Buck hung back a little bit, not precisely comfortable around a barghest after the attack we’d suffered. I felt that too, but using one here was our best chance at finding the lab. I was betting that the lab also served as living quarters for these Fae now, since we’d heard no reports of them renting a flat in Edinburgh or anywhere else.
[We’ll need your GPS tracker,] I told Nadia. The barghest would track the pixie for us, and provided it stayed in-country, we’d track the barghest from the van. If it the pixie was in Scotland or the north of England, we wouldn’t even need a second tank of petrol.
While Nadia left to fetch the device, I wrote up the contract and paid the packmaster with a writ for an hour of agency services to be provided later. Bartering services in this manner was much easier than trying to figure out a form of legal tender between the planes and far safer than trading nebulous favors.
[Please explain to the barghest that this is a seek mission only. He’ll have to carry a GPS tracker and remain corporeal as much as possible so we don’t lose the signal. Halt within a hundred meters of the target and wait for us to arrive to fulfill the contract.]
The packmaster, a solemn faery with kind brown eyes, knelt next to the barghest and murmured to him in Old Irish. Nadia came back and he took the tracker and affixed it to a collar, which he then looped around the barghest’s neck. Then he presented the pixie’s cage for a target scent, and the ghost hound snuffled and whuffed at it, absorbing the smells. When he finished, he looked up at the faery and said something that sounded remarkably like, “Roof.”
“He’s ready,” the packmaster said. “Would you like him to begin now?”
[Maybe not quite yet. Does he have an idea of which direction we’re headed?]
The faery asked the hound something in Old Irish and the hound spun around a few times with his nose in the air, then sat down again. “Ohwhuff,” he said.
“He says north.”
[So we’ll be staying in Scotland, then.]
“Aye. He can’t track across oceans.”
[Let’s wait a half hour. I have preparations to make.]
The packmaster explained this to the hound, who lay down on the carpet, content to stay. I asked if it was okay to give him a roast, and the packmaster said that would be fine. He left as I tossed the meat into the barghest’s jaws.
[I need to get some sigils ready for this,] I told Nadia. [And I should warn you that the Sigil of Iron Gall on your razor is not going to work on the Fae we’ll be fighting. These are immune to iron and stronger than usual.]
“Fae immune to iron? I didnae know that was possible.”
[Neither did I. You might wish to choose a weapon that’s more immediately fatal.]
“The idea here is to be fatal?”
I nodded grimly. [These Fae have killed humans directly on this plane. That violates our treaty, and the punishment is capital.]
“I’ll go home and get ma sword, then.”
She left and Buck asked, “Awright if I go home quickly to grab a couple things too?”
[Like what?]
Buck flashed his perfect teeth at me. “I have a clever plan.”
[Be back in thirty minutes or less. And bring my derby hat.]
He disappeared, and I went to my desk to press the stud that opened my ink library. I locked the office door and took off my topcoat, going through the many interior pockets and removing all the sigils I wouldn’t be needing—sigils for contracts and the like. I had a couple of different sets, or loadouts, that I used when I knew I was walking into a certain kind of situation. This one called for some especially destructive sigils that I rarely used. One of them, the Sigil of Unchained Destruction, I had never used at all except when I achieved my own mastery. It was the last sigil an apprentice learned before mastery, and I unleashed it to prove I could do it, and then, of course, never managed to get one of my own apprentices to mastery. The one I had prepared had sat under seal for a good forty years. I wasn’t even sure it would work anymore. Its potency might have faded after so long, like batteries left unused in a torch for years. I hoped I’d have no cause to find out.
Just as I finished my preparations, my phone buzzed. It was D.I. Munro.
“Mr. MacBharrais, I hope you’re still at work? You haven’t left for the day?”
“Aye.”
