It took three hours to reach Edinburgh by high speed rail, then another hour to reach a small store along the Royal Mile that looked as if it had been there for a thousand years. It was just after one in the morning and it was raining. Everyone had rain jackets, including the pair of bogies who wore rain ponchos that drug on the ground behind them.
Lord Windsor-Sykes led the strange entourage out of a Mercedes van that had been waiting for them at the station and knocked on the door. No sooner did he raise his hand than the door opened and they were ushered inside. The store seemed to cater to tourists who wanted kilts and Sgian Dubhs.
The man who met them at the door looked as old as the building and had actual cracks in his face and hands. Preacher’s Daughter knew right away he couldn’t be human but didn’t dare ask the question. At this point, she was along for the ride. While the members of the Black Dragoons knew her enough to understand her sense of humor, it seemed as if the royal messenger they had with them found her absolutely incomprehensible. She didn’t want to be relegated to a desk somewhere out of the way. She wanted to remain on the front lines of the situation, so she knew she needed to watch her words.
But as much as she tried, she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the man’s face. It looked human and moved like leathered skin instead of porcelain, but it had cracks like a dinner plate might have, one jutting through an eye socket to his forehead.
“We’re here to see the Centaur,” Windsor-Sykes announced.
The man nodded but kept his eyes down. “He’s been waiting for you, my lord.”
“What’s up with cracked face man?” Francis Scott Key asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“He was grown, not made,” Crockett said from beneath the layers of cloth.
Preacher’s Daughter looked closely. She spied tiny green leaves sprouting from the man’s wrists just inside his sleeves. Is that what the bogie meant? That the cracked face man was a grown thing with some sort of mask?
Crockett added, “He smells like you.”
The cracked face man led them to the rear of the shop, where a service elevator awaited them. It was large enough for all of them to get on, which they all did. She glanced down at the scuffed wood of the elevator floor as they descended. It could have been ten, a hundred, or five hundred years old. It held the scuffs and stomps of innumerable people. Hoof prints were prominent, half-moon shapes making a mosaic of shuffling. The man pressed a button and the door lowered.
As the elevator descended, music played in her head. Soft jazz. Like she was in a department store. She also felt an itch at her left wrist. She scratched it and came away with a tiny leaf. Had she got it from the cracked face man? What an odd thing. She wadded the leaf and rubbed it between her fingers, then dropped it.
Crockett picked it up and ate it without comment.
Bogies. She had no idea about their culture or their diet. All she knew was that two of them had decided to partner with her and she’d so far benefited from the relationship. They’d both disappeared for a while during the train ride which had given Preacher’s Daughter a chance to speak with Barbie.
“I just want to point out that you get a couple of bad ass Pixies that bonded to you and will keep you out of trouble, while I got the Laurel and Hardy of the unseelie who ended up watching too much 1980s television and decided to live their lives as the main characters of Miami Vice.”
“At least you don’t have a sylph who only communicates with you during simulated sex,” Barbie said. “It’s sort of embarrassing when Waterhouse comes out of a meeting with his fairy because we all know how gross the situation was.”
“What do your Pixies have to say about the Sylph?” Preacher’s Daughter asked.
“First of all, they aren’t my pixies. What do they say? They call her the old woman who loves humans too much. That’s why she had all of the other men in the family killed, you know. She got jealous. As long as she lives, Waterhouse can’t have any other relationship.”
“Oh.” Preacher’s Daughter blinked. It had never occurred to her that the link to the deaths had been anything more than bad luck. “Really?”
Barbie stopped cold. “You weren’t really thinking…”
“Me? Oh no.” But she had been thinking that. A little bit. It hadn’t been front and center in her mind, but the more she’d gotten to know Donkey Kong, the more the attraction grew. Not that she’d ever seen herself ending up with a stuffed shirt Englishman, but she’d had her share of flights of fancy. She guessed that’s all they would be as long as Madeleine was around. And who was she kidding. They had a mission to prosecute. They needed all hands on deck and a distraction of that sort would just cause problems.
The elevator jarred to a stop, making them all take a step for balance—all except for the cracked face man who had his hand on the lever that lowered the contraption.
