Friday night, April 2023. Busy night at the Mitchester Arms. Business as usual - except there's no such thing as business as usual, is there? I'd had a long day prepping food so that everything would run smoothly in the kitchen. Rabbit pie, or mushroom pie for those too squeamish or too vegetarian for rabbit, and chips. Can't go wrong with chips. Celia was in the bar playing up a storm - not literally, I should say - and people were up and dancing. I completely lost track of Topher and Fiona although I assume they were doing their usual thing. I saved them dinner though. It was a cold night and Topher had to be freezing out there.
I shut the kitchen at ten as usual and started the clean down. Not too arduous with tonight's offerings and by half past I was done. I'd just put together a tray for the others and was about to take it out to them when I heard a noise at the other sound of the door. It took me a moment to place it, but then I realised it was someone crying.
You know that thing where you think someone is just a casual friend, someone you'd smile at if you saw them on the street but otherwise wouldn't really go out of your way for, but then something happens and you realise that person matters a lot more than you thought? Well, maybe you don't, but anyway, that's what happened when I opened the door and saw Celia in tears.
I brought her into the kitchen, got her a cup of tea and asked what was up. Boy trouble, of course, but not what I expected. Her guy Damian was missing and has been for several days. Obviously she'd told the police, and with Damian working for Clan Kielsyn you'd think P-Division would have taken an interest, but they'd told her that he wasn't missing, even though they didn't seem to have any idea where he actually was, and their last message was basically telling her to fuck off and that they had no records of Damian even existing..
I could see where this was heading, but at the same time this was seriously weird. On top of everything else, Celia's a diviner. She doesn't lose things. But I didn't have time to think about that because Celia got her phone out to show me her photos of Damian, turned white as a sheet, and dropped the phone.
I fumbled the catch but still got a look at the lock screen. Celia's definitely the type to have a photo of her boyfriend on her lock screen. Except it was actually a photo of Celia, which seemed a bit odd until I started to realise there was something deeply wrong with this picture. It was obviously a selfie, but Celia's hands were both in the picture and the angles seemed wrong. Then I felt it. Magic.
Normally the Sight is literally that - sight - but this time it came to me as a kind of pressure in my head trying to make me not See. I'm not even sure what I did to get past it and I felt drained afterwards, but Damian was back in the photo.
I told Celia we'd try to find Damian, without making any specific promises, and after some emotional hugging we went to find Fiona. It was agreed. We'd take the case in exchange for a favour. All the same I was worried. Glamours can be pretty powerful but to do one like that that's affecting memories as well as vision? That's some serious magic. Fiona asked for Damian's full name, and I'm glad Celia was looking at her and not at me, because I know what Fiona is thinking when she asks that question.
Turns out the others had had an eventful evening as well. That creepy bastard Firs had shown up to ask Topher to look into some surprise fairy rings at the rugby club. And DS Frank Gunne had dropped by to give some Fiona some info on why the pub's licensing was up for review way too early.
We closed up at 2am as usual and sent Celia home in a taxi. No way any of us were letting her cycle home alone at that time of night. I headed to the attic and bolted my flight window. Not long afterwards I started to sense Fiona's wards settling across the building. They feel quite comforting, but at the same time, the fact she felt the need to set them wasn't reassuring.
Next morning over breakfast, Fiona reported on her nocturnal activities. She'd tried to call up Damian's spirit and failed. That either meant he was still alive, or was in more trouble than we could possibly imagine. Other than that, all we had to go on was what Celia had told us. The last time she saw him, he'd got a text at 11pm telling him to go to the barracks because he was due on the night shift.
This case was starting to look like it was going to involve at some point walking into a werewolf gang hideout, and while I'm not entirely without defences, I felt like Topher might be a better choice to chase that one down. I was feeling more confident about dealing with the rugby club situation. I just had to tell myself I wasn't doing it for Firs, I was doing it for Topher.
I took the bus to the rugby club. With all of us going different ways, it didn't seem fair to take the only car when I've got other transport options in a pinch. I regretted that later, but it was the right choice at the time. I attracted the attention of a couple of kids on the bus. Just a hint of magic about them and it looked like they'd picked up the same about me. I saw one of them change his eyes, just for a moment. Maybe not the smartest thing I've done but I couldn't resist lowering my sunglasses to let them see my eyes. I got the reaction I wanted. Then they started talking about how I was really old, in my thirties at least, and then the bus stopped and they got off before I could give the cheeky little sods a piece of my mind. Old! I'm only twenty-five!
