Halloween I.F. – “Something Rich and Strange” – Day 24

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“Wait here,” Dandelion said, moving to step out. 

Grabbing at his sleeve, Star hissed frantically, “What are you doing?” 

Dandelion blinked at him, eyes swimming in mercury. “Perimeter check,” he murmured. “I’ll see if I can get a sense of the best way in. I’ll stay well out of their reach and keep from being seen. Let go.”

Star’s fingers uncurled without any input from him. “Be safe,” he murmured instead, pulling himself and Viv more firmly back into the alley as Dandelion ghosted out, flickering out of visibility even to Star. He didn’t love it—not when Dandelion was the one these guys wanted—but Dandelion had decided and, besides, it was true that he’d be the best at it. 

To pass the agonizing wait, he closed his eyes and did a quick assessment of what their capabilities were as a group.

Viv’s primary ability was divination, obviously, but she could identify magics okay. She tended to have more access to her powers at night thanks to her bond to Thysania, but that wasn’t going to help them right now. Might as well bring her, Star decided. She knew shielding and light magic well, and Star recalled that last year she’d studied some basic attack spells. Who knew what they were or if she could actually use them? But hell, better something than nothing, and given Viv’s personality, if they went in and didn’t come out, she’d go in after them anyway. Might as well stick together instead.

Dandelion could do a lot of things, though mostly to humans and other fairies. Technically, he could command lower fae, but given that he was an exile, fairies who weren’t sworn to him had a loophole out of it. Still, he, Adrien, and Caoihme had sworn to him, so if any of them had been brainwashed to turn them against Dandelion, he could likely still command them to act under his orders. He was great at swordplay, and kept his own magical sword on his person, so he would come in handy if stealth failed and they needed to get into combat. He was also amazing with illusions, not just glamour. And he could enchant humans, but he needed music to do that.

That only left Star himself. He could do buffs and debuffs on himself and others, but not quietly; he, too, needed music to activate it. He could kick. And, if he were in horse form, he could stick someone to his body. Maybe okay for extraction, though he wasn’t sure a horse would be very manoeuvrable inside a warehouse.

Then, if they got hold of Adrien and Caoimhe and both were well enough to fight—something that he had to admit seemed implausible—they’d have a strong brawler and a master at leading others astray. They couldn’t rely on either of those things right now, though.

It wasn’t a lot, resource wise. Still. It was a good enough team for infiltration, especially when the enemy had no reason to think you’d already be there, and hopefully it wouldn’t come to a fight. 

He started as Dandelion suddenly appeared next to them as if he’d been there the whole time, biting back on a curse. Viv actually jumped with a squeak. “None of the doors are guarded visibly from the outside,” Dandelion reported. “The front door has some pretty strong magics on it. I wasn’t willing to test them. Probably wouldn’t blow us up, not if they’re expecting to bring hostages in through there, but I mislike it. The back loading area has a number of trucks already hooked up to the doors to unload, and a few empty ones, but all the doors back there are iron. It wouldn’t serve us well to enter them. Side door’s the one I feel best about. It does have a warding spell on it—I’m confident it’s a simple ward-and-alert if broken spell. We could simply go through and move fast, or we could try to remove it.”

“You could leave that one to me,” Viv whispered. “I’ve taken a few of those down.”

Dandelion lifted his brows at her. “What’ve you been breaking into, exactly?”

“Hey, what Thys and I do on date night is our business.”

Star snorted a laugh, relaxing a little. If their resident neurotic witch felt okay with joking around, things surely couldn’t be that bad. “What about any other entry points? Air ducts? Sewage?”

“I just don’t think it’s worth it,” Dandelion said, a slightly prim edge in his voice. “I’m not confident banging around in metal ducts would be subtle, and… I mean… without time to research a sewage map, would we even know how to get in? Plus. Manhole covers.”

“More iron,” Star agreed. “Side door it is. Let’s try to move fast. The longer we take, the more likely it is they’ll expect me to arrive as a hostage, and get set up to try to ransom us off or whatever they meant to do.”

