone just as quickly.

Finn sat at the desk in his bedroom, below a windowsill cluttered with coins, batteries, broken bits of an old phone, and a frayed cuddly toy with eight arms and soft fangs that he’d never been able to bring himself to throw out. His goldfish, Bubbles, picked about the stones in his tank, occasionally darting in fright at his own reflection.

In front of him was a large hardback book: The Most Great Lives of the Legend Hunters, From Ancient Times to the Modern Day (Vol. 18: ‘From Rupert the Unwise to Sven Iron-Tooth’). Finn was meant to be studying it, but his eyes were not on the book. Instead, they were on the now dark, quiet street outside, which still glistened with the wet of the day’s rain.

His mind was somewhere else entirely.

It was replaying the sight of the car that morning, crumpling like a tin can. The disappointment on his father’s face. The moment when the Minotaur had cornered him. The smell of its breath still clung to Finn’s nostrils, forcing him to run the scene over and over in his head, and he felt his shame grow with every replay until it formed a large knot in his chest.

From deep within the house, he could hear dull thuds and whirrs. His father had been making something for weeks now, sometimes long into the night. Since returning home, Finn had seen him only briefly – when he walked into the kitchen while Finn was doing his homework, telling him what section of The Most Great Lives he had to read that night, while prising a blade from the food blender before leaving again without explanation.

There was a thump so loud it sent a shiver through the house and shook Finn out of his self-pity. Then silence.

Finn glanced outside, trying to clear his mind. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the curved, diamond-like object that had been in the Minotaur’s nose and held it up to let the street light catch its edges. Before he could study it further, his door opened. Finn quickly threw the crystal into an open drawer.

“Mam! You’re supposed to knock before coming in.”

“Sorry, Finn,” his mother said, entering the room. “I was just worried about you. I heard you had a tough day.”

They sat on the edge of his bed together. “How was work?” he asked her. His mother was a dentist and, as she did most days, she had brought home a faint odour of chemicals and ground teeth. This was more comforting to Finn than he had ever stopped to consider.

“Not as exciting as your day thankfully. Although everyone was talking about the Legend that came through this morning. Luckily, all I had to do was wave the drill at them and they shut up pretty quickly.” She put her arm round Finn and went to give him a kiss on the top of his head.

Finn smiled, but squirmed away. “I’m not a baby, Mam.”

“You’re still my baby,” she replied quietly.

He groaned in protest. He didn’t want to admit that it warmed him when she said that.

There was a phwump from deep in the house, followed by the long squeeee of a drill. “I wish he’d hurry up and finish whatever it is he’s building down there,” said Finn’s mam. There was another thud. “Have you talked to him? About … this morning?”

“Not much. It’s fine, really. Stop worrying.”

Finn’s mam looked at him. “I knew what I was getting into when I met your father. You never had that choice.”

“Sometimes, I wish you were a Hunter too,” said Finn. “You’d be a really good one.”

Finn’s mam grinned. “I don’t think my parents would have let me marry your dad if I’d been expected to do that. I don’t think I would have married him. Anyway, you know the rules. Civilians can’t become Legend Hunters, Finn. You’ve got to be born into it.”

Finn and his mother were quiet for a few moments, the only sound the goldfish pecking at pebbles.

“I mean it, though, Mam. You’d be a great Hunter.”

“I could give them a good flossing until they succumbed. Or threaten them with a root canal.”

Finn smiled weakly, sending another trickle of warmth through his chest, loosening the knot a little.

“I’ll talk to your dad,” his mother said, standing up. “Get him to go a bit easier on you.”

“No!” snapped Finn, before quickly calming down. “Please don’t. I’m trying really hard, it’s just …”

“I understand.” His mam gave him another kiss on the head before she left. This time he didn’t squirm so much.

Finn got up and locked the door after her, then went back to his desk and took the diamond from its hiding place. He heard the front door of the house open and looked out of the window to see light spilling on to the pavement.

His father’s long shadow knifed across the street. Finn could see that his attention was focused on the far end of the street, where a parked van started up its engine and, without even turning on its lights, slowly pulled away.

His father turned back to the house and there was the heavy sound of the front door being bolted.

Finn wrapped the diamond in an old pair of pants and placed it at the back of his underwear drawer where it would be safe. He didn’t know what he was doing with it, only that it felt too late to admit to having picked it up in the first place. It was his souvenir. No one would need to know.

He sat back down at his desk and flipped through The Most Great Lives, only half registering the text, until, from beneath it, he pulled out a smaller thinner book. On its cover was a man in blue medical overalls holding a dog by the jaw. It mightn’t have been too clear if he was about to help the dog or punch it except for the title, half obscured by a school library stamp: So You Want to Be a Veterinarian.

