Houses were quickly left behind, and it became clear that the road was intended only for access to upper pastures. When it curved around to the right, away from the red dot on the GPS, I told Nadia we’d better park and walk the rest of the way.
“Gah. I hope we don’t get stuck,” she said, as the turf to the side was rather soft and muddy. I didn’t know how much traffic the road got, but parking in the middle of it would be rude. We got out, squelched in the mud a bit, and Nadia fetched her sword from the back and inspected the rear of the van for any obvious signs of hobgoblin misbehavior. Buck grinned at her and shouldered his pack.
“Absolutely zero damage! I bet ye wish all yer passengers were so gentle on yer ride. Shall we be about it?”
Nadia had him fetch a torch out from under the altar before he got down into the mud. We’d probably need it if we were to spend any time at this, since the sun had set and we were walking under a lavender sky edging toward violet.
We found the barghest a hundred meters nearly straight uphill from the van. He was facing a copse of trees deliberately left standing to serve as a windbreak between pastures, as well as a habitat for various birds and other creatures.
I asked Nadia and Buck to hang back a bit so I could walk up and talk to the barghest without worrying about my curse.
“The pixie’s in the trees, eh?” I asked him.
“Whuff,” he said.
“Lead me to her, please, but slowly.”
He walked on, and I waved at Nadia and Buck to catch up. The wall of trees grew before us, and I wondered how we’d actually find her in the darkness beneath the canopy. Pixies would have plenty of places to hide in a wooded grove like this. But the barghest stopped before the first tree directly in front of us and whuffed softly, his chin pointed up at one of the branches. I couldn’t see anything, so I got out my phone.
[Buck. Call to her please, see if she’s willing to talk.]
“Oi! Pixie!” he shouted. “I was the hobgoblin in the cage next tae yers in that shite flat of Gordie’s. Can we talk? Are ye awright? We want tae help if we can.”
A tiny voice responded from about halfway up the tree, though I still couldn’t see anything. She had an Irish rather than Scottish accent, and I awarded myself some fleeting congratulations for tracking her down when neither Hatcher nor Clíodhna had been cooperative.
“Wee pink man. I remember seeing ye unconscious. Did ye escape somehow?”
“Aye, even so. I’m bound in legal service now tae the sigil agent Al MacBharrais. And Gordie’s dead, so that’s a joy and a justice tae the world.”
“I don’t think there’ll be any joy or justice for me, hob. What’s your name, by the by? We never got to talk.”
“I’m Buck Foi. This here’s Nadia, and the old man there is Al MacBharrais himself.”
“Pleased to meet ye all. Or kind of afraid, really. I’m Cowslip. Are ye gonna kill me now?”
CHAPTER 27
The Rock of Gargunnock
Buck and Nadia both turned to me, and so did the pixie. The torch revealed her position, perched on a branch perhaps three feet above our heads. While Buck could probably reach her before she flew away, there was no way that Nadia or I ever could. Not that I was anxious to dole out death.
She wasn’t quite a full foot tall. More like nine inches. She had some gossamer wings that shed pixie dust like a minor snow flurry, which sounded like pure magic until ye remembered that dust was simply flakes of dead skin, so if it was magical, then it was magical wing dandruff. She had on some nondescript grey clothing that camouflaged her against the bark of the trees, along with some very wee grey boots, but it only served to highlight her extraordinary pallor. A patch of dark hair—in a pixie cut, of course—was tousled around her scalp. Her eyes looked puffy and red from crying.
I typed a response to her question and held up my phone in hopes that she would be able to hear it.
[The treaty’s been violated, but it’s not necessarily your fault. I have broad discretion in terms of enforcement. So let’s just talk for now. I’m not itching for a fight.]
“You’re going to get one, though. Not from me, sir—from the rest of them.”
[Are the rest of them nearby?]
“Sure they are. The lab’s just over there against the rocks, behind the wall.” She pointed past me, and peripherally I saw that Nadia and Buck turned to look, but I kept my eyes on her in case it was a trick. This whole thing might be a trap. She could be bait. We might be presenting ourselves as a fine, still target for a sniper.
