-/-/-/-/-/-

"That Murchison dude's dead, looks like a psychomancer killed him," said Vrotch, sitting down across the table from Alice - who had been woken up by the bang when the Bigger Van stopped that missile - and Fiona.

"In that case there's a psychomancer I owe a good turn," said Fiona; she paused, frowned, and added, "Vrotch, why does a dead sick degenerate have you worried?"

"Because Nick asked me to have a look at the body and make sure whatever killed the dude isn't catching, and I noticed he had the Lexbridge seal on the grips of his pistol, so I checked and he died with a Lexbridge signet ring on a necklace," said Vrotch.

Fiona paused for a long moment, and then said, "No wonder the bastard thought he could do anything and no wonder Kensington called the bastard connected. Fuck, and that makes at least the second Lexbridge Fellow killed in Inverness in a matter of weeks,"

Vrotch flatly said, "What."

"I'm not really supposed to talk about it," Fiona told him, lowering her voice, "But after that thing with a pyromancer going bananas in the no-go Grandmother had myself and her other witches, Morag and Mairi, watching one of the coppers who was injured there - a man named John Griffths, who's got a lot of enemies, and she figured he'd make a good tool since she's, well, she's got something to be holding over him that could have him a one-way ticket to Mars like that," and she snapped her fingers. "Anyway a man sneaked in to inject him with something a week ago today, I never saw what it was but he was nae hospital staff or a copper so I dropped the glamour I was wearing and told him nae to do that - he went for a gun, I, well, I smeared him up the wall by direct application of magic and I noticed a guess what on his ring finger after he'd gone splat."

"Well," said Vrotch. "Fuck."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"So, are you believing what Vrotch was saying?" Mackie asked as the two of them walked out of the pub on their way to actually assess the damage the Bigger Van had taken.

"Aye, I think so," said Nick with a frown. "It's making entirely too much sense."

"Aye and myself'll be having a wee word with this whatever brought herself here when we're catching up with it," Mackie muttered, and Nick instantly caught the meaning of 'a wee word' being 'spoken' using full-contact sign language; Mikhail Romanov had no sense of humour whatsoever about things that played funny buggers with his friends and appeared not to make an exception for the game of funny buggers being why he'd met that friend in the first place.

"Aye," he said, and then added "Shite, what a mess," as they walked up to the heavily-damaged Bigger Van.

From the look of things the missile had struck the Bigger Van's hottest part: where the exhaust system stuck out from under the loadbed. Both back axles were totally done for, it didn't have any back wheels that side any more and both half-shafts were mangled that end as were the axles, spall or something had ignited its fuel - they'd been fast enough to get out the pub and put it out that it hadn't burned out - but on closer examination the entire chassis was twisted and the armour Nick had built that side was just as utterly done. The lining had worked, no fragments had actually got inside the vehicle, which was heartening, but in the end he was going to have to jack the cab, engine bay, and gearbox up and put a new truck chassis underneath then build an entirely new loadbed onto it even if the blast hadn't flashed up the exhaust and thrashed the engine - it wouldn't be a surprise if the blowback had cracked the block and/or done terrible things to the heads via the exhaust ports - and this time he was going to see to it that the fuel tank was just as armoured as the cab and loadbed and see about getting the exhaust somewhere anything going for it would hit armour plate.

"How's it look?" Mackie asked

"Look at the way it went straight up the exhaust pipe, we'll have tae check it didnae flash up there and fuck up the engine, I'm thinking it was some sort of heat-seeker. I'm going to be able to salvage the cab and engine bay, and hopefully the engine and gearbox, but we'll be running an entire new chassis under it and building an entire new loadbed. Bugger, I really wasnae needing all the extra work, nae with everything else we've got on... Gie us a hand, let's get this bloody thing dragged round the back yard."

That was when Alice came walking over to them, and said, "I need to learn to use this," patting the Welgun she'd picked up from somewhere during her Orkney trip, which she'd been carrying on a sling since she got back, and that got a surprised grunt out of Mackie.

"Myself was thinking yourself was no comfortable around guns," he said.

"I'm not, I didn't grow up around them the way you lot did, these things are designed for making things dead and they're really good at it and that makes me all sorts of jumpy, but for one thing my finger is a weapon just as loaded as this thing only it doesn't reload nearly so fast and to cut a long story short the character I got this off tried to kidnap me on the ferry, I don't expect him to be the last time someone tries something funny with all this Lexbridge crap and whatnot, and I'm with Annie: I've been a helpless victim once, I was a helpless getting blown to bits by a sodding car bomb in the street victim, it was bloody awful and I'm not having with it again, and if that means me carting this thing around and knowing how to use it is a good idea?" and she shrugged.

Mackie nodded.

"Aye," he said with a sagely nod and a smile. "Myself will be glad to be helping," and you didn't need to be a committed Mackieologist to hear that he really would; he had, Nick knew, been wanting to see Alice learning to properly defend herself since before they'd headed for college.

It was, after all, always the best idea for a good-looking lass to know that.

-/-/-/-/-/-

For something described as a war it was - at least in Inverness - really a rather sedate affair.

The cops spent the whole time bunkered down in the blockhouse they called a police station; the protestors made multiple attempts to shoot up said fortified cop-shop, pelting it with everything from petrol bombs to home-made mortars to haggis guns, all to little or no effect. Four assorted bodies - Alice (who spent the whole thing hiding from it in the Harbourmaster's) never got the story behind any of them - turned up hanged from streetlights over the first couple of days. Several shops - all outlets of businesses based in England - were shot up and looted, and a couple of building were burned. Other than that, the entire affair consisted mostly of driving round in circles, waving banners, and dumping belt after belt of .303 at the cop shop; as for the rumours about the air force the boys had fed, the Bigger Van was the only vehicle hit by a missile during the entire affair.

