Alice made sure the following day to apologise for firing her mouth off to each of the girls who'd been present at the table in the Ironworks that night and she was slightly surprised how readily someone as fiery as Keiko gave every impression of accepting the apology, or at least the ready smile on the Japanese-looking girl with the incredibly thick accent appeared to be acceptance, and it resulted in a lengthy and rather muddled chat by the end of which she was pretty sure she was starting to make out maybe about one in ten word Keiko said and had definitely had it confirmed that the squirrel was indeed named Jock, that it was a male squirrel, that Keiko had found him abandoned as a baby and hand-reared him, and that he got what Keiko called 'worked up' if he was away from her thus his constantly riding around perched on her head or shoulders; either way, Keiko proceeded to thereafter act in a manner one would expect a friend to, and Alice decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and treated the indecipherable girl as a friend in return.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The evening of the first Sunday in October saw the Harbourmaster's back open and the whole vampire-hunting gang back in there and much to Alice's disgust the first words out of Fiona's mouth as soon as they'd sat down were, "So it's turning out that our Alice is a natural necromancer," and that got surprised noises out of Val and Mary and Keith Thompson, whose ship had arrived in Inverness the previous evening, and the boys.

Nick immediately asked Alice, "So do you think you can control a vampire? Wait, is there going to be any zombling going on?" and he stuck his arms out with his hands dangling limply and added, "Braaaains," while putting on a hilarious derp face.

"Shut it you plonker," Alice sighed, glaring at Fiona, who paled slightly.

"Alice," said Annie, "I think your eyes are developing a fault, when you glared at Fiona there all the micromovements that make them look natural just completely stopped - we'd probably better get on to Doctor Clayton about that."

"They are?" and Alice blinked a few times and consciously rotated her eyes left and right. "Better?"

"Jesus Christ Alice, that stare could knock a bull haggis flat on it's arse," Fiona said, then asked Annie, "Do you think this Clayton bloke could give her a switch sort of thing so she can stare like that on purpose? I think a death-glare like that is worth keeping."

"Dunno but I don't see any technical reason why not and anyway we can find out," said Annie, then added, "If you want, Alice."

"Well there's no harm in asking," Alice said with a sigh. "And no, Nick, I'm not planning any zombies unless there's a way to zombie without murder, graverobbing, brain-eating, or stink."

"Hey Mum," said Andy, "Is there nae still that rat skeleton down the back of the big freezer in the beer cellar?"

"Was Alice nae just saying nae stench," said Mackie.

"It's nae that bad you great woosie, it stopped stinking last year," said Andy with a shrug. "I'm thinking we can pull it out and Alice can have a go with it."

"Oh, you're not going to stop bothering me until we try," Alice said with a sigh, getting up, whereupon the whole lot of them minus Mary and Keith Thompson went trooping down to the beer cellar and post Mackie having wrangled the freezer in question out of the way, they fished the long-time-dead rodent out of the mess of dust and cobwebs and bits of rubbish down there.

"Wow, that's been there a while," said Val as Mackie was lifting the freezer back in.

Alice carefully sniffed at the skeletal rodent, and said, "Huh, you're right, doesn't smell of much more than general dirt."

"Aye, it's been down there since I was wee," Andy said. "Want to give it a try animating it then?"

Alice considered that, and decided to go with the sheer silliness of animating a dead rat; she collected it and dumped it on top of the freezer.

"I dub thee Sir Rattythorpe Wigglesworth Rattington, Ratty for short. Arise, Sir Rattythorpe Wiggglesworth Rattington," she declared, extended the feel of her magic into it the way Fat Bloke had showed her with a dead wasp the previous week, and twisted.

The skeleton shivered a bit, and Alice carefully pushed a little more magic into it, making sure it encompassed the entire dead rat and more to the point the space around and between the corpse that would have contained rat when it was a live rat, and willed it to move, almost like moving a string puppet without the need for strings, and it did - it twitched its skeletal limbs, shuddered, wobbled, and then she got the right amount of magic into the right parts of it and moving in the right way and got it to sit up.

Getting it to scuttle around took a bit of practise, but soon Alice was making the rat skeleton move in a pretty natural (aside from the skeleton part) way - she made it run around, mime sniffing at things, stand up on its hind legs, and mime cleaning its whiskers and it all seemed startlingly easy.

Then she made it jump onto her hand, and sit there peering about, and that was when she realised she could feel a small presence in the knot of magic inside the rat skeleton, about which there was a very particular something which was, on the one hand, strangely comforting, and on the other made her wonder, if one got this feeling from an undead rat, would the same from something larger make it way too easy to get carried away with it all?

"I think," she suddenly decided, resolving to strategically avoid finding out, "I'm keeping him. Let's go and mud some vampires."

That was when Mary stuck her head into the basement and said, "Ah, there you are - Fiona, there's two lassies I dinnae ken looking for you."

The 'two lassies' proved to be a pair of young women, one ginger and vaguely familiar from somewhere and the other with mud-brown hair and not familiar from anywhere, similarly dressed to Fiona and both looking impatient; the ginger one immediately said, in a Skye accent, "Ah, there you are - your phone's nae working, come on, it's happened again."

Fiona frowned and said, "Well, that's nae good."

Glancing back she added, "Dinnae wait up for me, I'll most likely be a while," before hastening out of the pub with the other two black-clad girls.

Nick and Mackie and Annie shared a round of meaningful looks, and then Nick turned to Alice and said, "Hey Alice, did anyone teach you to scry?"

Alice said, "To what?"

"That was something Vrotch was showing ourselves while you were stuck in unspace," said Mackie. "How to be looking at someone from a ways away,"

"Okay no, Nick, I don't know how to do that without cameras or a telescope or whatnot, and even if I did no I wouldn't bloody spy on a friend."

Nick frowned, but nodded anyway.

"I'm getting a wee bittie worried about Fiona," he told her. "But aye, it wouldnae really be right to be shoving our noses in like that."

-/-/-/-/-/-

They were just pulling out of the Harbourmaster's back yard in the Bigger Van when Alice, on looking to the left to check it was clear before she turned to drive over to Vrotch's, saw a pair of very familiar dark-haired white-dressed young women just exiting the gate between numbers 56 and 58 Innes Street, and she said, "Oh what the, there's another pair of them."

"You what mate?" said Nick, and she pointed.