Finn read a few pages, poring over the images of dogs, cats, birds and lizards, with instruments pointed at their ears, or holding down their tongues, combing through their fur, feathers or skin, each in the hands of a confident-looking person in scrubs. He imagined himself in those scrubs rather than a fighting suit. He closed his eyes and saw himself tending to an animal rather than blasting one, healing creatures rather than shrinking them into little balls.

His daydream was interrupted by the sounds again, deep in the house. Finn placed his head on the desk, the page of the book cool on his cheek, and listened to the noises, feeling the vibration tickle his face. Khrump, khrump, khrump. Silence. Squeeee.

They didn’t stop him from quickly falling into a deep sleep.

From A Concise Guide to the Legend Hunter World, Vol. 2, Chapter 65: ‘The Infested Side: A Guide to What We Know and What We Don’t’ (published by Plurimus, Magesterius, Fortimus & Murphy).

Over the years, there have been instances of Legend Hunters travelling to the Infested Side, either to wage an attack or because they were abducted by a Legend. There was even one infamous attempt to make peace with the Legends. And, in at least three recorded cases, people simply tripped and fell into a gateway.

The experiences of those who have returned from the Infested Side are largely unverified. However, there are consistencies in their accounts: they each arrive home with vivid descriptions of a scorched world, poisoned and poisonous, where death clings to every bare tree and every shard of burnt scrub. They also arrive home with a really, really bad smell.

So, over hundreds of years of such visits, added to the words and screams of thousands of interrogated Legends, we have learned many things about the Infested Side.

Some of them may even be true.

Broonie did not know where he was being dragged to, but the simple fact that he had a bag over his head, and his arms were tied, gave him reason to suspect that it was not anywhere pleasant.

At first, he had thought it was a practical joke played on him by the Hogboons who lived three mounds over and with whom Broonie had been engaged in a battle of pranks for a few months now. The most recent gag played on Broonie had involved a small rodent being released into his home, which in itself wouldn’t have been so remarkable if the small rodent hadn’t been on fire at the time.

It was, Broonie reckoned, a fair response to his own clever and complex jape involving ivy, sharpened sticks, a large hole and a bag full of beetles.

So, when he was woken rudely from his standard all-day nap by a bag being placed over his head, he was certain it was just another revenge prank. “Oh right, lads, very funny,” he’d said as his arms were being tied. “But wasn’t it my turn to play the joke?”

That was when he got punched in the head for the first time.

Even through a minor concussion, he could tell that there were two assailants and they were big. They clearly weren’t Hogboons like him, because Hogboons were a short, spindle-limbed race, though what they lacked in physical stature they made up for in length of ears, crookedness of teeth, greenness of skin and general mischief.

“Stay still, you ugly little thug, or I’ll snap your arms off and use them to break your legs,” one of the assailants roared as Broonie found some energy to struggle.

“You’re calling me ugly?” exclaimed Broonie. “I can see your feet through the bottom of this bag. Do you mind me asking, are all of those warts yours or did you borrow some for this special occasion?”

That was when he got punch number two. It knocked him out.

When Broonie came to, he was being dragged up a slope of some sort. It was steep and brutal underfoot. Actually, brutal underfoot would have been a luxury to Broonie right then. As he was dragged along, it was brutal under his toes, brutal under his shins and particularly brutal under his knees.

Worse than that was the stench in the air. It seeped through the canvas of the bag until he could feel it burning his throat. He had heard about this intense smell from other travellers, or at least from those who claimed to have survived it.

“If you were to leave a bag of fish to rot inside a corpse stuffed with already rotten fish, that would be sweet perfume compared to the stench of this place,” one traveller had insisted.

“I burned every item of clothing I owned to get rid of its foulness. Even then it wasn’t enough,” whispered another. “In the end, I had to shave every last fibre of fur from my body, pluck every hair from my nostrils, pull every lash from my eyes, to free myself of it. Yet, even now, if the wind blows in a particular direction …”

The air seemed to grow more putrid with every step Broonie’s captors took, with every bump and scrape his body absorbed. He understood now where he was being taken. It was to a place of death. Most probably his.

Eventually, the climb evened out, the ground becoming flat, hard stone. It was warmer and the echoes of his captors’ footsteps told Broonie he was indoors.

A door groaned open and heat smacked Broonie hard. They stopped. Broonie was flung to the floor. As he pushed himself up, one of his kidnappers yanked the bag from his head. The Hogboon was briefly blinded by numerous fires, burning tall in huge cauldrons that lined the large stone room. In front of him, the largest of them popped and crackled and leaped high towards the ceiling.

His captors shuffled their hulking bodies away. Broonie realised now that they were Fomorians, brutal, merciless giants who were all either very intelligent or spectacularly dumb, with nothing in between. He wasn’t entirely sure which type was better to encounter.

