-/-/-/-/-/-

On the Friday morning Nick decided to ride his as-yet skeletal motorcycle down to the college despite its lacking lots of significant things such as any more seat than a pillow duct taped to the top of the frame, exhaust pipes, lights, mudguards, front brake, speedometer, actual clutch lever instead of a pair of mole grips clamped to the end of the clutch cable, numberplate, etc etc etc.

This left Alice to pilot the Albon (with the trailer hooked up to it and Silent, still wearing her wrist plank but with the chain replaced by a common-or-garden lead, camped out in the back while Fiona rode shotgun) while Annie brought her trailer full of stuff like Nick and Mackie's fridge behind her pickup - Mackie joined Nick on the bikes for the morning - and to Alice's surprise the Albion proved much harder to drive than the Bigger Van mostly, Nick said when she asked, because it didn't have power steering.

From there with the morning's lectures done with they loaded the bikes onto the big trailer and hit the road headed north with Alice now driving the Bigger Van (which they'd loaded with all Fiona's stuff and Alice's portal) and Nick the Albion with Mackie riding shotgun, and as they drove Alice started noticing something odd; the drivers of oncoming traffic were taking great pains to avoid looking at her, to the point that as they were leaving Dingwall having dropped Fiona and her stuff off one gentleman nearly put his car into the ditch.

They stuck on the main road north past where, a few weeks prior, they'd turned onto it near Tain, winding their way north along Scotland's east coast - beyond Tain Alice started seeing increasing numbers of armoured and or armed vehicle without numberplates on, the occupants of which grinned and enthusiastically waved at her - the terrain flattened out more and more as they headed further and further towards mainland Britain's northernmost point, and they eventually arrived in Scrabster not far from (and realistically more or less part of) Thurso with most of an hour to spare before the day's last ferry trip to Kirkwall would start taking on vehicles - the ferry hadn't yet arrived at the terminal, so they parked the vehicles in the queue, Annie bought tickets, and they ducked into a nearby shop to get something to drink.

The ferry - a big enough vessel it was only fair to call it a ship, Alice later learned it was originally designed to land tanks on a beach while being shot at and had been through three different sets of hands on three different continents after having seen (and been built for) military use in the American invasion of Japan, with the upper decks (in which passengers were required to ride while at sea) a post-war addition - arrived and they boarded; they left the crew strapping the Bigger Van down (and not one member of the ferry's crew had looked directly at Alice in the course of getting the Bigger Van situated) and headed up to the saloon deck with their laptops in tow, briefly leaving Nick to discuss his 'hazardous cargo' (IE his gas welding gear's oxygen and acetylene tanks) with the crew; he rejoined them right as the ferry was backing off of the dock.

They'd all grabbed jackets when leaving their vehicles, and stuck them on and went out on deck to admire the view - it was clear if overcast with a stiff breeze making for perishing bloody cold. The ferry was busy with most of Inverness College's population of Orkney natives onboard in addition to usual traffic, but the trip passed without incident and soon enough they were walking into a chip shop in Kirkwall, in the tight narrow stone-paved section close to the cathedral that the town used for a high street, to get a bite to eat.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Having spent the night camped out in Alice's corner of unspace (this was somewhat less onerous that it might sound; Alice simply turned four of the until-then empty rooms in her ersatz airship into bedrooms even while explaining to a highly amused Nick, who had asked, that the reason her bit of unspace was now an airship flying above clouds was because since her guardian had turned out to be a post-apocalyptic steampunk airship pirate catgirl she should really have a pirate airship to live aboard and besides, she unaashamedly explained, airships made her happy) with the vehicles parked in a random layby not far from Kirkwall, they spent Saturday morning doing the touristy bit, checking out the sights around Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, with the highlight of it a walk into the chambered tomb called Maes Howe, and then Alice having plucked up the courage they went and knocked on the low door of the lonely blackhouse, rounded-ended and low-laying with a thatch roof and central chimney, that stood on the spur of land between two freshwater lochs that was the Ness of Brodgar.

After a moment the door was answered by a little old man who walked with a bit of a stoop but even still had to duck under the old building's doorsill - the door was on the low side of five feet high. He had wispy white hair and a splendid beard that made him look rather like Santa, and was clad in corduroy trousers and a check shirt.

Looking surprised he said, "Well hello there, and what bring you lads and lasses to my door today?" in a perfect Orcadian accent that only a couple of months ago Alice would have been unable to distinguish from the (when you know it very different) Gaelic accent the Loch Allen trio spoke in.

"Hello," Annie, who'd been unofficially elected spokeswoman for the affair, said. "I'm awfully sorry to bother you, but my friend here," and she indicated Alice, "Is studying archaeology, and she says that there's something funny about the shape of the land here."

"Archaeology, aye?" the old man said with a nod. "Well Orkney's nae a bad place to be looking at that, it'd be hard to dig up a square yard of Orkney without finding something an archaeologist would be liking a wee look at. Och, but where's my manners, my name's Malcolm Laing,"

"Annie Kelly," Annie said, accepting the handshake. "This is Nick Macbane; Mackie Romanov; and Alice Liddell."

"Well," said old Malcolm with a nod, having shaken hands with everyone, "I suppose you'd better come in for a cup of tea and you," and he nodded to Alice, "Can tell me what's odd about the shape of my croft - mind your heads there, now."

As with Grace's house the extremely low front door led into a much roomier interior than it felt like it should; even Mackie could stand fully upright once they were inside. The interior was separated out by multiple partitions that looked to have been made using salvaged wood, shared the same sloping floors and dearth of straight lines as Grace's house, and just like the morning Alice had come round the air was heavy with the earthy smell of peat smoke.

