"The name 'Isobel Mackenzie'," said Nick Macbane, "Is familiar from somewhere, I've been racking my brains but I can't think where... I was no wanting to be saying anything in front of Fiona, mind, I mean I'm no sure I like this Vrotch bloke's attitude there but everything they've been intimating, Fiona included, is making it sound like whoever this Isobel Mackenzie is she's no good news at all,"

The girls having gone together back to the pub in Annie's ute, he and Mackie and Andy were riding over in his van.

"Aye, it does ring a bell doesnae it," Andy agreed with a frown, "Though I'm buggered if I ken where from - I mean I ken three Isobels and more Mackenzies than I've had hot dinners but no any Isobel Mackenzies, but the name's still familiar from somewhere."

"Are you thinking a politician or someone who was being in the news a while ago?" Mackie asked. "Because it's sounding familiar to myself and all."

"Good, it's no just myself then," Nick said with a nod. "I'm thinking we're wanting to keep it under our shirts so far as Fiona's concerned, but we should be asking about, folks like your grandpa the next time he's in port, Andy, and maybe the other old boys who're regulars at your mum's place?"

"Myself'll be asking Mum the next time we're back in the village, and myself am thinking yourself should be asking your parents too Nick," Mackie said.

"Aye, that's no a bad idea at all," Nick agreed. "We'll see."

"So are we planning on having a go after any vampires the night then?" Andy changed the subject.

"Fuck no, I don't know about yourself but I'm sorely in need of a bit of a break," said Nick. "The last week's been utterly bloody exhausting, Annie was saying something about getting caught up on sleep before one of us gets too tired and makes some sort of horrible mistake."

He was quite unaware of exactly who - or perhaps that should be what - was watching them as he pulled the Bigger Van back into the yard behind the Harbourmaster's.

-/-/-/-/-/-

When the group of students arrived at the Harbourmaster's the following evening - Tuesday the twenty-fourth - they found Vrotch, Fat Bloke, and McBangBang all clustered round a table utterly covered in papers in one of the corner booths and arguing in low voices, and a rather bored-looking Vicky nursing a pint at the bar.

"Getting anywhere?" Annie asked, arriving beside the booth occupied by the trio of alleged wizards.

"To certain decimal places of somewhere, yes," said McBangBang, who was wearing civvies this time but maintained the Proper Officer English, "At this moment in time we have three proposed methodologies, though quite how useful any of the three will prove… Ah, Fiona, perhaps it would be best if you were to take a look at our numbers."

"Aye, will do," Fiona said, seating herself beside Fat Bloke; Vrotch handed her a sheaf of papers and she started quickly reading over them. She immediately grew a frown. "Sacrifice-driven? Isn't that a bit rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul?"

"Nope," said Fat Bloke. "See sacrifice is all to do with life force, right, and what determines that isn't brain-power, it's body mass. So basically there's nothing you can do with one of those skinny teenage girls every idiot seems to jump straight for whenever someone says 'life sacrifice' that you can't do ten times better with a cow." He caught the expression this had put on Fiona's face. "I shit ye not and the whole 'virgins' thing has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with small penises."

"… Huh," said Fiona, and Nick was about to ask why she had an expression like she'd just been hit in the face with a lump of week-old bait when there was a crash and the pub porch burst into flames, immediately followed by several somebodies opening up on the front of the building with what sounded like rimfire Sten guns, the sort that was license-exempt throughout most of the British Empire and thus was everywhere - the sole window went in and people started screaming - a girl came running into the bar with her clothes on fire, only for Fat Bloke to go hurtling across the room like an eighteen-stone human cruise missile, knock the burning girl flat, and bodily roll her over - she came back upright in a daze but no longer on fire as her overweight saviour produced an obnoxiously long-barreled revolver and started returning fire through the burning doorway, his shots sounding more like an old rifle.

The cool, deadpan calm, clear, commanding voice of Commander Michael Compton, Royal Navy, cut through the chaos.

"Sane Dave, get that fire suppressed - Fat Bloke, you're on bullet-denial duty. Fiona, Vicky, ensure the rear entrance is clear to begin an orderly evacuation. Macbane, Romanov, Kelly, you're with me. Arm yourselves and let's give these buggers a good seeing-to,"

He was not, however, one of the exactly four people alive from whom Mackie Romanov would take an order: the pool table went clean through the solitary small window from bar to street, bodily hurled by a bloody furious part-Russian from Sutherland who happened to have been born with the strength of a monster, taking a good-sized portion of wall along with it, and Mackie went roaring like a maniac out of the newly-formed aperture, his trench gun booming - Nick was hard behind his lifelong best friend the whole way.

Behind them Annie Kelly waited exactly long enough to ask "Do we look like we're fucking Naval ratings?" before following the lads with her seldom-seen machine pistol in hand and its stock extended.

The bunch waiting in the street for them Nick instantly pegged as vampires, they were wearing gang colours matching the lot from one of the places they'd busted up the previous Saturday and had the look of pumped-up arrogance down pat. They also looked somewhat taken aback by the pool table as it impacted one of their vehicles - a beat-up Sunbeam two-seater with a visibly drilled lock - with enough force to flip the car over and reduce the pool table, which perhaps fortunately hadn't had any wargames in progress atop it yet, to fragments.

As the Inverallen lads came storming out of the hole utterly disregarding the fact that they were still being shot at Mackie made certain neither of the attackers other vehicles - a Bedford van that'd seen better days and a Holden ute that managed to be even more dead than Annie's motor, both of which had skidded to a halt when the Sunbeam blocked the road in the process of being turned over by a flying pool table - were going anywhere via the simple expedient of applying shotgun blasts to their front offside tyres, with rounds #3 and #4 going through the windscreens, then Annie started raking bullets along the side of the Bedford and across onto the Holden.

Arriving alongside the flipped Sunbeam, Nick made sure the pair of vampires still in its seats weren't going anywhere, pulled the now muddy-bladed Claymore back, and went for the Bedford. Fire erupted from the loadbed of the Holden - Annie had caught one of the vampires in the back of the thing right in the crotch as he was winding up to bung another petrol bomb, and he'd dropped it; he went up like a dod of petrol slung on a bonfire right along with his mates.