His eyes adjusted quickly and he saw, stomping towards him from the far side of the room, a figure Broonie had dearly hoped he would never have to lay eyes on.

Gantrua’s massive bulk was turned away from Broonie and, when he spoke, he turned his head only slightly towards him, just enough to reveal the curved edge of great fierce horns that sprouted from his forehead.

The light of the flames danced off armour that ran from his waist up to a jagged grille across his mouth. Even in the uncertain light, Broonie could see that it was made up of many individual teeth fixed on to a metal rim.

“Do you know who I am, Hogboon?” Gantrua’s voice was so deep Broonie felt it quiver through the stone at his knees.

“Yes, Your Greatness. The whole land trembles at your very name.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Broonie did not. So he took a guess. “Is it the beetles? It was only a bag of them, Your Lordship, and no one was eating them at the time. If they were yours, I am truly sorry. I had intended to sweep them all up and return them, but, you know how it is, Your Powerfulness, there were other things to do, and—”

“Quiet,” commanded Gantrua with an authority that terrified Broonie so effectively he briefly lost his balance. “I don’t care about your pathetic thieving. If you had decided to steal from me, you would have been struck down before the thought had even entered your head.”

Broonie’s head drooped from exhaustion and humiliation. His body ached from the violent journey. His head hurt from trying to figure out why he was here in the first place.

He lifted his head again to see that Gantrua was ignoring him now, engaged instead in a conversation with a smaller hooded figure in the shadows. Gantrua signalled to this other creature to wait, then turned fully and loomed over Broonie.

In the flickering light, Broonie could make out the scars that marked Gantrua’s skin, valleys sliced across his arms, rivers of wounds crossing at his shoulders.

“You are trained?” asked Gantrua.

Broonie had not expected that question. “We all were, Your Greatness. A long time ago now. Before the sky closed.”

“You had better search your memory for those lessons. The sky has not closed entirely.”

So the rumours are true, thought Broonie. There are still gateways to the Promised World. There had been talk among the armies of this, but he had never heard it confirmed. It had been a long, long time since he had heard of anyone going through and coming back.

“We are on the verge of a great invasion of the humans’ world,” continued Gantrua. “It must succeed or the way through could be locked for eternity and we will be trapped. Forever. In this place.”

He spat into the flames, shocking them into chaos. He composed himself again as the fire settled into its normal dance. “You, Hogboon, shall go to the Promised World.”

“I’m flattered, Your Worship. Really. I am greatly honoured. But, Your Masterfulness, I have not trained for many years. I fear I’ll get captured as soon as I step through the gateway.”

Gantrua leaned forward so that the flames licked the metal guard at his chin. “I am counting on it.”

He stood back, acknowledging a whisper from the hooded figure who was still lurking in the shadows. Then Gantrua addressed Broonie again. “The boy will be there.”

“The boy?”

“Do not act dumb, Hogboon. I know what they talk about beyond these walls. I know they talk about the boy. They wonder if it is true, if he is real. Well, he is real. You will meet him and you will take with you two things for him. One is a message. The other is a gift. My guards will give you both.”

One of the Fomorians removed a pair of tongs from his belt and approached a cauldron. Ignoring its angry flames, the guard plunged his tongs into the fire and pulled out a long clear crystal. He brought it over to Broonie.

“The miners work day and night to find the meagre supply of these crystals,” growled Gantrua. “Each has the power to open up a path between the worlds. We need to send one to the Promised World, but it will only retain its power through a sacrifice. I suppose I should tell you that yours will be a noble one, but I doubt very much nobility would ever stoop to be an acquaintance of yours, so we shall just get on with it.”

Gantrua turned away to exit from the far side of the plinth, then paused mid-step. “Which of your fingers is least precious to you, Hogboon?”

“Erm, they’re all kind of useful to me, Your Superlativeness. I’d find it hard to choose.”

“They all say that,” snarled Gantrua, then disappeared off the far side of the plinth.

The guard holding the crystal came closer. From his waist dangled a rather bloody-looking pair of pliers. The second Fomorian grabbed the Hogboon by one arm and pinned him to the ground.

Broonie had held out for this long, but he decided it was finally a good time to scream.

At breakfast, Finn’s father came into the kitchen and began rummaging through a drawer.

“How are you feeling this morning, Finn?”

Finn had a mouth full of cereal and couldn’t quite get an answer out.

“Good stuff. Listen, I’ve been thinking about what happened yesterday,” said his father, now searching through a cupboard. “It’s a lack of live Legend practice that’s held you back. My fault really. We’ll remedy that. Get hold of a Legend for you to fight.”

Finn swallowed his cereal. “Um … is that what you’re looking for now?”

His father had moved to another cupboard, his head stuck in it as he searched for something. “It’s all very exciting, Finn. You becoming Complete, me joining the Council. No other family in the world has that to look forward to. It’s really something.”

