by Damnit.
I threw caution and dignity to the winds and made a leap for the alikat. We fell in a blur of flying hair and fur and deeply unhappy beast, and I’m pretty sure that cleaver missed my shoulders by a mere two inches but it was worth it, because I came up with an armful of kat. The creature was hissing and writhing like a mad thing but she was, blessedly, still alive.
‘Right,’ I snapped, eyeing the hunchback with all the justifiable anger of a woman who has only narrowly escaped death by cleaver. He stared back at me with the same dull lack of interest as the rest of his kin, which took the proverbial wind out of my sails just a little. ‘Society,’ I said firmly, and my identifying symbol (a purple unicorn against the Society’s backdrop of three crossed wands) flashed briefly in the air before me. I fear the dignity of the moment was somewhat impaired by the antics of my rescuee, which continued to thrash and claw at me as though I was its tormentor. Honestly, did the absurd creature not realise I had saved its skin? I tightened my grip upon it, trying to ignore the way its black claws sank deeper into my poor flesh, and lifted my chin haughtily. ‘The Rules for possession, care and treatment of Magickal Creatures are well known to you, are they not? And upon this point, they are very clear. No endangered species may be owned without a valid permit, and they are never to be put on the menu!’
I expected some manner of objection to be raised to this, if to nothing else that I had done. But the hunchback only stared at me for several long seconds, mouth slightly agape. Then, finally, he shrugged, letting his dirty cleaver drop heedlessly onto the cobbled stone square at his feet. The sharp clatter of its fall split the heavily silent air with a crack, and I jumped.
The hunchback made no attempt either to defend his conduct, or to reassert his ownership of the alikat. Instead, he turned away and shambled off, his candy-striped companion shuffling after. One by one, the other half-dozen trolls scattered, leaving me alone in the square. I watched them go, stunned.
There was definitely something odd going on. Why were the trolls so apathetic? What had prompted them to try to make a dinner of an alikat? They did know the Rules. These policies had been in place for many years.
The quiet at least gave me an opportunity to pacify my poor alikat. I gentled it with a little charm I learned from my mother — handy when I was a child, she once said, which does not speak well of my temperament at that age, but never mind. The kat relaxed in my arms, affording me with the leisure to observe the toll its understandable distress had taken upon me. My arms were striped with stinging wounds that oozed trickles of blood into the shredded sleeves of my lovely silk dress, and I could not hold back a sigh. This line of work is, all too often, fatal to skin and clothes alike.
Jay reappeared. To my vast relief, he was carrying the other alikat. Definitely a male, this one: it was half again the size of the little female that now lay so quiescent in my arms, its fur dappled in deeper shades of indigo and black. To my mingled admiration and disgust, the second alikat embraced Jay as though the two had been best friends since their earliest youth. It lay twined around Jay’s neck and half down one of his arms, its whiskers vibrating with the force of its purr. I detected no signs of injury in Jay, though the thick leather of his jacket might have had something to do with that.
He took stock of my bloodied state and the alikat lying in my arms, and gave a tiny, satisfied nod. I tried not to feel offended by his visible lack of concern for the fate of my poor arms. ‘Vaporised the lot?’ he guessed, glancing around at the empty square.
‘Nothing but dust and ash.’
He grinned. ‘What did you really do with them?’
‘Nothing. They submitted to my withdrawal of the alikat without a murmur, and left.’
Jay’s brows went up. ‘Odd.’
‘Very. Shall we take these poor little soldiers home?’
‘Lead on.’
‘Uh, no. You lead on.’
Jay gave me a tiny salute. ‘You are the boss.’
‘Fine.’ I cast a quick look around to get my bearings, and set off.
‘That’s the wrong way,’ Jay helpfully observed.
I stopped. ‘Remember why they assigned you to me?’
‘I just… didn’t think you could really be that bad.’ Jay picked a direction almost the opposite of the one I had been wandering in, and marched off.
‘I’d love to take offence,’ I said as I fell in behind him. ‘But the truth is, I couldn’t find my way out of a bucket.’
‘Noted.’ Jay sounded perfectly composed. Not a quiver of mirth could I detect.
‘Are you laughing at me?’
‘Never.’
‘You are.’
His shoulders began to shake, which prompted a dissatisfied mrow from his alikat. ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
I caught up with Jay, and expressed my disapproval with a disdainful toss of my cerulean curls. ‘I have other talents.’
‘I am sure you do.’
‘Aren’t you going to ask what they are?’
‘I’ve been told what they are. Vast knowledge of magickal history. Specialised knowledge of ancient spells, beasts and artefacts. No insignificant skill with charms.’
