We returned just before sundown to a wary Sid and an equally relieved Addie. It’d been a week since we left. Katrine briefed the two on the situation, while Jodie and I kept her from too many digressions about her theories.

“I don’t like this.” Said Sid, after some deliberation, “Fucking with fairy politics doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“That’s another thing,” I said “Saghir put some kind of curse on me, I can’t think about giving up on doing what she says without getting a bitch of a headache. When I tried to deny her back there… I couldn’t. It was like something was stopping me.”

Sid leaned back against the kitchen counter.

“Katrine, is there something you can make to cut that connection?”

“Not safely. Chloe said that the fae creatures don’t use magic like we do, anything we do might just not talk to the curse. Or if it does-”

“We could fry my brain.” I was already developing an unnatural migraine.

“Frying Chloe’s brain is a bad idea, I say we go through with the first plan. What was it Saghir wanted from you?” Said Addie. I could hear her exact words ringing through my mind.

“Alter the alignment of the jinn so that we- so that they’re all with the Lower Court.”

Nobody spoke for a moment

“Well how the fuck do we do that?” Jodie finally broke the silence

“I think I know a guy who can help.” Said Sid.

Sid seemed frustrated to have to call this contact, he didn’t seem like one she particularly liked, but after ten minutes of awkwardly watching her pace around the hideout she put her phone in her pocket and turned to us.

“Start tidying up, he’s coming over in an hour.”

In all fairness, the hideout looked like a tip. We’d been all kinds of busy the last month, The Component was flaked with dried blood, nobody had the time to wash it after Katrine had needed it, and every surface was covered either with paper or weaponry. We split the hideout into zones, Jodie offered to do the washing up, Katrine took over filing her research away, Sid went out to restock the fridge and find the contact, and Addie and I were on scrubbing duty and tidying, respectively. It wasn’t too hard, but trying to sort books into their respective shelves played some mind games on me. Jane Austen, after a few trips between Sid and Katrine’s section, settled on Katrine’s shelf. A well-loved copy of Choucas was pretty obviously Sid’s, I recognised her handwriting in the margins. Addie held most of his books on his phone, but I found a solitary copy of American Psycho that I’d seen him reading a while back. He was still only about halfway through. Jodie’s shelf was the most distinct, and the heaviest. Percy Jackson, Alex Rider and a few stray Animorphs books. I struggled to imagine her with these, curling up to watch shapeshifting teenagers fight aliens.

“Don’t laugh” She’d crept up behind me and was talking softly, like she didn’t want to attract any attention. “They can get pretty hardcore.” She took the Animorphs off me and held it a moment

“She beats a guy to death with her own severed arm in this one.” She put it back. “Come on, don’t do too much, Sid doesn’t want it looking like we’re tidying for him.”

She was right, half the dishes were still in the sink, Katrine’s piles were a controlled mess rather than the aftermath of a bomb, and Addie, though working on making the walls less of a murder scene, had left The Component. A statement piece.

The sounds of unfamiliar staps on the ladder interrupted my decision on Gone Girl, The man was tall, and clearly an American in some way. He looked middle aged, greying hair cut short, but his eyes were blue. He looked the kind of tired you get from months of sleepless night, so that even a few good nights of sleep couldn’t get it out of your bones. He looked familiar.

“Chloe, good to see you.” He said, and it clicked. The first night, the night of the murders. I’d forgotten about the man following me home, but here he was, right in front of me

“Everyone, this is Lennie. He can help you all out with the fae issues.” said Sid

“Yeah. That’s me. This place is kinda stuffy” he said, “Can we get coffee or something?”

Katrine and I went with him, though Jodie stayed at the hideout to talk things over with Sid.

“If you’re trying to find a fight with the Courts, you won’t have to go far. Between the two of ‘em there’s probably not a otherworlder they haven’t screwed over.”

“Otherworlder?” asked Katrine

“Right, yeah. So otherworlders are like, the high fae. They’re their own things, the Fairies and the Jinn mostly ‘round these parts. Low fae are things like the ratfucker you told me about,” He sipped his coffee, “Things that go bump in the night. Anyway, Those courts have been at each other since ‘67. The way I heard, it started as a proxy war between the Seelie Court and the Court of Mirrors, and just kept going after those two died out in the ‘90s. Or so I heard, I wasn’t in the country most of the ‘90s.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Right. And what did you say your plan was?” Said Katrine

“You said the Jinn were aligned with the Upper Court, right?”

“That’s what Saghir told me,” I said, not touching my coffee.