Malcolm ushered them left through the cramped porch and into what he used for a living room - like the whole house this was small and dark and completely lacked windows. It was lined with wood panels that looked to have at one time been the sides of packing cases, themselves covered in a mixture of guns on hooks and framed black-and-white photographs of lighthouses, lifeboats, weatherbeaten seamen, and a series of photographs of what it was quickly possible to discern was Malcolm's family as the man in them all got older and more recognisably him, and illuminated by a single smoky oil lamp and the peats burning in the fireplace. One end of the room was taken up with a dining table and a couple of overstuffed bookshelves - the oil lamp sat on this dining table - with a couple of attendant straight-backed wooden chairs, the other was full of a half-circle of overstuffed old red leather sofas, the sort you'd expect to find in a country pub, round the fire with a low table between them; the kitchen was a sort of leg off of the living room with a small solid-fuel stove and a slightly beat-up old tin sink that appeared to be fed from a pair of old 40-gallon drums hung from the rafters. There was no sign of anything electrical in the entire living room and quite how water got up to the drums was not apparent.

The old man sat them down, put the kettle on, got out a tin of biscuits, and once the kettle had boiled and everyone was holding a cup of tea and he'd refrained from bustling about, sat down to hear what Alice had to say.

-/-/-/-/-/-

It quickly became clear that there was not, in fact, anything whatsoever odd about the shape of Malcolm Laing's croft and in Annie Kelly's educated opinion it was downright painful listening to Alice trying to articulate why she was interested in that particular spur of land without coming out and saying 'I'm from another universe and there's something here where I'm from.'

However, the stumbling and total failure to articulate had an effect totally contrary to what most would expect; as Alice continued tripping over herself and failing to adequately express anything of meaning the old man's expression became more and more thoughtful and, in all honesty, interested, before finally, once they'd finished their tea, he said, "Well," and he nodded to Nick and Mackie. "I've spades to hand, and these two young lads look like they've strong backs. Let's go out into the field and have a wee bit of a dig about, and we'll see what we can see."

The boys having been armed with spades from the non-house half of the house - if one were to turn right immediately on coming in the door one would find oneself in an unlined almost barn-like area containing a couple of cattle stalls, a sheep pen, a stack of bales of hay, a larger stack of peats, a wild array of tools, and an old outboard motor hanging from the rafters - Annie and the old man followed Alice and the boys out onto the field - there really wasn't anything that stood out about it, it just looked like a flat-topped spur of land jammed between two lochs including in the aerial photos Alice had pulled up on her laptop while failing to explain herself - but all that changed as soon as the boys started digging, observed with a detached air by a pair of small very hairy black cows.

The shallow trench the boys dug, right up the centre of the field westwards starting a few feet from the fence line and a stone's throw from Malcolm Laing's front door, quickly hit paydirt: Nick's spade hit rock under barely a foot of Orcadian soil perhaps ten feet from the fence, and as he and Mackie turned back the turf it quickly became clear that Alice was dead on the money.

The wall they'd hit was thick, extraordinarily so - about twelve feet of stone in all, and as Mackie followed it down on its eastwards side it proved to be much taller than anything Annie had expected to see, finally hitting bottom a good three feet down, and old Malcolm said, "Well," and fished a clay pipe and a leather pouch of tobacco out of his coat.

He and Annie stood and watched, Malcolm smoking his pipe and Annie thinking very fast, as Alice and the boys kept going, exposing more and more stonework to the air - they had exposed a patch of wall perhaps ten feet long when Annie said, "That's not a blackhouse, is it."

"No," Malcolm said, puffing on his pipe. He gave Annie a measuring look out of the corner of his eyes. "Or at least I cannae say that I've ever seen walls that thick on a blackhouse, even a broch hasn't walls nearly that thick - I couldna say what that was and I can't think of even old stories of there being buildings there, and my family had been biding here for a long time when the earliest records began."

Annie nodded. From what Alice had said, it was no wonder there weren't even old stories about buildings there; this was the first time those stones had seen daylight in over four thousand years.

"She's got the sight, hasn't she," Malcolm said. Though phrased as a question, it was said as a statement.

"Hmm?" Annie asked, jerked out of her thoughts.

"Your friend there," the old man said, pointing at Alice with the stem of his pipe. "She's got the sight, hasn't she."

"... You know I can't say that I know, but it does fit, doesn't it," Annie said, realising it as she spoke, and come to think of it with the entire necromancy thing even if she didn't she had something that'd work as a pretty good stand-in for it; they lapsed back into silence, Malcolm puffing away on his pipe and Annie considering the girl from another world.

"Well," Malcolm eventually said, and began carefully tapping his pipe out, "Perhaps I should be getting onto the telephone and giving the museum in Kirkwall a wee call."

"This isn't going to get you evicted, is it?" Annie asked.

"Thanyou for your concern, lass, but I'm one of the fortunate few," Malcolm told her with a dry chuckle and a shake of his head. "My grandfather lived to see me putting the tile deeds to the croft on what was at that time his kitchen table - buying my forefathers' land left me all but penniless even with how well paid we were in the Merchant Navy, but it was worth every last shilling, and I have my own peat, my own mutton, my own eggs, my own milk, my own tatties, I even have my own tobacco growing in the greenhouse behind the house and by Christ lass will you look at that view right outside my own front door, I have everything that I could ask for right here - the only thing I've wanted for since my wife passed away was a little company," and to Annie's mind if the ruin was anything like what Alice claimed it was he would soon have no shortage of that. "No, lass, when all is said and done you're speaking to the wealthiest old crofter in the north, for all that the bankers wouldn't be telling you that."

-/-/-/-/-/-

A little over an hour later, a spotlessly clean blue Morris estate car pulled up beside the vans on old Malcolm's driveway and disgorged a gentleman who looked precisely like one would expect a professor of archaeology to look; tweed, spectacles, bald top, sideburns - and he paused and developed a very thoughtful look the moment he laid eyes on the formerly-buried stonework.

"Oh I say," he declared in a very English and in all honesty rather plummy accent, and resumed moving, hastening over to the fence. "Mr Laing? That's quite the intriguing find you have there, old sock, Mr Phillips rather undersold it."

"Och, it's no my find," the old man said with a smile, letting the younger man through the gate. "Miss Liddell here," and he indicated Alice, "Has found it, for all that it happens to be on my land."

"Ah yes, the lady of the hour, Mr Phillips said something about that," and the man from the museum offered Alice a handshake, which she accepted. "Doctor Adrian Smythe,"

"I'm Alice Liddell," Alice told him. "This is Annie Kelly; Nick Macbane; and Mackie Romanov."

