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.
“You should. It’s excellent. Quite the training manual.”
DI Adams wished people would stop giving Beaufort ideas.
“Scone?” Miriam said. “They’re cranberry and orange. Just as a change from mince pies.” She glanced at Mortimer, who had three pies still on his plate. “Not that everyone gets bored of them, of course.”
“Well, they are compulsory,” Alice said. “It’s Christmas.” The dragon head cane rested next to her chair, the finish looking a little the worse for wear and a couple of new silver bands fitted where the wood had cracked. Not, as she had already pointed out to the inspectors, that she intended on needing it for long. But it was good in the snow.
DI Adams took a scone and decided that it was wiser not to share her opinion about walking in the snow within a couple of weeks of a hip operation.
“Can I have some eggnog?” Amelia asked.
“Me too,” Gilbert said immediately. He still had no scales on his chin after his spectacular final fall on the fells. He continued to insist that it had been deliberate, as he’d landed on two goblins and rolled over another three, but Amelia had pointed out to the room that he hadn’t been flying since. He’d even walked home after the battle was over.
“So,” DI Collins said, balancing a plate stacked with a thick wedge of Christmas cake, four cookies, and three mince pies on his knee. “We booked the men from the house with kidnapping, mail theft, selling stolen goods, you name it. They’d just inherited the house from a great-aunt, and went a bit mad running up credit card bills buying flash cars and clothes and so on, thinking they were rich landowners. Turns out the house is just about falling down and the land’s already mortgaged as far as it can go. They claim that they were trying to make enough money from the scam to pay off their bills and were working alone. They also keep asking for the maximum sentence and a cell with no windows. They don’t even want to be out on bail.” He deliberated, then took a large bite of cake. “So, over to you, um, High Lord? Your Highness?”
“Beaufort,” the old dragon said. “I take full responsibility for the involvement of dragons, and they are all being punished. Alex is now Lord Walter’s helper, and Rockford has nursery duty for at least the next ninety-three years.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Mortimer said.
“Yeah,” Gilbert said. “Rockford’s just a—” He choked on his tea as Amelia elbowed him.
“But it was my fault,” Beaufort said. “I rushed ahead into what I saw as a great opportunity for the clan to come out of hiding, and I didn’t listen to the voices of others.”
“Beaufort,” Mortimer protested again, and the High Lord held his paw up.
“I’m working on being more democratic, which will hopefully balance out the needs of those who want to stay hidden and those who are more comfortable being part of the modern world. As to Rockford, he thought that if he ruined the bauble trade in a way that threatened to expose the existence of dragons, I would be ousted and we’d return to a more traditional way of living.”
“Hiding,” Amelia scoffed, and dunked a piece of Christmas cake in her eggnog.
“Then some goblin got his ear and convinced him that it’d be even better if, rather than just stealing the baubles, they created their own faulty ones. Then they could wreak a little havoc on humans, which Rockford quite liked the idea of. He still fancies himself as a bit of a marauder. Meanwhile the goblins were stockpiling all the stolen baubles to sell later on at a profit.”
“I still haven’t worked out how the humans came in,” DI Adams said.
“The goblins needed someone to post the baubles and help with the internet thingy. Their grasp of English and technology is a little shaky. They’re terribly good at sniffing out desperation, though, and they convinced the humans that they’d split the money from the baubles, plus be able to ransom the drivers. Of course, the goblins would’ve eaten everyone for Christmas dinner, captives and cohorts alike. That’s how they usually do things.”
DI Adams wrinkled her nose and took a sip of tea. She’d had a nightmare last night in which six of the things had been chasing her while she pelted them with treacle tart, for some reason.
“Well,” Collins said thoughtfully. “It puts a new slant on some cases that have been bothering me.”
“Me too,” DI Adams said. “I wish you’d told me before that there were things other than dragons out there. I can think of half a dozen cases that fit goblins.”
Beaufort shook his head. “Most of them will be human, I’m sorry to say. You can be quite nasty enough to each other.”
DI Adams sighed. “That’s true, unfortunately.”
“Not all of you, though.” Beaufort raised his mug. “In fact, most of you are entirely wonderful. Just like Folk.”
There was peaceful quiet after that, filled with the whisper of the fire and the contented rumbling of the dragons. DI Adams sipped her tea and watched Collins examining them. He looked like he wanted to measure their teeth and look inside their ears, and was only restraining himself due to a combination of cake overload and the memory of Walter’s near-scorching.
“What about the silver Audi?” Miriam asked.
“What, mine?” DI Collins asked, glancing out the window as if to make sure it wasn’t being taken apart by goblins.
“No, the one that was lurking around the village,” Alice said. “There were goblins driving it at least once.”
DI Adams supposed that explained the ladies of the W.I.’s impromptu spying session in the village square. Aloud, she said, “Funny, you didn’t mention that.”
Miriam went very pink and made a little squeaking noise, and Alice gave DI Adams an amused look. “She was doing so well, Inspector.”
DI Adams took a scone from the coffee table. “Sorry, Miriam. But as to the car, the brothers got themselves four matching silver Audis for some reason. We found two of them driven off the road around the farm, and another sticking out of the tarn, so maybe the goblins were teaching themselves to drive. I imagine they were hanging around looking for their chance to steal baubles.”