You could quickly and visibly see things starting to peter out - the numbers of people involved started to thin by Tuesday, and the last actual shots were fired on the afternoon of Thursday 21st of November; by that evening the handful of hanged bodies had been cut down, police vehicles were back on patrol, and aside from the shot-up and/or looted businesses everyone went back to their lives as if nothing had happened.

However, that Thursday afternoon unlike the rest of the student body Fiona missed her lecture; Alice found her, looking very worried, waiting for her outside the Harbourmaster's.

"Alice, we're needing a quick word in private," she said. "Can we have it the far side of your portal?"

"What? Oh, sure," Alice said, and Fiona popped to her feet and hastened through to the cojoined containers.

"I take it this has something to do with this Lexbridge business," she continues as soon as they were exiting the portal on the unspace side; she made to head for her study but Fiona apparently couldn't be bothered, instead leaning against the dooframe right there in the portal chamber.

"Aye, it has," Fiona said. "We've been watching a Lexbridge operative fresh in town since two days after Murchison ate it - we're pretty sure he's prioritising killing Griffths over finding who killed Murchison and Derwent, that's the name of the man I splattered, he's basically just working his way down a list of police safehouses, we're expecting him to hit the right one tonight so we'll be waiting at it for him. He'll probably demand my head - Grandmother has a play planned, I can't say what but - anyway I want to warn you about the man from Lexbridge, his name's Nigel Berkeley, skinny bald bastard with a face like he's permanently smelling a really bad shite, suit and tie, he's got a blonde woman with him I'm fairly certain is a kineticist mage - that's the full on mage version of the sort of witch I am - I don't know her name but they're really bloody dangerous, be bloody careful and, and warn Vrotch."

"I will," said Alice with a nod. "Fiona... are you going to be okay?"

Fiona glanced around, looking a bit nervous, then suddenly fished a pendant out of down her blouse - a small green stone teardrop-shaped thing attached to a plain silver chain; this she took off and handed it to Alice.

"I don't know," she said. "I'm, honestly I'm scared, Alice. My hairbrush, it's sitting on my bedside table - you have been taught to scry, haven't you? I... I have to go."

Alice stared after her for a long moment, then decided what that had meant.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Fiona just flat-out asked me to get Vrotch and scry on her, like now," said Alice Liddell, raising the attention of the rest of their friends, who had turned up shortly after Alice got there.

"Aye, about Fiona, any idea why she just took off out of here like she was- wait, what?" said Nick.

"Fiona," Alice repeated, "Just flat-out asked me to get Vrotch and scry on her. Now. Immediately. Stop bloody staring at me and come on, you bunch of slack-jawed gummocks," and that got an amused snort out of Mackie, who was already in the course of rising to his feet having, unlike Nick, actually listened the first time.

"I thought you said you were nae going to spy on your friends," said Nick, alone in remaining seated.

"Different story when they ask me to," Alice told him; he thought about that and then nodded, and finally got up.

"Talking of which I think we should be making up a wee kit of wee bottles with bits of our hair in, and figuring out circumstances for Alice to be having a wee scry on us, and I'm thinking one for Vrotch too," said Annie; she nodded to Alice. "We are after all fighting a private sodding war, who knows which of us will be bloody glad the cavalry can have a wee look to see if we're okay first."

"Point, aye," said Nick as they arrived at the vehicles - his Albion and Annie's pickup.

"We need to get Fiona's hairbrush, it's on her bedside table at the digs," Alice said.

"Okay, how about us two swing up past the digs to grab it, you go get Vrotch, Annie, and meet us back here," said Nick. "And we can grab Silent and Sprocket while we're about it, just in case we're really needing the cavalry."

"Aye - let's go," said Annie with a nod, and she punctuated that by reaching into her pickup's engine to persuade it to start.

-/-/-/-/-/-

When Alice and Nick arrived back at the Harbourmaster's not twenty minutes later, they found Annie had, accompanied as per request by Vrotch, who was in turn accompanied by Vicky and Jenny Devil, beat them to it - and that Mary already had a bowl set up for Alice to scry using in the form of the one that usually sat on the bar full of salted peanuts.

"Okay," Vrotch said to Alice with a nod as she and Nick arrived in the back room along with a mob formed of two catgirls, a wolf, and a melanistic jaguar, "Let's see how well you remember Fat Bloke's lesson, yeah?"

Alice nodded, and held up and brandished Fiona's hairbrush, which she'd shoved in a poly bag.

"Voila, one hairbrush still with a bunch of distinctively not mine due to being blonde and too long hairs stuck in it because Fiona constantly forgets to clean the bloody thing," she said, dumping it on the table beside the bowl. "And while I'm at it, right before she took off she gave me this," and she dumped the necklace on the table too.

Vrotch picked it up, peered quizzically at it, and said, "Well it's definitely enchanted but I don't- oh. Huh. Well, that's obviously why she gave you it, actually I've seen this sort of enchantment like half a dozen times in fact I'm wearing something exactly the same right now, it's made to make someone hard to scry."

Alice said, "Huh."

"Let's get scrying," said Vrotch, and Alice nodded and got a hair off the brush.

Having tucked the hair-filled brush away again she wadded the hair up and carefully plopped it into the bowl of water, took a deep breath, said, "Moment of truth," and pulsed magic into the water focused on and around Fiona's hair the way Fat Bloke had shown her that time.

There was a faint popping noise and the surface of the water shimmered, then abruptly became a crystal-clear image of Fiona, walking down a street that Alice recognised as being in Kinmylies on the far side of the Caledonian Canal and not far from Craig Dunain mental hospital, if only due to having cleaned out a vampire nest right on that street the week after they got back from the October break, and Fiona was walking alongside the two other similarly-dressed young women who'd collected her from the Harbourmaster's that one time along with an unfamiliar white-haired black-clad elderly woman with one of those faces that seem to have a look of contempt permanently etched into them by wrinkles.

"Well, well, well," said Vrotch. "The hag queen herself."

