Halloween I.F. – “Something Rich and Strange” – Day 28

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Obviously, Star had to be really sure of the situation before deciding any of the specifics. He shook himself again, uneasy. “Éabha, you didn’t answer Dandelion directly. They are setting up at the track.”

“Yes,” Éabha said. She tensed as Dandelion approached with his sword, but he was carefully cutting a gap in the fallen shelving so she could step out of the ring they’d formed. Still, she waited until he offered her a hand before letting herself be guided out. “It’s in a good position in the web of magics. Part of why the magical leagues are held there, apparently? And then after flooding it, they’ve created a connection through the concept of ‘flood.’ They have to set up some destructive demonic magics before they can do anything with it, but then they can trigger it. Like a fuse.”

Star thought, cartoonishly, of a pump on TNT getting pushed down and then water exploding out of the dynamite instead of fire. Ah, yeah, there was the hysteria, he thought. “Cool. Great. And the timing is… you said soon. How soon is soon.”

“I don’t have that information,” Éabha said. “I wasn’t exactly in close with my captor. But it sounded like, if this attempt at a hostage situation failed, they’d step it up and do it ‘as soon as possible’. It could be tonight at the earliest. It could be later if we’re lucky. You still have a few hours before they decide it’s failed, and then it’s up to whatever ‘as soon as possible’ means to them. Once they have it set up, I imagine they’ll contact Dandelion to show their threat.” She slowly dropped Dandelion’s hand, standing awkwardly holding her harp, which seemed to thrum softly even without the tuning pegs.

Caoimhe croaked, “A few hours?”

“Well, they were giving their agents time to bring everyone in,” Éabha murmured. “I checked in once I captured you. Vayne wouldn’t have, since he failed to capture Star. I don’t know whether or not Yuree got a chance to call after capturing Adrien.”

“She didn’t,” Miette said, putting their fingers up in a V.

Adrien let out a weak laugh. “You know, you’re pretty cool,” he told Miette. “Saving me like that. If the world doesn’t end tonight, I’d like to get to know you better.”

“Hey now,” Star said. “We’re talking about the city, not the world. Don’t go heaping even more pressure on.”

It was bad enough as is, especially if they had so little time to act before Ramullin moved on to worse things, as Éabha was implying. He eyed the rest of his group. Everyone was tired and some degree of injured. He and Dandelion were the best off, but both had several wounds from the bone pegs. Adrien and Caoimhe were iron-burned and iron-poisoned. Éabha was battered and burned from the iron shelves collapsing as Dandelion had corralled her. Viv was uninjured, but at the end of her magical reserves. Miette was fine, but hadn’t been volunteering more help than taking the injured back to the Lindwyrm.

If they had more guaranteed time, Star would for sure suggest everyone just go back and rest, contact the authorities, get other people better suited to it to act. But there wasn’t enough information there. If it could be so soon, they couldn’t rest.

Well, if they didn’t have strength to lean on right now… “What about deception?” he wondered aloud. “Maybe we could use Éabha to bring us all in as captives and then we… I don’t know, attack while they think we’re harmless?”

“I don’t think… I mean, perhaps,” Éabha said dubiously. “But there was a set plan. Without the others checking in, it’ll look very suspicious, and I imagine they’d want to make sure you’re all well and truly helpless when I brought you in. Besides, the plan was for the demon to come here to deal with the hostages. Not for me to bring the hostages there.”

“It might still be possible to use this whole thing as a base for trickery,” Dandelion said, warming visibly to the idea. “With my illusions and glamour, I might be able to set up a distraction rather than an ambush. If that demon lord plans to come over here after you all call in, we can make you all call in. That way, we guarantee Ramullin’s out from their headquarters for a short time, which might give us a chance to undo the magics they’ve set up.”

“But even if we woke Yuree and convinced her, Vayne is gone, and his phone with him,” Star pointed out. “Unless—”

“I can magically spoof a phone number,” Dandelion said. “That’s easy. Simple fairy trickery. Star has Vayne’s number, and we can certainly get Yuree’s phone off her. And you must have that demon’s number yourself, Éabha.”

“…I do,” she agreed. “So your plan is to pretend to be Vayne and Yuree, call in as them, and send the demon here to make sure they’re away from the track when you have to go in?”

Dandelion nodded. “It might give us a better chance. Turn their own plan against them.”

“You’d have very limited time,” Éabha said, “before Ramullin realized that it was a trick, and headed right back to the track.”

“We would,” Dandelion said. “Which is why I wouldn’t suggest we actually make it an ambush—that’d put whoever we left in grave danger, and besides, the goal here is to get rid of their leverage by undoing their spells and rituals. We have a few hours still, as you said. So I believe that Star and I should go to a safe place near the track, and call in then. It maximizes our time at the track while the demon’s away. We just go in, find the setup, erase the magic circles. In and out.”

Star brightened. This was starting to seem workable. “Maybe we CAN use this as a chance to get some additional power, too. We get Miette to take our injured out and to the Lindwyrm for protection, as planned. But, Viv, instead of going with them, can you go to the Twilight Council? I think they’d have a pretty strong reason to get involved here ASAP.”

“They’re infamously slow-moving,” Viv said. “But yeah, if I can impress on them that some demon is actually trying to put the whole city under threat, I imagine I can call an emergency all-hands. They’d still have to vote, but I imagine they wouldn’t want to take too long doing that. I wouldn’t wait for them, you should go in anyway, but I hope I can convince them to move in to support you after you’ve gone in to erase the magic circles and all that.”