The boys arrived at the Bedford more or less together - Mackie took the driver's head the rest of the way off with a shotgun blast with the gun muzzle jammed against the bastard's Adams apple, mud everywhere, then tore the side door clean out of its fixings revealing half a dozen expressions of frozen fang-faced terror on half a dozen frozen fang-faced ticks.

(He hurled the door at the Holden, embedding it in windscreen, driver, and front-seat passenger, but Nick didn't register that until later.)

Nick waded into the van, carved the first tick in half from crotch to chin - the poor bastard had the grave misfortune not to mud from this treatment - and took two heads off before the remaining three vampires had time to react. Mackie's shotgun - shatteringly loud in the confines of the back of the van - removed the next one's head from the face of the Earth, Nick got the Claymore free from where he'd embedded it in the side of the van in time to carve the top half of the second-to-last one's head off, and another deafening gunshot wiped the final one away - whereupon, save for the crackle and pop of cooking-off bullets from the burning Holden and the swearing from the direction of the pub as Vrotch did a passable job of getting that fire suppressed, everything went kinda quiet.

"Shit the bed," said Nick, looking down at the bisected vampire in all the mud on the van's floor. "I guess I must've missed this wanker's heart."

"Aye, that you must," Mackie agreed. "Will we be putting it out of its misery?"

"Nah," Nick said. "Let's drain a deer into it and ask it a few questions, then maybe if we're no liking the answers we'll be giving the fucker a wee suntan."

"Oh Lord that's grotesque," Annie cheerfully declared, arriving beside the van. "Look at that, there's one bollock attached to each half of him, right up the nadger line there Nick,"

"That poor bastard's double Hitler," said Mackie.

"Shut it you great teuchter, let's get this split-scroted wanker indoors and nailed to the floor so it doesn't get any," Nick started, then noticed there was blood all over and coming out of Mackie's right arm and changed track mid-sentence, "Jesus Christ Mackie, you've been shot!"

Mackie blinked, looked down at himself, and said, in a tone of faint surprise, "I have? Oh aye, that I have - I was no noticing it until you were saying."

He started critically examining his new bullet hole, and added, "It's no too deep, it must've just skimmed my arm when ourselves were coming out of the pub, but it's bleeding like fuckery, myself had probably better be getting up to the hospital. You be dealing with that," he instructed, pointing at the vampire. "Annie, chances of a lift?"

"Aye, come on you great eejit, get in the ute," Annie declared, half towing him towards where her ute was parked. Nick rolled his eyes and picked the semi-bisected vampire up by the scruff of the neck, and headed for where the Bigger Van was parked.

"And where are you going?" an irate-looking McBangBang asked, emerging from the no longer burning pub.

"Taking this wanker somewhere that's no about to be heaving with the police along with the Bigger Van of course you absolute wassock, we're in the harbour, no the no-go," Nick told him with a sigh. "I'd prefer nae to have to rebuild that bloody thing, armoured cabs are no so easy to be getting hold of, and the cops'd impound it soon as look at it if it was still sitting here when they were getting down."

-/-/-/-/-/-

When Annie and Mackie got back down from the hospital, Mackie's bullet wound now neatly bandaged and no longer pissing blood post the application of some high-tech medical equipment, they found the police had arrived in the interim.

There were about a dozen cops standing around, most of them toting automatic rifles and most of whom Annie immediately recognised - there were half a dozen police Saracen armoured carriers parked three each side of the scene of the shoot-out and entirely blocking the street from both sides, and of Nick Macbane there was no sign.

Annie parked her ute under the bridge, baled out, and went sauntering over to the police line with Mackie trailing along behind her; one of the cops started moving to intercept then recognised her.

"No entry ma'am, I'm sorry but- oh for God's sake, Miss Kelly, and your friend's got what looks very like a gunshot injury, don't tell me we'll be taking statements from you," he said with a sigh.

"Evening Constable Hiller, and your ballistics boys will find my machine pistol matches the Parabellum bullets that're in those vehicles so there's no sense beating about the bush," she said.

"How'd I know it… Listen, any idea what the hell happened to the perps? There's an awful lot of muddy shot-up clothing but," the cop asked, ushuring them in through between the trio of armoured carriers at that end of the scene.

"Is Constable Joy around? It's the same thing as that little uproar outside Gunnies a few weeks ago," Annie told him.

"Crud," the copper said. "I'd heard about that - do you think this was more of the same crowd?"

"Aye, it's got to be - they petrol-bombed the front door so Mackie here hied the pool table through the nearest window," Annie said.

"I take it you're boosted?" the cop asked Mackie.

"Well he is technically my bodyguard," Annie said with a shrug.

"Ah, say no more."

"Any rate the pool table found that Sunbeam and turned it over, and we hied ourselves out after it - that must've been when Mackie walked into a bullet - the ones in the Sunbeam weren't going anywhere so Mackie made sure the other vehicles were staying around, blew their front wheels out with his trench gun, and I gave them a spraying from my machine pistol. Then the lads made sure they weren't going to be a threat any more, basically you saw what happened when they were dealt with, and I took Mackie off up to the hospital after we realised he was bleeding."

"Nick, that'd be the 'madman with a sword' assorted persons have mentioned?"

"Aye, that's no a bad description of him," Annie said with a laugh.

"I see, any idea where he's off to?"

"Not a clue but he tends to crash out pretty badly after the adrenaline wears off, he probably went to find somewhere quiet to kip," Annie easily lied.

"Hrm… So, do you suppose that lot," and the cop angled a thumb at the still-smouldering Holden, "Were looking for you and your companions?"

"This is the third big dust-up we've had with them in what, four weeks," Annie said with a shrug. "It'd be foolish not to assume they're after me, particularly given I'm well aware Dad would pay an awful lot of money for my safe return if I was taken."

"So DCI Stoker's hunch doesn't pan out," the cop said with a sigh, shaking his head. "Hey Booker, let Stoker know it's Miss Kelly who machine-pistolled those vehicles,"

"Miss Kelly's here?" one of the other cops asked, craning his head. "Oh yes, Miss Kelly's here. Evening Miss Kelly," and with that he made a beeline for where, over by the burning Holden, McBangBang was visible having a heated argument with a serious-looking moustachioed gentleman in a greatcoat and Trilby hat.

