I sighed. “Come on then children. Let’s go.”

Chapter Thirteen

By the time the three us reached Haughmond Hill again, the sun was high in the sky and midday was fast approaching. At least I knew from Slim’s information that the Batibat was nocturnal and therefore wouldn’t be likely to be making a voluntary appearance. With any luck, however, I’d still be able to track down her hiding place and find out just what in the hell was really going on.

Larkin and Max, the two mages, were sitting down on the ground, close to the warded off area. When they saw us approaching, they both scrambled to their feet.

“We didn’t think you’d be here so quickly,” exclaimed Max, with a note of guilt in his voice that he’d been caught virtually napping.

“Are you complaining about my presence now?” I asked.

Larkin held up his hands. “No, no, definitely not. It’s great you’re here.” He gave his companion a warning glance. I felt oddly good that I had them snapping to attention when I arrived. Maybe I could give myself some kind of moniker to encourage further deference. Arch-Dragon? Lady Alpha? Fire Queen? I chuckled to myself at the absurdity of the idea, then looked round and realised that everyone was staring at me strangely. I pulled myself together and got down to business.

“Right,” I said, “what have you found out then?”

“It’s a really strong ward,” stated Larkin seriously. “Not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

Max nodded in agreement. “It’s definitely not of Ministry origins. It’s bound by something very dark indeed. And that dryad is most definitely dead.”

I shot him a look. “That much I already knew.”

Lucy was staring in horror at the dryad’s hanging body. “Oh my God,” she whispered. She turned away and began to retch. Aubrey rolled his eyes at the apparent weak appreciation the shifter had for such ‘art’. I ignored him and focused on the mages.

“Can you tell what will happen if we break the ward?”

“You can’t,” Max said firmly.

I was irritated. “Can’t what?”

“Break the ward.”

I sighed deeply. “Let’s imagine that I can. What would happen?”

He appeared completely nonplussed. “I, er, have no idea.”

“Well, fucking find out,” I snapped. I turned my attention to Larkin. “Are you the Divination guy?”

When he didn’t immediately answer, I clicked my fingers impatiently in front of his face. “Divination? Are you the guy?”

“Um, yes.” He ran a nervous hand through his hair, and I realised that I was sounding a bit too much like a school bully.

I softened my tone. “Somewhere near here there’s a Batibat. A nocturnal tree spirit.”

“Fat naked woman,” added in Aubrey, unhelpfully.

“Yeah, whatever.” I gave the mage a serious look. “Can you find where she is?”

He nodded. “I can try.”

“Great. Be aware that there are dryads around here as well. They’re pretty shy and probably wouldn’t take too kindly to you mistaking them for an evil daemon.”

It was his turn to look irritated. “I can tell the difference between a dryad and a Batibat.”

Did everyone know what a bloody Batibat was apart from apparently Alex and me?

“You know what a Batibat is?” asked Aubrey, arching a surprised eyebrow.

Okay, me and Alex and Aubrey then. I felt slightly mollified, but still made myself a promise to do some proper research into some of the more obscure Otherworld nasties when I got home. I didn’t enjoy feeling stupid. I supposed at least I was on a par with a hippy mage and a self-obsessed ex-bloodsucker, if nothing else.

Larkin gave Aubrey a scathing look. “Nice hat. I suppose you’re the vampire, then?”

“What of it, wiz?” he snarled in return.

I stepped in before things got out of hand. “Chill, boys. Aubrey, you need to look after Lucy. Make sure she’s okay.”

His lip curled. “She’s a shifter.”

“Well done.”

“I’m fine,” Lucy gasped from behind.

I glanced over my shoulder at her. Her skin still had a remarkably green tinge to it. “Okay. But stay here with Aubrey anyway.”

“How come you’re so nice to her and so nasty to me?” whined the ex-vamp.

“Because I like her.”

Aubrey’s bottom lip started to quiver, and his eyes became glassy. A loud sob escaped him. Both the mages and Lucy stared at him in abject astonishment.

I shrugged, trying not to feel too guilty. “Hey, you asked. And I told you not to cry.”

“I’m not crying,” he gulped. At least I thought that was what he said; to be honest, it was difficult to tell through his current wave of unhappy emotion. I decided the best thing would be to leave him alone.

“Here,” I said, passing him over my plastic bag. “I’m trusting you to look after this, Aubrey. “

He blinked, one hand lifting up the brim of his ridiculous purple affront to the art of millinery so he could peer at me. “Why?”