He emerged empty-handed, then stood up straight while looking around intently. “That’s going to have to do,” he said, grabbing a knife and moving towards Finn, who dodged as his father made for the toaster behind him. Using the knife, he forced off the toaster’s handle and left the room with it.

A few seconds later, Finn’s mother arrived in the kitchen. “Hello, sunshine,” she said, grabbing a couple of slices of bread and putting them in the toaster. She paused, realising what was missing. “Hugo!”

Finn left the house for school, and Emmie appeared just as he passed the corner where their streets met.

“What’s happening?” she asked, stepping in beside him as if the two of them had known each other forever.

“Erm, eh …” was Finn’s reply. It occurred to him that he should be a little more articulate from now on.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to worry too much because Emmie did most of the talking. She generally seemed to treat silence like an enemy. And what she mostly liked talking about was Darkmouth. While most newcomers found themselves compelled to run out of the place as fast as they could, Emmie was fascinated by almost every detail.

She had noticed there were bars on the windows of many homes and businesses. “Even the church looks like a prison. What if you had an actual prison here, would they put bars on the bars?”

Then there was the way the people greeted every drop of rain warily, as if it might be a deluge of blood, not water. “If they’re afraid of rain,” observed Emmie, “Ireland isn’t a great place to live, is it?”

She greeted every dent in a lamp-post and every crack in the pavement as possible damage from a Legend attack, and was disappointed when Finn dismissed each one as just another dent caused by someone not watching where they were backing up their car or yet more cracks that hadn’t been fixed.

Finn hadn’t given a tour of Darkmouth to a newcomer before and he could see how much Emmie longed to hear of adventure. So, as they walked along the seafront, he pointed to the large weathered rock jutting straight up some distance off shore. “That’s called Doom’s Perch. A Legend threw that there. It’s called Doom’s Perch because, about a hundred years ago, a local man escaped a Legend attack by stealing a boat and taking it out to that rock.”

Under her fringe, Emmie’s eyes encouraged him to continue.

“He climbed to the top, assuming that it would be a good place to hide out, and waited for the Legend to pass. Once the attack was over and everything looked safe, he went to climb back down to the boat.”

“Did he get eaten on the way down?”

“No, he slipped on seaweed, fell into the sea and was never seen again. They’ve called it Doom’s Perch ever since.”

Emmie screwed her face into a taut grin. “Yeah, nice one. Try and fool the city girl. You’ll have to do better than that.”

Finn felt a bit defeated by that. The story was pretty much true, although he might have made up the part about the boat being stolen.

Because they had dallied on the walk to school, they were late and Finn was again forced to take the last empty seat. As he sat down, he saw a half-melted toy car on the desk. The Savage twins were sniggering from the back, Conn Savage fiddling menacingly with his misshapen ear and Manus rubbing his knuckles beneath his eyes. Boohoo.

Over the next few days, Emmie asked Finn a lot of questions about Darkmouth and about his life, and the thing that came up most was this: she wanted to see inside his house. She was quite persistent.

“Maybe I could come to your house instead,” he’d suggested.

“Nah,” she responded.

She did this a lot, and it worked as a verbal weapon of sorts, a swift stab of a needle that punctured any talk she didn’t want to carry on. Finn had learned little about Emmie, other than that her father had come here to work because of a contract on the phone lines, and he planned to go back to the city once his job was done. She had met all Finn’s other enquiries with a wall of Nahs.

“Will your friends come and visit you here?”

“Nah.”

“Do you have a nice house back in the city?”

“Nah.”

“I suppose the city was really exciting to live in.”

“Nah.”

“Do you miss your cat? I’d like to have a cat, but my dad’s not big into pets.”

“Oh, I’d love it if Silver was here, but I couldn’t bring him.”

“Is a friend minding him?”

“Nah.”

But, when it came to Finn’s house, the words poured out like water from a burst pipe.

“Why can’t I come in? I won’t touch anything I’m not supposed to. I just have to see what it’s like in your house because I can’t imagine what kind of place it is, when your father’s job is, you know, what it is, and the way everyone talks about your family and how you’ve spent, like, centuries doing this so there must be amazing things lying around, because of all that time and all those Legends—”

“Legends?” interrupted Finn.

“What?” asked Emmie. “Isn’t that what they’re called?”

“Yes,” said Finn, frowning. “But people don’t usually get it right. They call them monsters instead. Did you know about Darkmouth before you came here?”

“Nah.”

It also became clear, over the following few days, that Emmie wasn’t particularly interested in getting to know anyone else in the school, only Finn. He didn’t quite know what to make of it, but he was glad she did most of the talking because it stopped him saying anything stupid.

That Friday afternoon, as they walked home, Emmie asked yet again if she could come to see his house, and his resistance broke so suddenly he could almost hear it snap.