[And why aren’t you with them right now? Out here to distract us? Set an ambush, perhaps?]
“No,” she said, sounding offended. “I’m out here because I don’t like them. I’m not like them. They slobber and drool and drink wine and eat people.”
[They eat people?]
Cowslip nodded. “Men they killed in other countries. They bring back an arm or a leg and roast it and take their time nibbling at it. They even ate one man’s arse, and I said are ye barmy, why would ye ever want to eat an arse, and they said it was spicy. Can ye believe it? Spicy!”
[Ugh!]
“That’s exactly what I says, sir, I says to them, ‘Ugh!’ and I contented myself with a nice flower salad, which is a salad with . . . flowers in it.”
[Tell me three times, Cowslip: Are you here to ambush us or to let us be ambushed?]
“No, sir. I tell ye three times. I am here by my lonesome because I want to be alone.”
[Fine. What have they done to you, and who are they?]
“They’re not Irish or Scots. One of them said they are Americans, I think. Some group called See Hi Hey or something.”
[CIA. Okay. And what did they do when they got you here?]
“They poked me with needles, but not steel ones. Made of something else. Special needles, they said. They injected stuff into me and it hurt. I had sweats and fevers and I shat my wee bed more than once. They said not to worry, that was normal, and I said no, ye bastards, ye can speak for yerselves if ye want, but it’s not normal for me to shite the bed, so feck all yer poxy holes with a raw donkey cock. And after they were done, I looked rougher and older but iron wouldn’t kill me. Plus I’m angry all the time.”
Fresh tears coursed down her cheeks, and her tiny hands clenched into fists.
[I’m sorry, Cowslip. What hold do they have on you? Why don’t you go home?]
“Oh, aye, why don’t I just go home? Feckin’ easy for ye to say, but ye don’t know, do ye?”
[No, I don’t. That’s why I asked.]
“It’s an addiction, sir. A bloody addiction. I have to keep getting their injections and do what they want or I’ll die.”
[How do you know you’ll die?]
“I refused the shots for a while and I got so sick. It hurt so much. More than anything. And when they gave me a new shot, the pain went away. So I am well and truly bollixed. I have to do what they say.”
[And what do they ask you to do?]
“Go places with the others. Find men and kill them. Take whatever papers we can find and then burn it down, leave no evidence. Don’t let anyone see us or take a picture with their phones like ye have there.”
“Tch. What a waste,” Buck muttered while I typed my next question. “Think of the heists ye could pull off with a crew like that! And they’re playing spy games.”
[Have you personally, Cowslip, killed anyone?]
“No.”
[Are you sure?]
“I tell ye three times, sir. They mostly send me in from above to disable their cameras.”
[But the others have killed humans?]
“Oh, aye. They’ve developed a taste for ye, and the clurichaun brings a hatchet, a carving knife, some crackers, and a little jar of aioli with him on jobs now. It’s just mayonnaise with some shite mixed in but he thinks it’s super fancy, never shuts up about how good his bloody aioli is. But I like one bite of those vegetarian burgers—ye know, the new ones that don’t taste like
sawdust? Fills me right up.”
[Fascinating. So where is this lab?]
She pointed behind me again, but I kept my focus on her. “Head that way and you’ll see a wall of rock before ye get to the top of the table. A natural wall of rock in the hill, not the old man-made wall. It’s like a wee cliffside. And there’s a door in it now, hidden away. The lab facility is in there, built into the earth. That’s where they hide.”
[Who are they?]
“The rest of them. The fir darrig, who’s a dirty bastard. The clurichaun and the leprechaun room together, drunk on Irish whiskey and wine. The undine has her own subterranean lake, and she’s scary. And there are humans.”
[How many?]
“I don’t know for sure. I can’t tell them apart. They all look stupid to me, like you. Except you have a fun hat and mustache.”