Star nodded. “And the Twilight Council are involved with the Branwin governing forces, right? They can decide if it’s worth going to the human police or if it’d just raise new problems.” The humans in the city above the Valley found them dangerous, so sometimes things like this were better swept under the rug. But with the city at danger, they might risk it. Regardless, if the Council was in the know, they could make that call, not Star.

“In the meantime,” he continued, “Dandelion and I can go down to… hmm, Beanheadings, maybe. It’s just like a 10 minute walk from the track. Faster on horseback, and it’s relatively protected and neutral. A good place for it. Dandelion can call pretending to be Vayne. I’ll get Dom out to join us; he knows the track really well, and knows the offices and so on better than I do. I don’t usually handle that side of things. Then, after we’ve waited for a bit and caught Dom up, Dandelion can call pretending to be Yuree. Say all the prisoners have been got, and encourage the boss to come on out. Then we wait a few minutes for the demon to leave, and we head over.”

“Got any bruisers in case there’s guards?” Viv asked.

Star had one in mind, and he pulled out his own phone, dialing the stable again. They picked up quickly, sounding harried. “Hi,” Star said, in a chipper voice. “I wanted to see if Georgio had been sent back?”

“Well, about that,” the stable-hand said, tense. “We told him that he’d been asked for and he just… hauled ass and began running down the road. Hopefully he knows what way the city is. And hopefully you have a place to put him up for the night.”

Star winced. “I’ll deal with it,” he said, and hung up. “We might,” he answered Viv. If Georgio showed up, he showed up. There was no contacting him if he was busy running in a random direction on the freeway. “But we might not even need a bruiser. The two of us have glamour, and the stables have way less iron than a warehouse. Plus, since it’s shut down, it should mostly be empty. I’m confident we can sneak better without a bruiser anyway.” 

“The plan sounds good to me,” Dandelion said. “You go ahead and call Dom, Star. I’ll get the phone numbers I need and see everyone else to the door.”

Star did, and his heart leaped when Dominic picked up on almost the first ring. “Hey.”

“Hey. Everything okay?” Dom sounded worried.

All of a sudden, Star felt weak and tired. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. He could have a meltdown later. Just someone asking after him so sweetly didn’t need to be a cause for one now. “I’m good. Things have kind of got more intense, though, and we have to break into the track tonight. I could use your help. You know, knowing your way around, not being a fae in case there’s anti-fairy traps, being moral support. Come meet us at Beanheadings, if you still want to…? I’d understand if you didn’t. If you couldn’t—”

“I’ll be there,” Dom said softly, his voice low. “Thank you for asking me.”

“Okay. I lo… love… that… you’re doing that,” Star said, and hung up.

He practised mindful breathing, and soon enough Dandelion rejoined him. “We’re leaving the guards locked in the truck,” he told Star. “We don’t want them getting out and warning that demon, and we decided against executing them; it’s likely more than one of them was coerced. Maybe the demon will stop to get their story and it’ll buy us a little more time than if they got here and simply found the whole place empty and trashed.”

“Fair enough,” Star said. “Ready? Dom’ll meet us at Beanheadings.”

“Ready,” Dandelion said, and took his hand. “The others have all headed off in a group. Viv will peel off to go talk to the Council and call for an All-Hands. The rest is up to us.”

Star swallowed. Dandelion’s hand felt cool in his, fragile, almost tacky with silvery blood. Together, they carefully picked their way around the fallen shelves and headed for the door; Dandelion had somehow left them a path out. He was almost too skilful, Star thought.

For a long while, they walked in a tired silence, Star occasionally stealing glances up at Dandelion. It was getting dark, and the street lights were coming on; they caught in the white hair haloing his head and lit it up. He really was uncannily beautiful. 

Star found himself squeezing Dandelion’s hand a little too hard. “Do you think you should actually come with me to break in?”

“That’s… the plan, isn’t it?” Dandelion looked at him a bit askance, glancing down at him out of the corner of his eye. “My powerful glamours and all that.”

Swallowing hard, Star put his head down and kept plunging forward. “Yeah. But there’s a chance it’s a trap. We’ll do the phone calls and all that like we planned, but maybe you should stay in Beanheadings? What if they set up something for you personally if you came? On the other hand,” Star found himself babbling, distressed at the way Dandelion’s hand tightened on his, “I want you there. You’re so strong. Your ability with magic is real, too, you don’t just have glamour like me, you actually have magic. And you’re cool. And you’re… comforting. Of course I want you there.”

“I do not want to stay behind and let you and your human go on without me,” Dandelion said, voice falling into a more formal cadence, which was a surefire sign that Star had hurt him. “In a worse case scenario, I should be there, because if Ramullin can activate those spells already, I might be the only one who can stop them. And… if everything went to the dogs, I’m the one they want.”

“That’s true,” Star said, grabbing Dandelion’s hand harder as if to reassure him. “And I do want you there.”

“I doubt it would be a trap. After all, this was a trap. Why trap both places, but keep them separate? And they know you’ve been sniffing around the track, probably, so there could be a trap there for you. If there is, I may be able to defeat it. But… the truth is, I might be too close to the situation to say what the best option is,” Dandelion said, tone aching.

“Dandelion…”

“Should I leave it in your hands, Star?” Dandelion asked, voice low and rough in his distress. “What does your heart say? Should I go with you when it’s time, or wait nearby for your return?”

[Should Dandelion come with Star & Dom to the track,
Or should he stay behind at Beanheadings?
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