Chapter Eight
‘Oh great!’ Her eyes lit up when she saw Frida. ‘Cliff said you’re going to Raziel. Would you mind feeding the Bugul Noz on your way?’
Frida didn’t hesitate before taking the heavy feedbag. She always loved visiting the Noz. ‘Sure.’
‘Thank you!’ Sora cried. ‘You’re a lifesaver.’
Frida grinned. ‘No problem.’ She opened her mouth to ask if Sora had any news about Lucky, but the woman had already disappeared into the busy crowds.
Frida felt a moment’s pang, but she was keeping half an ear to the radio anyway.
She knew Lucky was still asleep. Her headache from earlier was still simmering, but the periwinkle blue sky and the delighted laughter of the guests was the equivalent of a double dose of paracetamol.
When she reached the Noz’s vast grove of beech trees however, she was surprised by a sudden recurrence of dizziness.
Just as she reached for the door, she winced at the spike of pain, stumbling inside and collapsing on a nearby log.
If she passed out, Cliff would filet her.
So, she sat there for a while, just holding her head, trying to breathe through her nose and appreciate the dappled shadows, drenched in apricot hues with leaves that whished and swished in the summer breeze.
There was no sign of the Noz, but he was a shy creature made up of the spaces between things: mist and gloaming and falling leaves.
He was gentle, and it wasn’t unusual to hear him softly tapping against the beech trees, warning people of his presence, a rap-rap-tapping of branch against bone.
The Night Shepherd, some people called him.
Legend had it that he was so ugly, you’d die if you saw him, but whenever Frida caught a rare glimpse, his face was made up of white flowers, with nooks for eyes where the owls nested, and his enclosure was always, without fail, full of tiny creatures, basking peaceably in patches of sunlight.
He’d been caught by poachers fifty years ago in Brittany and had been a resident of the LEZ ever since. Another of the LEZ’s endlings.
With an almighty heave, she stood up and got to work, heaping little piles of pansies and wood anemones into the bowls of mossy tree stumps.
The scent of something primeval wafted over her.
Somewhere, there was the flurry of brown birds taking flight and the patches between the trees seemed to shift, dark like raven’s wings.
For a moment she leaned back, and just listened, the bag of flowers at her side going limp in her hand.
Rap-tapity-tap.
She heard the faint, distant laughter of a group of guests walking past the fence. A flash of violet flared over her vision, but she blinked it away, rubbing her eyes again.
‘Hello?’ someone whispered, just by her right ear.
Frida jerked up and hit her head on an overhanging branch.
‘Shit!’ she exclaimed, spinning as she blinked away sudden tears.
‘Is someone there?’ The voice had been old and craggy, like nothing she’d ever heard before.
She tried to peer through the boughs, but other than a brace of blackbirds lurching out of the tree next to her, there was no one.
She could smell something though, something wafting between the dark spaces around her.
When she was a child, she’d watched a David Attenborough documentary about selkies.
He’d said that when he was in the vicinity of extraordinary creatures, it felt as if he was sinking in wet sand.
She’d just assumed that this was the case for everyone, but a few years later, her mum had told her a story of how a river sprite had once come up onto a beach where she’d been swimming, in southern Russia where she was born, and the frosty air had felt like tongues of fire, licking her throat.
When Frida had first met Antony, he’d told her that for him, the feeling was like a warm blue ocean, the colour of Issy’s eyes.
For Cliff, it was the ripe scent of forest loam, and for Hamish, it tasted of salty popcorn.
The first time Frida had felt it, she’d stepped inside the cave of the fairy glow-worms. She’d been twelve years old, and her mum had paid extra for them to go on a night tour.
That was the moment Frida had realised that, for her, it felt like stepping between the stars.
Gigantic, smouldering, and metallic. And as she stood there in the Noz’s enclosure, she caught a whiff of it.
The scent burrowed into her, hiding behind damp moss and the chalky odour of clay.
It wasn’t unusual to smell such things in the enclosures.
The wards only prevented an extraordinary creature’s power from leaving, not existing.
She’d felt it countless times before but for some reason, this time, it made her uneasy.
Something in her body, deep in her bones, seemed to stir.
