“You know this is really bad, right?” Onari turned away from the window in the back of the kitchen to look at the rest of them, assembled at the tables near the front. “This is some high-level faery bullshit. What’s doing it?”

“We…don’t know,” Raya said meekly. “That’s why we called Lachlan. Where is he anyway?”

“He’s entertaining one of the boss’ rivals. I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole.” She came over to sit with Lucas and Raya. “Also not going to sugarcoat this: without Barrett you guys are probably as good as dead. Rogue Fae are no fucking joke.”

“He’ll come back,” Wyland said, scratching his back. When his hand emerged, it had a tuft of cat fur stuck to it. “What the heck?”

“What are we dealing with here exactly?” Lucas crossed his arms. “And when can I go back to running this establishment?”

“I don’t know about exactly. Who did you say was affected?”

Raya stood up. “Come on.” She ducked into the doorway that led into their living area behind the counter, and pressed an ear against the door that closed off what was usually the yokats’ room. Hearing nothing, she put one hand on the warm doorknob, and turned it closely, inching in. She felt Onari looming over her shoulder as their field of view expanded to where they had last left Ellis snug in a blanket, right in front of the space heater…and found that he was no longer there. Raya pushed the door open further, revealing the open window and the chilly draft blowing through it. “Oh shit.”

“I’ll find him.” Wyland volunteered after peeking past the two of them, grabbing his uniform’s jacket from his chair and going to rummage through his sled full of gear on the other side of the bar.

Raya walked up to the window to peer out. Thanks to the weather lock, there had been no new snow, and Ellis’ footprints were quite visible, leading away towards the trees in the direction of the lake.  “Wait!” she called, rushing out past Onari and to where Wyland was. “I think I know where he’s headed. You got a map?”

“Yeah.” Wyland turned on his phone and browsed to the area map he had pre-downloaded. There were sections of a big red circle where he had estimated the edge of the storm containing them.

She pinched the image to soo in, and added a marker next to the mountainside. “That’s where I was with Barrett and the yuki-onna. Uness the cave mouth has moved he’ll take the shortest path there. If you cut across this way.” She traced a line down a different path. “The slope is a lot nicer and you’ll get ahead of him.”

“Thanks.” Wyland picked up his shotgun-with-an-axe and flipped open another box to scoop out a whole box of ammunition.

Lovelace, seated along the bar with a cocktail Raya couldn’t identify, chuckled at the sight. “Are we shooting our superiors now?”

“Yes…and no.” He held out the lid of the box for her to see. “Baton rounds. We have to hunt down and incapacitate humans and human-like things more often than you think.”

“You’ll get no complaints from me for gut-punching the Marshal,” Lucas added, coming up to the bar counter. “Just be careful out there. Giant lobsters might not be the only thing around here.”

“I know.” Wyland loaded a single shell into the action, thumbed a button to close it, and started piling six more into the tube magazine. “Let’s hope that lobster doesn’t come back soon.”

“It’s wounded enough that I think we can kill it.” Lucas twirled the spyglass in his hand. “So I really hope it does come back.”

Raya found herself smiling at his bravado, until she heard a strange noise like a combination of something heavy falling over and glass breaking. “I’ll handle that,” she said quickly, heading back to the room Ellis was missing from. Onari was standing in the middle of the room, in her hand a broken vial that once contained a clear liquid - one that was now all over the floor, surrounded by shards from the bottom of the tube. A drop of crimson joined the shards on the floor, and Raya looked up. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Onari switched hands with what remained of the vial, pressing her cut hand to the pure white lab coat, staining it deep red. “Casting’s a little off.”

“What were you trying to do?” Raya took her hand, seeing the gash across the inside of her knuckles.

“Just a reconstitution spell. If he was really affected with whatever made that dome then there will be abnormalities in the air around him when you look through a vial of swirling clarified, non-elemental spritzer.”

Raya paused, looking back down at the spilled liquid close to her shoes. “Should I be concerned?”

“Exposed to air it’s inert now. Basically water and a bit of acetone.”

She pressed a cloth to Onari’s wound, whispering to herself, and when she removed the stained handkerchief, the surface had used back together. “Better?”

Onari turned to look at Raya with her golden eyes. “That wasn’t magic.”

“No, that was what little I know about what Reynard left in me.” She folded the cloth and pocketed it. “Those eyes are from a faery, right? So your casting is all weird.”

Onari rubbed the skin of her palm where the wound had been. “I didn’t know you were a trained mage.”