"See those two girls over there?" she said, turning left up Innes Street instead of towards Vrotch's. "That's the third pair identical to them I've seen in the last week and this set are right where I saw the first one."

"So you're seeing the same set of twins over and over," Annie started, sounding like she wasn't sure what Alice was on about.

"No, it's three different sets of twins - the first pair I saw jumping off of a freight train onto the embankment just back there at sunset on Monday, so I followed them because of course I followed them, made sure I got a better look at them while they were waiting around on the platform, and they got on the train to Glasgow - the passenger train, that is, and got on as in went and bought tickets and yes I did see them physically sitting in a compartment as the train left, don't ask why, I really needed distractions Monday night - and just after that train had left I came out of the front of the railway station and a pair of girls who looked exactly like them, I mean exactly like them down to the long-haired one having odd eyes, were getting on the tram up to the spaceport."

"Odd eyes?" Nick asked. Alice halted the Bigger Van beside the road ahead of where the two under discussion were now walking along the pavement.

"Yeah, the one with the short hair has these sort of amber-yellow eyes, and the long-haired one has one eye like that and her other eye's blue, I mean really blue, even bluer than Fiona's eyes,"

"Weird," said Annie, and pulled her mobile out of her webbing - she had a poke at it and then said, "Well whoever they are they just got off a fish train from Mallaig. What time Monday night did you say you were seeing the other set?"

"At sunset so, uh, when was sunset? About half past seven?"

"Aye," said Mackie. "The sun's setting just about dead on half past seven at this time of year."

"Yeah, so right about half seven," Alice said. Annie had another poke at her phone.

"Eastbound goods, was it?" she asked.

"Yes, it was a whole string of these sort of stubby flat wagons with one of those armed brake vans at the back," Alice told her.

"Okay, so that will have been... empties from a Fleet Space Arm reaction mass train coming back from the bogie exchange yards with the Sutherland in Mallaig," Annie said. "Everything else eastbound through that bit of track between seven and eight Monday evening was passenger workings, trains from Kyle of Lochalsh, from Fort William, and from Lochinver."

"Huh," said Alice. "So to cut a long story short, Mallaig again. Interesting."

"I think maybe we should grab another camera from your dad's depot up at the spaceport and set it up on the abutment where it'll see anyone coming down off of the embankment," Nick told Annie, who frowned and then nodded.

"Okay," she said. "We can do that tomorrow, or... want to follow that two?"

"Nah, no point farming for trouble, let's just go give some vampires a good seeing to."

-/-/-/-/-/-

The target for the night was a stone's throw from the hospital and police headquarters meaning they had to get in and out fast; this they did successfully, though there were already blue lights flashing at the cop-shop as Alice threw the Bigger Van onto the top of Old Perth Road, leading to a talk about how to go about escaping the cops if they went after them at any point, to which Nick said they could easily just put it in the Caledonian Canal and clear out via 'one of Alice's wee portals' though he hastened to add that he'd prefer not to as it'd mean building another one, and Alice made a note that she really should get on with working out how to open portals from the Earth side.

Monday after having once again ascertained that Murchison was still a monumental sexist limp-dicked fuck Alice proceeded to try out the Bigger Van as a bulldozer to entertaining commentary from Nick, then Tuesday the eighth of October arrived and that evening, not long after they'd seen Keith Thompson off with the Diamond once again fully laden with iron, just as they were chasing down a stray vampire who appeared to have been holing up in a derelict box van in the goods yards all hell broke loose.

Alice and Andy were sitting in the Bigger Van between two of the sheds that lined the southern edge of Harbour Road and as a result the north side of the rail yards, not far from Longman Road, waiting for the others to get back from rubbing out that one vampire so they could go and deal with the next nest on their list, when they heard a massive explosion from the direction of the east end of the goods yard - after a moment's thought Alice nudged the Bigger Van forwards a bit and they realised they could see a huge fire lighting up that entire end of the yard, coming from the south-eastern corner of the no-go.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Nick and Fiona were hastening across the yard in search of their target vampire - Val and Annie were holding down the fort on the tick's lair in cae it came back while they were looking for it - when they spotted something out of place; a slim figure, much too small to be their target, hurrying westwards along the side of the line of empty fish vans that were parked in the goods yard.

They'd just got close enough to see that the figure was firstly female and secondly had something bundled up in her arms when the explosion lit off - whatever went up it wasn't small, and it immediately flashed whatever had just exploded into fire, a massive petrol fireball blowing skywards and lighting the entire yard up - the figure dropped her bundle, which produced a chain-like clatter, and spun round to face back the way she'd come, revealing a couple of oddities - there were a couple of protrusions on the sides of her head, silhouetted nicely by the fire, and she appeared to have a tail.

She froze for a moment and then started splitting it back the way she'd come, towards the source of the explosion, and right then who should step out of between two of the fish vans but just the tick they were looking for; the vampire, who obviously hadn't noticed Nick or Fiona, clotheslined the running girl, laying her flat between the tracks; the vampire was just saying something hackneyed about what have we here when Nick arrived, Claymore first, and took his head clean off.

"You okay?" he asked the girl on the ground, and was surprised to find a very wide set of cat-like slitted green eyes looking back up out of an otherwise human face with one hell of a scar down across her right eye and cheek. The train the other side of them - mixed goods - jolted into motion with a grunt from the locomotive about a hundred yards away east up the track.

The sudden unexpected cat-girl tried to say something but all that came out was a slight weezing sound; she looked frustrated and scrambled to her feet, grabbed whatever she'd dropped - it really was a chain, and it was attached to what appeared to be a steel collar round her neck - and went running like hell towards the west end of the goods yard; Nick glanced at Fiona and the two of them took off after her.

She kept her dead sprint right out onto the side of Longman Road, whereupon she stopped dead in her tracks, so suddenly Nick nearly ran into her, but he stopped too when he saw what she'd seen.

Apparently someone else had concluded that Scotty Johnson had been involved in the killing of Gillen Innes or something: Johnson & Co Gunsmiths was bathed in pulsing blue lights.

The cat-girl cast wildly around then must have seen something about the gradually-picking-up-speed goods train; it took Nick a moment to realise what, but then he spotted Scotty's right-hand-woman Mags running along beside the brake van with Scotty himself slung like a bag of potatoes over her shoulder and a pair of burly men carrying big briefcases running behind her; the red-haired woman caught the brake van, handed Scotty up to the guard while in the same motion getting herself onto the brake van's steps, then the two burly men took it in turn to throw their briefcases to her, each of which she handed up into the brake van before hauling herself up; that done she caught the hand of one of the two men as he put on a burst of speed, effortlessly hauled him aboard, and repeated the performance with the other, and a moment later the train started to pick up speed.

