The Lost Girls

by Sarah Painter

  ‘I want more,’ Robbie said, sullen. ‘If it’s the thing that knifed that girl it could be dangerous.’

  ‘If it’s the thing that’s killing young women, then I think you’ll be safe,’ Mal said. ‘Being neither of those things.’ He was about to hang up, but something Robbie had said tickled the back of his mind. ‘Why did you say ‘knifed’?’

  ‘What?’

  Robbie’s voice sounded suddenly quiet, as if he’d looked away from his phone when something caught his eye. Or someone. Mal was getting paranoid, he knew it. Didn’t help. ‘You said she had been strangled.’

  ‘Aye, the French bird was.’

  ‘But you knew how Laura Moffat died too?’

  ‘I telt you it before,’ Robbie said, his voice stronger. ‘Are you feeling all right, man?’

  ‘Fine,’ Mal said. He stuffed his paranoia down deep. He knew he couldn’t trust Robbie but he was sure he wasn’t working for Pringle. Even demonic entities had standards. He hoped. ‘Get away to the infirmary now. Let me know if you see anything.’

  Robbie didn’t say goodbye, and Mal slid his phone back into his pocket with the horrible feeling that he might have just made a mistake. Every molecule of his being wanted to go straight to Euan’s bedside and stand guard, but he knew that if Pringle had been bluffing he certainly had suspicions and nothing would confirm them faster than Mal heading to the hospital at this very moment.

  The best way to keep Euan safe was to finish the job for Pringle. Find the girl. Get the girl. Deliver the girl. He swallowed hard, trying not to think about poor Laura, about Aislinn and his part in her death.

  There was a stiff breeze but the sky was bright blue and he knew that there was only one place he would really be able to talk to his brother. Not in the overly hot room of the infirmary, but up on Arthur’s Seat, looking down over the city and remembering all of the times they had climbed the hill together.

  There were a few folk with the same idea, but once he was on the summit he moved away from the main path and found a quiet space. A lunatic with a yen for extreme fitness ran past him, head to toe in performance gear, and Mal resisted the urge to shout after him, ‘You’re still going to die, ken? Why not go and have a beer?’

  At the edge of the hill, where the land fell steeply away, Mal kicked away an empty bottle and sat down on the scrubby grass. Edinburgh was laid out beneath and the blue sky arched above, but the view wasn’t as soothing as he had hoped. His arms were resting on his knees and his hands dangled in between. The sunlight picked out the tracery of scars on his knuckles and the disc-shaped pale patch below his right thumb where he had been burned on a hunt when he was sixteen.

  He glanced around, checking that he was still alone, and then pulled the piece of leather string around his neck out from underneath his t-shirt. The charm attached looked like something you would buy from a stall during festival time. Some cheap piece of silverish metal, shaped into a vaguely Celtic symbol. He ran his thumb over the surface, feeling the indents and the smooth patches.

  Euan buried his kindness under an unwavering devotion to the principles set out by their father. Magic, charms, undead birds; all of these things were supernatural and therefore bad. He wouldn’t have liked Mal using a charm to conjure his image, but then, there was precious little about Mal’s life he would approve of. He squeezed the charm and closed his eyes and, after a moment, he felt his brother sit next to him. He was dimmer and less tangible than the last time – the charm was obviously almost out of juice – but it was better than nothing.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey,’ Euan said. ‘Am I still asleep, then?’

  ‘Aye,’ Mal said. ‘Lazy bastard.’

  Euan smiled and, for a moment, it was like old times.

  ‘I’m in trouble.’ Mal didn’t want to see the judgement in Euan’s eyes, but he didn’t want to waste a single second of seeing him upright and animated. Alive.

  ‘There are rumblings. Even where I am, I’m hearing them.’

  ‘What is Pringle after?’

  ‘The usual, but it seems there’s a new source in the world. Twenty years ago everything shifted.’

  Mal felt his stomach swoop. Twenty years ago, their mother had died.

  Euan smiled sadly. ‘Not that. I mean on, like, a bigger scale. Massive.’

