Page 14 of Preaching to the Choir

“You come up.”

“We’re trying to come up.” Scaling the slope was proving surprisingly tricky. The roots that had so bruised Elena on the way down weren’t offering much in the way of handholds. They jutted out of the earth just enough to give her a good pummelling, then dived back in. Eventually Melissa wedged her walking stick between two trees up top and strung herself halfway down to them, reaching down as Will tried to keep the torch on his phone steady.

From shockingly nearby, something began singing. Elena registered it subconsciously before her ears passed on the news, freezing even as Melissa’s hand clasped her wrist. A fierce, aggressive, unpleasant noise like a circular saw biting into metal, yet a moment later it was past her conscious appraisal, opening out inside her head into that unearthly, weirdly beautiful song. She felt her fingers go slack and forced herself to reciprocate Melissa’s grip.

“Pull!” she hissed. “Please!”

Melissa’s face, in the torchlight, was screwed up into a hideous grimace. She had her eyes closed as though, by blocking one sense, she could exclude them all. With a furious effort she hauled Elena up, and they tumbled together across the knobbly, icy ground.

Below, Ross let out a yell, high and scared. The singing was rising in pitch, and it came from more than one throat. Two, three, a whole choir of them, high in the trees. The torch was out. Will must have dropped the phone, but Elena had no memory of the transition. Something big clattered to life overhead, showering them with broken twigs. She heard a solid thud as something else, some kindred horror, dropped down to the forest floor nearby.

Melissa shook her. “Ross!” she snapped. “We have to get him up. Come on, Elena. I need you.”

Ross seemed very far away. Elena’s own body seemed very far away as she let Melissa haul her over to the lip of the slope. The moon showed her a pale splash that was Ross’s face. The faint shimmer of his reaching hands. Then something passed between them, momentarily eclipsing him. She felt the shudder of the air, the rattle of wings. She should have screamed and recoiled, then. Instead, she just lunged forwards, almost too far—would have been too far if Melissa hadn’t steadied her. Far enough that she brushed fingertips with Ross, and he jumped, and caught her hand. His boots were scrabbling at the slope, but his full weight was on her arm for a moment, wrenching her shoulder hard enough to tear a scream from her. Then he was partway up, panic lending him all kinds of parkour skills. Melissa pulled back on Elena, and Will got Ross’s other arm in his good hand.

She felt the thing hit Ross. Felt it thunder into him in idiot, frenzied flight, and then cling, an extra weight. Ross cried out in horror and pain, kicking and flailing. Nobody had a stick to hand, they were utterly exposed. Then Melissa put in one last furious effort and had Elena three steps backwards and Ross dragged onto level ground, frantically prying and beating at something.

The moon showed her almost nothing. A dark shape, hunched, the size of a small dog. The wan light seemed to filter straight through its wings, making them nothing but a luminous blur. She saw the glitter of hard little eyes. Then it was beating savagely through the branches above them. And gone.

The singing had stopped at some point, though she had no recollection when. Now it took up again, further into the woods, an eldritch choral parliament reconvening where it need not suffer human interference.

Elena collapsed back onto the hard ground, feeling her abused shoulder in all its painful glory. Relishing the sensation, because it was immediate and undiluted and meant she had her mind to herself again.

“Did it get you?” Melissa was asking Ross.

“I’m scratched to F,” he said, sounding shaky. “I think… I’m bleeding. It’s fine. We need to go on. We’d better go on.”

Elena was on her feet. She didn’t recall getting up. The singing was louder.

They were pushing through the trees, almost running. They hadn’t found the trail yet. Melissa was cursing her phone battery. The singing was right at their back. There were wings overhead. The terror rising in Elena was more from the holes in her recollection of all of this, the realisation that something was robbing her of parts of her memory. Ross had her hand, pulling her forwards. Without it, would she just be standing vacant-eyed amongst the trees as the wings sang to her and readied their beaks? Little shiny eyes and gossamer wings. And hadn’t she read in a hundred urban fantasy stories how the fairy folk were proper little fuckers when you got down to the actual myths, and not nice little easily-marketable flower adornments at all? Old families and old secrets and old ways…

Then Will was saying, “What’s that? What’s that noise?” and it was the fairy singing, of course it was. Except it wasn’t. There wasn’t any singing, and now it was gone she was horribly uncertain how real it had been, because so much of the sound had been created inside her head and not entered through the ears.

But there really was a sound now, both more mundane and even less welcome.