"You know them?" Annie asked.

"In a sense - I don't know where the redhead and the brunette are from, the redhead's called Mairi and the brunette's called Morag, I know that much, and like Fiona they're witches and you've probably already guessed whose witches they are and who Madam Sneersy there is: that's the one and only Isobel Mackenzie."

"What is her story anyway?" Alice asked.

"I don't know much of it - I don't know how she came to survive learning magic but I can tell you she was married to the bloke who was the Earl of Seaforth about three and a half centuries ago, self-made immortal and that inevitably means nastiness," said Vrotch.

"Shut up, something's happening," said Annie; the old woman had began speaking in Gaelic, clearly giving the three young women orders and pointing around as she did so; Alice caught Fiona's name right before Fiona surprised her with a totally impossible hundred-foot-long standing jump at the end of which she alighted gently on the topmost point of a telegraph pole.

"She doesn't normally sound squeaky like that, scrying distorts voices," said Vrotch.

It took a moment of fiddling with the focus of magic in the bowl, but Alice got the view looking over Fiona's shoulder, facing the way the blonde witch was looking, quickly enough to keep up with what was happening - Fiona glanced around, letting them clearly see where each of the other two witches were - likewise standing upon high things, the redhead a streetlight and the brunette another telegraph pole, and then down at the ground where the notorious Isobel Mackenzie was calmly walking down the road, before Fiona started walking along the overhead cable with all the effort one would expect from her strolling down Shore Street.

Then the whole bowl went dark save for a lit-up spot of street at the centre, right where Fiona was looking, just as a black Bugatti two-seater with tinted windows and headlights that had abruptly gone out along with the streetlights coasted to a halt in the spot of light; it took Alice a moment to realise that every streetlight in the area had save for the one above the car gone out at one go,

"Plot thickens," said Nick; a bald-headed man in a sharply-creased suit with a suspicious bulge under the armpit (the sight of whom made both Vrotch and Vicky stiffen) got out of the car's driver's seat just as something from roundabout where Fiona was made a thrumming noise, and right after that something in the darkness made a sound that made Annie, Nick, and Mackie all go rigid; it was clearly a very large animal grunting, and sounded almost but not quite exactly like, 'Gronk.'

"Fuuuck me," said Annie.

The bald man demonstrated what the bulge under his armpit was by removing a large pistol - which Alice was slightly surprised to recognise, it was the type of hand-cannon that was A, called a 'Mars pistol' and B, had got Nick and Nat thinking about sawing off a Lee-Enfield when it hadn't made Silent bat an eyelid - and aimed it in the direction the sound had come from, and then as the source of the sound emerged from the darkness he slowly lowered the pistol and said, just loud enough to be heard via scrying, "Interesting."

It was a bull haggis. Not only that - it was an even bigger bull haggis than the one that had overturned a freight train a couple of miles south down the line from Inverallen the previous August. And, to the very visible horror of Nick, Mackie, and Annie, it had the woman Vrotch called Isobel Mackenzie standing on its head.

"Put that away before you get yourself hurt, lad," the old woman ordered. "It won't be doing you any good; you will find that my pet has an urge to trample you to a paste and I am all that is preventing it from so doing."

"I suppose," said the bald man, "I have completed the first element of my primary mission."

"Before we continue," said Isobel Mackenzie, "I should bid you welcome to Alba, man from the south. You may call me the Cailliach," and that got a loud disgusted noise out of Vrotch, nearly drowning out the woman continuing, "By what name should we call you?"

"Cal ack bollocks, you've got both eyes and aren't nearly so scary," Vrotch muttered, getting an odd look from Nick.

"I," the bald man grandly declared, "Am Nigel Berkeley, Fellow of the Lexbridge Shooting Society. I presume I am speaking to one of the persons responsible for the regular summoning of the beasts known as 'wild haggis', correct? My colleagues and I have undertaken quite some effort to locate you and your colleagues."

"And for what," asked Isobel Mackenzie, "Have you been searching for us?"

"You are aware of the experiences of Lexbridge where concerns the summoning of chickenlizards, and the experiences of the youdoun where concerns the summoning of tyrannosauri, correct?" asked Nigel Berkeley.

Mackenzie smiled thinly and said, "Ah; you wish to know if our working has run away from us. We learned well from our experiences with the small black bears that now plague an t-Eilean Fada; appearances of the 'haggi' remain fully under my control and so shall continue to be."

Nick instantly visibly went from 'simmer' to 'boil', and Mackie Romanov's knuckles began to creak. Annie quietly said, "She's going to die, and I'm going to be there."

"And what might your objective in their summoning be?" asked Berkeley.

"Perhaps we should make this an exchange, rather than yourself constantly taking all that you wish and giving nothing," said Mackenzie. "Why do you seek after the man known as John Griffths?"

"That," Berkeley snootily declared, "Is an internal affair of the Lexbridge Shooting Society and not a subject I am at liberty to discuss. Regardless, when I ask a question I expect an answer," and he was very visibly very unimpressed when that made Mackenzie burst out laughing.

"Do you truly believe you are in control here, little man?"

Berkeley barked, "Maria!" and a very loud (if rendered tinny by the scrying bowl) roar cut the night; a massive hole appeared in the top of Macknzie's haggis's head and the animal went down like a puppet with its strings cut - the muzzle flash, coming from the top of streetlight nearest to the animal, clearly lit up a blonde woman who looked almost exactly like Vicky and was holding the absurdly enormous gun it had come from. An ejected shell casing went clanging onto the tarmac below.

"Frankly?" said Berkeley. Fiona abruptly moved, leaping towards the street where the shell casing had landed, and that thrumming sound happened again as she landed on something well off of the ground.

"Hand-firing a haggis gun; you have an impressive pet," said Mackenzie with a nod and a grim little smile as she alghted from her collapsing steed; she snapped her fingers and three streetlights, the one Fiona was now standing under included, came back on.