“OK.”

That stopped Emmie dead on the street. Finn kept going, quietly satisfied with having said the right thing, and keeping his mouth closed in case he followed up by saying the wrong thing.

They walked past the derelict house fronts on Finn’s street, Emmie staying quiet the whole way.

When they finally reached Finn’s front door, he opened it and walked in, Emmie close on his heels. But, as she stood in the narrow entrance hall, Finn could see her struggling to hide her massive disappointment as she realised the Legend Hunter’s home was as ordinary as any other house.

The coat hooks weren’t made of serpent skeletons.

The wallpaper wasn’t made of dragon leather.

The pictures of Finn and his family showed them sitting, eating picnics and generally doing anything but wrestling beasts from another realm.

“This is the sitting room,” Finn said as he opened its door. He could see how crestfallen Emmie was to realise that it was, indeed, a sitting room. Nothing more, nothing less. The same with the dining room, with its dining chairs and dining table. And the kitchen. And the utility room, with its ironing board and an iron that could, at a pinch, be thrown at an onrushing Legend, although this clearly wasn’t its primary purpose.

He could almost see what Emmie was thinking. This could have been any house. On any street. In any town.

Finn couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. “There is something else …” he said, going to a small door squeezed between the kitchen and dining room. A stranger might think it was a cupboard because there was seemingly no space for anything larger.

The door had a handle, but Finn ignored that and instead pressed each of the door’s four panels in a practised sequence. He made a bit of a show of it, enjoying this rare dose of power he felt from knowing he’d kept the best for last.

“Ta-da!” he said with a flourish he immediately felt silly about.

There was the clunk of a lock opening. With a little effort, he pushed the door open with his shoulder and stood back so Emmie could enter first. She stepped through, peering into the deep dark that greeted her.

Finn flicked a switch and a single bulb flickered just over their heads. Then light raced along the ceiling away from them, illuminating bulb after bulb after bulb. It was not a room at all. It most certainly was not a cupboard.

“This corridor,” Emmie gasped. “It’s huge! It must take up a few of the houses next door.”

Finn gave her a look, and she frowned for a moment, then gasped.

“The whole street? Your house takes up the whole street? That’s insane!” She gave him a shove in delighted disbelief.

The hallway was narrow with a high ceiling. The lights bathed the faded brickwork, which changed in colour and texture every few metres, the street having been built one house at a time over many, many years. The entrance appeared to be the oldest part. “We just call it the Long Hall. It was like this long before I was even born,” explained Finn. “Our ancestors started off with our house where we still live, and over the years took over one house at a time, until we were the only ones here.”

Running along the length of the corridor’s right-hand side were closed doors, some wooden, some steel, and each marked with letters and numbers that would mean nothing to anyone who wasn’t a member of the family: the first was T4; the second E1; the third S3.

The left wall was lined with large portraits, some reaching from floor to ceiling. The first few were dark and faded. In them, the people wore metal armour topped off with shoulder spikes, helmets with antlers attached, and they carried basic but fierce weapons: double-bladed swords, nets rimmed with steel, shields studded with blades.

As Finn and Emmie moved slowly along the great corridor, the armour in the portraits grew increasingly modern and sleek, and the weapons changed from sharp instruments to guns.

The paintings were mostly of men, but women began to feature as the paintings became more obviously recent. Each had a nameplate: Sean the Brave, Hugh the Stone-Headed, Ragnall Iron Trousers, Aisling the Powerful, Conor Red Skull, William the Surprised, Rachel the Stubborn, Rory the Esteemed.

Each bore a striking resemblance to Finn.

“My ancestors,” he said.

Emmie looked at the portraits. “Weird names.”

“We don’t get a surname at birth,” Finn explained. “We gain one. Each of these people is named because of something they did or their personality.”

“What’s yours then?” asked Emmie.

“I don’t have one yet.”

“So you’re just Finn?”

“Until I get my Legend Hunter name. Everyone at school thinks it’s a bit strange not to have a surname, but it would feel strange to me to have one. Finn Smith, Legend Hunter. Doesn’t quite work, does it?”

“Suppose not,” said Emmie quietly.

It occurred to Finn that he had never asked her an obvious question. “What’s your surname anyway?”

“Er, Smith.”

“Oh.” Finn felt heat flush through his face.

“Don’t worry about it. I can blame my dad for that one,” said Emmie, who didn’t seem too bothered and was already scanning paragraphs of text framed beneath each painting.

She read from one.

“Conor Red Skull, Darkmouth, Ireland. Active during the late seventeenth century, he once went four days without sleep while tracking down and slaying two dozen Legends who had entered through three simultaneous gateways. It is said that he was so stained with blood it never properly washed off his skin. He earned his Hunter name due to his inability to spend any time in the sun without getting burned.”