The cat-girl stumbled to a halt and spent a moment casting wildly about, and her eyes lighted on Nick Macbane.

She bundled her chain into one arm, took a hold of his sleeve, tried and failed to say something again, then started tugging at his sleeve trying to get him to come somewhere, and he decided to keep following her, letting her latch onto and lead him by his left hand; Fiona trailed along behind them as they hurried east along the yards towards the fire, and Nick realised he could hear gunfire from up there.

"What's happening?" Fiona asked.

"Fucked if I ken," said Nick. "Whatever it is, it's in and around one of the old industrial units down that way,"

"I think that's the illegal bar Scotty's got set up along that end of the no-go," Fiona said, and right about then they got close enough to get a good look at the scene and all three of them skidded to a halt, the cat-girl included.

"Jesus," said Nick.

The derelict industrial unit he vaguely remembered seeing people who looked like pub patrons going in and out of was well afire, and so was a tanker wagon that had been standing nearby. There was half a burning police Saracen laying upside down about thirty feet from the blazing illegal pub, but it wasn't that, or the circle of other police vehicles, some of them on fire, or the cops cowering behind railway vehicles and fixtures, that really grabbed one's notice. Oh no; that was the scruffy-haired and lanky unshaven blond man in the shabby grey greatcoat, beat-up check shirt, combat boots and battledress trousers held up with a death's head buckle who was standing in front of the inferno that had been an illegal bar, a police-issue self-loading shotgun in his left hand and a handful of flame in his right, and a hell of a grin on his face; he also looked very familiar - he was for definite the man Nick had seen on Mary Macbride's security cameras coming out of the Harbourmaster's toilets right after Gillen Innes was killed.

He threw his handful of flame at one of the police vehicles and it brewed up just like that - suddenly the entire vehicle was on fire, ammunition cooking off inside - a burning man hurled himself out of the driver's hatch and was blown away with the shotgun by the grinning maniac.

"Fucking rozzers!" the man yelled, proving to have a distinctively Londonian accent very much unlike the Received Pronunciation English that Mary had described. "Fucking 'ave it fuck-for-brains, and 'ave some of this!" and he threw another fireball at another vehicle, which went up in a roaring fifty-foot-tall pillar of fire.

Then he noticed the frozen-to-the-spot cat-girl, and Nick; by this time Fiona had got into cover behind the line of fish vans

The man gave Nick an unreadable look then grinned like a maniac, said, "Fuck it," just clearly enough for Nick to catch, and pointed at the cat-girl, and Nick glanced at her - he saw the entire thing as any semblance of life faded out of her eyes, and suddenly she was running headon for the inferno that used to be a tanker wagon and Nick realised what was happening only just in time.

He hurled himself forwards, his hand reaching like a goalie after a ball that'd cost his team the World Cup, and just, oh so just, managed to get a grip on the chain trailing from the cat-girl's collar and yank, hard, before she could actually throw herself into the fire.

It took a lot more strength than he'd ever have expected to reel her in, and she started clawing at him, her eyes wide and unseeing and fighting to get towards the flames the whole time; he ended up having to actually use some of the very large cable ties he'd been carrying from the first real vampire hunt but never previously used, first on her wrists (and although it wasn't too hard for him to overpower her and wrestle her arms behind her back and pin them there with one hand she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked) and then her ankles too when she turned out firstly to have bare feet and secondly to have claws on both ends, and the whole time the blond fire-hurling maniac with the shotgun was just standing there watching him with this look of maniacal satisfaction on his face.

Nick picked the suddenly-unresisting and stiff as a board cat-girl up and slung her over his left shoulder, recovered his sword, and looked up, just in time to see the madman scoop some sort of rocket launcher - not a Strathcarron toothpick, this was actual military stuff - up off the ground and casually back into the fire.

Nick decided it was high time he was somewhere else.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Okay, the hell's happening?" Alice asked as soon as the Bigger Van's side door was closed; she threw it into reverse and backed up, deciding as she did so that she'd better head down to the northeast corner of this half of the no-go, ram the fence at the west end of Seafield Road, get across the Longman Road that way, cross the A9, then loop round the waterfront past the land reclamation site and get back to the safety of the Harbourmaster's that way. Meanwhile exactly what the hell was going on and why Nick had returned carrying a scar-faced but nevertheless very pretty black-haired fair-skinned catgirl with very wide green cat eyes, clad in an excruciatingly tight corset with a piece of chain wrapped round it at the narrowest point and fastened with a chunky padlock, a tiny hybrid of tube-top and off-the-shoulder crop-top with a lot of cutouts in it showing a lot of skin, the shortest skirt Alice had seen anywhere since awakening in Grace Mitchell's kitchen, it was in danger of becoming a belt, and a rather medieval-looking collar and chain, with her wrists and ankles bound with the big cable ties they'd been packing in case they needed to tie up any vampires, was something she found herself rather wanting an explanation for.

"I'm no sure, I think the fuzz decided to bust Scotty and bit off more than they could chew, there's three police Saracens going up like a bomb down near that illegal pub at the other end of the goods yard and I counted a dozen dead cops, that place is well the hell on fire too, I saw Scotty and Mags and a couple of big lads jumping a goods train I think was headed towards Aberdeen, and Jesus Christ you should've bloody seen what brewed those bloody cop Saracens up!" and Alice completed her reverse turn as Nick was speaking, so she started putting her exit strategy into action.

"That was a pyromancer," said Fiona, "And from the way that bloody Saracen fireballed I'd say he was a pretty bloody powerful one too."

"It's nae that Fiona, I'm starting to wonder if there was a gun in Mary's toilet when that Innes lad was killed, that was the same bloke," Nick said.

"Well according to Constable Joy they found a .32 bullet and some very small fragments of rubber from the silencer on one of those stupid-quiet SOE pistols inside his head so there was definitely a gun involved and at this point the going theory is the SOE were playing funny buggers," said Annie.

"You sure that was the same bloke Nick? That didnae sound anything like toff-speak to me," Fiona said.

"Aye I'm sure, I'd know him anywhere and I'm nae thinking it's a coincidence that was the same accent as Scotty Johnson - and anyway name an accent more people can mimic than Upper-Class Twit," said Nick.