The other two had the redhead and the brunette standing under them - both standing on the heads of bull haggi, and a slight change of angle of scry revealed that Fiona too was standing on the head of a very alive bull haggis.

"And would your servant be able to shoot all three before one was to crush you?" Mackenzie asked.

Berkeley said something in a strange percussive-sounding language and sprang into the air; Mackenzie copied him half a heartbeat behind.

He straightened his tie while standing on nothing, and said, "Perhaps we should take this to some form of neutral ground."

"Perhaps," said Mackenzie, "We should."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Neutral ground turned out to mean the cathedral, on the western bank of the River Ness a stone's throw from Eden Court and currently at the corner where traffic was being diverted around the leading edge of construction of the tramway extension; Alice didn't see what happened to the trio of haggi, Fiona and the other two girls just ditched the animals and didn't look back, but the lack of any sounds of rampaging or further gronks told a story of its own.

The two parlaying groups arrived separately; Nigel Berkeley and his blonde 'pet', who was clad in an elegant white dress with a low-cut neckline and a very narrow waist indeed and looked even more like Vicky now she was in the light, were waiting when Fiona arrived hot on the heels of Mackenzie; the two from Lexbridge were standing to the left of the altar as one entered the cathedral, and Mackenzie, flanked by Fiona and the brunette and the redhead, took up position to the left of the altar.

"So," said Mackenzie. "Shall we begin with the matter of Griffths?"

"Yes, that we most likely should. Griffths is - was - an operative, a catspaw if you like, for Lexbridge however he betrayed us some weeks past, attacking and denying us the actions of a direct member of the White Raven's family at the commencement of our search for you. As he is also entirely too fond of little girls the White Raven has seen fit to have his less palatable deeds revealed to his erstwhile colleagues, a task that I saw to earlier this evening; as he is a product of one of the sources from which Perfect Warrior was derived he is quite physically potent and must be strategically and specifically damaged before he awakens from the coma he was put into by the White Raven's descendent."

"I see," said Mackenzie. "So, you've spilt his dirty little secrets to the law, then? In that case I suppose I have no further use for him; I shall wash my hands of him. In return, you and yours shall keep strictly out of affairs north of the line of Loch Ness and the Moray Firth; these lands are mine and I do not believe it will go well for either of us should we fight for them."

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"That will depend on our disposing of the parties responsible for the deaths of not one, but two, Fellows of this Society," said Berkeley. "A Mr Kevin Murchison, and a Mr Roger Derwent."

"Indeed?" said Mackenzie with a frown. "I was unaware any of your Fellows had been killed?"

"Liar liar bum's on fire," said Alice.

"Quite," said Berkeley. "Naturally, the White Raven requires their killers' heads, and has commanded that there be no peace until they are avenged. Mr Murchison appears to have been subjected to a massively powerful fear spell during the recent 'land war' unpleasantness, and Mr Derwent was slaughtered attempting to administer justice to Griffths at the," and he hadn't finished saying whatever he'd been going to say before Fiona was running.

Annie shot upright and stuffed a phone into Vrotch's hand.

"Keep filming the scrying bowl on that," she said. "And phone Alice's phone, talk us onto Fiona," and she turned to her friends. "Come on."

"No need for that, it's stable until you touch the surface," said Alice, picking the bowl up and taking the phone from Vrotch - she hastened to follow the others out to the van.

Vrotch watched them go, then turned to Vicky.

"So the bastard who killed Reg wants Fiona dead," he said.

Vicky nodded once. Outside, Nick's van spluttered into life and pulled away with a great deal of tyre-squealing haste.

"And so Fiona's got some very good friends," said Vrotch.

"Maybe we should think about whether the bitch deserves friends after all," said Vicky, and then she was sprinting out the pub with no impression of having gone through the entire process of standing up on her way from sitting down to splitting it like an Olympic sprinter after Nick's rusty old van.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"I'm no seeing them," said Nick, peering around as the van rattled past the front of the railway station on Academy Street. "Are you sure we're going the," and how he'd been going to conclude that would remain unknown for right at that moment Fiona came flying headlong out of the mouth of Queensgate - she touched down on and for a moment seemed to run along the side of the tram that Nick had just overtaken, kicked off and launched herself across to land on a windowsill on the third floor the other side of Academy Street, then very obviously saw the van, for the next thing she did - midway through leaping back onto the tramway's overhead power cable - was shuck her gunbelt off, bundle it up, and hurl it underarm so it flew through Nick's open driver's window and landed in the Albion's front passenger footwell, so instead he said, "Jesus!" before finishing with a yell of, "Christ!" as one of Fiona's pursuers - Alice didn't catch which, but would later hear from Nick, who'd seen it in his wing mirror, that it had been the redhead apparently named Morag - threw a lightning bolt at her, which missed by a mile, instead hitting and setting fire to the building right at the end of Academy Street where it split into Inglis Street and Hamilton Street.

He then added a cry of, "Fuck!" as Val, who was riding centre seat up the front, flung herself right across his lap, knocking his hands off the van's steering wheel, on her way to crane herself and one of Keith Thompson's old Sten guns halfway out Nick's door's window and dump the magazine in the direction the lightning bolt had come from, and Alice, who was in the front left seat, looked up from the scrying bowl and at the passenger side wing mirror just in time to see one of Fiona's two pursuers utterly lose her footing, faceplant in front of the tram Fiona had kicked off of, and vanish under it, and much to her later intense satisfaction she caught it on Annie's mobile phone camera too.

"Gerroff!" Nick continued, pulling his arms out of under his sudden unexpected lapful of punk - he grabbed the wheel with one hand and used it to swerve to avoid what would have been a very abrupt meeting with a Morris Marina, which went on to completely lose control and hit the tram, while using the other to pull Val back out of his lap. "You trying to make me crash?"