“I’m not. Didn’t cast until I went up that mountain and a proper kitsune lady taught me. Like, shrine maiden and everything.” She smiled to herself, and touched the extra ears on the top of her head. “Turns out internal circumstances get changed a lot when you’re part something that doesn’t conduct magic well. Like whatever Reynard was, or…Fae.”

“Lachlan said I should pick up an instrument.”

“I did hear the Aeterna Symphonia kind of magic is easier to pick up if you already know some basics.” Raya nodded. “Hard to find lessons out here though.”

“I’ve no coordination with music,” Onari muttered, producing another small vial from the little case she had inside of her lab coat. This one was an off-yellow colour, and as she moved it around in the air in front of them, little sparks of light could be seen inside. She was staring intently into the liquid, at something Raya presumed was only visible to the faery eyes she had. “Oh that’s weird.”

“What's weird supposed to mean in the context of everything else going on?”

“When I looked through the spritzer earlier I did see traces. Definitely Fae, definitely very old, but this is supposed to help me narrow it down.” She wagged the off-yellow liquid vial. “Each Fae enclave has a signature emission pattern. It looks like abstract shapes when the right particles pass through this. Problem is I don’t recognise this one.”

“You can probably only know the ones Lachlan knows, and he only knows the ones that your boss or whatever knows about, right?”

“No, we know all the ones in the Sun and Moon Courts. Gotta know how to be respectful towards the other houses, detect danger from enemy factions, stuff like that. I think I’d recognise the signature of pretty much all of them. This is more Fae that are off that spectrum, like the Elves. No elves around here, are there?”

Raya shook her head. “I don’t even remember actually seeing one like, ever.”

“Good, I don’t like them.” Onari put the vial away. “Most of them live in the Multiplex and are all supremacy and gunsmithing and being pretentious and stuff. It’s still nothing like their signature.” She waved her hands through the air.

“So what is it?”

“I’ve got no fucking clue.” She smiled. “Maybe I’ll need to get a good look at that lobster of yours, but likely it’s something new. There’s records of Fae everywhere in human history, and this is a human world, so maybe I can deduce something…”

Raya put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll figure something out when Wyland gets the Marshal back. Until then though…you still drink?”

Onari scoffed. “Of course I still drink. You know I have to babysit Chloe like every other day, right?”

“Sends chills down my spine. Same-same?”

“Lots of new things are happening these days. I think I’ll try something new.”

They made their way out to the bar, hand-in-hand, looking for Marcello.

Hard as he tried, Barrett couldn’t remember the last time he had felt tired - diving, mountaineering, even navigating the fires of the underworld - all of those were a simple act of travelling, and it was just pretty much that to him too: distance to overcome. Fatigue and rest had never mattered because he always just did it, no matter how strained his muscles became or how much air he had left.

Carrying the sixty-or-so kilograms of freezing cold snow and ice in the shape of Miori, effectively extreme power walking up a mountain to ensure the lobster didn’t catch them, and leaning on the acceleration of the Blessing…he felt out of breath for the first time in a very long while. At least now he was before the red gate, the air still dark and obscured on the opposite side of it, before falling onto his knees, what was left of Miori almost tumbling from her form.

Her chest rose and fell as he watched. Still alive, at the very least.

A rush of air behind him told him that a blade of centimetres from the nape of his neck. He glanced around, spotted the mostly-human shadow cast to the side, but with wings, and he could venture a guess as to who it was. Outside of the realm, they weren’t too different, after all. “I’m not here to fight.”

“And yet you return with one of ours, injured,” the tengu knight said.

“Not one of yours. Your elder exiled her, as I recall.”

“State the purpose of your incursion, human, before my patience runs out.”

“She was injured saving me. I know she was exiled for less, but you are the only ones here who know how to save her.” he slowly leaned over, placing Miori on the path. “I will not enter your realm. Do what must be done. Save her…please.”

The tengu said nothing, but Barrett felt the hairs on the back of his neck relax. He stood up and backed away, allowing no fewer than three winged men in traditional garb to pass by him. He turned away and started back down the path, not waiting to watch them bring her across the threshold.

And then he saw the cat. Trotting up the path, coming right at him, and right at the gate was…he didn’t know the name, but it was grey and fluffy, with piercing yellow eyes. All the way from the pub…something was up. Barrett stopped before it, staring back at it as it sat there on the road to parley. “What…are you doing here?” he couldn’t help but ask.