Dandelion wrapped glamour around the three of them again, an encouragement to simply pass like leaves in the wind, and slid his arms around them both, leading them quickly around the corner and up the street to the warehouse. There, as Star had previously seen, was a side door at the top of some concrete stairs, with a metal railing next to them that he very carefully kept from touching. 

Viv ducked forward to examine the door, spitting into her hand and starting to trace patterns around the knob with her fingertips. Star tried to breathe slowly and deeply, straining to hear any sounds.

After a moment, Viv made a gesture like a kindergarten teacher trying to silence an unruly class, pressing down and on the knob at the same time. The door slowly swung open, casting late afternoon autumn light into the building. 

It opened into a maze: tall shelving units as far as the eye could see, from the floor to the ceiling a good twenty feet up, and almost entirely filled with boxes. Star tried to think of any other warehouses he’d been in, and realized that was simply not a type of place he spent a lot of time. Instead, he thought of the tabletop RPGs he’d run before, envisioning Shadowrun-style map layouts.

A bit uncertainly, he whispered, “It should be mostly shelves like this. Warehouses are for storage, after all. Then to the right, based on where the back of the building is, it should be the loading and unloading area. That’ll be wider open, so people can get things off the trucks. Opposite side from the shelving I bet has some enclosed offices.”

“Offices sounds like a good place to keep hostages,” Dandelion whispered, then abruptly paused, head cocking. “Hear that?”

Star did; it was just loud enough that he imagined even Viv could with her weaker human ears. Harp music, mournful and longing, slightly muffled. “Do you think the others are with the player?” Star whispered to Dandelion.”

He grimaced. “I can’t tell. It’s not that precise. I can sense that they’re in the building with us, but not the specifics. It makes sense that they’d be kept all together, though,” he added, still soft, barely speaking above a whisper. “Follow the sound, and let’s hope we find all of them.”

They passed through some shelving, winding around and trying to follow the music. It wasn’t easy. The shelves were a tangle that surely made sense if you were used to the organizational system, but for new arrivals like Star, they were a confusing maze that couldn’t be seen around and were impassable the straight way due to the shelving being almost entirely iron. Still, they didn’t have a choice but to navigate it, given that the side door had tossed them right into it. The music at least gave them a direction. 

Finally, they emerged at the edge of the horrible shelving maze. Star looked around, seeing forklifts against one wall and some large open boxes around here and there. To their right, sure enough, Star could see the loading and unloading area. Most of the docks were shuttered in iron, but three of them were hooked up to trucks, the closed truck rear doors visible instead of the shutters. And right across from them were four different rooms built into the back wall, unpleasant plywood and plaster things, with darkened, one-way windows. The offices.

The harp music was clearly coming from one of the offices, the second in from the left, and the group darted across the open flooring area to it, gathering around the door. Viv touched the door and whispered, “No ward here.” She tried to turn the knob, but no, it was locked.

If the hostages were otherwise incapacitated, that’d be enough to keep them in. Nothing to do but get through. Star reached into his hair and pulled out some lockpicks.

Dandelion lifted his brows at Star. “You too?”

Star shrugged back. “I don’t ask you about your illegal hobbies,” he whispered to him, leaning in and working on the knob.

The lock clicked after a sweaty ten seconds, and he shook himself, trying to rid himself of his nerves. He closed his hand around the knob and slowly turned it.

He wasn’t sure what he was imagining—magic circles locking them in, iron manacles, a bunch of thugs with guns ready to fire like this was an action movie—but instead, Éabha, the blind selkie from the Lindwyrm’s, lifted her head. “Is someone there?” she half-whispered, her hands stilling on her bone harp.

For a second, Star hesitated. It was mostly shock, but given that Dandelion had gone to the Lindwyrm for help in Star’s name, it seemed like maybe they’d captured one of his people to get to Dandelion that way. “Éabha?” he said. “It’s me. The nixie from the Lindwyrm’s earlier. Do you… are you in need of rescue?”