"Well I got her didn't I?" said Val, her usual totally unapologetic self. The other of Fiona's pursuers made the jump and sprinted off towards Inglis Street where Fiona had just gone, throwing a fireball and setting a bank on the far side of the High Street on fire as she went. "Put your bloody foot down, the other one's still going,"

Nick did so, even while continuing to complain, "Don't bloody jump on my arms when I'm driving you absolute numpty - where's Fiona going now Alice?"

"Straight up Eastgate towards Millburn Road, still on the tramway overhead," Alice said, returning her attention and that of Annie's phone's camera to the scrying bowl, and Nick nodded and hung a hard left at the end of Inglis Street, the van fishtailing wildly as he swerved between a Reliant Robin van (which promptly turned on its side) and a Commer minibus going in the other direction.

He hit the horn, and held it down.

"We oughtta get a siren on the Bigger Van when we fix it," he shouted, really having to yell to be heard over the bellow of the engine, the horn, and the wind blasting in the open windows, which only got worse when Mackie hauled the side door open and hung himself half out of it with his hands full of the Vickers gun he'd grabbed out of the loadbed of Annie's pickup on the way out the pub and Sprocket holding onto his webbing with one hand and the back of Nick's seat with the other. "Jesus, will you wankers just get out the way, can you no see we're having a chase here!" and he took another violent swerve, taking the Albion off the road where the tramlines diverged past the old railway locomotive shed the tramway used as a car barn and the ride quality became twice as bad as it started running on sleepers.

Mackie shouted "Gotcha!" and the machine gun roared into life, one long raking burst - Alice saw the girl who'd been chasing Fiona and hurling fireballs at her faceplant the trackbed right in front of them right before there was a jolt as the Albion went straight over her; Nick let out a yell of delight then hauled the wheel across again, sending the van careening down the embankment and onto the east end of Harbour Road right where it was about to run underneath the railway line leading towards Aberdeen; a moment later Mackie was passing the now-steaming machine gun back to Annie.

"Kettle's on," he said. "Woo! Bloody hell, I hope Fiona's okay."

"Same but we'd better be offski, that wasnae quiet," said Nick, hanging a right onto the Millburn Road to head back into town.

"Better nae turn up towards Raigmore, the fuzz'll be down any moment," said Mackie.

"I'm going to turn onto Victoria Road, they'll be headed straight for the town centre," Nick told him, and put action to words, hurling the Albion into a side-road that headed steeply uphill and round a corner in between two lines of trees - they were just getting far enough round that the railway yards were going out of sight when something with blue lights shot past back there, on the Millburn Road, and Nick added a pleased, "Bye!"

-/-/-/-/-/-

The drive back down to the Harbourmaster's was a much more sedate affair, as it seemed was the rest of Fiona's journey; she had seen Nick run the apparently-named Mairi down and immediately got off of the tramway overhead cable and stopped running, instead walking along the side of the A9 until the junction with Sir Walter Scott Drive where she headed back into town, but to the increasing bafflement of everyone in the van she proceeded to make a direct beeline for the police headquarters, where she walked inside and greeted the desk sergeant with a calm, "Evening. I understand you'll be looking into the death of a man named Roger Derwent, who turned up splattered up the side of a hospital ward containing a copper by the name of John Griffths who I understand you've just discovered has been a very naughty boy. I killed Derwent - maybe you'd better be arresting me."

-/-/-/-/-/-

It seemed that Fiona's comment had contained enough to get her taken seriously by the cops - there was a certain level of detail it takes, Alice knew, to get the cops to take a random turning up and claiming involvement in a case seriously and somewhere between the 'splattered up the side of a hospital ward', the names involved, and/or the comment about Griffths being 'a very naughty boy' Fiona had succeeded in making that mark; by the time they were back in the Harbourmaster's back room she was in an interview room, sitting at a table, handcuffed with the cuffs fed through a little metal loop in the table-top - and whatever the cops were doing, it left the group on the far end of the scrying time to assemble themselves for a fully-blown council of war (from which Vrotch, Jenny and Vicky were absent by dint of having left right after the others did) by the time a series of serious-faced cops came trooping into Fiona's interview room and seated themselves at the table opposite the completely calm-faced blonde witch.

"Is that everyone here now?" Fiona asked.

"It is indeed," said one of the cops, a rather distinguished-looking balding fellow with grey hair and spectacles and something oddly familiar about his face despite the fact Alice was quite certain she'd never seen him before, whose Public School Boy English sounded even more ridiculous via the reediness scrying seemed to impart on noises.

Fiona nodded and said, "Good," and she paused for a moment then carried on, "My name is Fiona Macleod and I am what many would be referring to as a witch," and she snapped her fingers, causing a flash of fire to appear above her hand. "I am – was – a part of what you would be calling a coven from an t-Eilean Fada, we meet up the back of Steòrnabhagh at a place I can show to you if you wish. Back in October, Grandmother – the leader of the coven, I have never learned her actual name,"

"Your nose grew when you said that," said Nick, not that she heard it.

"Was sending me to make sure no harm befell John Griffths," and unlike earlier this time someone in the Harbourmaster's back room, namely Alice, noticed the way Silent flinched at that name, "As she felt we would be using him as a pawn, and in so doing I killed a man who approached him when neither a police officer nor a hospital worker as he drew a gun when I warned him not to inject his syringe into the Griffths lad."

The distinguished-looking cop with the grey hair and spectacles frowned, and said, "Apropos of nothing, the usual penalty for murder is to be hanged by the neck until dead."

A grim little smile appeared on Fiona's face; she nodded. "Aye, and that would be a better way to go that the alternative that I find before me; I have no desire at all to find out what it is like inside a wicker man."

Nick started muttering about having 'a word' with this Isobel bloody Mackenzie when he caught up with her. One of the cops - a serious-looking man clad in a greatcoat, who on closer inspection looked both even more oddly familiar from somewhere and remarkably like the balding cop - frowned, making his face even more familiar though Alice really couldn't put her finger on where from, and said, "Why exactly do you have that to fear?"