"My pleasure. Now, I have a ground-penetrating radar system in the car, let's see what else there is to be seen down there."

This equipment proved to be four units; a three-wheeled contraption with a handle, vaguely reminiscent of an upright vacuum cleaner, and a laptop connected to the third and fourth parts, a pair of Tupperware tubs full of electronics, by a cable. These, Dr Smythe explained, were wirelessly networked; as the ground-penetrating radar itself was rolled along, what it 'saw' was displayed on the laptop screen, with the antenna in the laptop and those in the two tubs stretched out at the ends of their five-yard-long cables allowing the whole setup to know exactly where the wheeled unit was in relation to the laptop at any given moment.

Mackie volunteered to push the radar unit, and the rest of them crowded round the laptop as he traipsed back and forth across the field - and as he went, Dr Smythe's air of vaguely detached interest started to give way to suppressed excitement.

"Good lord," he finally said, "The scale of this..."

"I take it that it's quite something then, aye?" Malcolm asked.

"Oh rather! It's starting to look very much like much of this peninsula is in and of itself a mound of ancient ruins and rubbish dumps, and let me tell you nothing gets a fellow in my line of work rubbing his hands together like some long-dead someone's rubbish," said Smythe with evident satisfaction. "Being entirely certain would require a rather more comprehensive geosurvey, most likely followed by a number of exploratory digs, but if what we're seeing is anything like it seems? I've never seen anything like it, Miss Liddell, you would appear to have found quite a way to commence your career as an antiquarian! What in the world tipped you off to it?"

"I had a hunch," Alice said.

"A hunch?" said Smythe, startled.

"Yeah, there's just - something, about the land here," and Alice made a vague gesture.

"Well I must say if this is the quality of your hunches I'd appreciate a little heads-up whenever you get a feeling there's 'something about' a piece of land," Smythe told her with a smile. "As it stands, I have a sense everyone here is soon to become quite famous within the archaeological community."

"This is that big a deal?" Annie asked, clearly surprised.

"This," said Smythe, "Would appear to be at least as extensive as Skara Brae if not more so, and that wall, my God! I've never seen a structure so massive anywhere in Orkney, we shall have to undertake a full-scale geological survey of this entire spur of land - with your permission of course, Mr Laing - in fact I expect that doing so shall shoot right to the top of our plans for the coming months the very moment my colleagues get a look at the data we've so far collected, I shall be up to my eyeballs seeing if I might put a date to what you so far have uncovered no later than tonight. If we're looking at what I suspect we're looking at..." and as he shook his head his facade collapsed completely and just how very excited he was became clear.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The Bigger Van's engine finally clattered into silence, and Alice let out a sigh, fished the keys out, and climbed out and down into the Macbane's barnyard, ignoring the inquiring bleats of Pestface the sheep.

They'd caught the last ferry to the mainland on Saturday night but the boys were dog tired and Alice hadn't been far behind them - enough so she'd been getting wary about how safe she'd be to drive - so while Annie had pushed on and, according to the phone call Nick had made when they got up, got home at around half past midnight, Nick, Mackie and Alice, along with Nick's catgirl, had spent the night sleeping in Alice's corner of unspace again, then they'd got on the road and headed for home, arriving at the croft at a little after lunchtime, where they found themselves met by Elf and an annoyed Brigid, who was just making to complain bitterly about whatever had annoyed her when Nick, who'd swung out the van first, reached back in and helped Silent down.

Brigid opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, earning her a searching look from the catgirl, and eventually arrived at, "Why's her hands through a plank?"

"She scratches," said Nick.

"Nick," Elf declared, stomping over and making to snatch Silent's lead out of his hand, "That's unnecessary and cruel, and- FUCK ME!" and she very abruptly reversed course as, as he had warned, the catgirl scratched.

This ripped the sleeve of Elf's jersey open nearly from elbow to wrist and left three deep gouges in the back of her arm, about which she swore loudly and at great length.

Alice rolled her eyes and got the first aid kit out of the Bigger Van's door pocket.

"He bloody well warned you," she told Elf.

"Scratches isn't a strong enough word for it, bloody hell," said Elf, admiring the neatly-spaced set of three bloody gashes, each a foot long. "Jesus, Nick! She part-wildcat or something?"

"Or something," said Nick with a nod, pulling the catgirl out of behind him where she'd withdrawn to immediately after lashing out at Elf; he judiciously shortened the amount of lead he was allowing her. "Look, as far as we can work out she's been through some pretty ugly stuff and she's only just started not cowering when people walk in the room, don't bloody grab at her like that. She does a really thorough job of scratching when something freaks her out."

"So I see. Fuck!" and Elf swore again in reaction to the syn-skin Alice had just sprayed onto the gouges in her arm. "Fuck I hate that stuff, stings like nobody's business."

"Well you shouldn't go trying to grab the traumatised catgirl then, should you," Alice said.

"Probably the best idea, aye," Elf said with a sigh. "Okay, so how in the hell did you lot come back from college with a traumatised pet catgirl with insanely sharp claws and an, um, giant incredibly rusty armoured lorry van thing?"

"We started hunting vampires for a hobby and one thing led to another," Nick told her.

The resulting expression was an absolute picture, and Nick's satisfaction at actually managing to catch his elder sister flat-footed for the first time in his life was palpable.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Nick Macbane had a lot on his mind as he walked downstairs.

Having got Mackie and that of his stuff that he expected to use during the break home, his own stuff that he expected to use during the break dug out of the van, and Silent situated in his bedroom, he had a couple of things to discuss in private with his elder sister, who was still in the kitchen/living room, sat in front of the Rayburn with a book, and conveniently enough nobody else was about; their parents and Nat and Neil were out getting the sheep in off the hill in preparation for the gale that was due in a couple of days, Brigid was pestering Alice, and this was his chance to run a few things past his elder and much more knowledgeable (even if getting said knowledge out of her tended to be like getting milk out of a duck) sister.

"Couple of things have come up I want your input on," he said as soon as he'd entered the kitchen and ascertained that she was still there.

Elf made a hang-on noise, continued reading for several long moments, then marked her place and set her book down.

"Okay," she said. "Like what?"

"Well, first off there's Alice," he said.

