Burns Night

by Amy Hoff

  She had opened up her wrist for him, with no other option available, and he’d whined as he wrapped himself around her, lost in his abandon, as he suckled the blood from her wrist and the aspect of him that would be called incubi mindlessly ground against her, just as he had the last time they visited Clarencefield and she’d taken pity on him.

  Never in her long lifetime had she even tried to change someone; she wasn’t even certain it was possible for a creature like her to do so. Things like that were more the province of popular-culture vampires, and she was more Fae than anything else.

  Still, here he was, and what else was she to do? She had enough grudging respect for humanity not to turn him away, and the sense of responsibility for this young man she had turned forever into an eternal being cursed to drink blood.

  Then again, as she watched him, and his eyes glowed gold as he moaned through the first peak he hit as a vampire, shuddering through the inhuman intensity of it, addicted from first bite, he certainly didn’t seem cursed to her at all.

  He seemed like he was enjoying it. She kept herself cold and distant; God knew what might happen if she displayed any kind of warmth or shared in his exultations, though that kind of feedback loop worked wonders for her hunger.

  She wasn’t quite certain what he was, yet. And if he’d retained his bizarre and inexplicable love for her beyond the grave, then participating in something like that would only serve to drag him further into that specific kind of hell.

  Still, allowing Robert to drink from her, and wrap himself around her, and lose himself in her, may not have been the best choice for his first drink of blood.

  Nevertheless, she’d helped clean him up, afterward; at first, she thought her fears regarding his ongoing affections were in vain. The first destination he planned was his own house. He could not be dissuaded, and so Desdemona followed him.

  Robert stood beneath the window of his home in Dumfries, staring up at Jeannie, who was standing in the window and looking out across the street, an expression of tired sadness in her eyes.

  “Don’t,” said Desdemona softly, as she took a puff from her pipe, leaning against the sandstone wall beneath the window so she would not be seen.

  Robert looked at her, and then up at Jeannie, who gazed out the window at something he couldn’t see. His great moon eyes were sad and despairing in the darkness, the light from the window reflecting the unhappiness there.

  “But it’s Jeannie,” said Robert, “I left her with children to look after and no money!”

  “Should’ve thought about that before you shared your bed with so many women and drank your house dry,” Desdemona muttered.

  “Des,” said Robert in anguish. Apparently, he had heard.

  Desdemona relented with a sigh.

  “All right, Robert,” she said. “It’s still a bad idea. Don’t go in there. Trust me.”

  “But she’s still alive,” Robert insisted. “She’s poor and hurting. They’re starving.”

  “I know, Robert, but this is a sacrifice you are going to have to make,” Desdemona said, her voice harsh and sure. “Jeannie doesn’t want to suddenly see her dead husband return from the grave. Think about your children. And how are you going to explain it?”

  She leaned back against the wall, that strange world-weariness returning to her features once again.

  “Nobody trusts a vampire, Robert,” she said, her jaw tightening. “No one.”

  Robert looked up at Jeannie again and sighed. She made the perfect picture of misery, there in her pink lace dress that had seen better days, the perfect widow, the perfect wife. Robert could not tear his eyes away – and yet, he had to; he knew the truth of Desdemona’s words.

  “You’re right,” he said, defeated. “You’re right.”

  “Believe me, I’m saving you and Jeannie a lot of pain and suffering,” said Desdemona. “What happens if you try to attack her? Or one of your children?”

  Robert shook a finger in Desdemona’s face.

  “I would never – “ he began.

  “Robert Burns would never,” she said. “A baobhan sith, well. You just wait until you get hungry enough.”

  Robert’s face fell with the realisation. Desdemona took pity on him.

  “I’m sorry. I really am,” she said gently. “This is the life you chose. These are the consequences.”

  Robert took one last look, shoulders slumped, and walked away for the last time, up the street and into the night.