"It transpires that the man I killed was a Fellow of the Lexbridge Shooting Society, powerful warlocks from the south; they are perhaps the most dangerous – not to mention influential – group of men in the British Empire, as we learned when one of their operatives - a man called Nigel Berkeley, and I can see that the name means something to yourself - had a wee bit of a stand-off with us earlier tonight. Under the same basis that make Lexbridge the most dangerous men in the British Empire I would call Grandmother and her lackies the most dangerous women in the British Empire. If the two groups were to fight, it is anyone's guess who would come off worse; they could really hurt each other, it is a war nobody with sense on either side would want, and what I did in that hospital room came very close to starting that war."

The cop in the greatcoat said, "I see."

"The last time Grandmother decided that a member of the coven, my aunt Eithrig, was to die, a wicker man was made," said Fiona.

"That was another lie," said Annie, "She's got a tell, her left eye twitches a bit when she lies." and this Alice, remembering the way Fiona's eye had twitched when she was talking about MIIiIiiiiIster Murchison on a certain day of infamy, found very interesting in a very confusing and unsettling sort of a way.

"Why did you kill the man?" the distinguished-looking cop with the grey hair and spectacles asked.

"A working fit to stop bullets is entirely possible, I myself have done it before, however it takes several minutes to perform and I had not cast one before taking up guard over Griffths. The man from Lexbridge had drawn a gun and was bringing it to bear on me."

"Is there any particular reason you didn't attempt to restrain or disarm the man?" the cop in the greatcoat asked.

"I didnae feel there was time, he wasnae slow on the draw," Fiona said.

"That," said the distinguished-looking cop with the grey hair and Eton accent, "Is a moot point; we identified the contents of that syringe two days ago. Four drachms of sulphur mustard, the killing was a clear-cut case of self-defence and the defence of others; the law does not differentiate according to what weapon was used by whom in such situations," and Fiona had spent that entire statement with a deepening frown on her face.

"If I'm released from police custody, I'll be burned to death within a couple of days," she said.

"Will you fuck," Nick and Alice chorused, not that she could hear them, despite the fact that both had noted her eye twitch again.

"We shall see what we can do," the distinguished-looking cop with the grey hair said, rising to his feet, and this served as a cue for the rest of the cops to exit the room and for Nick to turn to Annie.

"So who was who there?" he asked.

"That," said Annie, "Was the chief of the Highland Constabulary, I don't know his name offhand. The bloke in the long coat I've only met a handful of times, his name's Stoker, Malcolm I think it is, he's one of their top detectives - the woman who was standing beside him is his partner, I only know her as Jones. The other two are regular beat cops, Hiller and Booker, they were probably there to look big and intimidating since they're good at it."

"What do yourselves reckon about what Fiona was saying?" Mackie asked.

"I reckon we need to get Fiona the hell away from this 'Grandmother' person," said Alice.

"Isobel Mackenzie," said Nick.

"What do you think about how Fiona wasn't telling that name to the pigs?" asked Val

"Not a clue but I do ken I don't like it," said Nick.

"Myself am starting to think she's why Fiona was nae splattering that bastard with the wee twat moustache up a wall," said Mackie with a grim nod. "Oh, myself'll be having a bloody word with that woman when myself am catching her."

Nick nodded, and said, "Aye," and with that they lapsed into a brief thoughtful silence which Mackie chose to break.

"Hey Annie, yourself think this Stoker lad might be related to that Trish Stoker lassie who's on yourself's course?"

Annie frowned.

"Could be," she said. "Trish hasn't said anything about her dad being a cop but that mainly proves she's no daft, and thinking about it their eyes are a similar enough shape it could be a familial resemblance, I don't know."

"Aye but you could be saying the same about the chief there, hell, it's almost looking to myself that himself might be related to this Stoker lad," Mackie pointed out.

"I couldn't help but notice," said Alice, "That somebody flinched the very moment Fiona said 'John Griffths'," and she pointed at Silent, who was still paying close attention.

Nick went and sat down beside her - she was sitting on a spare pub bench and looking quickly from one to another of them.

"You know this Griffths bloke, don't you," he said, and got a rapid nod, and her expression had clued the others in before he had time to continue, "And not for anything good, either. I'm betting he was involved in attacking you, wasn't he."

She nodded again.

"Did the bastard do all this to you?" Nick asked, running a finger down her scar, and got another nod and she opened her mouth and pointed at the stub of her tongue too. "Good thing he's nae got Fiona keeping an eye on him any more then, I'm going to find the bastard and make sure he swings on a fucking rope the very next time there's a land war."

"Any idea how to switch this thing off?" Val asked, pointing at the bowl, in which Fiona was still visible sitting at the table with the vague manner of someone waiting for a bus. "Think we've seen enough for tonight."

"Oh, that's easy," Alice said, and touched the surface of the water with her hand, disrupting the pool of magic; the image dissipated with a plop, and she took a moment to fish the floating blob of hair out. "Done."

They sat round in silence for a bit, save for Nick muttering darkly and stroking the top of Silent's head, before Annie eventually asked, "So what'll we be doing with Fiona's stuff? What'll we be doing if the cops chuck her out?"

"I'm thinking we keep a sharp eye on her using that," and Val pointed firmly at the bowl, "And when the pigs kick her out we grab her and get her through one of Alice's wee portals, fast."

"Good plan," said Annie with a nod. "What about her stuff?"

"We can get it stowed at the Harbourmaster's in the morning," said Nick. "Talking of the morrow I'm wanting a word with Vrotch about what we were just learning about haggi - but nae tonight, I'm about bushed."

However, the following morning came with unexpected news of its own.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Great," said Mackie Romanov, who was sitting in the left front seat of the Albion. "Kicked out of the digs for having 'illegal immigrants' in our rooms."