“Each portrait has an entry like that,” said Finn. “It’s taken from The Most Great Lives, which is this book we have to read while training to become a Legend Hunter. Books actually. There’s a lot of them and they’re about all of the Legend Hunters throughout history.”

“Does that mean you’ll be in a book one day?”

“Um. Yeah, maybe. When I become a proper Legend Hunter,” said Finn.

“Cool.”

Finn flushed again, the heat prickling his face. Emmie moved on, eventually stopping at the second to last portrait. It was of a man who looked about as furious as it was possible to get. Across his lap was a simple rifle and behind him was a row of shelves lined with jars, whose labels the artist hadn’t bothered to add detail to. On a small table beside him was a miniature tree, leaning away from him at a sharp angle.

The nameplate on the frame read Gerald the Disappointed and the text below was particularly lengthy, going into some detail about the many adventures of his early life, including his rescue of a family of Legend Hunters hemmed in on the Scottish island of Iona; the year in which he staved off 154 Legend invasions of Darkmouth; his world-renowned bonsai collection; and how he once single-handedly felled a massive three-headed Cerberus, armed with just a single rock (“… albeit a very pointy rock,” The Most Great Lives clarified).

Finn hovered patiently while Emmie read. Finally, she spoke. “Nice nickname. Suits the face.”

“That was my great-grandfather,” replied Finn. “I never knew him.”

“Bet he was a barrel of laughs.”

“He trained my father. My dad says he was pretty fierce.”

“Why did he have to train your father? What happened to your grandfather?”

Finn gestured towards the last portrait. This man wore armour but no helmet, and was the only one in any of the portraits who was not holding a weapon. Instead, he was surrounded by scientific instruments and scraps of paper. He didn’t look particularly confident or aggressive. His chin wasn’t held high and his eyes were pointed down, as if he was meek or maybe even a little afraid.

“That was my granddad, my dad’s father.”

“Niall Blacktongue! Excellent name.”

“Not really,” said Finn, downbeat.

Emmie read the entry aloud. “Niall Blacktongue was the first Legend Hunter to try and talk to the Legends, to reason with them and attempt to understand why they wanted to come into this world. He died. No one likes to talk about it.”

That was it. Nothing else.

“I don’t get it. What happened to him?” asked Emmie.

“He died,” Finn responded haltingly. “No one likes to talk about it.”

There were two empty frames at the end of the row, with nameplates ready and waiting, but nothing engraved on them just yet.

“Who are those for?” asked Emmie.

“They are to remind us of our responsibilities to all of the Hunters who have gone before, all of these people along the wall. You only get a portrait when you’ve passed the role of Legend Hunter to someone else or if you, eh, well, die.”

“Wow, that must be pretty scary.”

“Well, you know, it’s our way of life, I suppose. That first empty frame’s for my dad.”

“What’s your dad’s nickname then?”

Finn paused before answering. “Hugo the, erm, Great.”

“The Great?”

“Yeah,” Finn mumbled. “He did a couple of things when he was younger. Kind of great sorts of things.”

“What, like fighting Legends?”

“That. And more. He never shuts up about it.”

“So, when will you get your nickname?” asked Emmie.

Finn’s hands were rammed into his pockets, his shoulders tight. “I have to do a thing called a Completion first. It’s a big ceremony.”

“When?”

Finn didn’t respond, but instead walked on towards the very end of the long corridor, the wall now empty of portraits on one side, but with doors still lining the other (T1, A4). Emmie tried one, but it was locked. At the end of the corridor was a large steel door with a wooden sign that read ‘Library’. Finn hesitated for a moment and turned to head back the way they’d come. “And this concludes our tour,” he said, with forced jauntiness.

“What’s in there?” asked Emmie, still standing at the library door.

“Nothing much,” said Finn unconvincingly. “Let’s go and see what food’s in the kitchen. I’m starving.”

Emmie hovered there a couple of moments longer. Finn watched her, listening to the noises from inside. The faint sounds of feet moving around, the squeak of a chair. She moved a little closer. From deep within came what sounded like a shriek.

“Come on. Race you to the kitchen,” said Finn.

Emmie hurried after him.

“Hit me.”

Finn punched his father in the face.

“Hit me again.”

He hit him again.

“Put some anger into it.”

Finn had anger in reserve, but he had to drill deep below his exhaustion to get to it. He concentrated hard, summoning it from the depths, and swung again. His father hardly flinched. Instead, he pulled off his soft padded headgear.

“Come on, Finn, this is only training. When I was your age, I was—”

“—already fighting Legends five times my size,” Finn panted. “You’ve mentioned it once or twice before.”

He dropped his tired arms. His father gave him a dig to the chest.

“Hey!” Finn protested.

“Don’t drop your guard. Now kick me. Aim for the crotch.”