The basement—if that’s what it was called—had the earthy smell of a barn. The floor was littered with enough straw that it had a bounce to it. The walls were comprised of exposed rock the same color as the volcanic plug that Edinburgh Castle sat on. She was aware that the castle had been built on the pinnacle of an extinct volcano, but it was hard to think of the United Kingdom as a land of volcanos. Their imagery belonged in a more equatorial zone, and not the cold misty days of Scotland.
Cracked face man led the way.
She hung back with the two bogies.
This didn’t feel at all like her scene.
Francis Scott Key Catches the Enemy followed her lead and stood beside her.
Double wooden doors opened before them and they all piled inside. The room was larger than she expected, but then when she saw the figure that dominated the center of the room she knew why. They’d mentioned they were going to meet the centaur, but she’d thought it was a nickname. The four-legged equine with the head and torso of a human told her otherwise. His body was jet black with a sheen from being brushed. The man part was dressed in a tartan vest with a white shirt, sleeves rolled up revealing bulging forearms. The head was a little longer than a normal human’s, but the face was beyond handsome. Black eyes set over a patrician’s nose and a jet black goatee that came to a point. His lips were a deep red, but she doubted he’d needed makeup to achieve the effect. His ears were pointed and poked through thick black hair that had been pulled back into a pony tail.
Cracked face man bowed deeply and said, “The man from the Queen, my lord.” Then he backed out the door without straightening.
All eyes fell expectantly on the centaur who stood heads and shoulders taller than Jagger, the tallest of them. Other than a side table with crystal glasses and a half full scotch decanter, the room was empty.
“Things must really be in the shite if you’re coming to me,” he said, voice bone deep, Scottish brogue deeper.
“The Queen has concerns,” Windsor-Sikes said.
“She should. The Formori have returned and there doesn’t seem to be any stopping them.”
“If we had known sooner, we could have helped.”
“Tell that to the dead dryads,” the centaur said, tail lashing angrily.
The two stood nose to nose or rather nose to chest, neither backing down.
McDonnell cleared his throat, but didn’t say a word.
Windsor-Sikes was the first to back away by a single step. He scratched the side of his head, then shook it. “We shouldn’t be at odds with each other. That will get us nowhere fast. We need to find a way to work together. Which means—”
“You’ve not wanted to work together in the past,” the Centaur said.
“Which means,” Windsor-Sykes reiterated, “that we need to put past differences behind us and look ahead to solving the problems at hand.”
The centaur began to pace, which pushed everyone to the edge of the room. He eyed each and every one of them. When he saw Crockett, he couldn’t help but chuckle. Both bogies had removed their rain ponchos and looked like a before and after version of a seared and singed Ewok. Then he noted Preacher’s Daughter and completely stopped. He stared at her so long she felt uncomfortable. She glanced at Munro and Jagger, but both of them seemed as concerned as she was.
Then the centaur pointed at her.
“This one will speak for you.”
“But Arthur, she is a guest and—”
“I invoke the old ways. You may have one ambassador and this is it.”
“But the Queen sent me,” the lord said.
The centaur whirled and he gestured towards the door. “The rest of you. Out!”
Windsor-Sykes stared lasers at Preacher’s Daughter, but all she could do was shrug. She hadn’t done anything.
Waterhouse attempted to come to her, but the centaur stepped into his path. He gave her a sympathetic look, but was helpless to do anything.
The more people appeared worried, the more worried she became.
The centaur gave the two bogies a withering look and spoke in a language filled with coughs and grunts.
They responded to him, but neither seemed ready to leave her side. At that moment, not even knowing what the centaur was about to do with her, she loved the little fuckwits for all of their murmuring chicanery. Crockett seemed to stand up straighter as he replied with his own series of grunts and snorts.
The Indian didn’t know what to do, but he did stand taller, chin up.
The others were already on the elevator.
She turned to her retinue. “I’ll be alright, fellas. Why don’t you go with the others?”
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Francis Scott Key Catches the Enemy said.
“What he said,” Tubbs added.
Crockett just looked beat, but wasn’t about to leave her.
Where did she get off having such admiration?