  ‘Pringle is challenging Mary King. If those two start, it will be a war. I don’t want to give Pringle what he’s after, but I can’t protect you.’

  Euan nodded. ‘Or yourself.’

  ‘I don’t much care about that,’ Mal said.

  Euan was fading. Already Mal could see the city buildings through his body. It was too quick. He wasn’t ready.

  ‘Stay with me,’ Mal said, willing himself not to cry.

  Euan shook his head. ‘You have to wake me up.’

  Mal couldn’t speak. The lump in his throat was choking him and Euan was almost gone. Only the faintest outline of his face remained, his features just a light sketch against the grass of the hill and the view of the city beyond.

  ‘Things are gearing up, all right.’ Euan’s voice was very quiet, almost lost on the wind. ‘It’s not a good time to be in the life.’

  ‘Has it ever been?’

  He waited to see if Euan could tell him how he could get out, describe an alternative path, but there was just wind and faint traffic noise from below. He sliced the leather string and stuffed the spent charm into his jacket pocket.

  He hadn’t chosen the life, his father had chosen it for him, and now he was stuck in it, all alone. Once upon a time, it had been different. Mal and his big brother, slicing and dicing in a demon nest over in Corstorphine. Getting beers on the way home and playing FIFA on the Xbox to celebrate a job well done. It had been good for a wee while there. Just for a precious few moments.

  * * *

  Rose couldn’t stay in the house. She had gone through the rooms in the vast terrace and found them all as empty as the study. The only room which looked the way she remembered was her bedroom. She had curled up under her duvet and tried to sleep, to block out all the strangeness and, maybe, zap things back to the way they were, but it hadn’t worked. All she could see were the lies. The framed photograph of Rose with her mum and dad which sat on her bookshelf. Two strangers posing for a picture. The line of battered Penguin children’s paperbacks which she’d thought she had read as a child but now meant nothing to her. The faded stickers on her wardrobe door. It was all set dressing. She pressed one of the books to her nose, inhaling the old-paper scent and willing it to transport her back to childhood. To the childhood she had carried with her as series of snapshot memories. Memories which were as flimsy and fake as the Photoshopped family picture.

  She packed a rucksack with a change of clothes, some toiletries and her toothbrush. She checked that she had her purse and, without thinking about it too much, she shoved the framed photograph into the bag and went down the stairs and into the street. As she closed her front door for what felt like it would be the last time, she missed Astrid with a physical pain. It radiated from her stomach and travelled along every muscle, pulling her down to the ground with grief. Why hadn’t Astrid followed her? She must have known Rose was just hurt and upset, hadn’t really meant for her to leave.

  If she had a phone, she could call Astrid, but there wasn’t one in her jacket pockets or her bag. She pulled out her purse, instead, and looked through it. Some cash, a debit card for her bank account, and her student identity. She looked at her face on the card and tried to remember the time of her next lecture. She could meet Astrid at the university. Slide into the seat next to her and say ‘hey’ and they could sort all of this out. Astrid would have an explanation for the house, would make everything all right.

  She couldn’t remember her timetable. She had always just appeared at lectures. Woken up waiting for Astrid outside the psychology building or in the middle of a lecture, some professor droning on at the front and Astrid snapping her cherry menthol chewing gum.

/>   Okay, then. She would go to the psychology building and wait. Sooner or later Astrid had to show up there. She pushed down all the bad feelings and told herself that this plan was a good one and that it would work. She was always waiting for Astrid, always standing in the same places, waiting to see Astrid’s shining blonde curls appear in the distance. She would follow the pattern and Astrid would be delivered back to her, a miracle in tiny spike heels.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Astrid arrived at the booth just as one of the other tour guides was closing the shutters. She stepped back from the entrance and waited behind the kirk wall until the young man had gone on his merry way.

  The smell of the booth – pine resin, paper, and the rubber that made up the cheap souvenirs – was comforting. She re-opened the shutters and sat on her stool, thinking how much she had come to like this part of the charade. What had begun as a convenient way to acquire fresh meat, a constant stream of day trippers and foreign tourists, had become part of her life. That she thought in phrases like ‘my life’ was another warning sign. She had become complacent.

