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‘And what evidence is that?’ I asked.
‘What evidence haveyougot?’ Voltaire countered.
I sighed. Everything in this realm was like pulling teeth. Could none of them work together without examining each other’s motivation? ‘A pup of ours has been kidnapped. We tried to scry him but the scry failed. He’s been warded.’
Voltaire nodded. ‘We’ve had the same. We had them scried without success.’
‘Any ransom demands?’ I asked hopefully.
‘None. Whatever the kidnappers want, it isn’t money.’
‘What do youthinkthey want?’
‘Immortality.’ With that, Voltaire stepped into the shadows and phased away.
‘Damn, but he knows how to make a good exit,’ I muttered.
‘Are you going to stand on our lawn all day?’ a woman called from the front door. She didn’t look like any ogre I’d ever seen. She was tall and thin, with waist-length black hair and pursed lips that gave her a stern demeanour. Admittedly, I hadn’t seen any ogres before, but she wasn’t eight feet tall as the books I’d read this morning had described. And she was blatantly tusk free.
‘We’ll only be a moment,’ Greg called. In a quieter voice he said to me, ‘She’s in Common. If she’s at the den, then she’s still an ogre and you shouldn’t underestimate her.’
‘Why would she be in Common? I thought creatures didn’t need to recharge like us?’
‘They don’t. It’s tactical – ogres love to be underestimated. You look at her and think she’s a nice normal woman, but even in Common she has extra strength. While she looks completely ordinary, you’ll be less on your guard. Then you insult her in the den and the rest of the ogres, who are very much in the Other, sweep down and pulverise you,’ Greg explained.
‘Yeesh. I bet these guys are fun at barbecues.’
‘Rumour on the black market is that ogres pay through the nose for portal potions from the witches.’
‘Portal potions? I thought the only way you could go through the portal was at a place like Rosie’s, or via a hell hound.’
‘Officially. That’s the Connection’s stance,’ Bastion explained. ‘Unofficially, on the black market they’re always looking for new ways to circumvent the rules. Portal potions are a poor substitute for a real portal like you find in Rosie’s. They’re also expensive and the ingredients are questionable at best. My understanding is that the ingredients include parts of hell hounds, which is one of the reasons that hell hounds are virtually extinct these days.
‘The problem with portal potions, besides being immoral, is that they will only portal the person who drinks them for a maximum of five minutes. After that, they revert to the Common state with one hell of a hangover. But for an ogre fixing for a fight, five minutes with their size and strength is all that they need. That woman may appear to be in Common, she may evenbein Common, but if she downs a potion she could be kicking your ass before you can say illegal drugs.’
It was rather funny to hear a deadly assassin comment on the immorality of a potion when his job entailed murdering people for cash – but who was I to throw stones? My life philosophy is ‘you do you’.
The woman by the door was getting visibly impatient, and now looked like she was sucking a lemon.
‘We’re coming.’ I started forward, leaving the boys to fall in behind me. ‘We are expected. Lucy Barrett, Greg Manners and Bastion.’ Bastion doesn’t have a surname; he’s the Cher or Madonna of the assassins’ world and everyone in the Other knows and fears him. He is the bogeyman.
‘Hurry up,’ she bitched. ‘His Excellence will not be kept waiting.’
I expected her to step back so that we could enter the cottage, but instead she shut the door and gestured for us to follow her with a sharp jerk of her head. She started along a gravel path down the side of the cottage, through a gate and into the back garden.
To call it a garden was a massive understatement; it was a huge expanse, complete with a lake that was too large to be called a pond. Bordering the lands was a wood. I began to see why the ogres might have this tiny cottage as their den.
An ordinary looking man was sitting at a glass table by the lakeside. There was only one chair. Nice power play. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, about my age. He had black hair, copper skin and a generous mouth, and he was lean and wiry. There was nothing about him to suggest that he was an ogre. I guessed that, like the woman, he was also in the Common realm.
I glanced around the vast garden. The first thing I noticed was that he was surrounded by what is correctly termed a ‘murder’ of crows. He was feeding them scraps and they were cawing with delight. They made quite the visual impact, so distracting that I almost didn’t notice the couple of ogres lingering behind the nearest trees. If I hadn’t been looking for a trap I’d have missed them, though I doubted Bastion or Greg were distracted by the cacophony of cawing crows.
Glancing towards the cottage, I saw an ogre’s face at every window. However relaxed he appeared at first glance, His Excellence was still being heavily guarded.
I’m fairly used to shocking sights these days, but even so I felt a tendril of fear at the sight of the beasts. They were huge, hulking creatures with tusks protruding from their faces. Even with their broad shoulders, their heads were overly large for their bodies. They all seemed deformed in some way, with misshapen noses or mouths, or one arm longer than the other.
We couldn’t take them all,Esme said regretfully. There wasn’t even a zing of fear running through her.
All? I doubt we could take one of them.
