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The journalist turned to a woman at her side So the ubiquitous Mrs Arbuckle was there after all, I noted I turned away rather than listen to her take on ould no doubt be transfor earthquakes of biblical proportions That hen I noticed Nick across the street, watching the action with his arnored my presence It probably wasn’t worth my effort to try and appease him, and I was pretty certain that he would have no further details on the robbery at Perkins De hidden fros And Cornwall’s finest weren’t exactly CSI I felt bad about hurting his feelings but it was better for hi run

There was an old red telephone box by the other side of the little square I was pretty sure I had soan and tell hiht of Julia This was her hoe than Lord Shifty I was annoyed withof her first She was my alpha – sort of - she should always come first I thrust my hands into my pockets and stalked over to the phone Julia wasn’t the kind of technologically advanced person who possessed a etting to bring it with ht as well not own one at all either I called the keep itself No-one picked up so I left a ly at the years old graffiti etched into the paint, trying to decide what to do next It was ridiculously dangerous, but oing to do was to send h ould wear us down bit by bit, then surely it was high tio on the offensive instead The proble her, or my way around once I entered her demsenes It could very well be a vast plane of existence, which I’d spend the next sixty years or so wandering around in a clueless fog before eventually dying of old age I drulass and absently traced a s written in black that proclaimed that ‘Blake woz ere’ Inspired words Truly

Then I paused and reme and which had been shot through with silver It was just possible that it had belonged to Iabartu It see there, and there hadn’t been any evidence of her presence anywhere other than at the seven stones and tree runes at the beach But who else could it have belonged to? Alex would be able to tellit If it wasn’t hers, then it was at least likely that it belonged to another of her servants who ht be able to lead me to her And if it was…

I was confident that Alex would be able to put a locator spell on the material to find its true owner He had already said that one of his jobs was often to help owners find lost objects It must be an easy process to reverse and help lost objects find their owners I felt instantly invigorated Let the Brethren and the pack take care of rab some of the silvered weapons, and sort the bitch out

Awesoh the woods towards the keep with a renewed sense of purpose Now that I finally had a proper plan, both adrenaline and warh me I ducked under a couple of branches and leaped over a bush, avoiding the usual path so that I could take a shortcut and get back quicker It wasachievement, however, that made me so blinkered, and so dumb

Traces of the otherworld are evident everywhere, if you knohere to look I did knohere to look but today I wasn’t seeing the ht into an invisible wall and was iered to ers already pulled But there was no physical ene

"Fuck!" I slah I kneas a useless gesture

Faerie rings are perfect circles of woodland mushroo s were now defunct; they didn’t tend to hold their power for long However the ones with enough juice in theerous Time, for the Fae, moves differently to what it does for almost everyone else They survive for millennia in Earth terms; and once in the Fae demesne itself, you could spend one day and then return to find that decades in the ‘real’ world had passed They’d set faerie rings to capture foolish humans, and would then force their hapless prisoners to dance themselves to death It was said that just one beat of faerie bells was enough to set your toes tapping and your hands clapping, and that once you started you’d never be able to stop Even worse is that with tio by before they’d check on their faerie traps It would be impossible to force my way out of here on my own, and of coursethat e on the answer an, would be using their Voices to get in touch and see where I was If I had soh it, but even more stupidly I was pretty sure thathappily onto be cleaned and sharpened after I’d used it to slit the throat of the terra, anyway, just to be sure I’d put the empty Coke cans that I’d shared with Alex on the beach back inside but they wereother than a recycling plant There was the half een peroxide that reminded me painfully of John for a second, but which offered no help in terms of usable iron There was a sy bars, a tatty book that I’d been reading when routing out the rabbits had beco that would help ers were h iron to work Soy was a curse I tried anyway, stabbing rando happened

I flung the contents of round andit for any vulnerable points Nothing I felt rage and frustration shivering all overbefore I’d ever have to persuade any of the Fae to let et into the portal

I thued, in the centre and sla up a fine dust as I did so I kicked out uselessly at the edges of the ring It was no good; I’d just have to wait till soinning to settle I was curled up, dozing, and waiting

Where the fuck are you?