Page 15 of The Falconer

I dress myself in wool trousers and a white lawn shirt tucked in at the waist. My leather knife sheath is buckled and slung low across my hips. Boots reach to mid-calf, laced all the way up and secured with three buckles. I tuck my trousers into the boots to prevent them from catching on anything, and don a long, grey raploch coat to complete my ensemble.

‘You’re only taking the dirk with you?’ Derrick says from the chimneypiece, above the cooling coals in the fireplace. Gold flecks fall from the halo around him and disappear before they reach the ground.

‘Of course not,’ I say.

‘Good. Shouldn’t bother taking it out at all, I say.’

I smirk. Derrick told me once the blade was useless because I couldn’t even kill him with an iron weapon.

‘It works best for distracting my victims.’ I carefully pick up the altered watch fob from the table. ‘And I’ll be testing out this little beauty after I see Kiaran.’

A test to see whether the fob is the weapon I want to use to kill thebaobhan sìth. I’ll only have one chance to get that right, to make it meaningful, and I have plenty of other devices to choose from if this one isn’t quite right.

Derrick snarls some fae curse that ends with, ‘Vicious bastard.’

He has never told me why he hates Kiaran, not even after Kiaran saved my life and trained me to kill the kind of faeries Derrick would see dead. I doubt he ever will. If I so much as mention Kiaran, Derrick responds with the kind of vitriol that would make the workers down by the Leith quay blush. Already his light has turned a deep crimson and sparks sizzle around him.

I place the fob in my pocket. ‘Indeed, he is that,’ I say. ‘But I still have to go.’

Derrick crosses his arms. ‘Fine. I’ll take the bowl of honey in exchange for mending your dress now.’

‘Half,’ I say. He’s being unreasonable and he knows it.

His halo begins to lighten. Faeries enjoy bargaining. And for Derrick, honey is the greatest reward he could receive. The only problem with giving him any is his intoxicated behaviour afterwards: him flitting about, shining and cleaning my belongings repeatedly, and then lying about, declaring hand movements to be fascinating.

‘Full,’ he says again.

‘Half.’ Since this could go on for ever, I add, ‘And I won’t release Dona from her duties, so you can continue your strange obsession with her cleaning product.’

‘Deal,’ he replies and flutters his wings.

‘When I return, then,’ I say.

I push the wooden panel next to the fireplace. It springs open to reveal a series of small steel levers. I pull one and, with a soft whoosh, a large, rectangular portion of the wall detaches and descends slowly into the garden. Gears tick quietly as the ramp lowers and finally settles into the grass below. This was an addition to the room I built while my father was away on one of his many trips – a perfect, silent escape route from the house.

As I descend into the garden, Derrick says, ‘Do give Kiaran a message for me.’

‘Let me guess – “I shall hurt you if anything happens to the lady whose dressing room I reside in. Also you’re a nasty seven-letter insult that begins with the letter ‘B’.” Close enough?’

‘And I plan one day to eat his heart.’

‘Right. Wonderful. I’ll tell him.’

I shove the lever hidden behind the tall hedges and the wall closes behind me. Then I lean down, spin the dial to activate the locking mechanism and slip through my house’s private garden into Charlotte Square.

The streets of New Town are always empty past midnight. Every house is dark, my surroundings silent save for the patter of my footfalls as I dart across the road. The street lights cast long shadows over the grass as I cross the garden in the centre of the square. Soft rain dampens my hair and soil squishes beneath the soles of my boots.

I spare a longing glance at the flying machines parked in the garden square, one of them mine. The design I came up with and eventually built was an ornithopter inspired by a few of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches, his fascination with the physiology of bats. The spacious oblong interior and wingspan are meant to imitate the body and motion of a bat in flight. In its resting position, the wings are tucked in at the sides.

Of all my inventions, it remains my most prized. If I weren’t meeting Kiaran, I would take it out and soar over the city, slicing through the misty clouds above Edinburgh.

But tonight, I run. I breathe in the chilly air and feel so alive with it that I could roar. The darkness inside me unfurls and takes me over, a consuming thing that pounds the simple desires for vengeance and blood together in a constant beat.

This is what I live for now. Not the tea parties or assemblies or picnics at the Nor’ Loch, or the spine-straight, chin-up, shoulders-back polite conversation accompanied by fake smiles. Now I live for the chase, and for the kill.

Rain-slicked cobblestones shine in the lamplight ahead of me. I race down the street and my boots pound through puddles that soak the hem of my coat.

Electricity hums from within the clock tower as I sprint past it. Translucent glass lines the sides of the building, blazing gold from a system that lights the whole of New Town. I slide my fingers along the slick glass, watching the pulsing bulbs within. They’re so bright I can see through the flesh of my palm to the metacarpal bones outlined beneath.

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