Elf frowned. "What's wrong with her? No, what's new and wrong with her?"

"You mean apart from this entire 'unspace' thing about which I don't even know where to begin," Nick started, then sharply shook his head. "She seemed to have really found her balance again in the aftermath of that, maybe even because of that, this whole thing with her learning actual honest-to-god magic," and he would treasure the look of surprise he got for a long time, "Has done her some real good even despite how badly that entire learning how close she'd come to exploding her own head shook her up, any rate she's found her balance again and I'm nae sure she'd still need that ban on her bed, then we're back to the college the next Monday and she takes an absolute punk, I can only think of a couple of times I've seen anything like it and one of them was Grace when the Navy tried to throw Big Murdo off of his land, she was absolutely livid and she's been angry since and she's still not right and I haven't a clue what it's about."

"I see," Elf said with a frown. "Okay, I'll see if I can find out what's going on there."

"Thanks sis."

"What was the other thing?"

Nick spent a moment thinking how to phrase that, and then said, "I need to know how to unbind a witch," and that really got his sister's attention.

"Nick, what the hell have you got yourself into?"

"Ever heard of a woman called Isobel Mackenzie? A friend of ours - Alice's roommate at the college in fact - turns out to be one of her witches,"

"Oh Nick, Mackenzie's really bad news, you should stay away from anything to do with her,"

"Fiona's a friend, Elf. We need to get her un-involved with Mackenzie and the sooner the better."

"I... don't have any good news about that," Elf told him. "The only way of unbinding a witch I know of is, well, basically you kill the witch. That or you kill the witch's master, and a hell of a lot of people have tried and failed to kill Isobel Mackenzie over the years."

"I'd heard as much," said Nick with a grim nod, "But I had to be checking."

"... You're not going to actually kill this girl are you, Nick?"

"Don't be daft, of course I'm bloody not - and no just because Fiona's a friend either."

"I thought so," said Elf with a grim nod of her own. "But I had to be checking... Any rate, far as Alice goes I think we should be keeping her busy still."

"Aye, I think that'd be the best plan," said Nick. "Guess it'll be a full week of gallivanting then and I'll no be getting much sea time in after all,"

"Well for one thing none of us'll be getting much sea time with the gale due to hit us the day after tomorrow and I don't think we'll be doing a lot of gallivanting either," said Elf. "I'm wanting to take an early start tomorrow, get as many of the creels out of the water as we can, just got the north shore of the loch left to lift - it's supposed to be a bloody wild one, we're forecast for gusts off the top of the bloody Beaufort scale Tuesday night and by the sound of things even the gulls will be staying at home until Thursday, maybe even Friday."

"Guess we may as well see if Alice is fancying a day on the boat the morrow then," said Nick. "And I guess we'll just play it by ear the rest of the week."

"Aye, that was what I was thinking," said Elf with a nod.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The Vigra put to sea at the crack of dawn on Monday 28th with more people in her roomy wheelhouse than normal. All five of the Macbane siblings were aboard instead of the usual three, and so was Alice Liddell.

The Vigra was one of the loch's largest crab boats, right at the upper limit of what was reasonable to use to work creels - the Macbanes used her for a mix of inshore stuff (though they couldn't get in nearly as tight as the smaller boats like the Walrus or the Chalice) and deep-water lobster. They began the day working along the loch's northern shore, westwards from Inverallen bay towards Lochinver, with the plan being to cross the mouth of the loch to the cluster of islands centred on Eilen Shea and Eilen na Uilbheast to empty and load onboard fleets of creels round the outer side of the islands before carrying on to the southern shore of the loch, but all that fell by the wayside three fleets of creels (and a couple of dozen brown crabs and one lobster) in, as they were setting up to catch the leading buoy of the fourth fleet of creels - Alice was down on the foredecks watching Nick line up to snag the buoy with a boathook and considering how surprised she'd been to learn that a live lobster is a lovely dark blue, when Elf, up in the wheelhouse, suddenly banged the engine wide open and hauled the helm across, peeling the boat off away from the shore and the buoy.

"What the," said Nick.

He and Neil glanced at each other as the boat surged forwards, then hurried for the wheelhouse; Alice came out from behind the stack of fishboxes where she'd been keeping out of the way, and followed the boys through the deck shelter.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"I don't know," and Nick went scrambling up the steps to the bridge. "Elf? Hey, Elf, are you okay?"

"Aye, but someone isnae," Elf replied - everything became a lot quieter as the door closed behind Alice, shutting out a part of the engine's roar. "The Walrus just put out a call on guard, Struan Flint's saying he's found a cabin cruiser hard aground in the narrows between Eilen Shea and Eilen na Uilbheast, there's no any sign of the crew and the liferaft is gone and with that gale bearing down on us..." and she shook her head. "If there's anyone still alive from her crew they're needing found right now."

Her siblings nodded and said nothing.

"Is this normal?" Alice asked.

"Is what normal?"

"You doing search-and-rescue stuff."

"Doesn't happen often," Elf told her. "But everyone who works at sea knows very well that they could be the ones being searched for the next time, so I guess that's an aye, when there's a distress call sent out everyone mucking in to help is normal."

"The nearest Coast Guard station's in bloody Cumberland," said Nick. "The Navy may have a SAR whirly at the fleet space arm base but they don't respond to anything non-military unless they're in the air and see it happening - there's a volunteer lifeboat in Stornaway but that's the best part of two hours away and if there's someone in the water they don't have two hours. Not in the Minch, not in October, not with a gale coming in."

"I just hope whoever was aboard that boat isn't 'not there' because they walked into the minefield on Eilen na Uilbheast, where'd Struan say that she was aground? Oh, and has anyone checked at the lighthouse on Eilen Shea yet?" Neil asked.

"Struan said she was grounded on Eilen Shea, at the eastern side of the narrows, hard in one of those wee gullies on the island's south shore there, hard enough in it must've been the top of the tide when she went in there," Elf told him. "And the Boy Douglas was working creels in and around the Devil's Pavement when Struan put the call out, I'll bet the lighthouse was the first place that Callum McCallum was thinking to look."

"Minefield on - how'd you say it?" Alice asked.