"Point."

"So what's with the, er, freshly-caught catgirl?" Alice asked, and was momentarily surprised by the fact that catgirls existed and that Nick had for some reason decided to catch one who appeared to have already been wearing a chain didn't surprise her, was she actually getting immured to the constant weirdness?

"I don't know but she doesnae seem to be able to talk, got any ideas Fiona?" Nick asked.

"No I don't, in all honesty," Fiona said.

"She ran into that tick we were looking for," Nick continued, again talking to Alice. "She was looking for something, I think it must've been Scotty because she was headed that way and she stopped dead in her tracks when we saw the blue lights going up by his shop, then she must've spotted him and Mags going to hitch a lift on that train cause she fair lit it after him, well we followed her and she was just standing there half-panicked when she must've figured she wasn't going to catch up before the train was out the yards and away, then she grabs at my sleeve and starts tugging at it like a bairn trying to get someone to come on, so we kept on following her. Looks like whatever she wanted it was in that illegal pub cause she just stopped dead in her tracks soon as we saw what was going on back there, she was stood there looking more and more panicky when that fireball-flinging maniac points at her and snaps his fingers and, well, honestly she tried to run into that burning tank wagon, I only just managed to grab her chain in time before she'd have been headlong into the fire, she's a sight stronger than she looks and she went pretty wild there, got some beauties of scratches on my arms and my shirt's pretty torn up - funny thing though, it was like she wasnae seeing anything until I'd got her wrists and ankles cable-tied."

"I think," said Annie, "We'd better go and see what Vrotch thinks."

"Plan," said Alice, mentally altering the western end of her chosen route.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The initial reaction of Vrotch, who was very visibly stoned, was a simple, "Huh."

"Huh what?" Nick, who had his arms full of catgirl, asked. The catgirl reserved comment, though that said you could really see she was on high alert - her entire body was tense, in fact she looked like she was scared absolutely shitless.

"Huh I've never seen anything like her," Vrotch told him, and then he stood up off of his caravan steps and said, "I think you'd all better come in, I don't know what she is or what happened with the running into a fire thing you were on about, man, but I'm not the expert on different sorts of people."

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Okay, so who's the expert then?" Val asked.

"The Hamster's the expert," said Vrotch with a shrug, and Nick, who was the first up the threshold, paused there.

"Sure you're okay with us coming in? You've been pretty clear on the staying out of your space thing from the word go, and let's face it, you are pretty stoned tonight."

"Nah man, it's cool, I've started liking you dudes, apart from Fiona of course and she already knows what's in here," said Vrotch, so they trooped into the caravan. There was something off about the interior but Alice didn't worry about that, instead thinking that realistically it was pretty much how she probably should have expected it to be - lined with psychadelic-coloured cloth wallhangings and a mish-mash of mismatched beat-up sofas, populated by a couple of dozen women and girls of a wide range of ages and wider range of denominations some of whom appeared to be high, and featuring several low tables full of ashtrays, crisp packets, and empty drinks cans. The end wall being entirely jammed full of computer equipment, however, was not quite what she'd expected.

Then Vrotch made her realise she really was getting immured to constant strange by sticking his head into a monitor and asking, "Hamster? You online?"

There was a pause, and he climbed all the way into the monitor and vanished.

"Well," said Annie. "That happened."

Vrotch stuck his head back out of the monitor and said, "Make yourselves at home dudes, I just gotta go find the Hamster," then disappeared again.

Annie tilted her head and said, "Huh - it happened again."

Mackie cautiously poked at the monitor - it was a flatplane hologram - and said, "Feels pretty solid to myself."

"Sit your arse down you great teuchter, we can be asking Vrotch what's with the climbing into screens later," Nick said with a sigh, sitting down with the catgirl, who was stubbornly refusing to shake like a leaf despite visibly being scared halfway out of her wits.

"So who're you?" the girl he'd sat down beside - a diminutive blonde who couldn't have been older than about fourteen - asked, addressing the catgirl. She had an immense wild mane of hair with a lot of thin tresses woven into it with rainbow-hued thread, an incredibly ratty grey-blue men's vest with an anarchy logo crudely scrawled on the front making for the closest thing to a T-shirt Alice had seen since waking up at Grace's, battered and vastly oversized denim jeans, a thick velvet choker necklace that appeared to be made out of a band of stretchy fabric pushed through a shiny metal ring and had a chunky inverted cross suspended from said ring, beat-up hiking boots, and the ubiquitous corset.

The catgirl gave her a frightened look and let out a small soft wheezing sound, followed by a series of painful-sounding coughs, and Nick started gently patting her back.

"At this point we've basically ascertained she cannae talk," he said.

"Oh right," said the girl. "Well. Awkward."

"So who's yourself?" Mackie asked her.

"Me? Oh, I'm Jenny Devil," the girl said with an unconcerned shrug.

"What, the one who nearly got drank to death at that Smedley's Place place?" Mackie asked.

"Meh, ain't all that many pubs in this town that'll sell me, we're not that far north that most of 'em don't start on about ID if they think the pigs might be watching and most of the places that don't get a bit wild," Jenny said with another unconcerned shrug. "Sides, it didn't actually kill me, did it? Well, it was a bit, yeah, kinda close, I was bleeding pretty badly by the time I got back here and it was getting kinda hard to stand up, and I mean Dr Mayhem says I'm not supposed to get pissed for a while cause he says I still ain't really got enough blood in me but meh, what does he know."

"Sight more than you do, he's a doctor in the medical sense," said Vicky.

"Meh, it's just a little drink, what's the worst that could happen."

"Fuck sake Jenny, doesn't matter how many times you undersell it, you nearly died," Vicky said with a sigh, and Alice clocked that this was not the first time they'd had this conversation.

Vrotch chose that moment to come scrambling back out of his monitor, followed by the Hamster, who looked curious; Vrotch was just saying, "... I don't think she's a nekomata."

Annie muttered something about 'it' having happened a third time.

"I was wondering about whether she's half-nekomata actually," said the Hamster, then she saw the catgirl and frowned and said, "Oh. No. Can't be, she's got a tail - nekomata hybrids only get the ears."

She sauntered over to Nick and had a good long look at the catgirl, who gave her a downright fearful look by way of an answer, realised she was now surrounded, and froze, visibly unable to decide which direction to flinch in; Vrotch looked a bit pained and started rolling a joint.