“They were planning to kidnap either Alice or Miriam,” a new voice said, rich and a little BBC-presenter-ish. “Or both. They thought they’d fetch a rather good ransom from the Cloverlies.”
DI Adams pinched the bridge of her nose, wondering if she was ever going to get to grips with Toot Hansell. DI Collins choked on his tea and Alice said something very unbecoming. Miriam made a new sort of squeaking noise.
“That – what?” DI Collins said.
Alice picked the cat up and lifted him to eye level. “All of that nose pointing and wine spilling, and you could have just told me what was going on?” Thompson blinked lazily and yawned at her, and Alice put him on the floor. “I don’t think I want you on my lap anymore.”
“Suit yourself.” He inspected a paw. “But you’re lucky even goblins are smart enough to know not to grab humans that the Watch have their eye on. That’s why all they did was try and warn you off.”
“The Watch?” Beaufort asked.
“Well, I’m Watch, aren’t I? But it goes no further. Some things can be kept between friends.”
DI Adams wondered if she wanted to know about the Watch, and decided that a talking cat was more than enough for one day. “So you were protecting them?” she said.
The cat looked uncomfortable. “Looking out for them, let’s say. Protecting’s a bit … you know. Doglike.”
“And you did that by taking them straight to the goblins?” Mortimer demanded.
“Yes,” Beaufort said. “Why didn’t you come to us?”
The cat shrugged. “I can’t get anywhere near a dragon hill. Not with those blocking runes you have all about the place. You weren’t around, so I thought the ladies, as you call them, could take a look and call the police. I didn’t expect them to go all commando on me.”
Alice scowled at him. “As you call them indeed. And you’ve not once said thank you for all the tuna.”
“I prefer salmon,” Thompson said, and sprawled out by the fire.
“I still want to know why you didn’t talk,” Alice insisted. “It would have been an awful lot easier.”
The cat looked at her lazily. “This. Questions, questions, questions. Talk-talk-talk. It would have been the new year by the time we got there.” He closed his eyes.
“And that,” Beaufort said, “is why most people are better off thinking cats can’t talk.”
DI Adams glanced at Collins. He was looking at his mince pie as if suspecting it might contain some rather unusual and possibly illegal ingredients. “I’m really not keen on the eggnog idea,” she said, “but if you have any Scotch …?”
“And what about you, Detective Inspector Adams?” Alice asked. “I understand you weren’t really meant to be up here.”
DI Adams sipped her Scotch. Yes. Turning up with a stitched-up arm from an arrest that wasn’t even in her jurisdiction, let alone in her caseload, hadn’t exactly put DCI Temple’s mind to rest. He was still concerned about her stress levels, although she had told him, quite truthfully, that she felt much better. There had been pursuit, and some good punches, and even a couple of tackles, although technically that had all been with the goblins. The humans had all been fighting to be first in the car. It had done the trick, though. “I’m on probation,” she said.
“I keep telling her that if she likes it that much she should just transfer up here,” DI Collins said. “I’ll put in a good word for her.”
“I’d be bored out of my mind. What was your other case? Missing turkeys?”
Gilbert choked on his eggnog, and Amelia patted him on the back affectionately.
“Oh,” Mortimer said. “I completely forgot.”
“Forgot what?” Beaufort asked.
“Why were you chasing a turkey when you went into Rockford’s cave, Gilbert?”
Gilbert mumbled something, and everyone leaned forward.
“Sorry?” Beaufort said. “Speak up, lad, some of us are a bit deaf.”
“It got away,” Gilbert said.
“Away from where? There’s no turkeys living on the hill.”
Gilbert took a deep breath, then said, “I took them from the turkey farm and hid them in my cave. I didn’t want them to get eaten. I was going to let them go, but then I figured it’d be safer after Christmas.”
“Gilbert! Not again,” Beaufort said, frowning. “We’ve talked about this.”
“You’ve got to stop,” Amelia said. “What’s wrong with you?”
Gilbert glared at her. “They’re living creatures!”
“Frank does overcharge terribly,” Alice said, “And I don’t think he feeds his birds decent food.”
“You see? I saved them!”
“You stole them,” Beaufort said. “You have to put them back.”
“But they’ll get eaten! It’s so unfair!”
“There’s your case solved,” DI Adams said to Collins.
“And you thought it’d be boring. Can I just – Gilbert, why don’t you want them to get eaten?”
“Because no one needs to eat meat. We should all eat pumpkins,” the young dragon said earnestly.
DI Collins looked at DI Adams, then took a large bite of Christmas cake. “I was prepared for dragons,” he said. “No one said anything about vegetarian dragons and talking cats.”
Outside, the snow began to fall again, bringing a hush to the soft fields and wild fells, and a full moon hung silver among the stars as Christmas edged quietly closer. Inside, in warm cottages and fire-lit caverns, in cosy dens and sheltered nests, small secret lives were lived and loved and dreamed, on two legs or four, and sometimes on more or less than that. And, for one night at least, magic was as much a part of the world as all the many forms of love, because they are, after all, one and the same thing.
And what a poor world it would be without either.