Her blind eyes passed over the doorway, where, thanks to the glamour, she wouldn’t have been able to spot them even if she were capable of sight. “Yes,” she said at once. “I was—I got in trouble, and I called an old friend for help. They seemed even more eager to grab her than me. She’s called Caoimhe. She’s an elverpigen. Do you know her?”

“And how,” Star said, head spinning. 

“Do you know this selkie?” Dandelion murmured to Star uneasily.

“She was at the Lindwyrm’s,” Star murmured back. He looked around the room; it was a simple office, but to someone blind and lost, it might as well be a cage at the bottom of the ocean. Even if she got through the locked office door, she’d be in the middle of a warehouse that was full of iron booby traps, with the front door warded to hell and back and the side door in the middle of an iron maze. “Do you know where the other hostages are?”

“I don’t,” she said. “I heard something from our captors, though. Something about locking them in the iron trucks to keep them docile? I think I’m the only one they tossed in the offices. I’m not sure why. I haven’t heard anything around me for a while, though.”

Shit. That made sense. Three trucks, three of Dandelion’s sworn people to keep in iron. Any additional hostages would be put elsewhere. “Okay, great,” Star said. “We’ll get you out of here. Follow close behind us.”

“Of course. I can hear your steps.” She re-slung her harp on her back, and fell in with the group, pressing close behind.

He nodded to the other two, who solemnly nodded back. They’d known there might be other hostages; at least this way, they had a clue to where they could find Adrien and Caoimhe. 

The trucks, then. They carefully exited the office, with Star pulling the door shut behind himself so that it would at least look like it hadn’t been disturbed. Even knowing the glamour was up, the group hurried across the wide-open receiving area to where the trucks were seen to be hooked up.

Viv gestured the fairies back; the trucks were iron, after all. She knocked lightly on the first truck and heard a faint groan.

“In here,” she said, frowning at the lock. “Star, can you pick it if I hold the lock?”

This close, the iron felt nauseating. Star couldn’t imagine being surrounded by it. He just nodded. “The rear doors are iron. The lock itself is probably steel, but might have enough iron folded in that I can’t touch it. Hold it still and I’ll try my best.”

Fortunately, it was a ForemanLock, one of the easiest to pick. A few wiggles and it was cracking open. Viv slid it off the latch and hauled the rolling door upward.

Caoimhe was inside. She was clapped in iron as well as surrounded by it, wrists and ankles bound, her hollow back visible from how she was forced to bend. She groaned again, lifting her head. “…Look out…”

“We have you,” Viv said reassuringly. “Here, shit, we’ll have to get those off you, but let’s get you out of the truck first…”

Dandelion was moving forward, half climbing in despite the iron. Star reached for him to pull him back, but before he could, Dandelion’s shoulder blossomed in a spray of silvery blood.

Somehow, Dandelion only gasped, stumbling, catching himself on the iron step with a sickening sound, then swaying himself back upright to jolt away from the iron, which must have hurt worse than the injury. He reached back to his shoulder, and Star lunged forward to grab whatever had pierced him.

It was a bone, sharpened at one tip. 

“Look out,” Caoimhe said again, soft, dazed. “She betrayed me.”

Star flung himself and Dandelion to the hard cement ground as soon as he heard that, seeing another bone go whistling through the space where they’d just been, skittering along the inside of the truck. Viv let out a loud yelp, throwing herself into the truck for safety. Star pushed himself up just in time to see Éabha stepping into the maze of shelving, vanishing into the darkness.

“What the fuck,” he gasped, then jolted away again as another bone shiv came flying out of the shelving. This one he got a good look at as it embedded itself into the box next to his face: a tuning peg for the harp.

She might not be able to see them, but she could hear them, track them by sound. 

They had to get Caoimhe and Adrien out of here before she could get them, or take her out—which would involve following her into a maze of shelves she clearly actually did know better than they did. Either way, the door they’d come through was in there, so they’d have to deal with her sooner rather than later. 

How the fuck, Star thought dazedly, were they supposed to do that?

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