  Robbie, one of her many admirers, hung around this part of town in the hours before the pubs opened. He was grey-haired and greasy and as aesthetically pleasing as a pustule, but he was useful. He roamed all over town and heard all kinds of interesting titbits on his travels. He had an obsession with Astrid and would turn up to the booth several times a week to get his fix. Just to be certain he wandered by for a glimpse today, she put out a bit of extra shine, something to draw him in. Sure enough, after only forty minutes, which she spent enjoying her third favourite pastime, napping, Robbie’s unkempt figure shuffled up to the booth’s open window.

  ‘Hello, you handsome devil,’ she said, stretching her arms above her head and tilting her head to each side. Robbie looked around as if expecting to see somebody else. She drew a quarter bottle of cheap whisky from the inside pocket of her leather jacket and handed it to him. ‘Let’s have a blether.’

  He straightened himself up, obviously pleased. The bottle disappeared into his ratty grey army surplus bag.

  ‘Mal Fergusson,’ she said. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Mebbe,’ Robbie said, his eyes flicking up and to the left.

  ‘Come now, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I thought you knew everyone.’

  He looked momentarily pleased and then the guarded look was back.

  ‘He looked like a military type.’ She leaned forward, ignoring Robbie’s perfume of sweat and booze. ‘He official like that?’

  Robbie shook his head. ‘Nuh-uh. He’s trained, though, ye ken?’

  ‘Dangerous?’ She widened her eyes, then wondered if she was laying it on too thick.

  ‘Not to me,’ he said, puffing out his emaciated chest.

  ‘He was kicking around with a girl,’ she said. ‘Looked like she’d been kept in a hole for the last five years. I want to speak to her.’

  ‘You cannae,’ Robbie said, wincing a little as he spoke as if expecting retribution. ‘She’s deid.’

  Astrid paused to digest this piece of inconvenient news. ‘He killed her?’

  ‘Nah, she did hersel.’ He shrugged. ‘She was crazy, like.’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to label,’ Astrid said, wagging a finger at him. Privately, she thought the girl had the right idea. If she had woken up human, she would probably top herself too. Didn’t know how the monkeys managed.

  ‘She was staying in the hospital. Mal took her out.’ He shrugged again. ‘I dinnae ken why.’

  Mal had used the girl to take a peek at Rose. Astrid had thought it was a coincidence that she had the sight, but it seemed he had been using her. Smart boy. Unfortunately for the girl, she wasn’t just touched with the sight. She was one of them, and pointing her at Rose had been like making her look at the sun through a magnifying glass.

  ‘What else do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s got a brother in the hospital.’ Robbie smiled an unpleasant little smile. ‘Vegetable. And he’s on, like, a mission. Used to be a hunter like his da, and he likes to play the big man still. I told him about that Moffat gurlie in Peebles and he was aff on one. You ken the type.’

  ‘Moffat girl?’

  ‘Aye. Another deid one.’

  Astrid had spent a fair amount of time in the underground places talking to the dead, and she knew her history. Back in the day, this world had been populated with plenty of shine. Plenty of people had the sight and could fix a little cursework if the need arose. It was rich pickings, and the soulless creatures which had grown up right alongside humankind had thrived, feeding on the shine and enjoying the sport. Around the eighteenth century, though, the humans had grown a little cannier and had found ways to fight back. A few trained hard and focused their cursework and invented weaponry to even up the odds. These hunters passed on their knowledge and trained others, keeping the fight alive. Now, in the twenty-first century, most humans knew the soulless only as folk tale and legend, superstition and whimsy. And the hunters that were left were out of step, clinging onto old ways and a world that no longer existed.

  ‘Why would a hunter be interested in a dead girl—’ Astrid stopped. There was precious little shine left on this rock. And scarcity brought value. Astrid had assumed that Rose’s true power had simply dissipated back into the ether and was zooming around somewhere in the galaxy, exploding stars and whatnot, but perhaps she had been too complacent. Perhaps it had hung around on Earth instead, giving a few humans a bit of shine, and this hunter was killing them, releasing the power back in little packets. He probably hoped to take it for himself, but what if it was going back to Rose? Waking her up. Astrid let out a sigh. That was irritating. ‘I meant, who does he work for? I’m assuming he’s not his own man.’ She would find the hunter and stop his murderous rampage. That ought to fix things nicely.