Every Friday night, one of the rooms off the long corridor would host Finn’s often futile attempts to learn how to roll over and get up again; or to shoot at a target; or to leap; or to dodge; or to leap while dodging. This room was T2, a training room bare but for the soft mats on its floor, a mirror running the length of one wall and a box of simple gym equipment containing various items of padded gear that allowed Finn to hit his father wherever he was ordered to.

He stretched out and kicked. His father grabbed his leg and wouldn’t let go, so that Finn was left hopping on one foot, completely at his father’s mercy.

“I’ve seen ducks kick harder than that,” said his dad.

Finn had been training since he was very young, so it wasn’t that he couldn’t do any of these things. It was worse: he could almost do most of them. He could half roll, and just about jump to his feet. He could kind of shoot, nearly leap, more or less punch and semi-dodge. He had strengths; it just happened that they were usually closely followed by his weaknesses.

“Let’s try the Wrigley Manoeuvre, Finn. It’s a simple way of not just avoiding an onrushing Legend, but of turning defence into offence.”

“That’s the same guy who ended up being known as Wrigley the Headless, right?”

“Yes, and that’s why we have to make sure to do it right. Now take this seriously, Finn. It might save your life.”

His father demonstrated the move, darting across the room, then sliding and returning to his feet, facing Finn, with his hands raised in an attack position. “Now you try it.”

Finn followed his dad’s lead, but compared to him he had the dexterity of a giraffe on ice. “I see what you’re doing. I get it,” he protested, breathing hard. “I’m just tired now.”

“Twelve-year-olds don’t get tired. When I was twelve …”

“That must have been some year. Did you save anything for when you were thirteen?”

“Look, Finn. In the classroom, you’ve the potential to be a very good Legend Hunter—”

“Well, bring the Legends to the classroom and I can tackle them there,” said Finn.

“If you were as quick with your hands as you are with your mouth, this wouldn’t be so difficult,” his father replied.

Finn sat on the ground, breathing hard.

“Stay fresh,” said his dad. “You can read a couple of entries in The Most Great Lives when we’re done here.”

“Ah, Dad, really?”

“You’ll be in there yourself some day.”

“So you keep saying. There won’t be much to say about me,” said Finn.

“That hasn’t stopped them before. Besides, they’re desperate for you to come through. No Completions, and no true Legend Hunter in years, mean no new edition of the book. No new edition, no profits. They’re badly in need of an update.”

Finn was well aware of this already, thanks to the publisher’s repeated letters.

“Looking forward to your Completion,” Plurimus, Magesterius, Fortimus & Murphy wrote. “How’s the training going?” they asked. “We don’t mean to rush you, but …” and so on. Finn spent a lot of time trying not to think about the queue of people lining up to be disappointed if he didn’t Complete. Nevertheless, his conversation with Emmie had reminded him he wouldn’t be the first family problem.

“Dad, what really happened to Granddad Niall?”

“No one likes to talk about it, you know that.”

“I want to talk about it.”

“And I don’t. Now quit stalling and get up.”

Finn had almost got his breath back, but kept up the heavy panting to get a couple more moments’ rest.

“Maybe I won’t fight them when my time comes,” he said.

“What?”

“Maybe it’s the fighting that keeps the Legends coming, you know,” said Finn, a clamminess rising in him as he realised he was treading on thin ice. “Maybe talking to them isn’t such a bad idea.”

“Which bit of the ‘no one likes to talk about it’ is hard for you to understand?”

“Maybe we can learn something from it.”

His dad squatted down to stare directly at Finn, holding his gaze until Finn’s eyes began to want to jump out of their sockets and run away. Finally, his father spoke. “What my father did is not something I will ever be allowed to forget, no matter how hard I try. That’s all the lesson we need to learn.” He offered Finn a hand up. “Now let’s get fighting again.”

“Is this going to be needed, though?” asked Finn. “The gateways are dying out. They’ll be gone from here too eventually. Besides, we have Desiccators. Why do I need to learn this stuff?”

“You might have noticed that the Legends aren’t gone yet.”

“Then why do they keep attacking here and nowhere else?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

Finn took a moment to ponder this. “I think I’ve scared the bigger ones away.”

His father grinned at that, held out a hand and helped Finn to his feet. Then he jumped back. “OK, buster, wrestle me.”

Finn’s sigh of annoyance was lost in the clatter of an alarm rattling through the building. That noise had been the soundtrack to Finn’s life – the signal that a gateway had opened somewhere in Darkmouth.

“Excellent,” said his father, perking up immediately. “Who needs training when we have a live Legend to help us out? Besides, if we get into trouble, you can just give the Legend the look you’re giving me now. That’ll scare it.”

Finn bit hard on his lower lip.

His father grinned. “Yep, that’s the one.”

