by Kim M Watt
He nodded stiffly, not looking at her, as the lead goblin said, “Goblin Lucy like Bill. Bill good name. Now Goblin Lucy be Goblin Bill, and human Bill be Food Bill. Yes?”
Bill looked up at them with his mouth hanging open and blood running down his chin. “What?” he said, although it came out as “Whad?”
“Goblin Jace like Bill too,” another goblin said. “Goblin Jace want to be Goblin Bill.”
Goblin Lucy shoved Goblin Jace, growling. “No! Goblin Lucy see Bill first!”
Miriam and the man she’d been fighting had stopped struggling, and Thompson had vanished again. Hazel and George were frozen with their weapons raised, and even Sam and Polo Shirt were looking at the goblins.
“Goblin Richard smart goblin,” one of the creatures announced. “Goblin Richard decide.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Goblin Richard will be Goblin Bill.”
Goblins Lucy and Jace looked at each other, then threw themselves at Goblin Richard with their teeth bared and their fists pounding, and within a moment the entire group of goblins were in a pile-up of arms and legs and flying hair and ugly screeches.
Alice looked at the frozen humans, all staring at the brawl.
“Run,” she said, as loudly as she dared.
They ran. Miriam stopped just long enough to grab the cricket bat, and they headed for the fells. The delivery drivers bolted like animals released from a cage, each of them racing off in a different direction, and the four men sprinted in a pack for the road. More goblins were swarming out of the shadows, and the fight broke up behind them with howls of fury. There were more of the creatures than Alice wanted to count, far more than had been chasing the cat, and they threw themselves into the chase with utter delight. They cackled gleefully and shouted to each other, hunting in threes and fours and using their long arms to help speed themselves along. Their teeth flashed in the moonlight, and when a quartet of them came charging out of a ditch in front of Alice and Miriam both women yelled something that was not fit for W.I. purposes and waved their weapons wildly. The goblins burst out laughing but swerved away, letting them run on.
They ran in the general direction of the car, trying not to stumble on the rough ground. The cold air tore at Alice’s chest, her breathing already ragged from the pain, and she wondered how long she could keep going. Every stride jarred her from jaw to heel, her belly churning with it, and there were tears squeezing out onto her cheeks. She risked a look back and saw the four goblins loping easily after them. There were more coming in from the side. Even if she hadn’t been hurt, she wouldn’t have been able to outrun them. She doubted anyone could.
She fumbled in her pockets. “Miriam, take the keys.”
Miriam slowed, her forehead creased with concern. “Are you okay?”
Alice gasped laughter. “Peachy.” She staggered as her hip screamed, and almost fell. Miriam grabbed her arm, pulled her upright, and looked over her shoulder at their pursuers.
“Back to back,” she said. “That’s how you do it, right?”
Alice shoved her keys at the younger woman. “Run, would you?”
“Oh, Alice. Just shut up for once.” Miriam shouldered her bat, ignoring the keys, and Alice snorted.
“Hitting goblins is good for you. But you should still run.”
“As if I could.” Miriam smiled at her. “Hitting goblins wouldn’t be as much fun without you.”
Alice laughed, and turned to face the creatures advancing on them. She shouldered her cane and decided she’d just found her second wind.
21
DI Adams
Tracking Miriam’s phone had proved more difficult than expected. They’d arrived at the bottom of a farm track that looked like it should only be tackled with one of those desert expedition trucks equipped with roll bars, spare water, and a flare gun, and stopped with the nose of the car pointed up the hill. Alice’s Prius was nowhere to be seen, but somewhere above them Miriam’s phone crawled on at walking pace. DI Collins killed the lights and they got out, staring up at the fells. For a moment DI Adams could see nothing at all, the night rushing in to surround her, swaddling her in high crisp cold, and she tipped her head back to look at the stars, taking quick shallow breaths that hurt her lungs.
The stars steadied her, and once she looked down she found that she could see the heavy folds of the fells hulking away from her like sleeping giants, and the track leading off into the darkness.