"Eilen na Uilbheast," Nick carefully enunciated, "It's the smaller of the two biggest islands in the wee group of islands in the mouth of Loch Allen, it was used as a bio-weapons test site back during the war and it's still fenced off and there's minefield warning signs up and we've seen the odd seal exploding, even the kelpies stay the hell away from it."

"The army used to go in with helicopters every few weeks but I can't say I've seen one in about five or six years now," said Elf, "Not since one of them tried to fly in during a land war and got blown out the sky by some numpty with a haggis gun, it's still on the bottom of the inner loch, though that said there's still signs of life there, everyone's seen smoke rising though how they're getting in and out is anyone's guess. They probably use submarines, the water off the south side of the island is easily deep enough for it. Who cares, we just stay the hell off of it, the rumour is that it was an anthrax test site and you don't want to be having any of that. Eilen Shea is fine though, a lot of the folks from Lochinver graze their sheep back there - the narrows only ever get shallow enough to wade across up to your chest and sheep won't try that."

-/-/-/-/-/-

They kept going until Elf declared the Vigra low on fuel, hours after the lifeboat - a hypermodern orange-and-blue affair with RNLI markings, it was one of the most startlingly familiar sights Alice had seen since the morning she came round in Grace's living room - had arrived. They weren't the first boat to bow out - that had been a crew from Ullapool one loch south - and Elf predicted that the last boats would keep at it until the gale got too close to stay out, and that the lifeboat crew would most likely stay at it right through the storm.

By that time they'd been working their way east along the south shore of Loch Allen, and they steamed back across the loch in silence that was finally broken as they were passing the islet in the mouth of Inverallen Bay, by Nick saying "Hey, I think I just saw something moving on Sgien Dubh."

"Bollocks, you been at the whacky baccy again bruv?" Neil instantly asked.

"Up yours Neil, there it is again - look! Something dark against the rock to the south side of the island and it's definitely moving," Nick declared, pointing, and Alice joined in with peering at the tiny rocky islet he was pointing at.

It was no more than about fifteen feet across, stood less than six feet above the high tide mark, and would be swept by the waves of the storm that was due that night - Alice had seen smaller islands in the course of the day, but not by all that much. From the look of it, it had to be the tip of a sea mount of sorts.

"Where?" said Elf.

"It's stopped... There! There!" and this time everyone in the wheelhouse clearly saw whatever it was - something dark and about the side of someone's head and shoulders, moving against the grey of the rocks, and Elf immediately backed off the throttle and started bringing the helm about.

"We'd better be getting a better look," she said with a nod.

As they closed the actual shape of the island became visible; whatever the something was, it was half tucked down into a bit of a crevice more or less dead centre of the island.

Elf eased the Vigra in closer and closer, gingerly feeling her way in - the water around the islet was too shallow for a vessel as large as the Vigra to get right alongside the tiny spot of dry land.

They had come to an almost complete standstill perhaps thirty feet from the islet with a scant few feet of water between the Vigra's keel and rock by the time they saw the something move again - whatever it was, it raised its head, peered around, then slumped back down again.

"That looks almost like a cat," said Brigid.

"Come off it, what sort of a cat's that size? It's got to be as big as a tup," said Neil. "Hey Nick, were are you going?"

"Down the bows," Nick shouted back up the steps; the engine rumble got louder for a moment, then quieted again as the wheelhouse door slammed, and they watched Nick appear out of the deck shelter and hurry along to the boat's very foremost point. He stood and peered over the front at the islet for several long moments, then hastened back to the wheelhouse.

"Brigid's right that it looks like a cat," he declared the very moment he was back in the wheelhouse. "It's some sort of a big cat with black fur - I can't tell for sure, we're too far off, but if it's as big as a tup that'd be the biggest bloody tup I've ever seen. We'd better get the wee boat off the mooring, it's just sitting there and it's having trouble lifting its head, I'm no bloody leaving the poor beast there."

"Agreed," said Elf with a nod, and she began carefully easing the Vigra back into the safety of deeper water.

-/-/-/-/-/-

It did not take long at all to collect 'the wee boat' - a red plastic thing with an outboard motor on the back - and return to the islet at the mouth of the bay with it towed behind the Vigra; as soon as they were standing off the islet Nick and Neil went scrambling down the rope ladder to the wee boat, and the outboard snarled into life with a couple of pulls at the ripcord.

"Come on, Alice, give us a hand," Nick shouted up, and she immediately hastened down the rope ladder, swearing the whole way and for the umpteenth time reminding herself she should really get some sort of footwear that didn't have several inches of lift at the back.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked, arranging herself on a thwart.

"Well we don't know if it'll take two of us to get this big cat into the boat," said Nick, which seemed reasonable enough, "So if you'll keep the wee boat from drifting off on us..."

"Oh, sure, no problem," Alice said, assigning it to the same mental place as piloting the Bigger Van on vampire hunting expeditions as Nick twisted the outboard's throttle grip, sending the boat roaring away from the Vigra towards the islet - and in moments Alice was sitting at the bows holding onto a rock while Nick and Neil went scrambling across, Nick toting along a coil of rope.

"It's no just one animal, there's two of them!" Nick declared. "The panther and... I think that's a wolf, and oh lord they've no got much life in them, come on!"

The panther lifted its head a little, just enough that Alice could see it from the boat, opened mismatched eyes - one blue, the other yellow, the animal appeared to have total heterochromia - and produced the most half-hearted growl you could possibly imagine, before its head flopped back down; Nick completely disregarded the growl, instead going scrambling into the crevice - it was only a couple of feet deep - with the coil of rope in tow, keeping up a running commentary the whole way, "Easy there, easy, we'll get you out of there - Christ the poor thing's half frozen - Neil, tell Elf to get the stove roaring, they've got to be hypothermic," and Neil pulled a handheld radio out of his jacket and did exactly that.

The panther produced another attempt at a growl as Nick got a hold of one of its forelegs - it really didn't have much left in it, making an attempt to struggle as he tied all four of its legs together, but between how very strong Nick was and how very strong the panther currently wasn't it did not meet a whole lot of success; he lifted it out of the crevice and laid it down on the flatter part of the islet, then turned his attention to similarly tying the wolf. Neil attempted to lift the panther, and gave up with a grunt.

