And moving through the scene slowly was the Cailleach Bheur, her face as dark as nature. The cold came off her in waves, metamorphosing at the tips into snaky tendrils which reached out to anything not yet touched by the icy blast of eternal winter. The speakers fizzed and sparks flew off the decks. A second later the ear-splitting music ended in a shriek of feedback. That only revealed the awful screams of the surviving clubbers huddled in one corner of the room. Laura covered her ears, but couldn't drive out the sound. She couldn't even tear her eyes away as one of the tendrils wound its way along the floor like autumn mist before wrapping itself around the ankle of a young man who was futilely trying to kick it away. It was followed instantly by an odd effect which, in her state, she found both fascinating and horrible: ice crystals danced in the air before forming around his leg, moving rapidly up to his waist. Yelling, he tore at it, but it simply transferred to his hands where he touched the crystals, turning the skin blue, then forming a film of ice over it.
A second later he fell to the floor with the same rictus, catching the light like a gruesome ice sculpture.
Laura was convinced she was going insane from the magnified panic and terror. Irrationally, and with desperation, she threw herself over the table and ran to the men's toilets. The door slammed behind her just as a rapidly pursuing wave of cold crashed against it. She heard the familiar cracking sound as the wood froze, but when it didn't burst in she guessed the Cailleach Bheur had turned her attention back to the remaining clubbers.
Frantically she tore around the small room and was overjoyed when she discovered a tiny window over one of the cubicles. She wrenched it open gleefully, oblivious to the breaking of a fingernail and the spurt of blood as it ripped into her skin. When she saw the solid bars that lay on the other side she burst into a bout of uncontrollable sobs.
'I can't think straight!' she yelled at herself between the tears. 'Why was I so stupid? I'm a loser! A fucking loser!'
The screams echoing dimly through the walls were bad enough, but when they finally faded away, the silence that followed was infinitely worse. Laura collapsed into a corner of the cubicle and hugged her knees, realising how pathetic her whimpers sounded, unable to do anything about it.
The silence didn't last long. The telltale sounds of forming ice and cracking wood gradually made their way towards the toilet door. Laura pressed her back hard into the wall as if, just by wishing, it would open up and swallow her. Her cheeks stung from the tears which had soaked her top. She was already making desperate deals with God: no more drugs, no more stupidity, if He whisked her out of there to safety, turned the Hag away from the door, did anything, anything-when she suddenly noticed a curious sight which broke through the panic. The blood which dripped from her cut finger was green. It wasn't a trick of the light or a vague visual hallucination; an emerald stain had formed on her top. Cautiously she touched the tip of her tongue to it; it didn't even taste like blood. It reminded her, oddly, of lettuce.
'Jesus Christ, what's going on?' It seemed like the final straw of madness. And an instant later she heard the toilet door begin to break open. Her breath clouded around her; the temperature was plummeting.
Clarity crept back into her mind as the drug entered one of its cyclical recessions, and with it came a decision not to die screwed up on the floor of a toilet like some pathetic junkie. She jumped up on to the toilet seat and began to wrench at the bars on the window in the hope that they were looser than they appeared.
By now she was shivering uncontrollably. The door groaned and began to give way.
'Come on,' she pleaded, but the bars held fast. Then another strange thing happened. Where her blood splashed on to the bars it appeared to move with a life of its own, spreading over the metal, changing into something which, in the gloom, she couldn't quite make out; all she could see through the shadows was movement and growth. Instantly the bars began to protest and a few seconds later they burst out of the brick.
The sound of the toilet door bursting inwards and the wave of intense cold that followed drove all questions from her mind. She pulled herself through the opening and fell awkwardly into a dark, litter-strewn alley that smelled of urine. Pain drove through her shoulder where she hit the ground. Ignoring it, she forced herself to her feet and hurried away just as a white bizzard erupted out of the window above her.
The relief that hit her was so overwhelming she burst into tears again, but by the time she stumbled out on to a main road her head was spinning; there was no point trying to make sense of what had happened until the trip was over. Yet she couldn't resist one last look at the green smears across her hands. An involuntary shudder ran through her that did not come from the cold.
Chapter Five
There was never-ending darkness, and pain, more than she thought she could bear. How long had it gone on for now? Months? Ruth's head swam, every fibre of her body infused with agony. At least the sharp lances that had been stabbing through her hand where her finger had been severed had subsided, a little. She didn't dare think how the wound had healed in the dirty confines of her tiny cell.
Since she had been snatched from the hotel in Callander she had cried so many tears of pain and anger and frustration she didn't feel she had any more left in her. Through all the hours of meaningless torture, it was the hope that kept her going: that she would find a way out, however futile that seemed; that the others would rescue her. But it had been so long- She drove the thought from her mind. Stay strong, she told herself. Be resilient.
It would have helped if all the suffering had been for a reason, something she could have drawn strength from by resisting, but the Fomorii holding her captive seemed merely to want to impose hurt on her in their grimly equipped torture chambers. They had held back from inflicting serious damage-they always stopped when Ruth blacked out-but she felt it was only a matter of time before they lost interest in their sport.
Feeling like an old woman, she shuffled into a sitting position. Her straw bedding dug into the bare flesh of her legs. She'd mapped the cell out in her mind long ago: a bare cube carved out of the bedrock, not big enough to allow her to lie fully out, smelling of damp, scattered with dirty straw, a roughly made wooden door that had resisted all attempts to kick it open.
There's still hope. It was her mantra now, repeated every time the despair threatened to close in.
She couldn't remember anything about her capture, who did it, how it happened, where she had been brought. Her recent memory began with the shock and dismay when she discovered her missing finger and she wondered if it was the upheaval of that discovery which had driven out all the other thoughts.
Somewhere distant the deep, funereal tolling of a bell began. Soon they would come for her again. Tears sprang to her eyes unbidden and she hastily wiped them away with the back of her hand. She wasn't weak, she would survive.
There's still hope.
Afterwards, with the pain still fresh in her mind and her limbs, she enjoyed the cool, anonymous embrace of the darkness, where thoughts were all; this was the place she could live the life she wanted to live. But, as had happened so many times, the balm was soon disrupted by the familiar voice which made her think of the serrated teeth of a saw being drawn across a window pane.
'Does the light still burn?'
'It burns,' she replied. 'Not brightly, but it's there. You're a good teacher.' She caught herself. 'Teacher. I still haven't worked out what our relationship is. Are you a teacher, aide, confidant-?' She wanted to add master, but a frightened part of her made her hold back.
'All of those, and more. I have been entrusted with your well-being.' The sound of his words made her think he was smiling darkly, wherever it was in the gloom he existed. Though he had been helpful and supportive, she had an abiding sense that buried within him was a contempt for her powerlessness.
'What are you?' she asked, as she always did in their conversations.
And he replied as he always did: 'I am who you want me to be.' It had almost become their little joke.
But she didn't know, and that unnerved her. She remembered all she had read throughout her life about familiars being demons or sprites doing the Devil's bidding, and however much she had grown to realise that was propaganda put out by the early Church, she still couldn't shake the irrational fears it had set in her. Whatever, she knew she would have to stay measured and protective in her dealings with him.
'I think I prefer you as an owl,' she noted. When the Goddess had gifted her the familiar in the dark