Having spent much of the journey otherwise occupied, I didn't really have a good story prepared for when I got to the rugby club, so I decided to keep it simple. Introduce myself as an expert on the problems they'd been having with the pitch. Which is true, after all. Except I couldn't find the groundskeeper when I got there and ended up attempting to explain myself to the junior coach who seemed to think there was nothing wrong with the pitch. And to be fair, when I looked outside, it looked fine. I managed to keep up the act until he had to go and take a phone call, and then went out to see the pitch.
Close up it was clear things were not what they seemed from a distance. Topher said the problem was with fairy rings and damaged turf. Things looked OK because they'd removed the fruiting bodies of the mushrooms and covered the bare patches with turf. I got my fingers into the dirt to see what I could feel.
Damp earth. Warm bodies. Safety and comfort. Except there was something else. Something sweet and sickly and decaying underneath. What was that about? There was the familiar shimmer in the air that told me a fairy portal had been opened there. It felt like reality had been bruised. I didn't know what the key to open it was, and I really hoped it wasn't people playing rugby.
I took a step back to look at the wider picture. Rings, not ring. I found the others at the four corners of the pitch, then located the centre point. Nothing there at the moment, but a suitable offering might do the job. First I stopped off to talk to the coach again with a fragment of fungus to wave at him. He was on the phone with some parent by the sounds of it. I've never heard a man so happy to hear the pitch was unusable due to a major fungal infection.
I went to the Co-op for freshly baked bread and non-adulterated honey, and took it back to the pitch. I made a suitable offering in the centre, and the portal shimmered into existence. I exchanged a few words with those on the other side, establishing that they didn't seem hostile. All the same, I requested safe passage both in and out of the portal. With that established, I stepped through.
OK, here's a secret. I love boggarts. The young ones, anyway. The older ones are scary fuckers and I have as little to do with them as possible. But these three little guys? Adorable. I love their funny little faces and their tiny horns and spindly arms and inability to grasp the concept of property ownership. There are much worse things to find on the other side of a fairy portal.
The best way to get anything out of a young boggart is often just let them talk until they end up telling you what you want to know. It wasn't long before talk of the pitch turned to talk of bones. That's what they thought I was there about. Stolen bones from under the pitch. Talk of bones led to talk of how they were going to make a doggy. A doggy made of bones sounded like bad news. Like a rawhead, in fact, and the last thing we need is one of them rampaging through the city.
Why would boggarts want to make a rawhead though? Or even know how, for that matter. They said it was because their burrow was too hot. Why they thought this would be more helpful that, say, a fan, was unclear. But then I caught a scent in the air. Bitter ash. Nothing good smells like that. And that's when I realised the boggarts were terrified.
I couldn't let them continue stealing bones - or messing up the rugby pitch, for that matter - and honestly I felt sorry for them. So I made a deal. I'd find them a new burrow to stay in while we dealt with the heat problem, and they'd put the bones back. Put them back before or after, they asked. Before, I told them, and offered to sweeten the deal with more bread and honey. One disgusting spit-covered handshake later, the deal was made.
Now I had to actually make good. Out of the portal I pulled up a map on my phone. It had to be somewhere with plenty of wildlife and ideally some caves, if the boggarts were going to agree to move in. Troopers Hill fitted the bill, but it was quite a way away. Too far to realistically walk, and however we got there we were going to need disguises. Some children's raincoats from the changing rooms did the job, and I called for a taxi. No way was I getting on a bus with three boggarts. This way only one person had to be exposed to them.
Dealing with boggarts is a strange mixture of frustration and charm. Sure, it's frustrating when they get into a taxi and instead of sitting on the seats they sit one on top of the other on the floor. And that string through the ears trick really isn't appropriate in front of normal humans. But it's hard to be too annoyed with them, even if I did have to stop them pulling the driver's hair. I asked him to play some bhangra so that he wouldn't hear any weird noises from the back, and it's lucky I did because it took quite some time and a reminder of the offer of bread and honey to get them to spit out all his CDs.
Finally we made it. I took them up the hill, and once I'd convinced them to go for the natural slopes rather than the nearby allotment, they pulled up another fairy ring and started getting settled in. I left them to it and went in search of more bread and honey.
Who should I meet in the local shop but that bastard Firs? At least he was in a good mood. I'd handled things to his liking, without anyone getting hurt. He gave me the offered reward of a token in the form of a large silver coin. Or rather, he held it out and dropped it on the floor, and while I was picking it up, remarked on the white roses I'd planted and how much of an improvement he thought he'd made. Absolute filthy bastard fae scum. But he was gone, and I had the coin. It was bigger than any standard coin and had a triskele on one side and a crowned head in profile on the other. I had some suspicions about it, if nothing solid as yet. And I had a lot of questions that need answering about what was making the boggart burrow so hot. But at least I could tell Topher the problem was solved and get back to the question of what happened to Damian.