“Because I think you’ll do a great job of taking care of it and I need to go and make sure there’s nothing else lurking in these woods.”

Almost to a man, my motley crew of unwelcome companions stiffened. “You are not going anywhere on your own,” huffed Max. Larkin nodded vigorously in agreement.

“You have no idea what’s out there, Mack,” agreed Lucy. “I can’t let you do this.”

I growled at them and, just for a moment, opened myself up to my bloodfire, allowing the Draco Wyr spirit to flood through me. I couldn’t do it for too long – I was too afraid about what might happen if I did – but there was no way I was going to stand here arguing about what I was or wasn’t going to do. A dulled roaring filled my ears and I felt my heart pound, once, twice. Then, almost as soon as it had happened, I yanked the feeling away, and looked round at them all.

There was a deafening silence that was finally broken by Aubrey. “I’m starting to think that maybe I was lucky that you were on drugs on Hampstead Heath, even if it did this to me.” He motioned down at his human body.

The others flicked startled glances at him.

“Are we all agreed then?”

They nodded.

“Fanfuckingtastic,” I said, tiredly, and turned away from the group.

I could feel their wary eyes on me the entire time I was walking away. It occurred to me that whatever they’d seen when I’d let the bloodfire take me over had terrified the bejesus out of them. It terrified the bejesus out of me. There was no way I was going to let them know that though.

I wended my way across the path and into the trees. Everything appeared somehow different now it was daylight. The entire area was still unnaturally silent, with only the very odd call of a bird breaking the air, but everything felt less ominous than it had the night before. The power of sunlight, I figured. It was a shame that Aubrey hadn’t yet come round to the joy of being out in the daytime. I wondered idly if he ever would.

Something caught my attention on a nearby tree. There was a branch that had clearly been slightly disturbed and looked out of place, as if someone had grabbed onto it. Heart in my mouth, I carefully picked my way over to it, trying to stay as quiet as I possibly could. I realised as soon as I reached it, however, that it was the tree I’d thought to conceal myself in the night before. There was nothing else there.

Cursing to myself, I moved deeper into the undergrowth. There were simply no signs of any other disturbance anywhere. The utter lack of any trace of anything was worrying. This was meant to be a popular tourist spot. The whole area, apart from the obviously scorched part with the dead dryad, seemed as if it had remained untouched for years. That did not compute. I considered briefly whether it would be worth tracking back and up, to see if I could find the clearing again and talk to the dryad from the night before. If this Batibat was living around here too, it seemed impossible that they wouldn’t have bumped into each other. However, even given the entire race of dryads’ apparent propensity for not telling the whole truth, it seemed ridiculous that she wouldn’t have mentioned it already if she’d known. The Batibat was somehow tied up in the murder and Atlanteia had asked me here to essentially stop any more such murders from taking place. Withholding that potentially vital piece of information was pointless.

I continued forward, scanning the ground, the bushes, the trees, everything, for any sign of anything. I was drawing a complete blank, however. A thought struck me, and I moved away from the trees and back towards the ward, heading for the area where Aubrey had been lying when the Batibat had apparently sat on him. Even before I got there, it was clear to see the evidence of his movements. The grass was flattened, indicating where he’d fallen over, not just once, but several times. I knelt down, focusing on what the ground was telling me. All around the barrier of the ward were the traces of his attempts to smash through it. Al I needed to do was to find traces that didn’t belong to him. It didn’t take long.

To the left of where he’d fallen there were enough heavily bent stalks of grass, in a different formation to those already created by Aubrey himself, to indicate where the Batibat had been. I was no forensic environmentalist, but I’d spent enough time growing up around the woods of Cornwall to have some basic tracking techniques. And what they were telling me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was the Batibat had come at Aubrey from within the ward. There was no sign of any tracks left within the burnt ground inside, but there was just enough on the outside to make it clear what had happened. He’d been attacking the barrier, and probably falling over idiotically as he did so, and the Batibat had emerged from the dead tree inside to teach him a lesson.

I shaded my eyes and stared at the dead grey branches. There was nothing to see other than the back of the forlorn figure of the dryad, visible through the twisted cluster of dead wood. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anything hiding there right now, camouflaged by some form of woody magic. If dryads could keep themselves hidden whenever they wanted to and from whomever they wanted to, I was pretty damned sure that a Batibat would be able to do the same. And that meant that the only thing left was to break the ward.