‘Right-oh,’ called Andy, almost casually.
Dominic went in first. It was his idea, after all.
We found Andy flattened against the wall by his kitchen door, shotgun at the ready.
‘I tried to call you lot,’ he said when we joined him. ‘But all the phones were buggered.’
‘Where’re the kids?’ asked Dominic.
‘Upstairs with Joanne,’ said Andy.
I peered around the doorframe. The kitchen light was off and half the windows blown out. The upstairs lights spilled down into the garden, illuminating the swing set, the rotary clothes dryer and a gleaming shape – like a horse spun out of glass. It snorted and its great head swung back and forth – looking for an opening.
Andy meekly handed over the shotgun when Dominic asked for it.
‘Out of shells anyway,’ he said. Nonetheless Dominic cracked it open and checked. I wondered if Andy had a shotgun licence, but decided now was not the time to ask. Dominic laid it carefully down and kicked it into the living room.
‘Andy,’ I said. ‘I want you to go upstairs, pick the most secure room and barricade yourself, Joanne and the kids inside.’
I expected him to argue, but he seemed to have a touching faith in the police and did as he was told.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Dominic once Andy was safely upstairs.
‘We go forth,’ I said. ‘And we de-escalate the situation.’
Dominic nodded. ‘De-escalation,’ he said. ‘One of my favourites.’
Peacocks, Nightingale had said.
I squared my shoulders, hefted Hugh’s staff and walked into the kitchen, fixed the beast outside with my eyes and said, ‘Oi, sunshine! Cut it out.’
The unicorn turned in my direction, the moonlight flashing on the ridges of its spiral horn, and for a moment we stared at each other through the smashed window of the kitchen door. Then, faster than I would have believed possible, it lowered its head and surged towards me.
Its head fit through the broken window, but its shoulders smashed into the frame, ripping it out of the brick work with a noise like a JCB ram-raiding a DIY store. Between the kitchen units and the table I had no room to dodge, and turning my back on half a metre of spike did not strike me as a good idea.
But I wasn’t some terrified peasant, I was an apprentice and I had been trained by the man who led the rearguard at Ettersberg. And we were about to find out how good that training was.
Anticipate
, Nightingale had drilled into me,
formulate
,
release
. . . and for god’s sake, Peter, you have to have the follow-up ready the moment you release the first spell.
I had anticipated the charge and I was speaking the spell even as splinters of wood clattered off the ceiling. It was my shield, famously capable of stopping seven out of ten pistol calibre rounds – on a good day. Had the beast hit it face-on, that horn would have gone right through it. But I didn’t have it held face-on – I had it deflected at an angle so that the point slid off to my right, because the surface of the shield is well slippery.
And I knew that not from some ancient text but because I’d logged hours on the range, conjuring the thing at different angles while Molly poked at me with a stick.
The thing bellowed with rage as its horn slid uncontrollably to its left. And where the horn went, head, neck and shoulders were sure to follow. It hit the kitchen table at just over knee height and went down on its side amidst splinters of laminated chipboard. Its great hooves scrabbled on the lino as it tried to get them back under itself. But I had my follow-up ready – I twisted and swung Hugh’s staff as hard as I could. I would have liked to have landed one on its head, but my reach wasn’t good enough and instead the staff’s iron cap scored its way down the unicorn’s shoulder.
It bellowed with pain and frustration.
Cold iron, I thought. The stories are true.
I hit it again and it screamed.
I kept the shield aimed downwards to keep it pinned and raised my staff once more.
The unicorn stopped struggling to rise and lay there quivering, staring at me with a mad brown eye – in the darkness it seemed real and solid and all there.
‘Are you going to be a good boy?’ I asked.
The mad eye rolled in its socket, but the head slumped down amongst the splintered wood of a kitchen unit, stainless steel cutlery and the remains of Joanne’s best china.
‘Dominic,’ I said. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That was interesting.’
‘We’re going to be stepping back into the hallway,’ I said. ‘Give Princess Luna here a chance to get up.’
Dominic put his hand on my shoulder and guided me backwards – as I went, I lifted the shield away from the unicorn, although I made a point of keeping it between me and the beast.