"Hello, I'm the Munching Hamster," said the Hamster; she then added, "You do understand English, don't you?" and got a hesitant, very frightened, nod. "Can't talk? I take it it's got something to do with that big cut."

The catgirl hurriedly shook her head, and opened her mouth, and sat there with her mouth as wide open as possible and giving the Hamster a very tense look around the very open mouth, inside of which something was very missing: her tongue ended in a patch of hideously burned flesh at the back of her throat.

"... Someone burned your tongue out," the Hamster said, sounding downright thrown. The catgirl shut her mouth, quickly nodded, and looked at her feet; Nick started muttering something about shoving his welding torch in someone's gob and seeing how they liked it when he got his hands on the bastards.

"Can you read?" the Hamster asked, and the catgirl gave another quick little shake of her head. "Looks like we're down to yes-no questions then, this is going to make finding out what your name is a bit awkward, we can't just keep calling you 'hey you'."

"Any idea what her story is?" Nick asked.

"Not a clue," said the Hamster. "Tell me about her."

She listened and nodded along and uh-huhed while Nick repeated the explanation he'd given Alice almost word for word, looking thoughtful all through, and then said, "I see. Well, she's clearly nothing to do with nekomata - when they shapeshift to human form the only catlike part that sticks around is the ears, and besides, she's only got one tail, I've never even heard of a nekomata without at least two tails or a hybrid with any tails at all... I don't think she has anything to do with those jaguar-people from Argentina sort of a way either, do you?" and the catgirl, whom she'd asked that part, just continued looking frightened.

"Completely the wrong build," the Hamster continued, "You're impossibly skinny by their standards and your facial structure isn't anything like a jaguar-person, and anyway the biggest jaguar-person in the world today is nearly four feet across the shoulders but not quite five feet tall. Anyway that basically covers every catlike form of human I know of."

"Do we think she's human?" Val asked, and the Hamster gave her a sharp look.

"Think about this," she said. "You'll hear a lot of bibble-babble with, you know, Svarthalfar, Alfar, Vanir, Jotnar, Trollkin, Oni, Nekomata, Jaguar-People, Sea People, so-called 'Pygmies', shapeshifters, any person that's 'different' and born that way, about them being 'non-humans'. The undead is one thing and there's a grey area around constructs, you know, golems and so on, but all of these different 'born that way' people, they can all - with a tiny number of exceptions - crossbreed with a 'normal human' one hundred percent perfectly, with actually less trouble than something like breeding two very different breeds of dog, producing offspring who can then reproduce just as reliably as their parents – and that's a long way up the list of strongest indicators that two visually different creatures are in fact members of the same species unless, for no apparent goddamn reason, unless you're applying it to people. I fail to see how some fat gaijin dickwad gets off declaring someone that's at most removed part of a subspecies if they're even that far 'not part of homo sapiens sapiens', especially since, you know, where does it stop? It is far, far too easy to allay 'not human' into 'not people' and we know exactly where that leads, just ask an Australian aborigine. It is hands down the worst possible sort of news anyone, anywhere, ever, can run into. At the end of the day the whole thing is directly personal to me; I'm Nihonjin which makes me a third-class citizen in my own country. Realistically speaking as of the Pacific War a glorified secretary in a police station is the nearest it's functionally possible for any ethnic Nihonjin to get to any sort of political influence - the gaijin have the mother of all glass ceilings in place, if you look Asian where I am is as far as you can go. You can't get your name onto a ballot, you've got maybe a one in a hundred chance of actually being allowed to vote and when you do you're presented with a series of gaijin men, you can't buy a share in a business, you'll never be promoted in any job, you'll never get into university, travel outside Nihon and you'll start seeing 'No dogs or Japs' signs on shop doors, make like you're not super happy about it and the TLA will make you disappear, you're a 'Jap', a 'Nip', it's your fault people with the same skin colour as you bombed Pearl Harbour, suck it up and obey your white betters," and she shrugged. "I'll never get my head round why they think it's fooling anyone when they pretend to be surprised that every time they bump off a Nihon separatist another three of us start thinking it'd be a great idea to get the gaijin the hell out of our goddamn country and that entire 'being the fifty-first state of America' thing can go hang, I get better than most Nihonjin because my hair isn't black - if you're wondering no, I don't dye it - but so long as the Stars and Stripes are flying over Tokyo I will never be a full citizen: you're damn right I take civil rights very personally and friend, I do not make exceptions because someone's a bit short or has odd ears."

Val shook her head.

"You don't need to preach to me," she said, and tapped the scar on her brow. "I'm half-Nepalese, my dad was a Ghurka, my kukri was his, he fought in three wars for the Empire and how'd they thank him when he was demobbed and started asking for the vote? He was murdered by the pigs in British Nepal for being involved in the electoral reform movement, they skidded to a halt, hosed him down with a Bren gun, then motored off, we know it was the pigs because one of my uncles - they're not like biological uncles, they're my uncles because they were dad's squad - threw his kukri at and hit one of their front tyres and rolled the bastards' car, then when Mum tried to get some justice or just some sort of an actual investigation this plainclothes cop knocked on her door, when she answered it he asked for her name and when she gave him it, he gunned her down on the spot with a machine pistol. I screamed the house down, what do you want, I was four - well he shut me up by kicking me in the head so hard I was in a coma for eight weeks. Came about that far," and she held her finger and thumb about half an inch apart, "From buggering off to join Mum and Dad early, but it's gonna take more than that for the bastards to get rid of me."

"That'll be why you're in Scotland, isn't it," said Annie.

Val nodded.

"My uncles don't know if I'm on a list of 'loose ends' to be disposed of so they changed my name - just my family name, it's Mum's maiden name - and sent me to live with my aunt Mabel, she lives in Nairn with Uncle Jeff - he's local, they met the same way Mum and Dad did, in the Falklands during the war - Mum and Aunt Mabel were twin sisters, right, and they went into army nursing together, Dad was with the Ghurka Rifles, Uncle Jeff was with the Black Watch. In all honesty I'm probably in a lot less danger here in Scotland than I would be back home, all in all, specially since two of my uncles came across with me and made bloody sure I know how to shoot and I know how to use this," and she patted her kukri's sheath.

"What a fucking world we live in," said the Hamster with a sigh and a shake of her head.

"At the end of the day, I guess we're all just wondering when the hell we'll be free of empires," said Nick.