The next second, it was gone. Her nostrils flared, disappointed. She tried to find it again, but all she could smell was moss and the sweet scent of the pansies in her hands. Chalking it up to exhaustion, she got back to work.
‘Enjoy your flowers, handsome!’ she called as she headed out the door.
Someone had abandoned one of the LEZ’s pink electric bicycles and she gave a little skip, slinging her backpack over her shoulders and setting off on a wobbly course towards Raziel, almost knocking over two guests arguing about whether to try the Peculiar Pancakes or the Fearsome Fajitas.
Frida started to recommend the Peculiar Pancakes with a double helping of the Extra Strange Sauce, but their death stares had her peddling away with a hurried, ‘So sorry,’ tossed over her shoulder.
By the time she reached Raz’s enclosure, she was shuddering from the exertion – an embarrassingly short distance, no farther than from her flat to the Crown and Anchor. She needed another coffee, stat.
‘Hey Raz,’ she called out, carefully propping the bike against the nearest wall.
The ghost-lynx was already there, waiting.
Hidden from guests, Raz was pacing back and forth, her fur a raging scarlet from the tips of her feathered ears to the fluffy end of her tail.
Frida crouched by the fence in concern, stubbornly ignoring the spike in her headache. ‘You ok, baby?’
The ghost-lynx snarled.
Though barely the size of a large handbag, her fluff made her look triple the size. She had enough rolls of fat that when she lay down, she melted into a technicolour puddle.
‘What’s spooked you?’ Frida crooned.
‘WE WANT TO SEE THE LYNX!’
‘THE LYNX, THE LYNX!’
Her heart sank when the distant shouts reached her. Of course Raz was upset.
Raz ducked her head, skirting away from the fence.
Eventually, the guests grew bored of waiting and the shouts drifted away.
But Raz stayed a furious scarlet, pacing relentlessly and slamming her paws on the ground.
Usually, if Frida waited long enough, Raz would calm down.
Her fur would melt from that stark, fearful red into the soft pink of a sunrise, and when she finally started to purr, Frida would smile, relieved.
This morning, however, there was no sunrise. Raz’s ears stayed pinned back, her tail jerking in unhappy flicks. ‘Not to worry, sweetheart.’ Frida pushed herself up, forcing a cheerful tone. ‘It’s lunchtime! I know you’ll love that.’
In response, Raz emitted a low, spine-tingling growl and with a running leap, spread her wings and launched into the sky, her fur shifting to the colour of rain-laden clouds, as she banked in laps around the corners of her boreal forest.
Frida headed for the freezer to prepare Raz’s lunch.
It wasn’t unusual for Raziel to act like this.
Who could blame her? Raziel had once lived in a palace in Russia, a pampered pet of royalty and fed a diet of veal carpaccio, sweetmeats, and sugar cubes.
It was even rumoured that she’d had her own pastry chef.
With only three hundred or so ghost-lynx left in the wild, she was the equivalent of owning a Van Gogh.
Of course she was a gloriously self-satisfied, deeply spoiled feline prone to fits of theatrical fury, and she made no secret of her disdain for most people.
However, she was also scared of everything, from falling leaves to a loud sneeze.
Creatures of myth, it was said that ghost-lynxes could see through solid objects, slide through walls, rouse someone from the deepest dream and make wishes come true.
But here in the LEZ behind the safety of the wards, Raziel was restricted to neck rubs, turning her nose up at breakfast, snarling at tourists, and shifting through every colour of the rainbow.
The first time Raziel had purred in Frida’s presence had been one of the greatest moments of her life.
But even better had been when Cliff first let Frida go inside with the ghost-lynx.
As soon as she’d stepped through the doors, Raz had wrapped her tail around Frida’s legs, her fur deepening to the exact shade of brown as Frida’s eyes, flecked with ripples of blues and coppers.
Cliff had said he’d never seen Raz turn quite that colour before.
Frida had never felt so deeply and wondrously seen.
Raz had licked her arms lovingly until they’d bruised and later, the team had presented her with a cake that said RAZ?SWAN2 in frosted icing.
That evening, she, her mum, Antony and Hamish had celebrated with Frida’s favourite takeaway from the China Garden.
That’s when her mum had given her the Kiss the Keeper travel mug.
It had made her laugh so hard she’d snorted fried rice out of her nose.