It hesitated at first, but then in a crackle of broken glass it got to its feet. I thought it might have another go, but it started turning immediately, incidentally smashing the sink off the wall and bringing down the last intact wall unit. Water hit the ceiling as the cold tap sailed through the air and out one of the broken windows. Even as it sauntered out through the ruins of the kitchen door it had begun to fade, until it was nothing but the sound of hooves vanishing into the night.
‘Aren’t we going to follow it?’ asked Dominic.
‘I know where it’s going,’ I said.
‘You know,’ said Dominic, ‘I think I’m going to marry Victor after all. An experience like this puts your life in perspective.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Mine is still passing in front of my eyes.’
‘Okay,’ said Dominic as we retreated to avoid the widening pool caused by the water fountaining out of the broken sink. ‘But are you sure what you’re seeing is not just the rest of your life?’
The next step was to get the Marstowes safely out of the house. We played rock, paper, scissors to determine which one of us would explain to Joanne why she was going to need to wrangle a new kitchen out of Herefordshire County Council – I won. We were waiting downstairs for them to grab some overnight clothes and Dominic had just unshipped his Airwave to get some support in when we heard the siren.
It had the slower tone change that marked it as an ambulance. We heard it come up the slope and then stop further down – about where the Old Rectory was.
‘Oh shit,’ said Dominic.
By the time we got there Derek was being wheeled out of the house on a trolley. He was wearing a neck brace and an oxygen mask – there was a pressure bandage covering the side of his head. Inspector Edmondson had taken over the scene. We gave him the sanitised version of what had happened to us, and he explained that his people had searched the house and that Victoria and not-really-Nicole were missing.
Going Forward
The house of Puck, the Pokehouse, where will-o-wisps were wont to lead travellers astray – and cause police officers to break traffic regulations with extreme prejudice. I’d told Dominic to floor it, and that’s just what he’d done.
Whoever had smacked Derek Lacey on the side of the head, and my money was on Victoria Lacey in the kitchen with the bottle of Baileys, had a good twenty minute head-start. But, since they hadn’t taken a car, we might have a chance to cut them off – literally at the pass, as it happened.
The big Nissan roared as we did a ton down the B4632 towards Mortimer’s Cross. And, trust me, that is not something you want to do without an ejector seat. Behind us I saw lights and sirens as assets started piling in from Leominster – fuck knew what DCI Windrow was going to make of this.
‘I think we’re going to be asked some questions,’ I said.
‘What’s with the “we”,
kemosabe
?’ said Dominic. ‘I’m planning to blame you for everything.’
He made a sudden right into a turn I couldn’t even see, and we went bouncing up a slope. I caught a quick flash of an English Heritage sign and then we slipped about on a rough track until Dominic told me to get ready to open a five-bar gate. So I leaned out the window and knocked it off its hinges with an
impello
. The Nissan bounced noticeably as we ran over the flattened gate.
‘That,’ said Dominic, ‘was not compliant with the countryside code.’
As far as I could tell, we were bouncing across an open field – ahead of us something dull and metallic reflected in the headlights.
‘Another gate,’ yelled Dominic, and I leaned out and knocked that one down as well. The staff seemed to ripple under my hand as I used it, purring as the metal five-bar gate fell down flat with no fuss whatsoever.
Then we were jolting down a tunnel of trees, with flashes of light grey to our left. I realised we were on the same path that Zoe had followed with baby Nicole over a decade ago. One that really wasn’t designed to be driven down at speed.
I saw pale faces suddenly caught in the headlights – so did Dominic, and he hit the brakes. The Nissan skidded, fishtailed sideways towards the riverbank before recovering, and slowed to a halt a couple of metres short of the figures.
It was substitute-Nicole and Victoria. The woman had bound the girl’s hands with what looked like duct tape and wound a piece around her lower face to gag her.
We climbed out of the Nissan and approached carefully.
‘You can’t stop me,’ she screamed and started dragging the girl up the path.
When faced with a low-level hostage situation your first task is to calm the hostage taker down long enough to find out what they want. Then you can lie to them convincingly until you negotiate the hostage back, or are in a position to dog pile the perpetrator. Dominic got his torch out and kept it on Victoria’s legs to avoid intimidating her – that could come later.