“Do you know where it goes?” she asked DI Collins. He was a shadow cut out of the night, rocking on his heels.
“No. But we can’t take the car up there. No good to anyone if we get stuck.”
She nodded, realised he couldn’t see her, and said, “There’s light up there every now and then.”
There was a pause while he watched, then he said with a note of wonder in his voice, “I don’t think that’s a torch. I think they’re headlights.”
DI Adams thought of the Prius speeding past them, and wondered what the hell Alice and Miriam were thinking. They weren’t equipped for that road. They were probably stuck in a ditch up there somewhere, freezing to death. And, if not, they were likely to slide straight off a cliff edge at any moment.
“Come on,” she said. “Get the GPS up and see if we can come at them from the other side.”
They hit the main road in a squall of gravel, sliding almost into the wall on the opposite side before the tyres gripped and they were accelerating rapidly, the headlights cutting the night ahead of them. It was only a main road in the sense that it was bigger than the one they’d just come off, and it had tarmac, and in the wider spots there was occasionally a centre line. Otherwise it was silent and empty and uncluttered with lighting or cats’ eyes, and DI Adams just hoped they didn’t meet anyone coming the other way.
Miriam’s phone was still creeping up the fells, and the GPS had shown them an isolated house up there that they seemed to be heading for.
“I don’t understand why they went up that bloody track, though,” DI Collins said, not looking away from the road. “The map shows a paved lane right on the other side of the house. Private, but better than that damn death-trap of a trail.” He hit fifth gear, and DI Adams braced herself against the dashboard.
“I’m guessing they’ve not exactly been invited up there.”
“But why the hell didn’t they tell us what they were up to? Silly old women!”
“Maybe they thought we wouldn’t believe them.”
DI Collins glanced at her, then back at the road in time to drop into third and spin them around a tight bend, engine and tyres screaming in protest. “You’d have believed them. You’re their dragon contact.” He sounded vaguely put out.
“True,” DI Adams said, letting go of the dashboard to cling to the door. “But I think they may have a slight problem with authority.”
DI Collins snorted. “Well, they certainly do now.”
DI Adams went back to bracing herself on the dashboard as they hit another straight, and thought that Collins might be being a bit optimistic if he thought that was going to be their only problem.
The long way round was, well, long. It seemed to take forever to make their way through an impossible maze of back roads and one-car lanes, and in the end they shot straight past the gate to the private road, DI Adams with her eyes on the GPS shouting to Collins to stop. He slammed the brakes on, swearing, and reversed with the back of the car fishtailing wildly. He shoved the nose of the Audi into the lane and the headlights lit a locked gate.
“Got it.” DI Adams had her door open before the car had quite stopped moving, running to the boot as Collins popped it open. She grabbed the bolt cutters from the kit that lived in every police car and ran to clip the padlock. It gave way easily enough, and she hauled the gate wide, jumping back in the car as it came through the gap. There was no time to bother about closing it. She just hoped there wouldn’t be any more sheep incidents. DI Collins accelerated rapidly, and they barrelled up into the deep dark of the fells, sliding
on the odd patch of loose gravel. There were explosions rolling across the sky ahead of them.
DI Adams looked at Collins. He was still driving with the same unaffected confidence, both hands on the wheel, but his eyes kept straying to those flares of hungry light. They were mostly purples and reds, balls of fire tighter and more intense than any fireworks display.
“You said not like Game of Thrones, right?” he said suddenly.
“Um, yeah.”
“I hope you’re right.”
They came around a corner and the road straightened out. He floored the accelerator, slapping the lights on. DI Adams doubted anyone was paying any attention. Whatever was up there was probably fairly busy as it was, and the flashing blue was rather less spectacular than the fire above them.