"Bloody hell, how strong have you got Nick?"

"Stronger than you, no as strong as Mackie," said Nick, coming upright with his arms full of utterly limp wolf. He laid it down beside the panther, and scrambled back up out of the crevice. "Get the wolf over to the wee boat bro, I'll get the panther."

"Aye," Neil agreed, puffing and blowing as he hefted the wolf onto his shoulders. It came to rest with its head hanging slack down his left side and its tail down his right; it was clearly visible that this was about as heavy as Neil could possibly carry.

Nick picked the panther up with a lot less effort, making what were presumably supposed to be reassuring noises, and the brothers heaved the pair of animals over to where Alice was waiting with the boat, keeping a firm grip on the rock.

The boys joined her as soon as the wolf and panther were in a heap in the centre of the boat with Nick fussing over them - while Nick minded their furry castaways Neil pulled at the ripcord and the outboard snarled back into life, and he backed the boat off and hastened for where the Vigra were standing off.

They found Elf waiting with a sling sort of affair - it appeared to be a tarpaulin - hanging from the hoist, while at a guess Nat and/or Brigid minded keeping the Vigra in place. Nick and Neil between them heaved the two animals into the tarp one at a time, starting with the wolf then once it was aboard getting the panther into the sling as soon as Elf had it back down - the poor panther didn't even have enough energy left to growl by that point, the only sign of life being it watching them and its shallow breathing.

Nick and Neil rode the hoist up, and were hurrying for the wheelhouse carrying the two animals almost the very moment that Elf had set the tarp sling down on the Vigra's foredecks - Elf detached the tarp, lowered the hoist, and gave Alice shouted directions to attach it to the little boat.

Alice stepped from it onto the Vigra's foredecks as soon as Elf had set it down on top of the tarp; Elf started making the little boast fast there as Alice hastened over to the wheelhouse.

Nick was saying, "... know if the poor wolfie's made it," as Alice scrambled up into the bridge.

"Neither do I but we all know hypothermia means it's no dead until it's warmed up and dead," said Neil. The two of them and Nat were crowded around the wheelhouse stove, in front of which the wolf and a much more lively panther were bundled up in blankets - Brigid was minding the helm. "Hold up, I'm feeling a pulse - the wolf's definitely alive bro."

"Well thank Christ for that," said Nick with a sigh, stroking the ruff of fur at the back of the wolf's head. "What the hell they were doing on Sgien Dubh I don't know,"

"It's not like big cats and that turning up is really all that unusual," said Neil with a shrug. "People go aww, that's a pretty kitty, then it grows up into thirty stone of solid muscle,"

"It's no quite that big you numpty, it's no a tiger, it's closer to eighteen stone,"

"Well that's still a couple of hundredweight and change you eejit,"

"Oh get bent you great teuchter, that's besides the point, will you look at them man, they're beautiful creatures! Who the hell would be stranding the poor bloody things on a tiny wee wave-swept rock to bloody die, I'll be giving the bastard a good seeing-to if I ever find out who it was!" and Nick's voice rose to a furious shout as he spoke.

Neil nodded.

"Aye, and myself bro, and myself," he said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Well," said Ian Macbane, contemplating the pair of animals that were now sitting in blanket-stuffed cardboard boxes in front of the Rayburn in his living room.

"Well what, Dad?" asked Nick. They'd radioed ahead and got his parents to heat the blankets up in the oven, to get the two animals livened the rest of the way up - the wolf had still been limp when they got home, but had now perked up and was cautiously looking around.

"Well what'll we be doing with them?" said Ian.

"I'm keeping them," said Nick.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" his father immediately asked.

"Look at 'em Dad," said Nick, gesturing at the two animals. "Totally unafraid, at most the jaguar's just a wee bittie irritated," they had successfully identified the panther as a melanistic jaguar courtesy of the Internet, "They're visibly used to being around humans - I'll bet they were reared in captivity, even if we could get to whichever part of South America jaguars come from I'll bet this beauty," and he stroked the panther's head, getting what sounded like a faux-irate noise out of it, "Wouldnae be cut out to survive in the wild - even if there's no any problems with them getting shot for hanging round too close to people it doesn't often go well releasing captive-reared animals like these two, they just don't have the skills to survive in the wild."

"They're very powerful animals," his father said.

"As far as being very powerful goes I'm no slouch myself Dad," said Nick.

"Well, so long as you're making sure there's no any bother with them getting into the sheep," said Ian with a nod.

"Don't worry about that Dad, I'll be keeping them on a chain," Nick said with a nod of his own.

"Heaven sakes," Caroline said with a shake of her head. "Most mothers have to worry about their children bringing home puppies and kittens, but oh no, not my children, my children top bringing home a quiet wee cat-girl by bringing home wolves and panthers," and Alice was certain there was a note of pride in her voice when she said it.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-

On Monday night roundabout midnight the gale came in, and by the time Alice got up on Tuesday morning it was proving as per Elf's prediction to be one hell of a storm - driving rain ripping past parallel to the ground, roaring past the eaves and making the whole house shake every time a gust hit.

The Macbane clan, Alice, Silent, and the wolf and panther waited out the storm in the house, in the case of the wolf and the panther tethered to the Rayburn with a chain and collars that Nick had made out of old belts the previous evening, and nobody left the building unless strictly necessary - Alice stayed indoors the whole time but the sheer power of the wind was clear to see as she watched Nick and Ian fight it to get to the barns to feed the livestock, they were struggling to keep on their feet on the way out and with the storm still building they had to crawl partway back up the path from the garden gate, and poor Silent spent the entire time Nick was out of the house visibly fretting then wouldn't get off his lap for half an hour each time he got back - the first time she did this came as quite a surprise.

By midafternoon Tuesday the power was out - Nick and Ian braved the storm again, only to come blowing back in through the porch ten minutes later shaking their heads.

"The river's burst it's bloody banks and flooded the generator," Nick said as soon as they'd got the door closed and shut the storm out again. "And a tree's gone down and taken the cables with it, we'll nae be getting it up and running again till the gale's blown itself out, even once the river goes back down it'll take stripping the generator and drying it out even before we can get the cables back together."