“Alignment is hard to shift, it’s not just who you like or who you don’t, it’s like… You’ve watched Fast and Furious, it’s like that, but on the scale of political organisations. If we wanna change the alignment of the Jinn, it has to be big. Something to break the bond that the Upper Court and the Jinn made. A betrayal, maybe.”

“So we need to trick the Upper Court into betraying the Jinn?”

“Not necessarily. There’s otherworlders and there’s low fae, but there’s a third kind. The sort of redheaded stepchild of the universe. Crossbreeds, humans that have been changed by otherworld magic. A lot of us have alignments to various Courts. Weak ones, but they’re there strong enough to track.”

“Us? I asked. He grimaced slightly and sat up in his chair.

“1919, just after the war,” Lennie started, “I got home to my town, nice place, everyone knew everyone. But this gang of boys had started playing at being bullies. I tried talking ‘em down, but it went sour. Long and short of it is I can’t exactly die anymore.” He shut up after that, and Katrine openly stared at him. He looked barely 40, if he’d been that age for over a hundred years that put him at-

“I’m a hundred a thirty-eight years old” He’d gone through this before. “Anyway, I’m getting cold, let’s go back to the hideout.”

Jodie needed Katrine off for help on something, I didn’t know what and presumed it was just an excuse to get away from Lennie for a moment, which left him with me. Alone. In the hideout.

“What’s this then?” he asked, breaking what must have been two or three minutes of silence.

“Oh that’s The- it’s a healing component. You charge it, and it’ll bring you back from most cuts and bruises, other stuff too. Unless you can use magic you’ll have to speak into it for it to work.”

“No shit, you guys can do that?”

“We can do a lot, hold on.” Finally, something to talk about, I brought down my design notebook and a few prototypes.

“This glove basically just does what Addie and Sid already do. The pentagon monitors my thoughts, and then the triangle shoots fire.” Lennie nodded

“I saw Sid do that once. Nasty shit.”

“This bracelet is something I made to be a little bit more covert. It’s a couple of simple circuits to push and pull things.”

“Like the force?”

“Kinda”

“Hey, what’s this one?” he held up a revolver, a long one. It fit him. I could imagine him holding one just like it, under a wide-brimmed hat and poncho.

“That’s a weird one, Katrine had me make it for her.” Lennie scoffed quietly and spun the revolver,

“Chloe, you’re a terrorist witch and i’m an immortal cowboy. Weird is our business.”

I recoiled slightly at the word terrorist, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I tried to enchant the bullets, but I couldn't get them to break properly, so I started working on the copper patterns around the barrel. Most of it’s decorative but there’s a circuit hidden in it. When it shoots, it hits a bit harder. When it’s charged up, at least.”

He stopped playing with it. “This thing’s loaded?”

I accepted the gun back and found two bullets. “There’s an alley out back that I use for testing.”

“He’s not having a good time, is he?” Lennie nodded at the target dummy

The alley was scorched from prior tests, and the dummy was barely recogniseable as a human

“And I can use this? Even without the whole..” he wiggled his fingers to imitate magic.

“I made it for Katrine, and she can’t do magic either, it should work.”

“Nice lady, the good doctor. Don’t suppose she’s got anything by way of a husband.” he squared up against the dummy, 50 feet away. “Or wife, I mean.”

Well then, that was quick. “From what I can tell the only thing she’s married to is her research.”

“Good to know. I haven’t seen her in… well however long it was, it's been a while. She looked different.”

I tried to imagine Katrine in anything other than a middle aged sensibility. Less stern, less lined. Smaller. She’d told me she transitioned in university, when I would've been about five or six. Trying to imagine her pretending to be a man felt sacreligious, so I tried not to think of her as any earlier than a new graduate.

Lennie raised the gun to fire two shots. The circuit that surrounded the barrel glowed to life and spat fire around the bullet, wreathing it in flames that lit up the alley in a hundred hues of orange. He didn’t flinch.

“Well then. That’s something.” he said as he lowered the gun. “Glad to see the good doctor’s well protected.”

“Those others… crossbreeds?” I asked

“Right,” he took one last look at the gun and passed it off to me. “There’s a pack of Upper Court werewolves in the area. Aligned to the Upper Court, I mean. Last I heard, they hate the bastards.”

“And how do they help?”

“Well, if some important Jinn stronghold gets fucked up by a group of people carrying the taint of the Upper Court, that ought to be enough.”

I took a step back. ‘Fucking up’. He meant for us to kill people, kill fae. Frame the Upper Court. But what other choices were there? We needed to do this. Sid’s voice whispered in my mind, “reasonable casualties, chloe.”

“I’ll check with Dotty.”