“Good. Because I’m in your lobby. I’ll be right up.” She disconnected and I swore, fetching an ink bottle full of a navy-blue mixture that I’d need to replenish soon. I drew three quick sigils and sealed them, but it wasn’t quick enough: D.I. Munro was mashing the office doorbell before I could finish. No matter; the door was locked, and she’d just have to wait until I was ready. Whatever she was here for was probably not good at all. Surprise visits by the police are never polite social occasions. She probably had backup if she had it in mind to arrest me for something, so that was why I prepared extra sigils.
There was no use calling to her that I’d be right there, because the office was soundproofed. She’d have to wait and get angry. And I’d have to figure out why she was here.
As I walked out of the library with my fresh sigils and shrugged on my coat, I spied the pixie’s cage and the barghest sitting by the whisky table and realized I’d have difficulty explaining either or both to the detective inspector.
“Come on, pooch,” I said, snatching up the cage and returning to the library. “Come on. Wait in here for a wee while, please? In here.”
Barghests are smarter than any earthly hound. They might not understand my English the way they understood Old Irish, but they understood body language and intonation well enough. Since they were under contract and knew it—and I was also someone who occasionally produced a roast—I was temporarily someone to be obeyed. The huge hound shuffled into the library and sat where I asked, and I thanked him. I set the cage down on my worktable and hurried to my desk to close up the bookcase. Only when it was fully closed and I had typed up a text-to-speech welcome did I open the door and welcome D.I. Munro into my office, pressing play on my app.
[Apologies. I was finishing up a very important email before the end of the business day.]
Two constables walked in behind her, as I’d feared. This was not the friendly fishing expedition in the coffee shop.
“How important can anything in this business really be, Mr. MacBharrais? Yer business is putting ink on paper. That’s it.”
[That is indeed it.]
Her eyes roamed the office, not looking at me at all. “Perhaps ye were up tae something other than an email. I’d be willing to bet ye were.”
[How can I help, D.I. Munro? Are you here to tell me the trafficking victims have been rescued?]
“No. I mean yes, they have been rescued. The boys in Trafficking caught them as they were waking up for the night and most of them agreed tae give up their pimps, so la di da, thank ye very much, they won’t be on the streets tonight and NHTU is very happy with ye now. But I am not.”
She hadn’t stopped looking around, even moving behind my desk and pulling out the chair to peer underneath it. But once that was done, she looked up at me with a scowl, and I tried my best to look concerned. I raised my eyebrows in consternation and typed, [Oh, dear,] just to make her explain. Though I suspected I already knew what she was looking for.
“Did ye know, Mr. MacBharrais, that inside that completely fucked room of Gordon Graham, your late employee, there was a smelly aluminium cage?”
[I didn’t. I recall telling you and D.I. Macleod I was never there.]
“Right. Never there. Except I think ye were. I remember seeing ye there. And I remember thinking before I saw ye that room had a lot of jars full of shite the boys in the lab would get excited about. But I didn’t see that cage for some reason. And in Gordon’s bedroom, there were a lot of personal effects and a laptop I was going to investigate later. Then there’s this strange gap in my memory, but I’m still sure I saw ye along with a wee pink man in that apartment. And after that time, well, ye know w
hat I found in those rooms? That smelly cage that I hadn’t seen before, but a whole lot else that went missing, including Gordon’s laptop and all those jars and pots and that. Still, I couldn’t place ye there for sure. Something was wrong with the cameras in the building, which was also strange. So damn strange I took precautions. I put a tracer inside that stinky cage, and what do ye know? It just reported that it’s here. So where is it?”
Bloody hell, she was good. A good sight better at the business than Macleod. [It’s not here. You just looked yourself.]
“Maybe ye have it in the shop, then. Where’s it hiding? Because we know it’s in the building.”
[May I explain? It will require me to take a piece of paper out of my coat, but I will do it slowly. I promise I am not armed.]
She told one of her constables to get behind me, and he got out his baton just in case I was lying. I pulled out my official ID and showed it to her and she blinked, taken in by the three sigils there. I took the time to show it to the constables too, and once they were all open to suggestion, I gave them the prepared sigils I’d just made and said aloud, “I want you to break the seals on these cards and look at the sigil inside, then hand the cards back to me.”