Buck sniggered and Nadia grunted in disapproval.
[How do we get in?]
“I don’t think ye do.”
I looked around to make sure there wasn’t an ambush coming at that moment. Nadia spoke what I was thinking.
“Look, Cowslip, if ye want Al tae overlook your violation of the treaty between the Fae and humanity, ye’re gonnay have tae get us in there.”
“I can’t. I can get myself in but not you. There’s all these security measures and defenses built in. You’re on camera, by the way. This is the bound tree we use to shift to Tír na nÓg, so they have it under surveillance. They know you’re here.”
They didn’t know anything for sure except that they were blind out here at the moment. The Sigil of Swallowed Light on my hat took care of that. If the CIA wanted intel on me or to train a weapon on my person, they’d need to do it with their actual eyeballs. I wasn’t going to let a drone or a satellite take me out.
[Will you let me use a Sigil of Reckoning Truth on you?]
“No, sir, I’ve heard that leaves some damage behind, but I’ve not told a lie yet. I tell ye three times. And I’ll answer any question ye have. I can’t make them pay for what they did to me, so I need ye to do it for me.”
She had been forthcoming so far and showed no signs that she planned to shift away, so I knelt down next to the barghest, removed the GPS tracker, thanked him for his service, and dismissed him before I continued. He didn’t bark so much as borked a soft farewell before melting into the air.
[Do the humans have guns?] I asked Cowslip.
“Aye, sir.”
[Are there more than ten of them?]
“Between five and ten is my best guess.”
[So we’re facing four Fae immune to iron and between five and ten humans with guns in a fortified bunker.]
“Right.”
[Is there another entrance?]
“Maybe? I only know of that one in the rock wall.”
[And this is where they have kept you since you left Gordie’s apartment?]
“Aye.”
[Were you lured to this plane by a promise of service from Clíodhna or one of the bean sídhe?]
She sniffled before answering and wiped at her nose. “Clíodhna herself.”
I shook my head, suddenly sad. The poor wee thing was so unhappy. Clíodhna had preyed upon her hopes, and then Hatcher’s people had preyed on her some more. Tricked, trafficked, and then trapped into forced labor, using the same methods that humans used on their own kind to press people into various services with little or no hope of escape.
“I’m sorry that happened to ye, Cowslip,” Buck said. “I got fooled the same way. I’d be in there with the rest of them now, hating my life, if Gordie hadn’t choked on a raisin scone.”
I was looking down at my phone to type out another question when Nadia abruptly tackled me to the ground and shouted, “Sniper!”
Gunfire erupted. It was aimed at us, sure, but primarily aimed at the branches of the tree that Cowslip was sitting in. Bullets shredded and splintered the wood, and Buck cursed creatively the entire while. When they had emptied their clips and had to reload—yes, I purposely say clips instead of magazines, to make pedantic American gun nuts froth at the mouth—Nadia checked on the pixie.
“Cowslip?”
“I’m okay!” she squeaked, though I couldn’t see her anymore. She had taken shelter behind a trunk or bough. Pixies were extraordinarily small targets.
[How many shooters?] I asked, not caring who answered as long as someone did. I couldn’t see anything in the gathering darkness and needed a sigil to fix that.
“Lemme check,” Buck said. He popped away, leaving his bag behind, and returned shortly thereafter. “Two. Up near the wall of rock that Cowslip told us about. Can ye see it without stickin’ yer head up tae get shot off?”
“Stay down!” Nadia yelled, just before the shooters began spraying down the hillside again with their fresh clips.
I had questions. The CIA had obviously sent out someone to check on their loss of camera surveillance, but why had they initially gone after Cowslip instead of us? After going to all the trouble and expense to develop an asset like that, why did they decide to terminate?
The only possible answer was that they had the area wired for sound as well and heard her giving us everything. Since she was more likely to be taken out in the surprise first volley, they had targeted her first. But we couldn’t be allowed to live either. We knew too much.
