Chapter Three #2
Duncan grunted. The one interesting exception in the sheaf of obvious bills and circulars he held was a grubby white envelope with a Whitby postmark, addressed in a rounded feminine hand. He turned it over, saw the name on the return address, and grimaced.
Ellie Furlough’s mother.
“This everything that came in today?”
“No, you had a drop-in, too. This fella.” Niamh prodded a calling card across the desk at him. It was pricey work—embossed lettering, a stylized color crest, done in painstaking flecks of black and gold and green.
“Forestry Commission?” Duncan picked the card up, eyed it curiously. “That’s a new one.”
“Thought they’d been around since the end of the war?”
“Aye, but not coming to see me. What’s he like then, this”—squinting at the name—“ ‘Martin Hardy, Special Estates Management’?”
Niamh shrugged. “He’s a Brit. Suit, mustache, forties; serious as fuck. Got an accent on him to match. The way he stands, I’d say he was ex-military, too.”
“Who isn’t these days? Is he coming back?”
“He asked if you would be so keind”—sliding into her upper-class English burlesque—“as to attend the commission’s offices at Albion Place, tomorrow at nine. Tea will be served.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Only the last part.” She dropped back into her habitual Irish brogue. “You had nothing in the diary, so I told him yes. I’ve marked it for you.”
Duncan hesitated.
“It might be paying work, Duncan.”
It might. It might also be a run-in with someone from his military past that he could well do without.
Reminiscence that could only open old wounds, questions he’d rather not put answers to.
Besides which, he had an 1891 bottle of Port Ellen upstairs, gift from an overjoyed and very wealthy client last year, and it was long overdue for opening.
The bad taste of Irene Rush’s desolation sat in the back of his throat like dust, and the letter from Ellie Furlough’s mother promised more of the same.
He fancied a determined effort to wash it all away tonight.
An early start tomorrow was not what he needed most.
“Duncan?”
“Heard you, Niamh. Loud and clear.”
He unlocked the formal glazed door on the staircase against the right-hand wall, tramped up the six flights of stairs to the top, and let himself into his rooms.
—
…and do not doubt that we are eternally grateful to you for the return of Our Angel. We look only for some hopeful news on the future of her Condition, but no doctor that we consult can give any such assurance to us. Perhaps you, with your gathered Experience and Arts, may yet…
Duncan closed his eyes, pressed thumb and forefinger against the lids.
He let the primly written sheets slip from his other hand and float to the floor beside his armchair.
Nothing there that Mrs. Furlough hadn’t written to him at least twice before over the last five months.
Little Ellie, her angel, still crumpling to the ground like dropped laundry as soon as she heard any sudden, loud report, and then taking hours to wake again.
They’d hoped that over the summer it might pass, but there’d been no improvement, and now autumn was here with its farewell to promise and light and—
He’d fucked up.
Behind his eyes, for the hundredth time, he saw the fight at Kettley Cross play out—
The Huldu leader leaning in, the fanged grin. “Or should I call you…Master Duncan of Stac Dubh?”
The mansion crashes into his mind—blond sandstone Victorian grandeur, wooded rise of the Munro peak behind, torn and tarnished silver evening sky, light on in the window of his third-floor room…
Like a storm wind howling through his head…
He pulls the trigger on the McCulloch without a second thought.
The trench gun belches smoke and fire, delivers the small grape load into the Huldu at sternum height and point-blank range.
Magnesium flash-dazzle in the space between them, like some angry newborn sun, flaring to life. The Huldu leader screams, goes thrashing backward like he’s made of snakes, innards wreathed in green fire.
Hits the cobbled ground hard.
Duncan’s eyes are already screwed mostly shut against the expected glare, but still his vision blotches and worms in purple and green and black.
He scans for the others, ready to leap and spin.
Yanks the McCulloch in close, left hand tight on the pump-action slide, arm awkwardly bent to keep Ellie Furlough in its crook.
He chambers the second shot. The spent shell jumps out and tumbles, hits the cobbles, rolls away.
On the ground, the Huldu leader twists and smolders and screams. Inhuman sounds. His acolytes move in, hissing, crouched low, watchful and poised. In all likelihood, they have Duncan bracketed. There’s no way he can beat them all to the pounce.
He sees the option—a way out of the mess he’s made—and grabs it.
Step in, angle down. The McCulloch pointed now at the Huldu leader’s head.
“Your call,” he shouts. “Get him to the Forest, pick the iron out of his guts, he might heal. You rush me and he dies, right now! So do some of you!”
And the instinctive assessment he’s chasing turns out to be true.
These are not clan warriors, not canny, centuries-old skirmisher types. They’re sycophants, courtiers, hangers-on. Young, unproven males.
They act accordingly.
They hesitate, they show him their fangs, they hang back.
On the ground, their leader screams. Skogurtal syllables, surfacing, sibilant and broken, from the heaving morass of his agony.
“I’m waiting,” Duncan snarls.
Two of the bigger Huldu creep forward, more on all fours than upright. The unhuman gait, the bared fangs, the hatred in their faces is nightmare fuel for weeks to come. They grab at their writhing, groaning leader, get him under the arms. Drag him slowly back.
And the leader lifts an arm.
Hinges upward from the waist—Christ knows what it costs him in pain, what arcane strengths he pulls on to do it—and points one taloned hand.
Utters the curse.
—
It took Duncan a while to work it out.
At the time, grinning high on the combat adrenaline of the moment, he’d thought he was the target and shrugged it off.
He was pretty much immune to that shit, as far he could tell; had been for years.
Go see the witch up on Crawgate, get it muttered over for offset, maybe even set some kind of minor offering at a tree altar in the Forest fringes to seal the deal.
Worst-case scenario, it was going to be a rash of some sort or headaches for a couple of weeks.
But then Ellie Furlough’s family threw a modest party to celebrate her safe return, some overjoyed relative clapped his hands loud, and little Ellie keeled over on the spot like a sniper victim at the parapet.
Duncan was there, guest of honor, glass in hand. The moment he saw the wean go down, he knew.
You fucked up, Duncan.
“You certainly did,” he told the empty room around him.
He knocked back what was left of the Port Ellen in his glass, grimaced as the neat spirit went down.
The bottle was on the floor by his chair, dark glass, ornate label, long neck.
He reached down, hooked it up between his fingers by touch alone, poured himself another harsh measure.
He got up with a convulsive effort, took his glass to the window.
Peered out at the lamplit street below, the facades across the way and the march of rooftops away west.
You couldn’t see the Forest from this far into town. But its presence haunted Erlsley just the same, hovered in the margins of thought, like the letter from Ellie Furlough’s mother, discarded on the floor at his back, like the promise of the hangover tomorrow morning would bring.
He stared out across the rooftops and into the night.
“Come on then, you Fae fuck,” he said softly. “Stop hiding behind little girls. I’m right here. Let’s see you finish what you fucking started.”
It was like an incantation in which he had no faith.
Hollow, tinged with bitter desperation. The night waited impassive, unaffected, like an incoming tide piled up beyond the glass.
He cursed again, a soft, indeterminate fuck it under his breath.
Turned back to the room behind him, but all it held for him was the whisky and his rage.
He set about sinking himself, slowly and deliberately, in the depths of both.