A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(17)

Which was how she was taken into the presence of a man who she was told was “Stewie, just Stewie,” who’d been standing at a little distance from the barn, toying with his phone.

He laughed when he saw her. “Here we go! Is this a delegation from the town?”

Lizzie didn’t want to get into whos and whys. “How long do you feel you’ve been up here?”

“Look, we’ll be off as soon as it’s dawn. This isn’t up for discussion. If I see you reading number plates or taking photos, churches have stained glass windows, right? What’s that they say about people in glass houses keeping their noses out of my business?”

The bearded lad who’d brought her over stepped in, his hands raised. “Hey. Hey. No need for that.”

Stewie just smiled as one would at the actions of a toddler.

Lizzie found herself just a little bit pleased that she knew more about this situation than Stewie did. “What if dawn never comes?”

“Is this, like, a metaphor you’re going to use in your sermon?”

“No, listen, Stewie, something’s going on up here.” The lad was insistent. “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell someone. We can’t get to the cars.”

Stewie was about to go back to playing with his phone, but Lizzie put a hand on his arm, and he looked pleasingly startled at the force of her grip. “How about you show us where the cars are, and then I promise I’ll wander off home to my quaint little church?”

*

Judith had been following the footprints that were being shown to her. She could feel the morning’s exertions sapping her strength every moment, but would she notice it getting to her noggin as well? She was better in the afternoons than the mornings. After lunch was when she tended to write angry notes to herself and attach them to the fridge.

She’d lost so much strength today, so much that she’d never get back.

If she bloody lost track of what was real . . . No, don’t think about that now, you stupid old woman, find who made these prints. They were made by a bloke’s shoes, by the look, but you couldn’t be sure of that these days.

She turned at a sound. And realised she had company. Floating in the light above her were five extensions of that light, like weird, shifting interruptions of her vision. Arcs of light flew between them, blazing and extinguishing in a moment. Maybe this was the place migraines came from.

Judith knew that the real world of magic wasn’t like Harry Potter. Everyone had different names for the beings that came from the other worlds that bordered on theirs. And the degree to which those things recognised and understood human beings depended on how much they’d interacted with human cultures. The fairies, for instance, had a long tradition of cultural exchange. Which usually went one way, mind you, but at least their lust and avarice and anger meant they took the time to magic up human languages.

This lot . . . well, she had so little to go on. “Good morning,” she said. Which was more polite than she’d be to most human beings.

They moved closer, interested, worried, maybe aggressive.

“Do you like mints?” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan and brought out a rather old packet of black and white striped ones. “They’re very bad for me.”

A jolt of light hit the packet, grabbed it, and threw it aside.

Judith was about to start telling the damn thing off, because it was either that or lose control of her bowels when there came, from behind her, something that was a mixture of a bellow and a scream.

A figure leapt out of nothingness, grabbed her, and hauled her away in a moment to an area of the black surface where the beings were no longer present. She was pretty sure, mind you, that in a space this small, they hadn’t actually lost track of her, but had held back from following.

The man, because it was a man, looked around urgently. He was shaking with fear. But now Judith had realised who it was. “Rory Holt,” she said.

“Judith Mawson? Oh, that’s right, you work for her, don’t you? Did she get you too?”

Judith didn’t know quite how to answer that.

“We should be safe this far into the bush,” he continued. “She teleported us to another planet, like on Star Wars.”

Judith realised that his senses, limited, unlike hers, to what he’d been born with, were making an entirely different sort of sense of what was around them. “If that works for you,” she said.

“What the hell did you think you were doing, offering those monsters sweets? I hid as soon as I saw ’em. You reckon she’ll come back to finish us off? All right, we can’t talk here, come back to my camp and you tell me everything you know.”

And he grabbed her hand and hauled her off. He couldn’t perceive how small the world he was in was, Judith quickly realised. They were actually walking like two idiots in some theatre show, pretending to go for miles with big, silly steps as the ground rolled beneath them.

*

With much yelling on his part, Autumn had managed to get the lorry driver, whose name she’d learned was Marcin, out of his cab. She’d taken his weight and basically let him fall on her to get to the ground. He lay there, sobbing with pain, as she got to her feet and looked around again.

Still the silence. Still nothing moving. Still the feeling there was something out there.

She’d already found a suitable stick, and taken a roll of strong tape out of the back of the lorry. She knelt beside Marcin, and started wrapping the stick to his leg. As she worked, she tried to stay aware of her surroundings. But as she was pulling tight the last piece of tape . . . what was—?