"Well, better get this lit then," said Carol, heading for the odd-looking light above the cooker, about which Alice had vaguely wondered a couple of times; she collected the box of matches off of their shelf beside the cooker, fiddled with something on the light, lit a match, and poked it at the light, which lit with a pop, demonstrating itself to be an actual honest-to-God gas light.

Elf, who had been setting up candles at strategic points around the living room, got stuck in to lighting those too, and they all stayed in the candle-and-gas-lit cosy and warm and friendly environs of the living room, listening to the wind howling past the house and rattling the rafters and the sheets of rain hammering against the windows, until after midnight before heading to bed as a unit.

The gale stuck at it all day Wednesday and didn't start to peter out until well into Thursday morning, late enough that Elf decided against attempting to go to sea that day - having spent the lion's share of Wednesday in unspace adding furnishings to rooms and moving the odd wall, and adding on engine pods and the background drone of aero-engines, Alice spent most of Thursday helping Nick, Ian and Brigid get the family's home-made hydro-electric equipment dried out and running again, followed by a play-around with some of the guns they'd taken from Ruilick, in the process getting Alice actually thinking about Nick's offer for the first time that week - Nick and Mackie had really wanted a crack with the Victorian-looking machine gun, which was apparently something calling itself a Maxim gun - and it was during this episode of sitting around and taking potshots at a raggy old worn-out tarpaulin with a target painted on it strung up between a couple of trees that Nick, at Nat's urgings, gave Silent a go with one of the varied revolvers, discovering in the process that recoil appeared to have absolutely no effect on her, and that got him interested.

He and Nat went and dug out every handgun they could find between the three fishboxes of guns they'd stolen at Ruilick and Nat's comically extensive gun collection, and got the little catgirl to shoot them; they steadily got bigger and bigger, and it was after she'd scored a bullseye with the biggest pistol of the lot - this huge lump of faintly baroque-looking metal that Nat called a Mars pistol - despite her hands still being through the plank that Nick got a funny look in his eye and shared it with his brother.

"Y'know, I've got a Number 4 rifle with a bent barrel laying around the barn," said Nat.

"Let's saw it off," said Nick, and they both split it for the barns in a state of high excitement.

They were back about ten minutes later (Alice and Brigid and Silent spent the interim sitting around and in Alice and Brigid's cases jawing about nothing much, listened to with apparent interest by the catgirl) with a bolt-action rifle with most of the stock and barrel cut off, and some ammunition - powerful .303 British rounds - to match; Nat loaded it up and handed it to Silent with an enthusiastic, "Have a crack with this. Careful though, it'll kick like a cow."

The two boys watched with great glee as Silent gave this contraption a very dubious look, did a very visible mental what-the-hell, took aim, and fired.

The roar was incredibly loud - the gun barrel jumped and spat a long flame, and a hole appeared in the tarp about six inches up and left from the bullseye.

"Holy crap," said Nat, delighted. "Give it another go," and he went and worked the insanely powerful 'pistol' bolt and slotted in another round.

Silent gave him a funny look, then steeled herself; the gun roared and spat fire again, jumping less this time as she'd tightened her grip, and another hole appeared down and right from the bullseye

"Wow," said Nat.

"I'm going to put a foresight on that," said Nick, affectionately patting the little catgirl's head. "Very, very cool indeed."

Silent gave him a pleased look.

-/-/-/-/-/-

That evening Alice got her introduction to two very different things, both of them equally memorable.

The first was a result of the gale having taken the heavy cloud cover that'd been blanketing most of the north of Scotland for a couple of weeks with it, and consisted largely of her finding out just how much difference there is in the night sky somewhere with a lot of light pollution such as where she grew up or the area round Inverness in the east, and somewhere with a mountain range between you and the nearest streetlight and the only manmade light visible after the neighbours have gone to bed a lighthouse twenty-odd miles away across open water; accompanying Brigid out to feed the cows just after dark that evening was like looking up into an astronomical photograph, and for the first time in her life she really understood where the term 'Milky Way' had come from - there was a visible smear of unimaginable millions upon millions of stars all but blending together in a broad smear from horizon to horizon - and five days past the full moon, the moon was so bright you'd almost think you could read by it.

The second, the leading edge of which interrupted the impromptu spot of stargazing that resulted from the first, was Halloween as celebrated in that part of the world - this did not come in the 'trick or treat' form familiar from back home, instead it took the form of what the locals referred to as 'guising' - the bit with kids dressing up was as expected, but they were expected to give a poem or a song to earn their treats and the costumes were mostly home-made rather than the shop-bought sort Alice was more familiar with.

On Friday she finally got the uninterrupted day at sea she'd fancied since she'd first heard that the Macbanes owned and worked a fishing boat.

The day passed without any repeat of the unexpected search and rescue, with the only reference to such a chat on the radio during which they learned that the abandoned boat's liferaft had turned up wrapped round and half under a boulder in Inverallen bay, found by a crofter who'd been out beachcombing in the aftermath of the gale, and that there hadn't been a sign of any bodies, at least not yet. The day was spent working the way from one fleet of 'creels' - as the Macbane siblings insistently called what Alice was fairly sure she'd previously heard referred to as a 'crab pot' - to the next along the north shore of Loch Allen, stopping regularly to untangle ropes and write off the odd part of a fleet that had got thrown up onto the shore or was utterly jammed down on the bottom in amongst whatever the sea had shifted around down there, or to fend off the occasional kelpie with a jab from the pointy end of a boat-hook and a cry of 'piss off, you old nag' - in the process Alice learned that kelpies, although looking very much like a very handsome jet-black horse save for a faintly fishy aspect to their eyes, make a very unhorselike sound uncannily like 'Blarg!' when poked with a boat-hook - and she found herself being introduced to the numerous odd sea-creatures one finds in a creel, from an octopus to the bizarre ugly spiky blob that is a scorpion fish, and even the occasional sea urchin; the realisation that a kelpie, which she was pretty sure hadn't been a real thing where she came from, wasn't even close to the weirdest sea-creature she saw that day would later cause Alice some very strange musings.