‘What can’t we stop you doing?’ I asked.
Victoria gave me a puzzled look.
‘You can’t stop me getting Nicole back,’ she said.
I looked at the girl who was not-Nicole but probably her half-sister. She glared back over the duct tape as if it was my fault. Which technically, I suppose, it probably was.
So it was a hostage swap – which meant if we were clever we might be able to get Nicole back and keep not-Nicole as well.
‘Who are you making the swap with?’ I asked.
We were emerging from the tunnel of trees. To our right the treeless slope of Pokehouse Wood swept up the ridge. The white poles that protected the new saplings thrust up amongst brambles and the stands of foxglove stood grey and trembling in the moonlight. I smelt horse sweat and malevolence – I didn’t think we were alone.
‘The lady who owns Princess Luna . . .’ she said. ‘She came to see me last night. I thought it was a dream. But it couldn’t have been a dream, could it? Because you never remember your dreams, do you?’
Victoria started to drag the girl up the diagonal forestry track – it was slow going, not least because not-Nicole had gone limp in an effort to stop her.
‘This one is your biological daughter,’ I said.
Victoria stopped dead.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Remember when Zoe ran off with the baby?’ I asked. ‘This is where she came.’
‘For god’s sake, why?’
‘For the attention I suppose—’
Victoria cut me off with a disgusted sound.
‘Of course for the attention,’ she snapped. ‘I mean, why did she think it was a good idea to swap Nicky?’
‘That was an accident,’ I said. ‘She didn’t even notice it go down.’
‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘That makes everything okay.’ She shook not-Nicole roughly by the arm. ‘This isn’t mine,’ she said. ‘Blood isn’t everything – I want my daughter back.’
‘So do I,’ I said. ‘And when the other half of this swap-meet turns up, maybe we can do some bargaining.’
‘Um,’ said Dominic urgently. ‘That would be about now.’
I can’t say they materialised out of thin air, but it was as if when I turned my head they arrived in my blind spot, so that when I looked back in that direction they were there. It was creepy, and it was definitely showing off.
And they were real, there in Pokehouse Wood, on the last of the quarter moon. They were flesh and blood. Human shaped but tall and thin, with long delicate faces and hands and black eyes. A woman stood ahead of us dressed in armour made not of metal, but of overlapping stone scales, slate possibly, polished to a bright blue-grey sheen.
Like the scales of a fish, Zoe had said.
Victoria might have called her a lady but I know a Queen when I’m within genuflection distance.
She wore a silver circlet upon her head with a single large sapphire at her brow. In her hand she held a straight spear of white wood tipped with a leaf-shaped flint blade. I’ve seen enough
Time Team
to know how sharp a blade like that could be. From her shoulders hung a cloak of white wool, and sheltered under one hem I could see a small figure with a pale worried face. The real Nicole, I presumed.
For a mad moment I considered just stepping up and arresting the lot of them – as a plan it at least had the virtue of simplicity. Its principal drawback being that the Queen was flanked on either side by her beasts, real and stinking. I could see the sheen of sweat on their dappled flanks, and the one on the left had a nasty cut on its shoulder – a streak of dark blood down its side. That one had a particularly mad look in its eye, just for me.
‘There’s a pair of good looking IC7 boys behind us,’ said Dominic softly. ‘Carrying bows and arrows. And another two upslope.’
‘Good fields of fire,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘We’re okay as long as we don’t do anything stupid.’
‘You’re giving me this advice now?’ said Dominic.
Victoria grabbed not-Nicole by the shoulders and held her out at arm’s length towards the Queen.
‘I’ve brought this one,’ she said. ‘Now give me back my daughter.’
The Queen narrowed her eyes and suddenly I knew I’d seen that expression on someone else’s face. She twitched back her cloak and gently laid a long-fingered hand on Nicole’s shoulder.
Victoria shoved not-Nicole, who was having none of it and refused to budge.
‘Move,’ hissed Victoria, and the Queen’s lips twisted into a thin smile. She shook her spear and not-Nicole’s shoulders slumped and her head drooped – she took a step forward.