"I've a feeling it'll be a long time - one falls, another rises," the Hamster told him, rising to her feet. "Keep me posted if you work anything out about her that might shed any light," and she nodded to the catgirl.

"Will do," said Nick with a nod.

"Anyway, I've gotta rush - I'm due on shift in," and the Hamster glanced at her watch, "Twenty-eight minutes, no rest for the wicked, I'll catch you guys later," and with that she ducked back into one of the monitors and vanished.

"Hmm, so I didn't hallucinate that the first time," Val muttered. Nick ignored that in favour at looking at the still-visibly-very-afraid catgirl in his lap.

"So," he said. "What are we supposed to call you?" and she started slightly, her expression turning more worried; she opened her mouth, showing her lack of a tongue again, and made the nearest approximation of a sound she could, which came out as a faint wheeze; he sighed and carried on, "Don't suppose you'd like any 'cat' sort of names?" to which the change in expression made it immediately clear she was not a fan of this idea, though she didn't otherwise react to it and did not cease to look afraid, and he nodded, thought a moment, and said, "I guess I'm just going to have to call you Silent, if that's okay with you, I mean?"

The catgirl, who was starting to look faintly puzzled in among the fear in her eyes, shrugged a bit.

"I think," said Vrotch, lighting his joint, "That's the nearest to a real answer on that you're going to get out of her for a while, she's scared shitless. Not surprised, that big burn in her mouth and that huge cut down her face are all very recent - that cut has had syn-skin put onto it," and Alice immediately realised he was right, she'd used the exact same stuff the varied times they'd found banged-up victims in vampire dens and/or Nick got overly stuck in and/or Val started yelling something about 'ayaho Ghorkali' yet again; Vrotch carried on with a, "I know that stuff anywhere, from how red it all is that can't be more than a day or two old and, well, I've seen an injury like this before, this dude I know had an accident with a chainsaw, deep gash in his arm after a blade broke. It looked just like this after it had syn-skin got on it," and he ran his finger down the catgirl's injury, almost but not quite touching it; she flinched away from him.

"Some sicko took a chainsaw to you, didn't they," he said to her, and just how kind he managed to sound when he said that really threw Alice; after a moment just staring at him, the catgirl gave him another of those hesitant little nods.

"Looks like there's a bit been ripped out of the bone of her brow ridge, her cheekbone, her jawbone, and I think it got into her collar bone," Vrotch continued, then went back from telling Nick to talking to the catgirl, the tone of his voice changing again. "That's not even nearly all they did to you, is it."

Everyone caught the way that statement made her shrink, and he sat back with a sad, tired, bitter, "I knew it."

"What's been done to her, Vrotch?" Nick asked.

"You don't want to know, man," Vrotch said; he took a huge drag of his joint. "Look, it's like this. I've got what's called an uncontrolled mage-gift, man, I can feel other people's emotions when I'm not stoned, and..." and he shook his head. "Trust me man, you don't want to know, someone did a thorough job of brutalising her, real recent man, then right before you dudes came here something just ripped her entire world away like that, and I'm pretty sure someone's been messing with her head very recently, some sort of really sick mind-magic - psychomancy is bad shit, man - I... let's not go into it," and he took another deep drag of the joint, and said, "It's bad."

They sat there in silence for a few moments with everyone looking at the catgirl, who just kept on looking frightened, before Vrotch earnestly told her, "It's over now, you know. You'll be okay with Nick, he's a good dude," and the look of pure disbelief he got was heartbreaking.

"I think she's about where I was right after you pulled my half-frozen arse out that train, Vrotch," Jenny suddenly said, then spoke directly to the catgirl. "You've never actually met a good man in your entire life before, have you."

Nick muttered a soft, very quiet, heartfelt, "Fuck."

"These dudes," Vrotch told the catgirl, "Are good people - even Fiona is at the end of the day," and that visibly surprised Fiona. "I know it seems completely impossible right now, I know, but you're going to realise it soon enough. Just... take care of her okay Nick? She needs it like she needs air."

"I will," Nick said, his voice soft. "I will," and they lapsed back into silence, Vrotch quietly smoking his spliff and the catgirl warily trying to watch everyone at the same time.

"What was that climbing into your monitor, is that some sort of portal or something?" Annie, who had been sitting on that question since right after they arrived, eventually asked.

"Or something," and once again Vrotch visibly had to stop himself calling her 'man'. "Basically you know the Internet?"

"What about it?"

"Well, basically it's a place and if you know what you're doing you can use places in Midgard where image data enters and leaves it - basically cameras and displays - to get in and out. No, seriously. It's like there's a tenth one of the Nine Worlds. The part we don't know is how it became a place, there's nothing we've been able to find intrinsic about information technology that should have that effect in any way we've been able to work out, and we're pretty clear it wasn't deliberately made to happen, but basically it did happen and the result is very useful."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"That was what was bothering me about Vrotch's caravan," said Alice as they were walking back towards the digs, having changed vehicles at the Harbourmaster's.

"Hmm?" said Nick, whom she was wandering along beside having ridden up to the digs in his van. He was carrying the catgirl now dubbed 'Silent' again; Mackie, the other side of Alice from Nick, was carrying a huge bundle of blankets and sheepskins Nick intended to make a pile of for Silent to lay on.

"Inside it is too big to fit in it," Alice told him.

Fiona, who having travelled up with Annie while they were still digging blankets out of Mary Macbride's loft was loitering in the digs door, let out a quiet laugh that startled the catgirl.

"Non-eucelidian geometry in a mage's hideout? Big surprise," she said; she then winced when Alice gave her a capital-L Look and added, "Bloody hell, Alice, you've got to get that eye glitch fixed."

"When it's so good at rocking you back on your heels?"

"What if your eyes just completely jam like that?"

"Okay, okay, will see about getting it sorted tomorrow," Alice said, and that was when Fiona's phone rang.

She answered it, and after a couple of terse words turned and headed for the road, looking worried.

"You okay?" Nick asked.

"I will be. Just... don't bother waiting up for me, it's going to be a long fucking night."

-/-/-/-/-/-

As per promise Alice broached the topic of her glitching eyes during breakfast on the morning of Wednesday 9th; Annie immediately got her mobile out and messaged Dr Clayton right there at the table, and within five minutes Alice had an appointment at the hospital Thursday night.