  ‘I cannae say,’ Robbie said, looking alarmed. ‘It’s no worth it.’

  ‘You can’t or you won’t?’ she asked.

  ‘Cannae,’ he said, and his lips compressed into a tight line.

  ‘That’s okay, sweetie,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say it, just think really loudly.’

  She touched his pitted cheek, making a mental note to wash her hands after. The name came instantly, Robbie being not what you might call especially strong of mind. Pringle. Ridiculous-sounding name.

  Robbie was swaying slightly and his pale skin had taken on a yellowish tinge. ‘You can go,’ Astrid said, wiping her fingers on a tissue. In that moment she missed Rose more than she thought possible. She didn’t belong here, wiping human grease from her hands. She had only intended to have a little holiday, after all, and now here she was trapped in this body with Rose AWOL, trading for information with a scabby little man. In every possible sense, it was beneath her.

  * * *

  Rose had been at home, she was almost sure of that. She had been in a very empty house and she had been upset. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember what had happened next, but there was nothing. Another blank in her memory, another lost piece of time. And now she was stood on the steep curve of Cockburn Street, blinking and confused. She looked around, instinctively expecting Astrid to appear.

  When she didn’t, Rose began walking. As she emerged onto the Royal Mile, the clouds parted and the sun shone upon the cobbles. And the crowds. The street was always busy, but the clear sky gave a view across the Forth and a sense of space. Her panic, barely held in check, swelled with the proximity of so many people, and she focused on the distant water to try to keep it at bay. The sounds of feet on stone, voices rising and falling, the smells of humanity; it all compressed against her until she felt sick. She looked at the water and imagined floating up and away, into that vast blue expanse.

  ‘Fucking watch out,’ a woman with a toddler in tow said, brushing Rose’s arm as she pushed past. Rose felt her nausea rise with the contact. She stumbled away from the crowd, hugging close to the wall in an attempt not to get in anybody else’s way. There
was a shop window filled with bottles of expensive whisky, and she felt a sudden urge to go inside, buy one, and get drunk. Astrid had said getting drunk was fun and that she ought to try it at least once. ‘Let it all hang out. Go wild.’ Of course, Rose wasn’t sure who Astrid was anymore so perhaps it wasn’t the best time to start following in her footsteps.

  Three men in polo shirts with red faces and sweat patches underneath their arms lurched towards her. ‘All right, hen? You look offy lonely.’

  Rose turned away. After everything she’d seen, the way her world had broken into pieces, she shouldn’t have been frightened by three pissed-up locals, but her heart hammered anyway. There was an entrance to a close in between the overpriced whisky shop and a juice bar, and she started down the stairs. The men behind her called out but didn’t follow.

  It was cool in the close, the tall buildings blotting out the bright sun. She got halfway down the flight of steps before she felt she could slow down. She took several deep breaths, feeling annoyed with herself for panicking. There was a fresh spurt of annoyance with Astrid, too, for leaving her. Dumping crazy words and explanations that explained nothing and then leaving her to walk alone. Why hadn’t she followed? Why had she let Rose walk away when everything was so serious and scary? It made no sense.

  Looking at the narrow steps below her, she felt her anger transfer to herself. She was a fool for making such a stupid escape choice. If those men had followed her, she’d be isolated on this dark stairway. No one near to hear her or come to her rescue. When she and Astrid watched horror films and one of the characters did something idiotic like go into the woods on their own, Astrid declared them ‘too stupid to live.’ That’s me, Rose thought miserably. She had to start being smarter, had to start looking after herself.

  She passed a doorway, propped open and releasing scents of stale beer and cigarette smoke. She moved down a few more steps, her hand lightly on the wall, steadying her while she tried to catch her breath and slow her racing heart.