Under the sway of Certain Authority, they obeyed this command, exposed their minds to the Sigil of Lethe River, and promptly forgot the last hour, including the fact that I had just spoken aloud. I didn’t like using Lethe River because it might cause someone to forget something vital to their own survival, but it was a stone cold fact that if I had used it in Gordie’s flat on the day he died I could have avoided all this trouble with D.I. Munro. Easy to say in hindsight, but it didn’t matter; I hadn’t taken any Lethe River sigils with me that day.
In this situation, an hour’s lost memory meant that the polis forgot why they had come to my office in the first place. And they were still under the influence of Porous Mind and vulnerable to further suggestion, so I took the cards back and put them in my pocket, along with my official ID. I smiled at them and returned to typing on my app.
[Thanks so much for coming by. I’ll be writing a check to the Scottish Police Benevolent Fund straightaway.]
D.I. Munro squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “What? I beg your pardon, but . . . I believe I’ve had an episode of some kind. How did I get here?”
[In the company of these two constables. I imagine you have a car waiting outside.]
“Yes, but . . . why am I here?”
[You came to inform me that the sex-trafficking victims decided to cooperate against their pimps and that they will receive such aid as necessary to rebuild their lives.]
“I did? That doesn’t make sense. I could have just called. And I wouldn’t have needed constables to come along for that.”
[No doubt you were on your way elsewhere and just stopped by. But it was a pleasure to see you, D.I. Munro. I hope I can assist the police again in the future.]
“Right. Well.” She stood there, blinking and trying to recall anything, but those connections were gone. Not knowing how else to proceed, she said, “Good day,” and exited with the constables. I locked the office door behind them and Signaled Buck.
Are you quite finished? I need you back here.
On my way, old man, he replied after a few seconds. He knocked on the door only seconds after that, and I let him in. He had that bag from Hatcher’s house with him, along with my hat, and he was sweating and breathing hard.
“Bit worn out from popping so far and so fast,” he said. “Do ye have anything nourishing, like chocolate-covered marshmallows?”
[No, those aren’t healthy.]
“Naw, but they’re important.”
[Okay, I’ll get you some or something similar. But I need you to take that cage back to Gordie’s apartment and leave it there.]
“Now?”
[Right now. It’s got a tracer in it somewhere, and the polis were just here looking for it. When they look again, I want it to be back in Maryhill.]
“I thought we were going after the pixie.”
[We are. As soon as you’re back and munch a couple of marshmallows.]
“Boff Bogdump’s bollocks, I’m going to be worn out before we get started.”
I wanted to ask who Boff Bogdump was—probably some infamous figure from hobgoblin lore—but Buck might be counting on that very thing to stall me, so I said, [Can’t be helped. I’ll get something to replenish you. Off you go.]
“Fine. But where’s the cage, old man?”
I opened my ink library and fetched it, telling the barghest he could come back out and rejoin us in the office. Buck popped away with the cage, and I told the barghest to wait while I went out for a few minutes. There was a convenience store around the block, which didn’t have chocolate-covered marshmallows but had the two items separately, and I decided that was close enough.
A quarter hour later we were all reconvened in my office, the swing shift was coming in to do the night’s press run, and we were ready to go. I sent Nadia and Buck down to the parking lot off George Street ahead of me so I could speak aloud to the barghest without worrying about my curse.
“Begin your search now. Remember to stay a hundred meters away from the target, and once ye find her, wait for us to catch up. We’re going to follow on roads using that tracker.”
“Whuff,” the barghest said, though I don’t know how much of that he understood.
“Good boy. Find the pixie. Let’s go.”
He faced north and his substance melted away, becoming a ghost dog as he pursued the target scent we’d given him. I made sure to take my cane along and walked downstairs to join Nadia and Buck in the parking lot. Nadia was telling Buck about the rules, which all boiled down to him not messing up her ride or stealing anything from it. I joined them as Buck was giving her assurances.
