The new assignment was to transport St Cuthbert's Kettle to a secure location. I hoped that meant a quick helicopter flight to London, but Horseshoe protocol forbade air transit for any artefact dubbed a "storm-maker," and the kettle fit that description.
In theory my presence was meant to keep the kettle in check, but the Admiral endorsed a belt-and-braces approach, so air travel was still off the cards. Instead of a helicopter ride, I had to sit in the back of a car for the three-hour drive from Whitby, on the east coast, to Liverpool, on the west coast, where the kettle would find a new home in a secret underground bunker.
While the kettle kept me company on the back seat, Hari and Abigail sat in the front and ignored me. Occasionally they would talk to each other, but I couldn't hear what they were saying, because they kept the radio turned up loud. Whenever I asked what they were talking about, they told me not to worry.
We were halfway to our destination when I finally had enough.
"Is this how it's going to be from now on?" I asked. "Because if I ask the Admiral for a different protection team, I'm pretty sure I'll get one."
"So, ask," said Hari.
"What was that?"
I had heard him, but I wanted to know if he meant it. Hari switched off the radio and turned in his seat. "Ask her," he said. "Get another protection team. This isn't why I signed up, Frazer. I didn't go through all my training to be your babysitter."
"What is your problem? I'm doing my part. I didn't choose this, you know."
"You've made that clear enough."
"Am I meant to be grateful? Am I meant to think this is the best thing that ever happened to me?"
"You're meant to know what side you're on," said Abigail. "Human or fey."
I opened my mouth. I closed it again. I couldn't think of a smart answer to that.
"That's what I thought," said Abigail. "You think you're too good for this. We're fighting to protect our country, which is your country too, by the way. Three of our guys died trying to save your mum. Meanwhile you're keeping secrets and going on dates with a terrorist."
"I didn't go on any—"
"Give it a rest. The Admiral says you're special, so we put our lives on the line for you. That's the job, and we do it. But the way I see it, you're not on anyone's side but your own. You could as easily help them as help us, and if that's the case, what the hell are we protecting you for?"
I sunk back into my seat. Abigail wasn't going to listen to any arguments from me, and I wasn't sure I had any. After a minute of painful silence, Hari turned the radio back on.
* * *
We came off the motorway a few miles out from Liverpool and drove past some small villages and onto a quiet road through the woods. I watched out of the window as the trees whipped by. Today was a sunny spring day, a birds-and-butterflies day, and the worst kind of day to be stuck in a car with two people who hate you.
We passed a thick copse of trees. The shadows were so dense that it looked like a slice of night in the daylight.
The trees parted to reveal rolling pastures and a field of horses.
A second wall of trees harboured the same thick darkness, but this time I saw a small gap between them, a little window that revealed a tumbledown dry-stone wall, a tangle of thorny bushes, and a distant tower against a moonlit sky.
That tower had not been there before.
I was seeing a different view. Almost like the same landscape at a different time. The moment flashed by so fast that I might have convinced myself that I was imagining it—if I weren't getting used to the idea of the impossible.
"Something's happening," I said.
"It looks like a storm up ahead," said Hari.
A mass of black cloud filled the sky a little way in front of us, and the road was soaked in shadow.
"Check on the kettle, Frazer."
"It's not the kettle," said Abigail. "That's not a storm."
Abigail was right. There were no clouds in the sky ahead of us. The sky itself was black. A clear line separated the day from the dark, and the dark was rushing towards us.
Abigail hit the brakes and turned on the headlights.
"Call this in, Hari. Tell them we need help."
Hari grabbed the radio and squeezed the trigger. "Mayday, mayday, this is Hari Sharma. We are under attack five clicks from Stonechurch Depot, due south on Stonechurch Lane, over."
The darkness swept over us and the radio fizzled and died. The headlights cut out at the same moment.
"What happened?" I asked.
Abigail tested her taser. Nothing.
"No electricity," she said. "Damn it. This should not be happening." I caught her gaze in the rear-view mirror. She glowered at me like this was my fault.
"What is this? Did we drive into a...what? A bubble of night?"
"Not night, Frazer. Look outside. It didn't just get dark."