They were almost airborne as they came over the crest of the last hill and into utter chaos. An outbuilding and several trees were burning, lending a terrible red light to the scene, and as DI Collins hit the brakes a man in a DHL shirt ran screaming across the road in front of the car, waving a butcher’s knife and being pursued by three snarling things that stood roughly on two legs, but otherwise didn’t look particularly human. They ignored the car entirely, and were gone into the dark again before DI Adams could get a proper look, but she was sure there had been far too many teeth.
Something roared not far off, and as they got out of the car a fireball bloomed purple-hot to the left of the house, followed by some not very human screaming. Another of the strange bipeds went bolting across the road, hunched over and using its hands to speed it along. It was shrieking, and being pursued by a small cat with a bushed-out tail.
Collins blinked, and looked at DI Adams. She stared back at him. This was not at all the same as the tea-drinking and cake-eating dragons from Toot Hansell. This had shades of London to it, dark spaces under bridges and missing children and feeling like she was swimming against a riptide just to keep the slimmest grip on what was real.
There was a roar that shook her bones, and she ducked as a dragon shot through the sky above them. Somehow they seemed much bigger when they were flying and breathing fire at you. She peered over the bonnet at Collins, who was hunkered down on the other side of the car, and he shouted, “I thought you said not Game of Thrones, Adams!”
Another dragon shot overhead, huge green wings buffeting them with a gust of wind, bellowing, “Old Ones take you, Walter! Just the goblins!”
DI Adams stood up cautiously and watched the retreating dragons. Walter had banked back over the fells, now on the trail of three of the toothy creatures (she assumed they were the goblins), spitting fire at them happily as they fled, and Beaufort was circling back toward the house. “My understanding is that Walter is a bit of a problem,” she said.
“You don’t say,” DI Collins said, straightening up.
A man ran from the fells toward the house, his arms pumping like a professional sprinter, screaming, and another man ran to meet him, throwing rocks at the goblins closing in on them as he came. One rock caught the sprinter square in the forehead, and he crumpled to the ground without so much as a whimper. The goblins descended into helpless laughter, clutching each other and howling. The rock-thrower stopped where he was, looking confused, then turned and bolted when a woman with familiar curly hair appeared out of the dark and jogged toward him swinging a cricket bat. She was shouting something the inspectors couldn’t quite hear, and when one of the goblins popped up next to her from behind a hummock she smacked it unceremoniously in the face with the bat and kept going.
DI Collins pointed. “That’s a human, right?”
DI Adams nodded. “Probably your aunt.”
“I know that. The other one.”
“Looks like it.”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s go arrest someone before they all get eaten.”
“They don’t—”
“I’m not talking about dragons,” he said, and nodded at two goblins who were sprinting through the headlights, wearing scraps of badly fitting human clothing. Their teeth flashed in the light, and they kept their eyes on the inspectors as they ran. One licked its lips. “They look bitey.”
“Good point.” DI Adams grinned, feeling suddenly that she was at least in the same hemisphere as her element. “Let’s go arrest people.”
They marched off into the flaming night, while someone above them shrieked, “Pull up, Gilbert! Pull up!”
It was Christmas Eve, and while Leeds had nothing but some grimy slush on the streets, the fells in the Dales were heavy with snow, the fields white blankets broken by the shadows of trees and the trails made by livestock. The sky was high and pale and thin, and Toot Hansell looked like a picture on a particularly twee card, every roof white-capped, every lawn pocked with disguised bushes and birdbaths and, often, snowmen. The roads were black lines dividing the houses, and the streams had burrowed themselves away under ice and snow as if in hibernation. Chimneys bled smoke that lingered in the still air, and Christmas lights danced in every window, or near enough that the odd grinch could be ignored. Footprints pattered across the crisp surface everywhere – big snow boots and little ones, cat paws and dog paws and the little cross-hatchings of birds.
And, DI Adams was quite sure, if one knew where to look, some rather more unusual footprints. She felt oddly reassured by the fact.
DI Collins stopped the car and they sat looking at Miriam’s squat little cottage, the roof heavy with snow, baubles bobbing in the windows.