Bullets were hitting the hillside now. We had minimized our target silhouette, but they were going to keep us pinned down at the very least if not perforate us multiple times.
It clarified my thinking and resolve. When it comes to beings that are on earth without permission, my license to kill is absolute. I have no such license to kill other humans.
I do, however, occasionally run across the need. As in this situation, a self-defense scenario where it appeared that there would be no opportunity to negotiate. A minimized silhouette and the legendary inaccuracy of automatic weapons would not save us forever. We must either kill or be killed.
And rarely—yet always to my eternal shame—I actually wanted to kill. I’d never acted on such desires before, because other solutions were available to me that would let me face the mirror in the morning, and I supposed so long as one possessed a sense of shame, that was a weak moral code of sorts: In the morning, and every morning after that, can I live with this shite I’m about to do, without self-loathing?
But this was an extraordinary situation in which my wants and needs overlapped. I needed to survive this and get into that lab, and, pinned down as I was, I couldn’t do that without a spoonful of lethal violence. That was enough to proceed. However, I also wanted these people who enslaved other beings yet sang of the “land of the free” to pay for their unforgivable cruelty and hypocrisy. They had literally created man-eating monsters but were no less monstrous themselves.
When they stopped to reload again, I leapt to my feet—leapt being a relative term for a man in his sixties—and pulled out the ancient Sigil of Unchained Destruction. I didn’t see the gunmen, but I could dimly make out the miniature rock cliff in the hillside that hid the secret entrance to the lab. It was a darker slab in the deepening darkness.
One hand aiming the sigil and the other poised above it to break the seal, I held the sigil carefully still and hoped that it would work after all this time. If it didn’t, I’d probably hear Nadia tell me to duck an instant before a bullet tore through me. I broke the seal, raising the flap and pinching it aloft so that nothing blocked the sigil, and counted:
One Ecclefechan.
Two Ecclefechan.
Three—
CHAPTER 28
The Corrupted Fae
The Sigil of Unchained Destruction is not quite like taking off and nuking a site from orbit just to be sure, but it’s close. It’s less wanton, more targeted, yet utterly irresistible. The aftermath looks like what you’d see if a helicopter news crew surveyed the path of a tornado through a trailer park. It’s a cone of raw kinetic force that obliterates everything for approximately two hundred mete
rs before deciding that’s quite enough and it’s time to fuck off and go to the pub.
It’s a true cone of force, however. Aim the center at a point slightly aboveground, like I did, and you’ll get a whole lot of that force scooping up the ground underneath the center. Or at least pushing it forward until it has nowhere else to go but up because that’s the path of least resistance.
The resultant impact created a percussive boom and shockwave and threw up a whole lot of earth into the sky. It knocked me back on my arse. That would bring someone to investigate eventually, so we couldn’t wait long before getting in there ourselves.
I looked over at Nadia and raised an eyebrow in question. Okay to proceed? She looked up at the expanding cloud of debris, clambered to her feet, and slapped at her clothes to get the mud off.
“Don’t want tae get too wild here, but I think ye might’ve got ’em, Al.”
“I’ll say! Bloody hells!” Buck said.
“Did you kill them all?” Cowslip’s tiny voice asked.
[The two shooters, yes. Don’t know how much damage it did inside the facility.]
“Can ye imagine if William Wallace had been packing one of those?” the hobgoblin asked.
A keening noise made me think I’d sustained hearing damage from the detonation, until I realized the sound was coming from behind me rather than internally, and it was growing into a chorus. Cowslip squeaked in alarm as I turned around and she flew down to us.
“The bean sídhe are here!”
They were indeed. They had shifted in through the bound tree and were now spinning in slow gyres about the trunk, their glowing but vacant eyes staring at nothing, their open mouths wailing and ululating nonsense in a rising wall of teeth-grinding sound. There were no recognizable names being called. But I cast a worried glance at Buck. He had his hands over his ears and a wince on his face.
I walked over and gave him two sigils. “Agility and strength. You be careful.”
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