The green trees on the roadside had turned bare and barren. The road was a mud track. We were stranded in the middle of a tangled, jagged forest, and it was snowing. I thought back to Belas Knap, and how I had been able to see the real world through the ghost flowers, and I tried to look through the trees for some glimpse of reality beneath them, but I found nothing else there.
"This is real," I said. "We're really here, wherever 'here' is."
"We're the same place we were before," said Abigail. "We're just in a different time."
"Are you sure?" asked Hari.
Abigail nodded. "Look around you. This is an old road; an ancient forest. We haven't moved, we're just... early. The road is dirt and the signs have disappeared. Damn it. This shouldn't be happening. There are wards in place to make sure this doesn't happen."
I couldn't see any stars.
"You must have good eyesight," I said. "I can't see a thing."
"I do. It's a curse."
"Have we time travelled?"
"That isn't a real thing. We've had a pocket of time dropped on top of us," said Abigail. "I've been briefed on this. A group of powerful witches worked out a clever way to trap their enemies. They would snatch a moment out of time and hide it in a pomegranate seed, with their enemy inside. If someone broke the seed, the moment would reassert itself and the prisoner would walk free.
"We're sitting in the middle of a moment from a thousand years ago, when the ground was saturated with magic, which is why none of our technology works. Of course, that's not the worst part."
"What's the worst part?" I asked.
"If this is someone's prison, we're in here with the prisoner."
The shadows felt a little thicker when she said that, and the air inside the car turned a little colder.
"What do we do?" I asked.
"Can we walk out of it?" asked Hari.
"I don't know," said Abigail.
"How long will it last?"
"I don't know. Maybe they trapped a minute? Maybe they trapped a day?"
"All right," said Hari. "I'm going to go get the flares and put up the hazard reflectors. If our call got through to Stonechurch, they could come in here looking for us, and we don't want anyone ramming us in the dark."
Abigail popped the boot of the car and Hari got out and squelched through the mud. Abigail scanned our surroundings with a hawk-like intensity.
"There's nothing out there," she said.
Hari rapped on Abigail's window, and I jumped. Abigail pressed the button to lower the window, but of course the electricity wasn't working, so she opened the door instead. Hari handed her a small steel suitcase.
"I think we should walk," said Hari. "I can carry the kettle. You keep an eye on his majesty here."
"We don't know what's out there, Hari. We're in a defensible position. We should wait it out."
"What if you stay with the car and I run to Stonechurch?" said Hari. "If I can get outside the pocket, I can send a message and make sure they don't drop a helicopter on our heads."
"Maybe I should go?" said Abigail. "I'm faster, and I can see better in the dark."
"Yeah, but I can survive getting hit by an out-of-control truck," said Hari. "Or whatever else might be out there."
"All right," said Abigail. "Go. But be quick."
Hari ran off along the road towards Stonechurch. The shadows ate him up.
There was no wind in this pocket of darkness. No animals moved through the trees. No birds or bats flocked through the sky. The air was still and silent.
"Come and sit in the front, Frazer," said Abigail. There was a casualness to her tone that was transparently forced, given how she'd talked to me earlier. "Climb over," she added. "Don't get out."
I climbed over. Abigail's eyes flickered from left window to right window to rear-view mirror. She studied the shadows like she was trying to memorize the picture on a jigsaw box.
"What are you looking for?"
"Nothing," she said. "Tell me about your family. You have a brother, right?"
She was trying to keep me calm. I liked the idea, so I played along.
"Danny. He's an army private, same as you, except he's in the Army Corps of Engineers. More bridges and less... trolls."
"We don't say trolls."
"Sorry. I was making a joke."
"We don't say trolls."
"Sorry. Why is that? What does it mean?"
"Ugly. Clumsy. It's a human slur. Don't say it, all right?"
I nodded.
Abigail maintained her watch.
"Do you get on with your brother?" she asked.
"I suppose so. Mum says he's the practical one and I'm the romantic, but we have a lot in common. We're both stubborn and we both have big mouths."
"But you like him?"
"Of course. He's my brother."
"That must be nice," said Abigail.
"You don't have any siblings?"
"I had a brother. He was—" She stopped mid-sentence. "Quiet."
I heard a loud thump, and the car vibrated. Another thump and the car rocked.
"What was that?"
"That," said Abigail, "was the prisoner."
* * *