"God, what a bloody night," the cop continued with a sigh and a scrub at his face. "I thought getting out of bloody Belfast meant I'd seen my last pub petrol-bombing, at least there weren't all that many injuries."

"How's the lassie who was burned?" Mackie asked.

"In an ambulance the last I saw, with the other half-dozen injuries - excepting you of course. We shipped them off up to Raigmore right smart. Nothing critical thank Christ, if you lot hadn't been there it'd have been a bloodbath."

"Like as not, aye," Annie said with a frown.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"So," Nick asked the rather more compus mentas vampire - now nailed to the floor in Mary Macbride's pub back room but no longer bisected and now thoroughly drenched in the liquid contents of a red deer they'd driven out of town and 'acquired' courtesy of Mackie and a Lee-Enfield - the moment the vampire stopped yelling, "Fancy telling us who you're working for and where to be finding them or will I be cutting your dick in half too this time?"

Almost exactly twenty-four hours had passed since the attack, the place was no longer crawling in cops, they'd got Mackie's hole in the front of the pub mostly patched up, there was a wargame in progress on the folding table that'd at least temporarily replaced the pool table, and now they were ready and - accompanied by Vrotch and his mates - set to go and discuss the affair with whoever was responsible for setting a bunch of vampires to shoot the place up.

The vampire gave him a slitty-eyed look. Having expected this, he picked up the piece of machinery he called 'the rip-snorter' - a large petrol-powered circular saw - fired it up, revved it a couple of times, pulled the blade guard right the way back, and started slowly lowering it towards the once-again yelling vampire's groin with the blade spinning.

The vampire was screaming promises to answer whatever they wanted to ask even before the saw had actually touched it; Nick grinned, released the blade guard, idled the saw, and set it - still ticking over and gradually filling the room with its exhaust pipe - down on the floor between the vampire's feet.

"So exactly which stupid bastard," said Fat Bloke, "Decided it was a good idea to throw petrol bombs at a pub containing three mages, one of them a Navy officer to boot, a superweapon, and this bunch of bloody mental-cases?" and he indicated Nick and his friends.

"You what mate?" the vampire asked.

"He's asking who you work for, idiot," said the girl who'd accompanied Vrotch every time so far Nick had seen them - if he'd got the right idea her name was 'Vicky' or something.

"Ivor," the vampire said. "Ivor Dracula,"

"Dracula, bollocks," said Nick, picking the saw back up and giving it a rev.

"No, no, honest, honest that's his name, least that's what he sez his name is and ain't nobody argues with him!" the vampire gabbled.

"Oh aye and where'll he be biding then?" Annie asked.

"Ain't far from here, he's got one of the warehouse units at the north end of the harbour facing onto the firth, the one right at the eastern end of the row nearest to the water, innit. Uh, I think he's got a bolt-hole like, just over the road from the mart somewhere - I dunno exactly where though, I swear I dunno - and a couple of sheds facing right onto the north side of the goods yard like, opposite Johnson's, right, you skip two buildings east from Johnson's and cross the road right by the petrol station and you've got the next two sheds are both his, he's got a tunnel from 'em to the warehouse like."

"And how was he finding ourselves?" asked Mackie.

"Weren't hard were it, half of us are up and down this street every night and onea the lads saw that armoured lorry of yours pulling in the back," said the vampire.

"So quite how many followers does this 'Ivor Dracula' have?" McBangBang asked. He'd turned up dressed for trouble earlier that evening - gone was the naval officer's blacks, in their place he was wearing battledress complete with the well-loaded webbing and helmet.

"Like about two hundred, I ain't never counted?" the vampire tried.

"And what exactly did he think he'd be achieving, sending you over here to be starting an arse-kicking competition with a hedgehog?" Fiona asked.

"Well he had this pub over the other side of the river, didn't he, place this geezer called Smedley run for him like," the vampire started.

"And we burned it to the ground, och well, there you go," Annie declared with a nod. "Come on, we might as well be finishing the job,"

"Hold on, just getting something from out the back," said Nick, and headed straight for where he'd built the Bigger Van - there he collected from the still-present tool trailer his petrol-engined hammer drill, followed by one of the assorted pieces of rusting junk that'd been leaning against the bridge abutment: a gigantic ancient masonry drill bit, rusted all to shit and nearly four feet long.

He put it into the chuck of the drill and toted the completed horror show back into Mary Macbride's back room.

"Andy," he said. "Do us all a wee favour? If this wanker's no trying to send us into a trap we'll be back in a couple of hours - call it," and he checked his watch, "Half past ten, and when we get back we'll be giving him," and he pointed at the vampire, "A clean finishing-off, I wouldn't say being mudded by a Claymore taking your head off is any too bad a way to go... If we're no back by eleven o'clock, run this drill right up this wanker's arse and keep shoving it up there again and again until the bastard muds."

He gave the now visibly even more terrified vampire a vicious grin.

"Will you be changing any of your story, laddie?" he asked.

"No, no I swear everything I said is proper honest!" the vampire declared.

"Good boy," Annie said, collecting one of Keith Thompson's Sten guns, which had spent the previous night in the back of the Bigger Van up a forestry track up the back of Loch Ness right alongside the then-bisected vampire and the rest of the varied illegal clobber like untaxed pot that'd been in the pub. "Come on - let's go and give this 'Ivor Dracula' a good twatting."

She gave the trio of wizards a contemptuous look.

"You lot coming?"

"Count me out, man, I'm useless in a fight," Vrotch said with a laugh. "I just completely panic and flail around like a twerp. Vicky's well hard, she's all the fighter I ain't. Fat Bloke, McBangBang, you two are both better at fighting than I am,"

"Yes well, I did after all do quite well in close-quarters training and I'd expect the training in dealing with cyborgs would map quite well onto dealing with walking corpses," said McBangBang. "If you ladies and gentlemen will have me, I shall see if I can be of any assistance."

"Sorting out a bunch of bastards who figured it was a great idea to set fire to the porch on a pub full of teenage kids?" Fat Bloke asked. "Sounds like a lark, mate, I'm in."

"Alright," said Annie. "Let's go kick the crap out some diddums bloodsuckers."