  Desdemona looked up at Jeannie, her eyebrow raised; then turned, and followed him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CALEDONIA INTERPOL

  The sun was setting over Glasgow, fading into the purple of the gloaming.

  Detective Inspector Leah Bishop crouched near the corner of the darkened alleyway. Nour and Dorian stood behind her as she peered cautiously around the corner.

  “Shit!” she yelled, just as fire blasted past her face. She could feel the heat and intensity of it.

  “Do you really think fighting dragons with a phoenix is a good idea?” asked Dorian.

  The pretty phoenix giggled and winked.

  “Fighting fire with fire?” asked Nour. “It’s your call. This is the reason I get up in the morning.”

  Dorian walked nonchalantly out into the alleyway.

  “Dorian!” hissed Leah, “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I had a better idea,” he said, and his eyes flashed that deep blue, like the ocean as it roils dark in a storm.

  The wind whipped around them and Leah backed against the wall. Nour groaned.

  “Oh, no,” she said, as a deluge of rain first pattered, then pounded down onto the city. The dragon breathed in and tried to shoot fire towards the slight figure of Dorian Grey. The light, it seemed, was out.

  Dorian straightened his white gloves and took out a small notebook. He wrote swiftly on it and then walked up to the dragon. Its amber eye rotated to look down at him.

  Dorian took out a small magnet and attached it to the dragon’s large iridescent green scale.

  “£200 fine for breathing fire within city limits,” he said primly, “and you are lucky I don’t take you in for interfering with the duty of a police officer. Now go back to the Highlands if you can’t behave yourself like the rest of us.”

  The dragon just looked at him.

  “Do you want me to make it £300?” Dorian asked, and with a flicker, the dragon vanished.

  He turned around to see his human partner drenched in the rain that hadn’t stopped, since it barely needed encouragement in Glasgow anyway, and a very angry-looking phoenix whose firepower was also a bit dampened.

  They all ran for cover, yelling and laughing, although Dorian would never admit to such an indecorous way of behaving.

  In the warmth of a nearby pub, Leah grinned at her partner.

  “Quick thinking,” she said, “although I think I won’t dry out for days.”

  “How about you, Nour?” asked Dorian, “Are you all right?”

  Nour gave him a sidelong look, but then grinned.

  “Of course,” she said, “Dragons are reptiles, phoenix are birds. My fire does not go out.”

  “Remind me never to get on your bad side,” said Dorian.

  “I don’t think you need a reminder,” said Nour.

  “Hey, what about me?” asked Leah.

  “I know not to get on your bad side already, Miss Bishop,” said Dorian Grey.

  ***

  The night was cold and dark, which was usual.

  It was dry, which wasn’t.

  There’s a red sandstone building in St. Enoch Square, the old subway station which today houses a coffee shop. It looks like a castle, with its four turrets and its clock tower, sitting incongruously in the centre of the plaza. Nobody takes much notice of it, as the year turns round and round the building, the Christmas Market springs up every year, the pigeons make their homes in it, the shingles are covered with lichen from the yearly damp of life in the second city
of the Empire.

  And yet, this is Glasgow’s most fascinating building, if anyone knew what lie beneath.

  This particular January night, a pair of revellers walked past a nondescript older man in a black leather jacket, smoking and leaning against the red sandstone of the ancient subway building, a small castle now a coffeeshop in the more modern hustle and bustle of St. Enoch Square.

  “Say a prayer for the soul o’ Rabbie Burns!” one of them shouted to the stars. The other began to sing, while they argued about whether it was, indeed, a Burns song.

  The man smoking shook his head. His eyes were an unearthly blue. He flicked his cigarette away, the red embers scattering amongst the bricks.

  “Fuckin’ Burns Night,” he muttered, and slammed the palm of his hand against the sandstone.

  A brief, dim glow surrounded his hand. A passageway opened, a long staircase and hallway surrounded by vines and growing things. Living creatures like fairy lights giggled and whispered among the branches, and the man walked through the door just as the wall closed solid behind him.