‘Great hair.’
‘Great hair.’
I smiled, mollified. ‘What are your talents?’
‘I,’ said Jay, ‘can find my way out of a bucket.’
‘I am speechless with admiration.’
‘And the South Moors Troll Enclave. There’s the door.’
Burdened as we’d hoped to be by a pair of frightened (and possibly injured) animals, we had judged it best to eschew flight this time and travel by car. At least, this was the official motive. I prefer cars anyway, for two reasons. One: it is unnecessary to manage the thorny problem of finding one’s way to somewhere while maintaining an invisibility or deflection glamour, all without falling off one’s choice of steed (chairs are popular). And two: call it vanity, but I hate what the high winds do to my hair. Cars, of course, have heating and sat nav and roofs overhead, which is delightful of them. They also have traffic jams, but I consider that a price worth paying for comfort.
Since Jay would be driving, he had insisted we use his car. I’d half expected it to be some kind of zippy, sporty thing with too few seats and overly glossy paintwork, but instead he drove a shabby-looking Ford Something in a respectable shade of dark red. It displayed the kinds of scratches and minor dents suggestive of a car that is well-used but not quite so well-loved. We carefully loaded our (thankfully uninjured) alis into a pair of cat carriers, settled them in the back, and headed for Home.
When I say “Home”, I mean headquarters. The Society for Magickal Heritage is officially called The Society for the Preservation and Protection of Magickal Heritage, or SPPMH for short. But while lengthy and convoluted acronyms might work beautifully for, say, the RSPCA, we summarily rejected the garbling and spitting involved and opted for the serene simplicity of merely: The Society. And the Society is housed in a gorgeous country mansion which is, considering its size, surprisingly hard to find.
We like it that way. The house has no official name; that’s why we just call it “Home”. Like the Hidden University, it isn’t marked on any map. It has no website, and no sat nav will direct you to it. This, as you may imagine, has frequently caused me no little difficulty. I was two days late for my first day of work.
The house dates from the mid seventeenth century. It was once owned by one of the more prominent magickal families among the nobility of England and Ireland, so they say, though reports vary as to which family it was. Officially, it was knocked down after the Second World War, like so many of our country houses; this piece of misdirection, combined with a liberal application of deterrent charms, keeps us largely secure from the outside world. It drowses, quietly hidden, somewhere near the border of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, ringed by peaceful hills, and as wholly unspoilt as a building that’s Home to two hundred people can possibly be.
Not being directionally impaired, Jay got us there within a couple of hours. I felt so many things upon approaching that beautiful house, as I always do. Admiration for its rambling stonework, its fanciful little towers, its long windows, parapets and soaring archways. Fondness, for the place I’ve called home for more than a decade. Pride, for the work we do; we’ve saved and restored countless books and artefacts; rescued many species of magickal creatures from the disaster of extinction; tracked down and extracted magickal Treasures and Curiosities without number, sometimes from situations of considerable danger. What kind of work could be more important than that?
This array of warm feelings suffered an early check. As we drove slowly up the spacious driveway, I noticed that Zareen had turned the flanking rows of stately, centuries-old oak trees upside down. Again.
‘Is it too soon to revoke her Curiosity privileges?’ I sighed, wincing at the exposed roots sagging helplessly in the air.
‘It appears to be too late,’ said Jay.
‘It’s never too late.’
‘You’ll have to talk to Milady. She—’
A great, groaning creaking sound interrupted whatever Jay was about to add, as the tree nearest to us flipped right-side-up again. Dislodged earth rained down upon the car like a shower of hail, and I was thankful anew that we had not come swooping in upon a pair of inconveniently open-topped chairs.
‘Definitely talk to Milady,’ growled Jay, narrowly avoiding a falling clot of earth of alarming size with a neat swerve of the wheels.
It was good to be Home.
Jay was only recruited by the Society a couple of weeks ago, and it shows.
We parked, retrieved our alikats and made for the house. I was aiming for a side door that would take us straight into the Magickal Creatures wing, but as we approached, the little green-painted portal faded into the stonework and disappeared.
I stepped back.
‘Uh,’ said Jay, blinking and pointing at where the door had been. ‘Is… it supposed to do that?’
‘No, but all attempts to dissuade it have failed. I think Milady’s given up. Take a step back, Jay.’
‘What?’
I don’t know whether it was the vanishing door that did it or the inverted trees beforehand, but Jay definitely wasn’t at his sharpest. I grabbed him and pulled, just as an elegant spiral staircase made from solid wrought iron descended from above, slamming into the ground a little too close to where Jay had been standing moments before.
