A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(24)

“Oh, don’t lie to yourself when someone’s sharing your brain. You won’t leave him here to be crushed.”

“I just wanted him to know I had the option. I’m in his head too.”

Rory looked up, suddenly furious. “Get out!” he bellowed. “Don’t touch me!” And he started to scream every epithet he knew. Everything about race, everything about gender, everything about anything he was not.

There was a long pause. Then, without another word inside Judith’s head, something changed.

*

The three fairies had suddenly reacted to something Lizzie didn’t understand. As one, they’d shouted something guttural, and crouched. Then they had charged.

Lizzie hadn’t hesitated. She’d grabbed the nearest kid and shoved them at the point where she’d encountered the anomaly, praying fervently as she did so, trying to push emotion into the act of pushing physically. The kid went straight past the anomalous space, and so Lizzie shoved her hands into it, calling out to anyone and anything who could help her in that instant, giving all her emotion to that in a way which she was used to in prayer.

She didn’t have more than a moment. Then she’d have to get herself between the others, who were already starting to scream, run, push forward, and the danger that was coming for them. She’d wave her arms and try to look powerful, she decided. Oh God, she was going to die here.

“It’s okay, Lizzie, I see you now!” a familiar voice shouted. In the centre of her own head. Kind of where she was used to God being. “Thanks for calling me. The fairies had put some sort of . . . curtain . . . in the way.”

“Autumn?!” said Lizzie, boggled.

But in that second the shadows of the fairies hit them all, and the screams of panic turned to sheer terror, as Lizzie felt rather than saw the swing of three swords—

*

The swords passed over her.

And the others.

Lizzie felt a great sense of closeness to her old friend as they fell into darkness together, a voice and an intimate presence in her head, an astonishing embrace.

And then they were all standing there in the woods above Lychford on a late summer afternoon. Lizzie looked round and was relieved to see Judith, and Autumn, and with them Rory Holt, looking round, yelling as if he’d just been struck, and a man with a splint on his leg who was blinking, stunned, slowly getting to his feet, and all the ravers, and the DJ, and the lad who’d hugged her, and Stewie, and his bouncers, and half their generator, which was steaming and sparking where it had been cut in two, and no sign at all of the barn, which was now presumably lost somewhere in the great beyond along with the DJ’s equipment . . . and floating in the air, a group of . . . perfect, smiling, giggling cherubs.

Rory Holt looked up at the creatures and broke into a gap-toothed grin. “That’s what they really were,” he said. “Little angels. They must have saved us.”

Judith looked awkwardly at the other two. “Cherubs,” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth. “Sprites, cherubs, I knew t’were one or t’other.”

Autumn nodded in the direction of the cherubs, looking pointedly at Rory. “It looks like we brought some refugees over the border.”

“What are you talking about?” He looked angry at her. “What have they got to do with that? They’re little angels.”

Lizzie found herself remembering certain lines from scripture about the need to treat strangers as if they might be angels.

Autumn’s voice stayed calm as she addressed him again. “But you have me to thank.”

Lizzie looked to Judith, but the old woman now had her hands stuck deep in the pockets of her cardigan, her expression unreadable, her body language saying she was deliberately taking no action.

“To thank for what? You got me into whatever that was. Probably drugs in my pint or summat. I’m going to tell the police.” He looked fearful for a moment, as if Autumn might attack him. Then, reasonably certain he could turn his back on her, he started off down the hill, looking back over his shoulder from time to time, an expression on his face of valiant, infringed dignity.

“What an enormous wanker,” said Stewie. And, thought Lizzie, he should know. She looked around at the kids from the rave. They were a mixture of angry and uncomprehending. They, like her, must all have had Autumn in their heads, and knew what she’d done. To them, that was all that mattered.

She turned back to see that Judith was watching Autumn to see what she would do next. Lizzie saw that the younger witch was holding in her hand something that Lizzie could only dimly see, a handful of glowing thread. “I can do maybe one more thing with this,” she said.

“You could send him back,” said Judith.

“But then,” said Autumn, “the cherubs wouldn’t get to go home.”

And she opened her hand. In a blur of motion like released elastic, the cherubs vanished.

The man with the splint put a hand on Autumn’s shoulder. “Good witch,” he said.

Autumn turned to look at him with an expression which said she still wasn’t sure.

*

When the human witch had burst into the knot at the centre of the worlds, the shardling had seen the path home and seized its moment.

It had been relieved to take three steps and then find itself once again where it had been conceived, inside the long shadow that had fallen across the barrow of the court of the fairy king.