  At the end of this long, leafy arched walkway was an enormous edifice growing out of the ground like living rock. This was his destination.

  The man walked into the cavernous main office of Caledonia Interpol, one of the world’s most curious police stations. The ceiling soared so far above that it was invisible beyond the clouds moving across it; the room was large enough to create its own weather. Off to one side, an enormous window looked out onto what, nobody seemed to really know. And yet the room was warm and welcoming, with fires leaping in various fireplaces, books stacked high on the walls up into the clouds. The firedogs in the fireplaces jumped and gambolled together, eager to impress the creatures working there, and the overstuffed sofas and rich, thick red carpeting along with the mahogany walls gave the entire place the atmosphere of home.

  It was also a hive of activity, and yet none of the people there were really people, per se. A gumiho sat at a desk, a liver in a lunchbox by her side. A monster with tentacles for a face sat down beside a woman whose face was entirely pointed teeth and wide mouth, as she leaned back and dropped pieces of orange into her face and her monstrous visage wobbled with the effort of chewing them.

  And at a back table out of the way, a woman with long, dark hair looked longingly at the sofa in front of one of the fireplaces. She sat beside a man so perfectly put together it looked as though he had been painted there.

  Detective Inspector Leah Bishop and her selkie partner, Dorian Grey, a holdover from the Victorian times, puzzled over the latest ongoing investigations, their paperwork spread out between them. Although Dorian was a shapeshifter, one of the ocean race of seal-people celebrated in folklore from the Faroe Islands to the coast of Wales, Leah was entirely different. In this place of so many amazing oddities that would make most humans dizzy, Leah was the only human working with this particularly unique branch of the police. She had a background in law enforcement and folklore, so the Fae had tapped her as the perfect human assistant back when they had realised there wasn’t anything Fae about the first serial killing of Faeries. She’d been on the staff for a few years now, and things that Leah once thought as mere fantasy had become her everyday reality.

  And much like anything else, although Caledonia was a police station run by monsters whose responsibility it was to keep the other monsters in check, familiarity breeds contempt. Just like any police work, the experience could be exciting, or very boring.

  Today, it was mostly boring.

  “It’s your turn to descale the kettle,” said Leah, paging through her latest paperwork and not bothering to look up. Dorian glanced sideways at her.

  “I thought the pixies did that,” he said.

  “Usually they do,” Leah agreed, “but Aoife’s boyfriend got murdered last night.”

  “One of ours?” Dorian said, startled.

  Aoife may have been one of the receptionists, along with another Faerie called Lindsay, but she was also an Irish warrior queen who had lived in Scotland long enough to have no real accent to speak of. The murder of her boyfriend was surprising. Aoife was not the kind of Faerie anyone bothered to mess with, but then again, she hadn’t been there when the actual murder went down.

  “Nah,” Leah shook her head. “Human police. She’s pregnant with his kid, though. Says he abandoned her, so she’s not feeling all that upset about his death at the moment. I’m sure she’ll come around.”

  “Hm,” Dorian hummed sympathetically. “Or she won’t. That sort of thing is always a danger when dating a human. Well. Anything else that’s new, or strange? I confess, I am in the doldrums, Detective Bishop. I should like to get out and stretch my legs.”

  Leah nodded, completely on board with what her partner was saying, and was about to respond when something caught her eye. She sat up straight, instantly alert.

  “Well, there’s that, for starters,” she said, pointing towards the doorway where a tall, sleek man wearing a tuxedo for absolutely no reason grinned at them. He gave the impression that he was entirely made of hair gel, and his black beady eyes were sharp as they evaluated the room.

  Everyone in the office went silent and stared at the newcomer.

  “Sebastian Bloodworth,” said Chief Ben, rising to confront him. “How did you get in here?”

  Sebastian surveyed the room.

  “Lax security,” he sneered. “I’ve still got my permission, ever since poor Geoffrey shuffled off this mortal coil. Same handprints, you see.”