"Sorry," said Nick, who was sitting in the Albion's driver's seat. Alice, in the centre seat, refrained from comment, as did the quartet - wolf, panther, Silent, and Sprocket - jammed in the back in between the mass of all their stuff and all Fiona's stuff too; it was just forty-eight minutes and one mad scramble since they'd been bluntly informed that they had one (1) hour to get themselves and their belongings out of the digs before the police would be called to arrest the lot of them

"It's just the, you ken, specificness that's doing myself's head in. Pets are okay, but no if they're either quote, 'illegal immigrants', unquote, large exotic predators, or sheep. What in the fuck?"

"Sorry."

"And what's making them so convinced catgirls are illegal immigrants God knows, for Christ sakes Sprocket's sounding like she's from Arbroath."

"They probably didn't know what else to call us," said Sprocket.

"See? That's an Arbroath accent if ever myself's been hearing one."

"The part that really unsettles me," Alice said, "Is that they defined illegal immigrants as 'pets'."

"Come to think of it, aye, that is really fucked up. So... where's ourselves going to, well, live?"

"I know where there's a house naebody's using," said Nick.

"Oh aye?" said Mackie "Where?"

"Ruilick up the back of Muir of Ord," said Nick.

"This is smelling of bad plan, myself can be smelling bad plan from a mile away," Mackie muttered.

"Shut up you big fanny," said Nick with a snort, "Where the hell else are we going to go? Camp behind the Harbourmaster's? Above the bloody Harbourmaster's? Fuck that, sleep is nae a luxury. Take up permanent residence in Alice's wee airship placie? Aye right, how long'd it take for someone to figure out we were proper vanishing every night? Crash over with Vrotch? Tempting but with all that really nice pot he has I'd never be getting a bloody thing done."

"How about," Alice said with a sigh, "You both stop yakking and we get mobile?"

Nick said, "You heard the lady," and threw the van into gear.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Ruilick Hall was quiet and still and the doors they'd left open were still standing open, complete with the hole and the strainer fence post Mackie had used to make it still laying right where he'd dumped it; even still they entered with caution, but half an hour later and they'd concluded there hadn't been any real need for it, the place was deserted.

That made the next things on the agenda obvious enough; move in and mend the doors, and once they'd got their stuff unloaded from the van and trailer (catgirls included) Nick took off to hit the scrappers in search of materials as he intended to make sure nobody else would be battering through what was now, he declared, their bloody front door with a bloody fence post; two loads of large amounts of rusted ironmongery later he showed up in the company of a man driving a low-loader with the thrashed Bigger Van on the back of it, and he made another two trips to bring back a certain pair of old bulldozers along with the parts they'd got together to turn into a remote-piloted lighter-than-air sensor platform, which Nick was insistently calling a 'miniature Zeppelin' or 'mini-Zep' for short.

With the move out the way they headed back into town for the scheduled meet-up at the Harbourmaster's to discuss how to proceed, which Alice mostly sat out in favour of keeping banging her head on the portal problem, with which she'd got no further; the eventual decision of the meeting on the other hand was one she agreed with, the others had concluded that they'd better leave off hunting vampires until they had the Bigger Van fixed, so they grabbed some stuff they didn't want left at the Harbourmaster's and piled back into the Albion and split it back to Ruilick while the others headed back to the digs.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Arriving at the college in the Albion on Monday post a weekend spent getting themselves properly situated they were met by a worried-looking Andy, who'd been waiting for them - and the first thing out of his mouth was, "You ought to stop using this van for a while Nick, there was one just like it blown up by a bomb buried in the road on Shore Street this morning and Mum got a vampire with what looked very like a remote detonator on one of the new cameras setting the bloody thing off."

"Shit!" said Nick, who had just exited the van with the wolf and the panther, whose names had over the previous week became simply 'Wolf' and 'Panther' respectively, on leads. "Jesus, aye, good thing I've got my new bike running, bloody hell," and as the gang of them went trooping into the college Alice couldn't keep the slight smile off of her face as she noticed the reactions their fellow students were having to what was walking down the hall.

Nick was distracted from muttering about there being a different van at Ruilick that didn't look to be in too bad shape by a sudden cry in Keiko's distinctive Buckie accent, which Alice mused to herself she wouldn't have been able to make out a word of just a couple of months prior, of "What the bloody hell,"

"Morning Nick," Annie said with a sigh, brushing past her. "What's with rubbing everyone's noses in what you've got in the way of pets?"

"Well since they were seeing fit to kick us out of the digs because of Wolf and Panther and Silent despite there being nothing in the rules or the laws against me having them I figured what the fuck," Nick said with a shrug.

"Isn't that, um, a bit dangerous?" a random punker boy – Alice was pretty sure his name was Bruce, that he was studying geology, and he was definitely a close friend of Keiko's – asked.

"Nah, not even slightly," Nick told him.

"But that's, well, basically that's a wolf, not a wolf-looking dog, an actual proper wolf, and that's definitely a black panther,"

"The term that you're looking for is 'melanistic jaguar', you numpty, and anyway I'm bigger than my girls and I'm hairier than my girls and I'm scarier than my girls so that makes me the boss."

"Kinky fucker," said Val. "Good thing Fiona wasn't here to hear that, her knickers would be fit to stick to the wall," and Nick blithely ignored her.

"Anyway," Alice said. "Leaving the Albion at home and using your bike is going to leave me in urgent need of a lift, the Bigger Van isn't in anything remotely approximating a driveable condition, we're not in walking distance of the college any more, we're not in reasonable, not Sutherland farmboy reasonable, actual reasonable, walking distance of public transport either, and I am not getting on the back of either of those piles of decomposing scrap iron you two call motorbikes, ever, Annie's ute is enough like riding across a sheet of corrugated iron as it is and my arse isn't cybernetic enough to not get a bruised tailbone."