-/-/-/-/-/-

Annie having completely mortified the naval officer by disrobing right in front of him to change into her combats (moaning about how much she loathed trousers the whole time, as usual) in her usual hilariously shameless manner, they split up into two groups. McBangBang, Vicky, and Val headed over to the warehouse on foot, while Fat Bloke, Nick, Mackie, and Annie piled into the Bigger Van and made a direct beeline for the pair of industrial units the captured vampire had claimed were connected to the warehouse by a tunnel; Nick drove the Bigger Van straight through the left-hand unit's front door and they piled out yelling like maniacs, to be met by a distinct lack of any signs of life or, for that matter, unlife.

The unit looked to be where the vehicles used in the petrol bombing of the Harbourmaster's had come from - the walls separating the two units had been knocked out, there were half a dozen more assorted vehicles parked around - three beat-up Sunbeam straight-eights, one of which was an estate, an Albion panel van that'd seen better days, a rotten old Morris van and another Holden utility that looked like it'd been the wrong way up a few times - in the space enough to fit the three vehicles now shot up and/or burned out and sitting in an impound yard there was a nice clear oil patch as found under all Bedford vans of that generation that'd spent at least a night parked in one place.

"This'll be where they were making the petrol bombs," said Mackie, indicating a workbench near the back.

"Oh aye, you reckon?" Annie, who was investigating the nearest vehicle, asked.

"Aye - oily cloths and cable ties, and from the way it's smelling that'll be a puddle of freshly-spilt petrol dripping down the back, eejits were nae using a funnel," Mackie said.

"Aye? Well. Anyone seeing a sign of this tunnel entrance then?" Annie asked.

"It's right over here," Fat Bloke, who had headed along the front of the structure towards what had been the other industrial unit, said. "Get a load of this, they barely even tried to hide it."

Heading that way hard beside the others, Nick found that the lardy mage was peering down a roughly-cut hole in the building's concrete floor, out of which was sticking the topmost few inches of a ladder. There had been a vague pretence made at it being concealed; there was a wall-mounted fire hose between it and the other unit's front door and a couple of old fuel drums were dumped nearby.

"Well that's pretty clear now isn't it," said Nick. Grinning, Mackie turned on the torch he'd duct taped to the pump on his trench gun and shone it down the hole - it went down a good fifteen to twenty feet, had a dingy muddy floor, and 'pit prop' style timbers - they were the right size to be old railway sleepers - were visible from where the tunnel headed off in the general direction of the harbour.

"Aye," said Mackie, starting to scramble down the ladder. "That it is."

Nick followed him, Annie wasn't far behind, and Fat Bloke shrugged and took up the rear.

At the bottom the 'pit props' proved to be what looked like groups of old railway sleepers bolted together, soaked in old engine oil as rudimentary creosote, and set on concrete blocks in an attempt to stop the ankle-deep mud rotting them out - the ceiling was even lower than Grace Mitchell's front door, you could hear dripping to the surprise of absolutely nobody given that they had to be below the high tide mark, and the only source of light in the entire tunnel was Mackie's torch.

It curved a bit on the way towards the warehouse, making it impossible to see down the entire length.

"This," said Fat Bloke, "Looks about half as safe as a fucking Reliant Robin."

"What are you thinking, just cave it in or something?" Mackie asked, dubiously surveying the tunnel's props.

"I'm thinking collapse it and flood it," Fat Bloke told him. "Then go and meet the others."

"Aye, I'm thinking that's a good plan," Annie agreed. "Anyone got any explosives? How are we going to cave this in without dropping the ceiling on ourselves?"

"We're not needing to be caving it in," Mackie said. "We're just needing to be pulling that ladder up then be sticking that fire hose all the way down it, well, just be using enough of the hose to be getting a wee bit too high to be jumping up and grabbing, and be turning that on - the water jet should be washing shite out down there and that'll be bringing it down."

"Huh, that'd work too," said Fat Bloke.

"Aye, sounds like a plan, let's do it," Annie agreed, and they all went trooping back up the ladder this time with Nick leading and Mackie taking up the rear.

It was work of moments to haul the ladder up and out, and little longer to string the first ten feet of fire hose down the hole, then Nick went and got the Bigger Van backed out of the hole in the door and turned and, the van being out the way and the others in it, Mackie turned the hose on and came piling out the building and into the passenger seat.

"That'll do," he said, and Nick trod on the throttle.

It wasn't a long drive down to the harbour - turn left onto Longman Road then right onto Shore Street and follow the road round past the Harbourmaster's - to nobody's surprise the others had already gone in, the main warehouse door was a smoking hole, and almost continuous gunfire could be heard and muzzle flashes seen from within. Someone went cannonball jumping out of a top-floor window as they pulled up - the jumper landed face-first in the middle of the street, staggered to her feet, reeled round drunkenly just long enough for everyone in the vehicle who wasn't Fat Bloke to recognise her as the vampiress apparently named Candice, the one they'd thought they'd given a suntan, before she saw the Bigger Van and ran into an alley as if all the hounds of Hell were hot on her heels, screaming blue murder the whole way.

Mackie and Annie and Nick shared looks, shrugged in unison, and went piling out of the Bigger Van and into the warehouse, with Fat Bloke following along behind.

There was a shot-up and smouldering forklift parked just inside, with a slightly shook-up looking Val crouching in a position to keep it between her and the rest of the warehouse. The warehouse was lined with ceiling-height racks of the sort you'd stack pallets on - it was full of gunsmoke and lit by strobing muzzle flashes from multiple sources, the near-continuous gunfire interrupted by the occasional blood-curdling scream.

"Shit the bed, what's happening?" Annie shouted at Val.

"Fucking stay back, there's half a dozen fucking machine guns up in the racks," Val shouted back. "I dunno where that Vicky or fucking Captain Toff are, they went deeper in,"

A screaming vampire accompanied by a water-cooled Vickers machine gun - old enough it was loaded with a canvas ammo belt in the place of the more familiar disintegrating links - came sailing down from the pallet racks above the door and hit concrete with an audible splat. He was closely followed by Vicky, dropping on him in a floor-shaking elbow slam - she took his head off with a Fairbairn-Sykes knife, mudding him, then seemed to notice the others and sprang to her feet with a happy cry and there was no way in hell it was a coincidence that this took her out of the way of an arriving hail of machine-gun fire a heartbeat ahead of the first round in.