“The fucker,” said Melissa, the refined British-ness of her accent giving the familiar American word a peculiar edge. She meant her father, Elena had no doubt. And she was absolutely correct to link what they were hearing to the man, because they were hearing dogs.

Then, abruptly, they were at the wall. Elena felt a rush of hope that dashed itself against those tall stones almost immediately. Nine, ten feet of stone, and the moonlight was strong enough, now they were out of the trees, to glint on what looked like jagged glass up there. They’d have needed to be birds themselves to get over. Melissa didn’t miss a beat, though. There was indeed an open track running below the wall, lightly rutted by tyres or perhaps hooves, and she headed along it without a moment’s hesitation. But the gate would be locked and chained, like she said, and the dogs were already closer. Or were they dogs? All Elena’s thoughts of full moons were abruptly in the front of her mind, conquering the fairy folk, or perhaps banding together with them to make one massed league of Old World curses and horrors. And she ran, because when the dogs were on your trail, what else was there to do but run?

She’d seen pictures of the dogs they used to hunt foxes in Britain, back when it was allowed, and—Ross had intimated—also when it wasn’t. They were floppy, happy, friendly-looking dogs. Unless you were a fox, presumably. What was coming through the trees for them didn’t sound like that sort of dog. Close enough, now, that she could hear snarls and panting breath amongst the barking.

Will stumbled, and Ross just hoiked him up by the armpit, set him on his feet and virtually carried him the two paces it took him to regain his stride. Melissa let out a sound that was part despair, part triumph. There was a gate ahead, an arm in the stone of the wall. It wasn’t a quaint old wooden portal to be kicked open in a moment of desperation. It was iron bars and an enormous bolt and chain clasped about it like a python. Melissa had something out from inside her coat, though, and to Elena’s astonishment and lasting admiration she saw long-handled bolt cutters in the girl’s hands.

Then the dogs caught them, three hounds spilling out onto the path just past the gate. Ross rounded on them, walking stick in hand, waiting for them to lunge, but the animals just held their ground, barking ferociously, announcing that they had done their duty and cornered their prey. Another two stood on the path at Elena’s back. They were big, heavy bloodhound beasts, deep-chested and wrinkle-faced. If they hadn’t been in such a fury of accusation, then probably she could have scratched them under the jowls and made friends with them. They knew their business, though, and drew a clear distinction between master and quarry.

Melissa’s teeth glinted in the moonlight as she set the bolt cutters to the chain—thick enough that she had to open them to their fullest—and then something huge stepped from the trees beyond the dogs, moving unlike a hound, unlike a man, shaped like a nightmare, too tall, too many limbs. Elena whimpered wretchedly.

It lit them up, the searing beam of a torch pinning them in place just as much as the dogs. It stalked forwards on thin, deliberate limbs, and there was an almost audible click in Elena’s head as she recontextualised what she was seeing. A man, on a horse. Just a man on a horse, and where it had stepped from must be the trail they’d never found. Jeffrey de la Pole, on a horse, and behind him a couple of other riders.

Melissa lowered the bolt cutters and stood there as her father approached. She was shaking, and some of that might have been cold, but Elena was willing to bet it was mostly adrenaline and rage.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jeffrey demanded. Squinting past the torch, Elena saw his face in the backwash of the light, pale and frog-eyed with fury.

“Whatever you’re doing here,” Melissa got out, “I want no part of it. None of us do. We’re leaving.”

“Nobody is leaving,” spat Jeffrey. “And you are a part of it. What you think, what you want, what your current fad of the bloody moment is, none of it matters in any possible way. You have spent your whole life thumbing your nose at your responsibilities, spiting your own flesh and blood, indulging one ridiculous whim after another. It stops here. This is what you were born to, Melissa Jane de la Pole. This is your bloody inheritance and you do not get to walk away. I won’t allow it.” He was incandescent with fury, perhaps the single angriest human being Elena had ever seen, yet every word came out with the crisp, clear diction of a Shakespearean actor.

“You expect me to stay, after seeing what I saw?” Melissa demanded. “After what you did to Uncle Patrick?” She shook the bolt cutters at him and the horse shied, dancing sideways a step. Jeffrey dropped the torch and wrenched at the reins. Then there was a blur and Melissa cried out and fell to one knee. It was so sudden, so unseen in the instant it happened, that Elena actually looked up, listened for wings. Only a moment later did she see the riding crop in Jeffrey’s black-gloved hand. Melissa was clutching her face.