"Pick any of the cars that're parked up at the house and I'll be getting it running nicely for you no bother," said Nick with a shrug. "That's a driving license you've got in your handbag too, we can even faff about getting it re-registered if you can be arsed."

"Okay," Alice said. "I'll take you up on that."

And that was why, eight hours later and well after dark, she took a walk round the Ruilick Hall courtyard going from one car to another, seeing which ones would start and which she might consider being so much as seen dead at the wheel of - and it wasn't until she had a look at the hulking dark grey shape lurking behind a pair of rusty old agricultural tractors that she actually found something she liked.

The car was very dirty and had clearly been sitting there for a while, but oh what a car it was - it was longer than Nick's Albion van with over half its length being made up out of engine bay, the whole thing looked 1950s with curvaceous wings, swooping bodyshell, white-wall tyres, a wood-and leather interior, chrome everywhere, tailfins, and the word SUNBEAM in chrome letters across the bonnet above the snarling bared-teeth grin of the radiator grille: in all it looked just as massively pissed off at the entire world as Alice not infrequently found herself feeling.

She tried the door, and it opened much more easily than she'd expected - the keys were in the ignition, and she gave it a try.

The engine hidden under that vast expanse of bonnet cranked a couple of times, coughed twice, then let off a thunderous backfire and just came to life, and oh what a sound it made; it snarled, rising to a flat-out roar when she stuck a leg in and pressed the throttle; it coughed halfway through but kept revving, and when she let off it emitted another thunderclap from the exhaust.

Nick and Mackie appeared from between the tractors, and skidded to a halt; Alice grinned at them, and gave whatever big old engine was lurking in there another coughing, backfiring, gun.

"I," she said, "Want this one."

Nick spent a moment walking around the old car, peering underneath it and occasionally frowning or grunting or tapping at the panelling with a knuckle, then he nodded.

"She's nae in bad shape either," he said. "Lucky it's dry in here - these old Sunbeams rust to hell and gone if they're anywhere wet and you havenae done a wee bit of work on them - she'll need a bit of welding up under the boot and the doorsills but her frame's looking okay and her body and engine mounts are in good shape. Switch her off, I'll get those old shitheaps," and he indicated a whole line of Morris Marinas at which the Sunbeam appeared to be baring its teeth, "Pulled out the way and we'll see if this old lady feels like turning her wheels."

"Looking like our Alice is having a funny sense for cars as well as for ancient ruins," said Mackie with a chuckle. "What a brute, that thing must be about forty years old, Sunbeam havnae been building them like this since before the Anglo-American split."

"Aye but these turn into bloody good cars soon as you do something about the rusting, lick of anti-fouling paint up underneath and drill drain holes in the right places and they'll last just about for bloody ever," said Nick. "Uncle John has two of them, he gied me a shot of one while we were down there last March, they're absolute rocketships - these were the first post-war British rich man's cars that you didnae hire someone to drive for you," and he nodded to Alice. "Want me to retrofit her with power steering while I'm at it? It's easy enough to graft on a Leyland van front axle, the mounts are almost close enough to make it a drop-fit."

"Please," Alice said with a nod.

It wasn't all that simple, of course; getting what amounts to a barn find rolling never is, even if someone has taken enough care of it that the engine is still running and it hasn't rusted to hell and gone, but it very visibly hadn't moved in years; there was muck almost up to the bellypan, all four tyres were flat and had perished, and the fuel was pretty stale - the engine ran much, much better once they'd drained it off and put new petrol and a new set of spark plugs in, though it didn't lose it's feral note, it just stopped pausing to cough and/or backfire every time you looked at it twice.

This, Nick explained, was what happened when a very wealthy gentleman with something of a taste for fast cars took a long hard look at what the British automotive industry were producing in the mid-1950s and decided that they were all a little too polite.

Nick took off for town in a blue Commer van that wasn't in too much of a state to pick up some parts with which to actually get the old Sunbeam to turn a wheel for what had to be the first time in years, and all in all they were not even momentarily prepared for the bad news that arrived at first light in the morning.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Unbeknown to any of the students, one of the cars that had been trundling past the college when Annie Kelly turned out to head for the digs had not, in fact, been full of commuters; instead it had, the end of the college day being something that happens after dark in that part of the world in November, been piloted by a walking corpse.

The vampire had due to his orders - they thought they already had the white Albion and didn't realise they'd missed it until he reported back - followed the other vehicle members of the gang he was a member of had identified as belonging to the people who'd given his kind so much grief in the northeast; Annie Kelly's wreck of a Holden.

He'd followed it all the way up to the college digs keeping three or four cars back, and had cruised past slowly enough to confirm someone with the same distinctive hairdo - a short green Mohawk - as one of the vampire hunters, exiting the vehicle - and that was why at about two in the morning four assorted midsize vans full of vampires skidded to a halt out the front of the college digs, the occupants hauled out a wild assortment of any and every fully-automatic weapon they'd been able to find on short notice, and they started hosing the front of the building down with gunfire.

The students were, however, armed to the teeth and still pumped up from the recent land war: the first return fire came from the upper floor not ten seconds after the vampire gang opened up, and while it was sporadic for nearly a minute, by the end of that minute the population of the digs - over a thousand students were in residence and the lightest-armed of the whole lot, Lucinda, had a rimfire Sten gun and several hundred rounds of ammunition in her room - were very enthusiastically if not all that accurately returning an enormous volume of fire.

The gun battle lasted a total of seven minutes and twelve seconds during which eight vampires were mudded by the sheer quantity of lead going the other way and fifty-seven students on the ground floor died, and two dozen heavily-armed students prominently including Annie Kelly and Val Adamson took off to follow the vampires when they bugged out - only when they found what they were looking for all two dozen immediately realised that they couldn't take it, not tonight - and that was why Annie and Val turned up at Ruilick at first light looking shook up and pissed off with a heavily-laden pickup and trailer.

-/-/-/-/-/-