At the last fleet before they turned across the loch to work what they had around Eilen Shea and Eilen na Uilbheast, they got a conger eel - a thing like an animate inner tube from a car tyre which Elf took great glee in explaining to Alice would bite a chunk out of you an hour after you'd cut it's head off - and out near the islands they had a chance encounter with a basking shark, soon followed with the amusing show of Nick having a chat with a seal - 'Arp Arp Arp to you too too!' - and the next half an hour devolved into a conversation about why kelpies don't eat seals; for one thing, Elf reckoned, seals are better swimmers than kelpies, and for another thing kelpies are smart enough, she said, to know that pissing off the selkies really isn't a good idea.

It was a long and full day, and when Elf shut the Vigra's engine off at the end of it the silence was just as jarring as the silence when Annie switched her pickup's engine off.Friday evening and into the early hours of Saturday morning was spent at a ceilidh in Lochinver - a particularly wild affair propelled by a rotating cast of increasingly drunk musicians, there was a lot of alcohol and curious substances going around and more than a few couples disappearing here and there for obvious purposes, and Alice was conscious of a lot of people leaving to drive home obviously drunk and/or otherwise off of their faces over the course of the night though she did not hear about anything worse than several vehicles getting put in the ditch, in one case with the driver later being found snoring away passed-out drunk behind the wheel of his stalled and thoroughly ditched van, the front axle of which Nick ended up making a quick buck repairing that weekend - all in the festivities resulted in everyone sleeping in on Saturday for hangover-related reasons, with the last Macbane sibling to emerge being Nick, who'd been absolutely ratarsed and didn't crawl out of his pit till about four in the afternoon, not all that long before they'd planned to drive south to Ullapool for another pub gig, which once again took place in a hotel overlooking the harbour.

This was a rather more sedate do than the Friday night festivities, though again the potent combination of very cheap very strong booze and curious substances turned up, and this time on the way home they passed a pickup upside down in the ditch that Alice had seen weaving all over the road when it was leaving the pub car park - the driver was staggering down the road towards Stronecrubie without any visible blood on him, swearing his head off and making insulting gestures at traffic, so they let him get on with it with Alice privately thinking that the main reason they weren't joining him was the fact she'd insisted on driving as she was the least drunk member of their party - if Nick had driven as he'd wanted to there was no way he'd have avoided putting the van in the ditch, he was hammered again.

Finally on Sunday they packed their gear into the vans, the boys loaded their bikes onto the trailer, and they headed back towards Inverness, a quiet and restful week over with.

The quiet and restfulness came to a very abrupt close not far before they'd be getting off of the single-track when, rounding a corner, Nick (who was leading in the Albion) suddenly jammed on his brakes so hard the trailer nearly jacknifed, swerved violently all over the road at the same time, forced Alice to emergency brake the Bigger Van to avoid going into the back of the trailer full of motorbikes, and skidded to a halt as a very tall feminine figure with incredibly long hair went sprawling on the verge where she had just stepped out of the bushes and straight into the Albion's left-hand front bumper.

-/-/-/-/-/-

It didn't take one look for Alice to realise that the woman who'd stepped out right in front of Nick's van was very visibly not human. Not your basic human, she reminded herself, bearing in mind the Hamster's little rant on the topic.

She was, in fact, the latest sudden unexpected catgirl - only this one couldn't be shorter than six foot six with the sort of build you'd expect from a cage-fighter. She had very fair skin, sandy brown hair matched by the fur on her ears and tail, an impressive set of tits, and the whole lower half of her face protruded into a sort of muzzle structure like a tiger with very visible powerful jaw muscles to match. She was dressed in a white tank-top (probably actually what's technically termed a vest) and camouflaged battledress trousers, with a corset rather less practical than the rest of her outfit underneath, a tool belt, and combat boots - she had a red plastic tag in her right ear, a set of military-style dogtags round her neck, and wire-rimmed spectacles with oddly-positioned arms to adapt them to how much higher her ears sat on her skull, and her hair, of which she had a truly awe-inspiring amount, was tied up in a high ponytail the tip of which would, with her upright, come down past her knees.

Aside from being thoroughly unconscious she seemed no worse for the wear for having been hit by a 40mph van, though the same could not be said for the van; the entire left front wing was stove in with parts of it jamming the wheel, the headlight that side was completely smashed to bits, and the bumper was thoroughly bent.

"Jesus, the bloody engine mounting lugs on the frame are bent this side, she hit the bloody van like a ton of bricks," said Nick, who was checking what needed done to get the Albion moving again. "Get the bloody cutting torch round here Mackie, I'm going to have to cut part of the front wing off to get this wheel off and the spare tyre on. How's our hedgehog impersonator look there Alice?"

"Not a mark on her though I can't think how, I can't find any sign of anything broken, her pulse and breathing are normal and the same goes from her eye response," Alice said.

"Tough lassie," said Annie.

"Very, but it does make sense, her muscles feel like they're made out of solid metal even with her totally limp like this, I can't push her bicep in at all," Alice said, demonstrating by poking at an arm, and then noticed the way Nick's catgirl, still sitting in the van, was looking at the unconscious cat-Amazon who was laying on the side of the road; she was peering at her with a half-hopeful, half-dreading, look on her face.

"Hey Silent," she said. "You know her?"

Silent nodded.

"Let's get a look at these dog-tags," said Annie; she squatted down and had a peer. "Hmm. They're copies of each other, not quite laid out like the military ones I've seen, they've got the serial number looking about right but there's just the word 'Sprocket' where there'd normally be a name and there's a barcode on the reverse side of each."

"Maybe her name's Sprocket," Alice pointed out, this seeming entirely logical; she turned to Silent and added, "Is it? Her name, I mean, is it Sprocket?"

Silent nodded.

"She's no your mother is she?" Nick asked, emerging from where he'd been getting set up to cut part of the van's very bent front wing off, and Silent immediately started shaking her head. "Some other relative?" and she paused for a moment then hesitantly nodded. "Sister?" and she shook her head.

"Aunt?" Annie suggested.

Silent nodded again.

Nick looked from one to the other, and then said, "Huh."

-/-/-/-/-/-