"Alright lads, welcome to the party!" she declared the moment whoever was firing let off, and with that she charged back into the cloud of smoke, shit, and bullets - two seconds later the gunfire stopped with a horrible scream that abruptly cut off.

"Fucking hell," said Annie Kelly.

Nick glanced at Mackie. Mackie shrugged, and headed into the warehouse; Nick followed him, Claymore bared.

They found McBangBang thoughtfully examining a large armoured door set into a partition wall splitting one half of the warehouse from the other. Vicky emerged from the cloud of smoke and dust, covered in mud and looking enormously pleased with hereself.

"All clear through this half," she said. "So what'll we do about this?" and she indicated the door.

Nick poked at the door, then nodded.

"This is just steel from the look of it," he said. "I've got a grinding disc for the rip-snorter that should go through it no bother."

"Might as well give it a go, aye," Mackie said with a nod, and Nick hurried back out to the Bigger Van - it didn't take minutes to swap blades in the big saw, and he was back in the warehouse with the metal-cutting disk in the thing right sharp, this time with Annie and Val bracketing him.

"I have to say I'm concerned that they'll have more heavy weapons set up inside there," Annie said as he was getting his goggles on.

"Only one way to find out. Stand back, this thing spits tiny bits of white-hot metal when it's cutting and that'd really be making a mess out of someone's eyes," Nick said, and pulled the saw's ripcord.

The door put up more resistance than he'd expected - the grinding disc, which he'd got for cutting the plate steel for the loadbed of the Bigger Van, had enough life left in it for the job but wasn't going to last much longer afterwards, whoever had put the thing together had stumped up for half-inch steel plate, they really hadn't been mucking about - but in the end the result was pretty much inevitable. He started at the top left, worked his way down, across the bottom, then up the right side and finally across the top, keeping it all angled so, as the last bit went, the entire centre of the door dropped the breadth of the cutting disk, hung there for a moment, then fell inwards with a rafter-rattling crash.

Nick, who had stepped smartly back and to one side, was very surprised at the marked absence of any hails of bullets.

"Well," said Mackie as Nick dumped the saw and recovered the sword. "We might as well,"

"Hold on a mo," Vicky said, holding up a brace of hand grenades that a moment of looking closer demonstrated to be flashbangs. She hooked her index fingers through the pins, pulled her hands apart removing both pins in the process, yelled, "Knock knock, fuckfaces!", and hurled both grenades through the doorway, immediately jamming her fingers in her ears - the others didn't need advised to follow suit.

The double-bang was about enough to lift you off your feet and left Nick's ears ringing even through having had his fingers in them - Vicky was through the hole in the door the instant her grenades had gone off, and this time Nick and Mackie were hard behind her.

As per Nick's expectation a mob of vampires had been laying in wait to jump them, one bunch each side of the door, and had got the benefit of the full flash and bang works. Nick went straight into the bunch to the left while Vicky piled into the bunch to the right and Mackie's trench gun started barking, seeming quiet after the flashbangs.

The fight, what of a fight it was, was over in moments and it didn't take Val, Vicky and Nick much longer to finish off the ones Mackie, McBangBang and Annie had shot, and then they started having a look around.

The warehouse half was set up as this mix of a throne room and a nightclub, with the warehouse's offices serving as a private area behind the throne. Finding the tunnel entrance didn't take long, all the doors between the throne room and it were standing open, it was off one of the offices and hooked up to a mains-powered pumping mechanism - this Nick wasted no time in turning off and, one sledgehammer later, making sure stayed turned off. They pulled the ladder up for good measure, and not long after that they started hearing swearing down below.

"Surprise, dickhead!" Vicky shouted down. "Having fun yet?"

"Fuck you whoever the fuck you are, you're gonna lower that ladder right now or I'm gonna find you and fuck you up," someone in the depths shouted back. Vicky shrugged, pulled a Mills bomb out of her coat, popped the pin out, and held it out over the shaft with the fly-handle held down.

"Got a present for ya - catch!" she declared, and dropped it.

The ground jumped, and a crack appeared in the back wall of the office as the tunnel down below them collapsed.

"Come on," she said. "I know where we can get a load of cement powder for nowt, let's go and dump a couple of dozen pallets of the stuff down each end of that tunnel."

"Oh for fuck sake," said Nick, recognising a jacket among the slew of mud on the floor.

"What?" said Mackie. Nick picked the muddy jacket up and showed it to him; he blinked and said, "Huh, that's looking familiar from somewhere,"

"Aye and it should," Nick said. "That's the coat that the bastard who stole my bike was wearing."

-/-/-/-/-/-

They concluded the evening's festivities by getting Vicky's concrete down the shaft - they left the fire hose running - then retired to the digs for a well-earned rest.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"This," said Annie, sounding a bit shook up, "Is even bigger than I was thinking."

The end of Thursday 26th's lectures having arrived, they'd retired to the Harbourmaster's - Fiona and the Wizards Three were ensconced in their booth up to their noses in paper and the rest of the gang had taken up residence in another booth with a bundle of documents Vrotch had finally remembered to give Annie: specifically, his list of known vampire hideouts. This they were now going through, ticking off those few - for few it was in relation to the whole - that they'd already visited.

The list was nearly seven hundred addresses long, from all up and down the north of Scotland, everywhere from Perth at the other end of the A9 up to a couple in Orkney, with over two hundred in Inverness alone, and Vrotch had emphatically stated that it wasn't exhaustive.

"It's a fucking plague," said Val.

"This is too big for us," said Mackie.

"Come off it you great teuchter," Annie declared. "We've already manage to do for thirty-seven lairs full of these idiots in a little over a fortnight, too big for us bollocks!"

"Annie's no wrong," said Nick. "Too big for us? The fuck happened to the hardest bastard on Loch Allen then Mackie?"

"Himself was walking into a bullet night afore last, and may have been thinking very hard about it ever since," Mackie said, pointing meaningfully at where he'd been shot Tuesday night. "This vampires stuff, we're fighting a war. No 'sort of like', no 'almost', actually fighting a war, and when all is said and done we're no the bloody Commandos, we're crofter's bairns with a few guns and the devil's own luck. Myself am having this sense it's only a matter of time before one of us is getting a sight worse than winged. We've been lucky so far. What happens when we're running out of luck?"