“Really, let me handle this.” She gripped the Indian on the shoulder and gently nudged him towards the elevator.
Reluctantly, he went, watching her through the slats as the elevator ascended.
The bogies remained, however.
Finally, the centaur shook his head and sneered at the two unseelie. He went to the side table, poured himself two fingers of scotch and slugged it down. He poured two more fingers, turned around and offered her the same glass he’d drunk from.
“Here. Might as well have a drink.”
She stared at the glass for a hard moment, then marched across the room, grabbed it, downed the tawny liquid, and handed him back the empty glass. It tasted like a stronger version of scotch and almost buckled her knees. She never took her eyes off of him and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she was terrified. She reminded herself that she’d done battle with giant Zoroastrian demons, so this fellow with four horse legs wasn’t about to intimidate her.
And it almost worked.
“So?” the centaur boomed.
“So what?” she said in return.
“You’re supposed to convince me to help you.”
She narrowed her eyes. She hated bullies. She swept past him, poured herself two fingers of scotch, downed it, poured another, then handed it to him.
“Here,” she said, trying to copy his intonation and inflection. “Might as well have a drink.”
He glared at her a moment longer, then took the glass, downed it and hurled it against the wall above where the two bogies stood. They both flinched, but didn’t move.
“What’s an American doing with that bunch?” he asked.
“At first we were trying to figure out why a town went missing,” she said. “But you already know that.”
“Yes. Of course, but why you? Why an American?”
“We had a town go missing as well. We had an exchange of sorts.”
“Oh, that. That accounts for the Indian.”
“And what’s with me supposed to be convincing you to help us?” she added, feeling a little juiced from the scotch. “You should be begging us to help you.”
His eyes blazed for a moment, then he laughed. “You’re a rough one, I’ll give you that. Even the boggarts think so and they don’t like humans much at all.” He glanced at them as did she.
“What did they say to you?” she asked, wondering if he’d answer.
“I told them to leave or I’d cook them and stuff them in my haggis.”
“What did they say?”
“They said if I did, they’d crawl into my throat and make sure I choked to death.”
She couldn’t help but grin. She nodded to the bogies who gave each other a high five.
“I don’t know why they hang around me,” she said.
“It’s your aura. It’s completely different than everyone else’s.”
She was taken aback. “My aura? Is that even a thing?” It sounded like something like her old friend Charlene might say.
“If you can’t see them then you wouldn’t understand the difference. Just know that it is different and it’s imbued with several things you’ll learn about in the near future.”
“Wait. That sounds like you do know.”
He shook his head. “The business at hand.”
She glanced around at the empty room. “Oh, yeah. I can see how busy you are. Unless you’re having a game of twister with a pod of pixies in the other room, I think you can spare the time.”
“You Americans really are disrespectful aren’t you?”
“If you mean why am I not going on about lord this and lord that and bowing or curtseying or whatever the fuck I’m supposed to do in the presence of another country’s royalty, then it’s because I am from America and we did away with all of that bowing and scraping more than two hundred and forty-five years ago.”
“I watch your television. When the French gifted you the Statue of Liberty they weren’t kidding when they said bring me your poor and hungry, because the amount you have in your country is, frankly, staggering.”
She held up her hand. “Let’s just say we all have our own political problems, Captain Brexit, and leave it at that. Now, why don’t you want to help us help you? It seems as if your Fae are doing a Brexit of their own.”
He glared at her, but then softened his look. Clearly he wasn’t used to being spoken to in this way but was coming to terms with it. “They have to do something or else they will all die.”
“The Fae? Will all die? How is that possible?” she asked.
“Where shall I begin? Are you aware of interdimensional topology?” he asked.
She blinked hard. She wasn’t expecting a centaur in a basement of an Edinburgh men’s dress store to begin a conversation with high order math. “I understand the concepts of topology,” she said slowly. “You can say that I traveled to a pocket universe created by a supernatural being on a previous occasion.”
He cocked his head and laughed. “You’re not simply a pretty American spy, are you?”
“I’m not a spy, I am a soldier.”
“I’ve read your dossier. You’re a member of the intelligence service and belong to Special Unit 77.”