"Scratched up again Nick?" Annie asked as Nick, looking frustrated and worried and with streaks of fresh syn-skin all over his forearms, came slouching over to their table with a tray of breakfast.

"Aye, that poor wee lassie's still scared shitless and her claws are really bloody sharp," he said with a glum nod as he sat himself down. "Can't leave those bloody cable ties on her and can't not have 'em on her, she's still just going wild every chance she gets and she's stronger than she looks but she's no strong enough to fight off vampires, we're going to have to figure something else out. I'd wanted to get rid of that bloody collar but it's starting to look like we're going to need to leave it where it is."

"I can get something that won't hurt her wrists," said Fiona, who had reappeared at about four that morning and looked it.

"What, something like that?" and Mackie casually flicked the ring on the front of her choker.

"Kinky," said Val.

"I'll just be making something before we're heading down to the college," said Nick. "There's enough crap in the back of the van, it'll no be hard."

"I think," said Fiona, "Someone who's got some idea of what is and isnae safe had better have a look at whatever you cobble together to make sure it's no going to mess her wrists up."

"And that someone's you?"

"Aye."

"Okay, how would you know that sort of thing?" Alice asked her.

"Oh for Christ sakes Alice, you're feeling especially observant today," Fiona said with a shake of her head.

Alice looked around her friend's faces, and concluded that she'd gone and missed something they thought was blindingly obvious again.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Fat Bloke came wandering into the Harbourmaster's shortly after they'd headed down there post dinner - the catgirl was sill in Nick and Mackie's dorm room, her existing chain now looped round and padlocked to the sturdiest part of the fixtures - Nick and Mackie had made sure to budge all the varied weapons and tools out of reach of her - and this wooden handcuff sort of thing - basically just a couple of bits of plank checked carefully for lack of splinters, with a pair of matching half-circle cutouts in one long edge of each, a hinge positioned so the cutouts became two circular holes big enough for her wrists but too small for her hands, and a hasp which a little padlock went through closing the other end from the hinge and making it look almost like her hands had somehow been thrust through a plank.

She had, when they headed for college, been cautiously examining this contraption. There was no longer a chain round her corsetted middle; Nick said that he'd cut it off with his bolt cutters the previous evening and that this and his not doing anything more than that to her had left her laying on the pile of blankets and looking completely bewildered, which he said was an improvement on looking like she thought he was about to rip her head off though on the other hand it did make him want to find whoever left her in such a state and rip their heads off.

All that, however, Alice endeavoured to put out of her mind for the time being: freshly-caught catgirls was the sort of thing that should be worried about at your leisure, and Fat Bloke turning up meant it was time for magic lessons again, something she was coming to very much enjoy regardless of her misgivings concerning the entire necromancer thing.

"Evening, Alice," the overweight mage said, coming ambling across the bar."Up for a bit more fun?"

"Let's go," she said, getting up. "What's on the cards today then?

"I figured I might as well teach you how to scry and chat with dead people," said Fat Bloke and that, in the latter case with the aid of a ghost by the name of Billy Fischig he knew, was exactly what he proceeded to do. Both were remarkably simple processes; for the former a scrap of hair was plenty enough and for the latter you did not, it turned out, need to know the departed shade's name or who they were or what their story was, only where they (or what was left of them) had been, at which Alice concluded that Fiona's comments on necromancy and archaeology had been exactly on point. It was even, Fat Bloke explained, just as easy to reinforce the summon and give the spirit the ability to interact with the physical world further than being visible and speaking - this he demonstrated with Billy's help - though both took pains to warn Alice that if you were going to do this it was very very important to make absolutely certain the spirit in question was on your side as while it is very easy to summon a shade, and to dismiss one you have not given form, once they have form dismissal becomes harder if the shade is not willing and they are all but immune to injury - bad shit, as he put it, tends to happens if you make a shade who has it in for you solid.

With the lesson done with they moved on to unspace, with Fat Bloke doing more of his research - testing a variety of magical effects and tools none of which Alice knew what were - while Alice, who was also drifting back and forth between fiddling with the insides of the not-a-kitten and trying to work out how to make her rat skeleton do things on its own instead of just being a puppet, described the previous night's strangeness, which she'd been wanting to get the input of another mage on since it had all happened; Fat Bloke spent the entire thing nodding, hmm-ing, and asking the odd question before eventually arriving at a preliminary conclusion.

"There's something on the edge of my mind that I've heard of but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. I'll need to get Nick and Fiona's accounts, and to have a look at this cat-girl," he said, then suddenly pointed and asked, "Hey, is that fox yours?"

"Fox? What fox?" she asked, peering where he was pointing.

"It legged it as soon as I pointed, there was a fox off a bit through the trees there peering at us."

"No, I haven't created any foxes," Alice said with a frown.

"Oh dear. Alice, that means something knows we're here, and more importantly knows that someone's created a small patch of ground here."

"... Crud," said Alice, thinking very fast. "What do we need to do?"

"Some sort of guardian would be a good idea, I think it's time for you to try making something that moves about that isn't a mock kitten," Fat Bloke said with a frown.

Alice thought about making the not-a-kitten into a gigantic ferocious guard cat for a moment, then dismissed it. Not only was she now rather fond of the not-a-kitten, having hands and being able to talk would be useful traits for a guardian.

"Okay, so what sort of guardian would work?"

"You've already got a cats theme going on," said Fat Bloke, pointing at the not-a-kitten.

"Yeah, I did briefly think a giant ferocious guard cat but hands are useful, and as that poor catgirl's been demonstrating so is being able to talk."

"Well why not see about half-and-half? Just make a big tough cat-girl," Fat Bloke said, and the idea seemed as good as any so Alice decided to go with it.

She said, "Okay, catgirl," and flexed her will and a catgirl, visually quite similar to the one Nick had found though minus the scars and in possession of a tongue, appeared standing in the middle of the patch of carpet and looking alertly around. She was clad in a plain white T-shirt and jeans.

"Hmm," Alice continued, getting up and getting a better look at the newly-arisen catgirl.

"She doesn't look very ferocious," said Fat Bloke.

"I'll have you know I'm entirely capable of ferociousness, thankyou very much," the newly-extant catgirl primly informed him, then flexed her fingers, showing off her very sharp nails, and added, "I scratch."