They lapsed into a grim silence that was broken by Fiona - pale and drawn and the mascara utterly failing to hide that she hadn't been sleeping - coming over to their table.

"We're ready to give it a go," she said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"The long and the short of it," said Vrotch with a sigh, "Is that we don't actually know how to open one of these Immaterium portals. What we have is a good idea of how to open a few other kinds of portal, which gives us some basic know-how, some idea of shortcuts such as the fact that it is always, always, always easier to reopen a portal than it is to open one that's never been there before, and some approaches to try."

"Thus our presence back here, I see," Annie said with a nod, thoughtfully contemplating the derelict control tower.

"Exactly. That said until we've tried, we're running on conjecture here: this is going to be trial and error stuff, and I do not realistically expect to get one up and running tonight," Vrotch said, and she nodded again.

"So what are you trying first?"

"Broadbase working to reignite a dormant portal," Vrotch said. "If the portal was not removed, instead just deactivated, and there's not a great chance of that, it should simply reopen it. From there, we're going to start the complicated stuff."

A 'broadbase working to reignite a dormant portal' swiftly proved to involve the quartet of magic users standing around the spot the portal had been and chanting at it in that same weird language Vrotch had used during his demonstration of 'actual magic'; throughout the chant a vague greenish glow developed around them, slowly contracting like the growth of a bubble in reverse, getting brighter as it went; the perimeter of it came through the walls about a minute in and continued to shrink inwards, getting brighter and brighter before, at the conclusion of the chant, vanishing with a pop. McBangBang immediately turned to his laptop, set up on top of the aluminium flight case he'd brought his equipment in and linked by cables to a couple of dozen guddles of electronics inside half a dozen tupperware tubs spaced around the scene of the portal; he shook his head.

"Not an inky hiccup," he declared. "We still just have the traces from the past portal, there was no fluctuation to speak of at any point during our relight attempt."

"Great success," said Fat Bloke with a nod. "Are we gonna give it another go?"

"Nah, no point," said Vrotch. "Didn't work try one, won't work try twun or try thrun."

"Okay, aye, sure it didn't work, what now?" Annie asked.

"Well we haven't got any sheep so we can't try any sacrifice-driven stuff, but there is a couple of things we can try right now," Fat Bloke told her. "Pass us the chalk and let me get a look at those portal traces, McBangBang, I wanna try a variant on a Bifrost call-down."

"A Bifrost call-down, that's never going to work," Fiona scoffed.

"If there's something you know about Immaterium portals that makes you certain of that how about sharing it," Fat Bloke immediately rebuked her, and went and started making a bunch of complex calculations on a slide rule of all things - this was the first time Nick had ever actually seen someone using one in real life - and scrawling notes on a scrap of paper while peering at the display of McBangBang's laptop. "Basically nobody, not even Heimdall, actually knows how Bifrost works - if anyone ever knew they're a long time dead, right - but I can tell you one thing for certain, calling a Bifrost portal down entails sending a 'request', for want of a better word, to a semi-intelligent construct at the Asgardr end - and given our knowledge of unspace that means we can send something similar there in case there's anything listening."

"Okay, yeah, we might as well give it a try with those patterns," Vrotch said and, Fiona muttering and grumbling, they proceeded to draw all over the floor in chalk then stand around chanting again: even less happened this time.

"Told you," said Fiona.

"No, you guessed. It turns out to have been a good guess, but it wasn't an actual prediction," Vrotch pointed out. "And don't start in on that 'I get good hunches' shite you're so keen on, I could name any number of times people I know who 'get good hunches' who've had a hunch something wasn't going to work and it worked."

"There's a couple of other combinations I want to try of basically that, then we're going to have to start looking for stuff to sacrifice," Fat Bloke said, and resumed playing with his slide rule, and the entire process repeated over with Fiona getting more and more miffed each time.

Finally, Fat Bloke shrugged and stowed his slide rule and said, "Okay, I'm out. Ideas we could try now anyone?"

"Nah, my simplest idea is going to involve killing sheep," Vrotch said with a shrug.

"I suppose we might as well pack it up for the night," Fiona said with a forlorn sigh, and they started collecting the sea of notes they'd spread round the floor of the old control tower during the prior festivities.

They were about halfway through the clear-up when McBangBang, on squatting down to start disassembling his electronics and presumably stow it all back in the aluminium flight case his laptop was currently perched upon, frowned and said, "Hello, what's this?"

"What's what?" Vrotch asked, looking up from where he'd been scrubbing out chalk marks with his shoe.

"I'm picking up dimensional activity, old sock," said McBangBang with a frown. "Not from this location, mind - I can give you a direction though I'd have to triangulate to get a location - but from the strength of the readings it can't be further than about five miles."

"Let me see," said Fat Bloke, hurrying over; the two of them spent several moments peering fixedly at the screen and then he added, "Huh."

"I'm not familiar with that amplitude," McBangBang said. "Ideas, anyone?"

"Well we know that Isobel Mackenzie is no exactly the only mage in the area, though that said the timing is interesting," said Vrotch.

"Can't say that means anything to me," Fiona said, having a peer over McBangBang's shoulder.

"Yes well, I did after all have to invent a system of computerised visualisation of dimensional activity signals out of whole cloth, so to speak," McBangBang said with a shrug. "The colour represents the frequency, the line the wattage."

"I see," Fiona said. "Huh - oh, aye, I get it... Aye, that is odd, isn't it."

"Can't say I've ever seen anything like it," McBangBang said with a shrug. "Though with the low wattage it'd be lost in background clutter from as much as fifteen, twenty miles away I'd say.

"That's it, it's gone," said Vrotch.

"Well, that was interesting. Shame we weren't able to triangulate it," said Fat Bloke.

"Maybe we should set up sensors in several fixed locations," Vrotch said. "I can definitely have a setup like this running permanently at my place."

"Good idea, let's plan that out later, a nice cup of tea seems the best plan for the moment," McBangBang said with a sigh, and closed the laptop.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"I'm not sure," said Annie Kelly as they trooped back into the digs, "Whether that was enlightening, weird, weirdly enlightening, or enlighteningly weird."