“How did you get my—” She shook her head. “We protect American interests,” she said, “Much as the Black Dragoons protect the interests of the United Kingdom.”
He waved her response away with a hand. “Pocket universe is the perfect description. Most of the seelie and unseelie live in such places. Call them cul-de-sacs of time and space if you will. They can move into and out of them regardless of where they are. The problems are with the Marrow. They can sniff out such places and have been doing so at an alarming rate in recent years. They’ve also come to understand something which we’ve kept to ourselves in that the dryads, seen once as lowly seelie locked into an existence based on their link to different aspects of nature, are actually the lifeblood of the seelie and unseelie alike.”
“Then why were the unseelie fighting against us in Cottingley Woods?”
“Like any marginalized group they can be made to believe what those in power want them to believe. It has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof. It has to do with their desire to leave the margins. The Marrow are being directed by the Formori. Chasing down all of the pocket universes was taking too long so they figured that they could hasten their plans by destroying all of the dryads.”
“But why the missing towns?”
“Each one is located at a pole of inaccessibility. You’ll note that each town is as far from the coast as possible. The Formori are of the oceans. They draw their strength from the tides and the ebb and flow of the currents. They are weakest when they are farthest away. The Formori are creatures the Fae drove away eons ago so that humanity could be allowed to flourish, instead of hiding in caves and behind walls made from stone. Now, they’ve returned for their pounds of flesh and in this case, they want the dryads.”
She thought about this for a moment, then thought back to the Pict symbol they’d all been studying. Then her dream about the White—or her transition to it—where she’d met Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier in their roles from the movie The Defiant Ones. They were the double disc connected by the tunnel. That’s what the missing towns were—of course. They were the discs at the end of the zag. The Picts knew all along. They understood before science was even formalized into a body of collected knowledge, and represented the way to transit interdimensional topology through a symbol. She should reach out to Dr. Fields so he could validate her hypothesis.
“The trees Francis Scott Key saw. You’re moving the dryads to a safe place. You’re trying to save the Fae.”
He grinned and stomped a hoof. “An irony is that we’re moving the lifeblood of our species to a place where your military has been known to indiscriminatingly kill Native Americans, or what you call Indians.”
“That was a hundred years ago. Buffalo Gap, Stronghold, and Wounded Knee were the last in South Dakota.”
He smiled like a mother might to a child. “Time is different for our kind. That’s almost yesterday for me.”
Her mind was racing. “So, Maeve is organizing the evacuation.”
“She is.”
“And who is Maeve in all of this?”
“The fairy queen herself.”
She remembered the conversation she had with Waterhouse about fairy kings and queens and how they conformed to the human construct. She said as much to the Centaur.
“Queen. King. They are shorthand. A true term would be New Mother and New Father, but those beg explanation. Why use those when I can just say King and Queen and everyone knows what that means?”
“Who is the king?”
“Killed by a Marrow.”
“These Marrow, how powerful are they?”
“They can be killed,” he said. “Our problems like when the first Formori came to the UK. They will come from the ocean and they shall be like kaiju. They will be monstrous and will destroy everything in their path.”
“How did you defeat them before?” she asked.
“It took time. We grew the dryads who influenced the land, making it poisonous for them to live here. Even the touch of our soil would sizzle their skin and they were forced to be driven back into the sea, into their own pocket dimension. Then they grew the Marrow, an abomination of Formori and unseelie created using shadow magic, outlawed by the Fae.”
“Without the dryads, they can return. Aren’t you helping them by removing the dryads?” she asked.
“Hence the problem.” His tail flicked back and forth. She was beginning to recognize it as an indicator of his mood.
“What if we can kill the Marrows before the Formori arrive?” she asked.
“Then the dryads can return and the Formori won’t be able to inhabit the land.”
She tapped her forehead with a finger and said, “Then we have to make the Marrow come to us.”
“How are we going to do that?” the centaur asked.
She turned to her bogies. “What would Crockett and Tubbs do?”
“Set a trap,” Crockett said.
“Set a trap,” Tubbs said.
She turned back to the centaur. “Then that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to set a trap. Let’s plan this.”
Thirty minutes later, she knew what she was going to do.
Or at least she thought she did.