“I swear on my maw’s sacred lamb stew,” he said, “I’ll be a model passenger. I’ll break nothing, steal nothing. I’ll just be honored to ride in yer gallus wizard van.”
“No pranks of any kind?” Nadia said, pointing a finger at him.
“None.”
“Awright. Ye wanna pray to Lhurnog with me?”
“Of course!”
“Good.” She hauled open the back door of the van. “Hop in.”
“Fuck yeah!” Buck launched himself inside and immediately sat on the love seat facing the altar, placing his sack next to it. Nadia turned to me.
“Want tae join us? Won’t take a minute.”
[Might be crowded. I’ll get in the passenger seat. The dug’s on his way.]
“Okay, we’ll be quick.”
Before I moved to the front, I saw her pull down a bottle of The Macallan and hand it to Buck. “You pour the whisky, I’ll melt the cheese.”
I didn’t participate in the ritual for the very good reason that, with enough worshippers, Lhurnog might collect enough psychic energy to manifest, and then I’d have to quickly write a contract that forced him to stay off earth. The last thing we needed was a god running around eating men and inspiring wizards to ride lizards. Or maybe we did need that; we might be better off, I don’t know. But for the sake of convenience I vastly preferred Lhurnog to be a vague idea in the ether, with only one place of worship—the van—and one holy relic honoring him thus far. I was doing my best to keep Nadia so busy that she never thought to produce a work of scripture that hallowed the Unhallowed.
I got into the passenger seat and did my best not to pay attention to the bloody prayers happening in the back. Flipping on the GPS receiver mounted on the dash, I waited for the signal to ping and give me a location. It took a few seconds, but a glowing red dot showed up heading north in the general direction of Stirling. That would be easy enough to get to, once we escaped the city traffic.
When the prayers finished, Nadia got into the driver’s seat and got us on the road. The sun was crawling orange into the west when Buck spoke up from the back.
“Okay, the cheese is melted!”
“Goo
d,” Nadia called back. “Now you carefully eat it with that bag of crackers I gave you. Don’t spill any!”
“This is the best,” Buck said over the crackle and rustle of a plastic bag. “Only thing that could make it better would be a shot of salsa.”
[Don’t ever give him salsa,] I told Nadia. [He gets high off it.]
“He does? That’s no fair.”
[Eli said the same thing.]
The red dot on the GPS display stopped a few miles west of Stirling, near a wee village called Gargunnock.
I looked it up on my phone just to make sure there wasn’t a convenient article describing a secretive research lab located there, but no such luck. It had an inn, a general store, and an old church. It was surrounded by sheep pastures, hayfields, and rural charm. There was also a table of rock that rose above it on the southern side, which someone had thought made a nice defensible position in the old days. There was supposed to be an old Bronze Age wall spread out along the base of it.
It was twilight when we hit the town. We had to go through it to reach the red dot; there was a road somewhere past the church that led uphill to the table, though it petered out before it reached the top. The tracker was near there.
The rock retaining walls lining the streets were capped with green carpets of moss and lichen, the soft furry kind one can pet. A few of the locals stared in shock and disapproval at Nadia’s wizard van, and she smiled and waved at them.
“I love how ye can tell after ye pass someone in this van that they’re gonnay turn tae their friend and shake their head and say, Kids these days! or sumhin like that.”
[Or get the polis. You’re suspicious and up to something.]
“Aye, that’s happened, unfortunately.”
Nadia had an official ID like mine in her glove compartment, which she kept for such occasions, telling the constables in question to simply let her go. It wouldn’t do to have them search the van and find open whisky bottles in the back.
We turned off the paved road and onto a dirt one that wound upward into the hills. A couple of sheep in a rolling pasture quivered and shot us anxious looks, transfixed by the sight of Lhurnog and the wizard lizard.
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