"Myself would be using the term 'hilariously inconclusive'," Mackie said. "Myself am still no sure this 'Vrotch' bugger's no leading ourselves up the garden path."

"Well if you kent Vrotch better you wouldnae worry too much about that," said Fiona. "I can't say I've ever heard a lie out of himself, the man's got a knee-jerk reaction to folks being dishonest as a result of which he react to folks asking questions about stuff he wants or needs kept private, or things he's been told in confidence, by flat out saying he won't be answering that."

"I didn't realise you knew him well enough to say that," said Val.

Fiona snorted.

"I spent three months living on his settee just after Catherine was killed," she said, turning off the stairs onto their floor. "I know him pretty bloody-"

And that was when Fiona stopped dead in her tracks, verbally and physically, so abruptly that Val had to stop just as abruptly to avoid walking into her, which proved abrupt enough Annie stepped on Val's heels in the process of stopping, and would have got her heels in turn stepped on by Mackie if they hadn't been high, instead nearly getting her feet kicked out of under her, and Nick proceeded to step on Mackie's heels, and after a few moments flailing around to avoid ending up in a heap in the floor they all realised that Fiona was rooted to the spot and staring blankly at her dorm room door.

The why took several moments for the others to start comprehending: specifically, there was light coming out of under it.

Fiona, with a very deliberate air, withdrew her key from wherever she'd hidden it in her bodice, and used it to slowly and just as deliberately unlock the door.

She stared at it for several seconds then kicked it open with her guns out and immediately proved them as drop-safe as any firearm ever is when she once again stopped dead in her tracks and went swaying back like she was about to drop in a dead faint and her arms went slack beside her and the revolvers went rattling across the floor.

Nick started pushing past her, hand on the hilt of his Claymore, only to stop and relax as he saw who was sitting on one of the beds and giving him, or maybe Fiona, a startled look.

"Well now," he said. "You were having us all a wee bittie,"

"Alice Liddell you'd better have a bloody good explanation where the Hell you've been you absolute bitch, by Christ I thought you'd been killed!" Fiona screamed, then hurled herself at Alice in what could only be described as a ballistic hug that ended with an even more visibly startled Alice knocked completely flat on the bed with Fiona on top of her, face buried in her jersey and bawling her eyes out, all of which caused Alice to emit a sound that sounded very much like, "!"

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Oh for Christ sake you bunch of blithering idiots," Alice declared nearly ten minutes into (And having utterly run out of patience for) Fiona's rant about how dangerous 'messing about in unknown dimensions' was and Annie's lecture about how dangerous 'running off by yourself' was and Val's sarcastic remarks about 'trying to get yourself killed', pushing Fiona off. "Don't you realise what that place represents?" and that silenced the others - all bar Nick, who had spent the interim leaning on the doorframe with a thoughtful look on his face and letting the girls get it out of their system.

"You're thinking it's that 'Unspace' placie Brigid said Grace was mentioning," he said. "And that makes it and more importantly kenning what makes it tick your best crack at getting home, doesnae it."

"Exactly," Alice confirmed with a nod; she turned back to Fiona. "Look… Fiona, I'm not just a complete stranger here, I'm an alien. This is not my world, I don't belong here and quite frankly it scares the living shit out of me - vampires and wizards and atomic-propelled spaceships ye Gods - it's not anything to do with you lot, in fact you're about the only real saving graces in all this, but regardless of all that what do you think it's like having your friends, your family, everyone and everything you've ever know in another universe? I'm still half-convinced I'm really just some girl from here who went crazy, it doesn't matter how dangerous that place may or may not be, until I'm absolutely one hundred percent convinced it's not my ticket home I'll be investigating it no matter what you or anyone else have to say about the matter."

"She's no wrong, Fiona," said Mackie Romanov. "And anyway for Christ sake, we've been starting a private war with the living dead and you're wanting to be on about dangerous?"

"No, you don't understand," Fiona declared, shooting to her feet. "It's no just that, it's - don't you remember what Vrotch said about how dangerous learning magic is?"

"Alice wasn't there for that conversation," Nick pointed out.

"Oh Christ, that she wasnae - look, Alice, the thing is, the thing is that manipulating the Immaterium is very directly a form of actual spellcasting complete with the need to actually draw the power we call magic through yourself - and basically the easiest thing to do with magic is set fire to things and the easiest thing to do magic to is your own brain, maybe one in a hundred would-be mages doesn't do for themselves with a zero-range fireball in the middle of their own frontal lobes and I'm absolutely bloody terrified if you actually get that far in the learning this stuff thing,"

"It's a bit late to be worried about that," said a completely unexpected North London accented voice, and everyone whirled round to find an equally unexpected fat bearded bespectacled man in a beat-up check shirt and jeans standing on the threshold of the room.

"… what? Wait, what the hell, Fat Bloke, what are you doing here," Fiona started.

"I had one of my hunches, about her," the man said with a shrug, indicating Alice. "That unexpected transdimensional activity McBangBang's contraptions sensed when we were packing up, something about that seemed familiar and I got this feeling it was our missing girl doing something about being missing from the other end and I didn't want to say anything because what if I was wrong but I was right! Hello, you'd be the famous Alice who managed to get lost in the Immaterium - we haven't been introduced, I'm Fat Bloke, basically Fiona talked to Vrotch, I think you'd met him in passing hadn't you? Anyway Vrotch doesn't know a buggering thing about the Immaterium or portal physics, so he got onto me and McBangBang - who surprised me by turning out not to be a girl in meatspace - because unlike Vrotch we've actually got some practical experience with portals and so on. Any rate Fiona, it's entirely a moot point at this point - she's got more magic running through her than you do by a wide margin."

"… What makes you say that?" asked an instantly both worried and in fact rather frightened Fiona.

"My glasses are magic, simple bit of boundary effect manipulation," Fat Bloke said with another shrug. "Honestly though I don't think we need to be too concerned, I'll bet you opened a portal earlier this evening while we were dicking around on that old airbase, right Alice? That means she's already actively spellcasting, Fiona, she can't not be actively spellcasting if she's managed to open a portal."