Broonie walked through the gate and emerged into a world of rain.

What he noticed first was not the scenery, but the air. It had a purity that was invigorating. At least it had a purity once he sniffed his way past the many impurities that were layered over it: fatty foods, burnt fuels, seaweed, decaying flowers, all overlaid by tons of perfume-doused sweat. It carried in the breeze and through the light rain.

But, underneath all that, the air was so fresh that he wanted to drink it.

Everywhere he looked there was a vibrancy that he had never experienced. Each colour was divided into shade upon shade – even the greys exploded across a spectrum.

This was the Promised World. This was what centuries of war had been waged over. He understood it now.

He was on a Darkmouth street. So orderly, he thought. Flowers growing from baskets in the air: novel. Numbers on doors: curious. The ground is painted with rectangles and vehicles are abandoned in them. Odd.

Broonie felt grubby in his dull rags crusted with his own blood. He saw that he was covered in a fine layer of dust that seemed resistant to the rain. Instead, it shed from him as he nervously shuffled on the spot, trying to decide what he had to do next. He had been told his mission. He still didn’t understand exactly what it was.

“When you see them, you can attack,” the Fomorians had said.

“Attack?”

“Attack.”

“Shouldn’t I take a bigger weapon with me?” he had asked, holding up the small knife they had given him.

“Your best weapon is your ingenuity,” they told him.

“While I appreciate the compliment, I’m not sure it will be entirely sufficient to—”

At which point a boot kicked him through the rippling gateway.

There was an incessant ache where his finger had been removed and clumsily replaced with a new digit made of crystal. It already felt loose at the knuckle. Even in his disbelief and pain, he was annoyed at the Fomorians’ shoddy workmanship.

An older human in a headscarf crossed his path, pulling some kind of square bag filled with provisions. When she saw him, she screamed and scuttled away, leaving her bag to spill at his feet. Broonie rummaged through its contents. He was desperately hungry, and slurped from a carton of milk, then bit into an egg and sucked its contents. They tasted so fresh he shuddered in delight. He rifled through the bag some more and recoiled. Inside a clear package was meat. Bloody. Sliced neatly.

These people must be more vicious than it is taught. Even the elders carry the raw parts of their prey.

It was time to run.

He struggled through Darkmouth’s maze of dead ends and blind alleys, continually failing to find a clear path.

Turning on to a wide street, he ran into a bustle of humans moving through the town. One noticed him and his shriek alerted the others. A small hairy animal at the end of a leash went wild, straining and snarling until Broonie thrust his knife at it, pricking the creature in the paw so that it squealed and withdrew, bleeding.

Its owner kicked at him and Broonie stabbed impulsively at him too, nicking his ankle, before jumping backwards on to the road where there was a horrible squeal of machinery as an oncoming metal vehicle braked only an ear-hair’s width from his face.

Adrenalin coursing through his raised black veins, Broonie darted through the nearest doorway to crouch inside its large window while he tried to figure out an escape route. Outside, the scene was chaotic. Some ran off straight away, while others stopped first to stare at him with mounting disgust before following the others.

Broonie became aware of something above him. And behind him. And around him.

Carcasses, stripped down to their flesh, hung on sharp hooks. Torn and cut and placed on display. Ribs, livers, tongues, all manner of sliced hunks of animals were neatly laid out behind a glass compartment. Broonie guessed they must be the fresh kills of the fat human currently standing behind the glass counter in a bloodstained overall, with one hand on a large cleaver and the other on a half-sliced body laid out on a table beside him.

If Broonie had opened his eyes any wider, they would have popped out and rolled across the floor to the butcher’s feet.

On the street, there was the squeal of metal, a great roar and another vehicle arrived through the crowd of humans that was heading in the opposite direction. A figure emerged from it, tall and imposing, fully armoured and wielding a gun.

Broonie immediately knew who this was. The Legend Hunter.

“A Hogboon,” he heard the Hunter say clearly. “Hardly a challenge, especially if it’s carrying little more than an apple peeler.”

Broonie sprang at the butcher, wincing at the blood smeared on his clothes, and wrapped himself tightly round his head, grasping firmly at the man’s face until he dropped the cleaver with a clang. Broonie then slid down on to the human’s shoulders, holding his bloodied knife to the butcher’s neck as the Legend Hunter burst into the shop, gun raised.

“Hugo …” whimpered the butcher.

“Don’t worry, Leo, we’ll soon have this sorted.”

From his dry throat, Broonie summoned the best rasp he could. “You’re a cruel species. Let me go or I will show you how cruel I can be too.”

“You want me to drop this Desiccator?”

“Now,” said Broonie, pulling tighter on the knife. His fear of having to carry through with his threat was outweighed by the thought of his insides hanging in this window while his outsides spent the rest of eternity as a comfortable pair of shoes.

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