“I guess we should go in,” he said.
“We were invited,” DI Adams said. The bandage was off her wrist now, from where the goblin had bitten her, but the scars puckered the skin quite spectacularly. She’d told the paramedics that it had been a particularly big and toothy dog. They’d looked mystified, but patched her up and sent her off to get stitches.
DI Collins took his hat off and ran a hand over his hair. It was starting to grow back. He’d had to take it down to almost a number one, to match the bit that had been scorched off by Lord Walter. The old dragon had apologised and said that he was terribly shortsighted, and had assumed that, based on the inspector’s height, he was a goblin. It was a pretty thin excuse, and DI Adams had been able to hear Beaufort chastising him until the dragons were out of sight.
Now she opened her door and got out. “Come on. We’ve faced goblins. We can face your aunt and Alice.”
“As long as it’s not the whole bloody W.I. again,” Collins muttered, and followed her through the little gate and up the path to the door. She had her hand raised to knock when he said, “Wait.”
She turned to look at him. The short hair made his face look round and young, and he was twisting his hat in his hands. “What?”
“It was real, right, Adams? All of it?”
She showed him her wrist. “Real as this.”
“And no one else knows.”
“Well, other than the whole W.I., but they seem better at keeping secrets than bloody MI6, so, yeah.”
“But what do we do about it?”
“We don’t do anything, except keep them secret. Dragons seem to be pretty self-governing. I’m not sure we didn’t make more of a mess than they did up there.” Which was true. They’d arrested the four men, all brothers, but by the time the ambulance arrived the dragons had not only routed the goblins, they’d cleared the house of anything remotely suspicious, and the delivery drivers had suddenly decided that there had been no one involved but the humans. That decision had seemed to coincide with Walter leering at them and drooling into the garden from his perch on top of a fence post. And it was doubtful that the brothers would say much, given that they seemed to have taken most of their injuries from two members of the Women’s Institute and a small tabby cat. Even criminals have images to uphold.
DI Collins rubbed his jaw, then shoved the hat in his pocket. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s have tea with dragons.”
DI Adams knocked, taking a deep breath of the calm day, and waited. A moment later the door
swung open, and Miriam smiled at them, looking distinctly calmer than she usually did at the sight of the police.
“Come in, come in!” she said, ushering them into the warmth and scent of the house. “We’re just having eggnog.”
“Pass,” DI Adams said with a shudder.
DI Collins looked at her. “We’re off-duty, Adams.”
“Why would I want to drink custard?”
“Suit yourself. I’ll take one.”
“Everyone’s in here,” Miriam said, and led the way into the living room, while Collins gave a very small groan and DI Adams braced herself for the onslaught of the Women’s Institute. She should have taken that eggnog after all.
Instead, they discovered four dragons taking up most of the available floor space and Alice settled in the armchair with the tabby cat on her knee. He opened one eye, examined the inspectors, and shut it again.
DI Adams claimed a spot on the sofa, and Collins hesitated in the doorway, studying the dragons with a rather stern expression. “You’re real, aren’t you?” he said.
“I should hope so,” Beaufort said. He had a book in one paw and a large mug of tea in the other. “I shall feel very disappointed if I find out I’m not real.”
“Beaufort Scales, High Lord of the Cloverly dragons,” Alice said. “As we didn’t really have time for proper introductions the other night. Mortimer next to him, then Amelia and Gilbert are over there.” Mortimer had mince pie crumbs on his snout, and he gave an embarrassed sort of wave.
“Right.” Collins’ serious expression vanished, and he grinned broadly. “Detective Inspector Colin Collins.”
“Delighted to meet you, Detective Inspector,” Beaufort said, as Gilbert whispered, “Colin Collins?” and Amelia shoved him. Beaufort flourished his book at the inspector. “I’ve just borrowed this from Miriam. Miss Marple. She seems terribly good at detecting. Have you read it?”
“No,” Collins admitted, seating himself next to DI Adams.