"You're saying," said Alice, "I'm some kind of freaking wizard,"

"Well not so much, you're some kind of freaking mage," Fat Bloke told her, then caught her expression. "Okay basically there are three known kinds of magic user, right? Wizards, witches, and mages. Respectively, passive, semi-passive, and active, users of magic. A wizard uses enchanted artefacts such as Mackie here's shotgun; they may be able to make enchanted artefacts using boundary effect manipulation and the likes, but they don't actually draw any magical power themselves, thus, passive use of magic, so no, basically your mates are the wizards. A mage is someone who actually directly draws and manipulates magical energy, active use of magic, like I do, like Vrotch does, like you did when you got out of the Immaterium. Well, and there's a possible fourth type that theoretically could exist that actually produces magic out of buggering nowhere but we've never even heard rumours of one in real life."

"What about a witch?" Alice asked.

"Well, a witch gets their magic from someone else," Fat Bloke told her, and she couldn't help but notice that he glanced at Fiona. "They're, uh, basically they're someone's living magical tool. They don't actively gather it but they do actively use it, meaning unlike us mages they don't need to worry too much about head explosions."

"I see," Alice said. "So I'm a mage. Great. What's that mean?"

"That means amongst other things basically at this moment in time it's probably really best if we make sure you learn enough you won't be accidentally killing yourself," Fat Bloke told her. "Which is what it sounds like: this is an open offer of teaching, right? It's really best if you get taught instead of learning everything through trial and error the way we did - there's all too much of the error part usually turns out to be fatal."

"I see," said Alice.

"Anyway, there's also the question of however you got out,"

"I worked out how to get a portal to open, yes," Alice told him. "It's… shit, how do you explain… basically uh, imagine you're in the Immaterium, right, you can make unspace do stuff by wanting it to do that stuff hard enough, right?"

"Right, the whole shaping it by force of will," Fat Bloke said with a nod.

"I got to thinking about something Nick said a few weeks back - you remember that conversation the day after I had my meltdown Nick? That whole thing with there being power to thresholds and boundaries and edges and so on? Basically how it works is you establish a threshold - by the way Nick, I can actively feel that power you were talking about, it's not so much that they have power as power sort of ripples, for want of a better word, along them - then you, uh, you add more power, I mean a lot more power, like a seriously absolute crapload of power, and, basically, turn the threshold inside out? I'm not describing it very well, but that's about the best term for it I can find."

Fat Bloke raised a finger, opened his mouth, frowned, closed his mouth, and lowered his finger.

"I'd like to see that," he said.

"I haven't tried opening one from this side yet," Alice told him; he nodded.

"How hard would it be to turn a threshold inside out in realspace?" he asked. "I'll bet it wouldn't be as easy as from the Immaterium side."

"Um, I'm really not sure but it shouldn't be too difficult, I mean you don't physically turn the threshold inside out, you do it with the ripple of power," Alice told him.

He spent several moments frowning, and then said, "Huh - this is really very interesting stuff. Hey, is your portal, the one you opened to get out, still there?"

"Yeah, it's in the basement bit of the house where we found Andy, I wasn't going to exactly close it when I don't know for sure if I can open it again from here was I?"

"Cool… Okay, so anyway I need to phone Vrotch and McBangBang, let them know what's happening, then can we go and have a look?"

"Well, I don't see why not," Alice said.

"I've got a suggestion, Alice," said Annie Kelly.

"Oh yeah, like what?" Alice asked.

"Can you move your portal?" Annie asked.

"Yeah, it's easy enough - you can get the two ends to move about separately from each other, it's not too complicated," Alice said.

"Can you change what size it is?" Annie asked.

"Easily enough, yes," Alice said.

"All of that from either end?" Annie asked.

"Yes, it doesn't make any real difference," Alice said. "I can feel it in the back of my mind right now."

"Then you can hide it inside a light bulb," Annie said. "Maybe a fridge light or something, nobody's going to be looking for a weird glowing thing inside something that they're expecting to be lit anyway."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well," said Nick Macbane as he stood just inside Alice's portal and admired the view, "You've been a busy lass then, haven't you."

The portal came out into a large flat square clear sort of area, all paved and surrounded by crenelations - there were pointy-roofed castle turrets at the corners and a random small stubby round tower sort of an affair stuck up near to one side. Several more towers in that same pointy-roofed style stuck up here and there alongside.

"Well it sort of started as somewhere to stand on after that island vanished when the portal closed, which became the roof, it started right about where we're standing, then, uh, kind of grew, well, grew downwards from there," Alice told him. "I'm probably going to take it apart and start over at some point, there's so much of it I did stupidly because there wasn't a plan that it'd be easier to start from the very beginning, and anyway I've pretty well scratched the whole giant fairytale princess castle itch at this point."

Annie snorted but didn't say anything.

"So you can literally just think hard at it and stuff, well, happens, right?" said Fat Bloke, who was minutely examining the rim of the portal. He'd phoned both his fellow mages on his mobile while they were walking over to the abandoned house the portal's realspace end currently sat in the basement of.

"I suppose that's as good a way of phrasing it as anything. Watch," Alice told him, and spent a moment concentrating very hard, carefully envisaging every detail of what she wanted, and a moment later a rocking chair matching how she remembered her grandmother's one was sitting on the castle rooftop.

"Huh, that's really very interesting - the ambient magic sort of pulsed around you when you did that, and I don't mean the same way it pulses when someone casts a more conventional spell or the way it pulses when someone uses an enchanted object or, for that matter, the boundary effect ripple, or maybe, hang on," and Fat Bloke said something weird and percussive-sounding - the whole world jolted and a ball of fire went roaring off of his fingers and away into the void.

"Huh, now that is cool," he continued. "The pulse from spellcasting propagates far, far more swiftly here than it does in meatspace - uh, basically in meatspace it propagates at lightspeed - of course I've got nothing but conjecture about what we're actually seeing, but my guess is magic interacts with whatever this stuff you thought into existence is - unmatter? - in a very different way to how it interacts with matter or things like spiritstuff… Anyway, that offer of training, how about it?"

"I don't know," Alice said with a sigh. "Let me sleep on it, my head is up my arse at the moment."

-/-/-/-/-/-