  He beamed at them and was greeted with stony silence. Sebastian had hidden among them behind a familiar face, a sweet young man named Geoffrey. It turned out that he had created a second personality, and Geoffrey wasn’t real, but Geoffrey himself didn’t know that. The innocent young man’s sacrifice was something that still hit a sore spot with the creatures assembled, even though he’d shared a body with Sebastian.

  “Gotta fix that door,” grumbled Chief Ben. “What can we do for you? You know this is the stupidest thing I’ve seen you do in all my years on the force.”

  Sebastian smiled again, an unsettling rictus of a grin.

  “Don’t worry yourself,” he said. “I think we both want the same thing for once.”

  He turned to address the crowd. Even the brass firedogs had stopped playing in the grates.

  “I’m here,” Sebastian announced, “to turn myself in.”

  ***

  While all of this was going on, one of Interpol’s finest was busy elsewhere.

  There was a window on one side of the enormous offices at Caledonia Interpol.

  It stretched from floor to ceiling and let in a certain grey light, but this was much cooler than the Christmaslike warmth of the main office, with its rich red carpeting and its leather upholstery, the firedogs sleeping in the grates beside the flames leaping in the gigantic fireplace.

  Out here, in what mostly served as the entrance hall and a passageway to the kitchen, Yoo Min liked to take her tea. She preferred green tea to the stodgy stuff the Brits drank; she had transferred from Seoul during the previous year, and found it reminded her of home.

  She liked to stand by the window and look out at the blue-grey mist that seemed to be a permanent feature of whatever the window looked out onto. No one had ever seen the mist clear, but there were often shapes moving in it. None of these had yet emerged, and most chalked it up to the mysteries of a magical police station built in Faerie, on the other side of the human/Fae divide. Yoo Min liked to watch the mist and wonder who had built Caledonia Interpol, and what exactly the mist was hiding.

  She was a detective, after all.

  The steam from her tea warmed her face as she gazed out into the grey for the thousandth time, idly wondering whether Chief Ben would finally assign her a partner. She primarily worked alone, which was a fine situation for a detective like her; people were put off by gumiho anyway. Nobody liked working with a fellow cop who ate the livers of men, especially one who was carving it out of
one of their own at every mealtime.

  There was a shape in the mist, darker now.

  Yoo Min narrowed her eyes. This was new.

  The shape moved forward, now a solid form.

  Standing in the fog was a young Korean man in ancient traditional clothing.

  She dropped her mug and planted her hands on the glass.

  He looked up at her. He mouthed the word why.

  And Yoo Min screamed as if she had seen herself in a dark alley, and leaving the broken pottery on the floor, she broke into a run.

  ***

  Leah stood up slowly, never taking her eyes off Sebastian.

  “Chief,” she said. “A word?”

  One of the wulvers cuffed Sebastian while Chief Ben joined Leah and Dorian in an empty corner further away from the crowded office where they could speak together unheard.

  Everyone else was still staring at Sebastian, who smiled around at them serenely.

  Yoo Min chose that moment to burst into the room.

  “Chief?!” she cried, and in the far corner of the Interpol office, she spotted the three of them whispering back and forth. She glanced at Sebastian and then approached the group.

  “What’s wrong, Yoo Min?” asked Leah. Dorian nodded to her.

  “Chief,” Yoo Min said urgently. “I saw a man outside the window.”

  “What window?” asked Ben.

  “The big one, the – the one with the mist,” she said.

  “What?” asked Leah and Dorian at once. Ben looked at her sharply.

  “You saw someone out there?” he demanded. Yoo Min nodded.

  “Did you recognise him?” asked Dorian. She nodded again and put her hand around an ivory necklace encased in a wire heron design.

  “It was Tae Pyeong,” she said, her eyes filled with horror and tears. “Tae Pyeong, the boy who loved me, who I – I…”

  She rubbed the pendant like a talisman.