"Yeah, but in one way he's right, you're the guardian for my part of unspace and it'll be useful if you look like something people don't want mad at them," Alice told her. "Maybe if you look more tigery," and the catgirl's hair colour and the general shape of her face changed while her muscles bulked out and her claws got a whole lot more impressive; she looked down at herself, flexed her now burly right arm, and grinned, showing off a very pointy spiky sharp-looking set of dentistry. "Hmm, better, but I think you should be a bit taller, maybe about six foot two," and the catgirl immediately grew.

"A strange-shaped vest and workman's trousers isn't very guard-y either," said Fat Bloke.

"True, hmm, some sort of body armour maybe?" and a military-looking flak vest came into being on the catgirl. "No, that's not quite right, it's not bad just as armour but it isn't visually impressive, is it," and the flak vest went through a whole string of random transformations until Alice settled on a general shape she liked - quite 'fitted' and clearly showing the shape of the lithe, toned, densely-muscled body underneath it. "That's better, but it's still not quite right - hmm, how about some shoulderpads, leather, and maybe studs?" and it sprouted big shoulder pads like you'd expect to see on an American football player, turned into scuffed black leather, and started sprouting studs. "No, I think it's still not quite right, maybe something like this?" and the whole thing changed, the shoulder pads going away and the torso section taking on aspects of corsetry (which Alice had to admit she liked the look of regardless of her intense disapproval of over-tightening the things) and sprouting green fabric in a blouse-like structure and something halfway between a loincloth and a skirt with incredibly split sides. "That's better."

"The trousers are a bit of a misfit now," said Fat Bloke, and Alice nodded and the trousers went away without any fuss.

"I think you need some sort of facial markings, like that dark fur tigers have round their eyes," Alice told the catgirl, and the catgirl's skin sprouted fine black fur round her eyes in a very tigery shape; Alice nodded and added, "Better. Now, some sort of boots," and combat boots appeared on the catgirl's feet, "That's not quite right, maybe they should go further up your legs," and the boots grew up the catgirl's shins, "Hmm, still not quite right, let's make them go up even further," and they did, growing to halfway up her thighs. "Oh, I like that - let's add some padding, kneepads, those sort of ribbed armoury sort of bits you get on motorbike trousers, maybe some studs too, that's better," and the catgirl raised one leg until it was sticking up at a forty-five degree angle, her tail (which came out of a sleeve sort of thing in the middle of the back of her not-quite-a-skirt) sticking straight out the other way to help her balance and looking pleasingly natural and fluid while it was at it.

"Maybe open-toed?" the catgirl suggested. "I have claws on both ends, after all."

"Hmm, good idea," and suddenly they were. "That's better, but we're still not quite there yet, I think there needs to be straps and things, maybe spiky bracers," and a set of spike-encrusted gauntlet wristbands appeared on the catgirl's forearms while a variety of straps, belts, crossbelts and so forth appeared and shifted around for a few moments before settling in a layout Alice liked - two belts round her hips, crossbelts crossing between her breasts and joining together behind her back, and a chunky studded choker, all with brightly-polished metal fittings and buckles and studs. "And I think you should be visibly armed - I know what, let's have crossbow death rays built into your bracers," and those sprouted too, went through several variations, and settled on a mixture of brass, steel, and wood looking like a cross between a crossbow and a hairdryer ray gun.

"Crossbow death rays?" Fat Bloke asked.

"Blast that target," Alice told the catgirl, pointing.

The catgirl said a cheerful, "Okay!" and raised her arm - there was a flat loud roar, and a bolt of blue-white energy connected the gadget on her arm to one of the dartboards left over from Alice shooting magic bullets - there was the thunderclap of an explosion and the dartboard more or less ceased to exist.

"Groovy," said Fat Bloke, who was getting very into all this.

"I think," Alice said, "A nice hat would make a good finishing touch," and with that a hat - a matching green to the catgirl's not-quite-dress, broad-brimmed and slightly floppy with a low crown - appeared, then sprouted a peacock feather.

"Perfect," she said. "Now you just need a name - what to call a... steampunk post-apocalyptic airship pirate catgirl? Hmm."

"A name would probably be useful," the catgirl agreed with a nod.

"I'm not great at thinking of names," Alice finally admitted. "I still call my not-a-kitten the not-a-kitten, and I went and named my rat skeleton ' Sir Rattythorpe Wigglesworth Rattington' for pity's sake, don't judge, I was in a weird mood," and Fat Bloke, who had not heard Ratty's full name before, let out a huge snort of laughter.

"That's a bit of a mouthful," the catgirl said with a frown. "I think it'd probably be useful if my name, whatever it is, is easy to shout in a hurry."

"Shiva," Alice finally decided, because of the tiger connection and the general theme of it, and Fat Bloke, who was still grinning, let out a surprised noise, so she added, "What?"

"When you named her Shiva, the thaumometer spiked even harder than it did when you first created her," he said. "Interesting."

"Aye," said a very unexpected Nick Macbane, who had apparently entered the portal while they were distracted. "It's funny - Elf always says that there's a power in names, but this'd be the first time I've ever seen anything to support that."

"Nick? When did you get here?" Alice asked.

"Right when you were deciding a flak jacket wasnae right," said Nick with a shrug. "Did you no notice me?"

"Obviously," said Alice with a sigh. "What can I say, I was distracted and having fun. Anyway," and she turned back to the newly-dubbed Shiva, "I made you to defend my land here," and Alice gestured around them. "I want you to be careful about it - most of the people with access to the yard through the far side of the portal are friends. If anyone you don't know comes in through the portal there, tell them in no uncertain terms to clear out and not to come back without me - don't say who I am though. If they push it, bodily chuck them back through the portal. If you catch anything coming from the depths of unspace that shouldn't be here, see it off - tell it to clear out and be scary as while you're at it, then chuck it off my land, then take potshots across its bows, and it that doesn't work you have my permission to zap the ever-living shit out of it or, you know, introduce it to the fact that you're a big strong tiger-woman, I'm sure you can think of all sorts of ways to hand out any necessary twattings. Oh, and if that fox comes back do your best to capture it, I want a word with it. I'll introduce you to everyone who's allowed in here when I get the chance - to begin with this is my friend Nick Macbane, this is my teacher I suppose you could call him, Fat Bloke, and of course I'm Alice Liddell."

"Pleased to meet you," said Shiva with a smile and a flamboyant bow, then she whirled around, her arm snapping up, with a cry of "And who the hell are you?"

Mackie Romanov had just stepped through the portal.

-/-/-/-/-/-