Loch & Quay: An Urban Fantasy Thriller: (Harker & Blackthorn - Book Two) Read online

  Loch & Quay

  Harker & Blackthorn - Book Two

  J. A. Ironside

  Copyright © 2021 J. A. Ironside

  Blue Stone Press

  Loch & Quay – Harker & Blackthorn Book 2 - first published 2021

  Copyright © J. A. Ironside 2020

  Cover Artwork copyright © J. A. Ironside

  Cover Design copyright © J. A. Ironside

  Cover Photograph Girl copyright © Faestock

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher and author.

  First Edition

  I look upon the waters deep,

  I’m tethered loch and quay,

  The bargain made by any man

  Who comes to love the sea.

  ̶ S. Thornton

  Contents

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One – Better Sidekicks

  Chapter Two – All Good

  Chapter Three – Road Trip

  Andrew Kilbride’s Notebook

  Chapter Four – Named and Shamed

  Chapter Five – Dark and Deep

  Amy’s Field Guide

  Chapter Six – Rivalry

  Chapter Seven – Water Horse

  Chapter Eight – Professionals

  Amy’s Field Guide

  Chapter Nine – Ruins

  Chapter Ten – The Loch and the Legend

  Steve’s Notebook

  Chapter Eleven – Come to Blows

  Chapter Twelve – Painful Truths

  Chapter Thirteen – Scare Tactics

  Transcript

  Chapter Fourteen – Suspicion

  Chapter Fifteen – Dreich

  Chapter Sixteen – A Spot of Burglary

  Chapter Seventeen – Crowley’s Footsteps

  Chapter Eighteen – Perfectly Capable

  Chapter Nineteen – Speak of the Devil

  Chapter Twenty – Drifting

  Chapter Twenty-one – All Connected

  Chapter Twenty-two – Searching

  Chapter Twenty-three – Rotten

  Chapter Twenty-four – Paralysis

  Chapter Twenty-five – Catch

  Chapter Twenty-six – Beneath

  Chapter Twenty-seven – Conversations Over Whisky

  Chapter Twenty-eight – Meant to Be

  Lodestone - Doc/010-57F

  Prologue

  A heavy fall of rain during the night had left the track towards Urquhart Bay slick and muddy. Gleaming dully as the sun crept over the horizon. Despite the damp, chill air, the lone walker reckons it the start of a braw day. He pauses, gazing down on the opaque waters of the loch. The sun sends slender spears of pale gold which strike the surface with brilliance like a newly minted coin, coaxing gossamer drapes of mist from the land and waters.

  A little way along the path, a gold retriever lifts his head and gives an enquiring yip. The walker chuckles at the dog’s impatience. They’d covered the three miles from Achmony to the bay in the grey pre-dawn, the retriever bouncing with eagerness along the footpaths, breaking into the occasional joyful run before returning to his master.

  A grand place for a dog, the walker thinks, gaze dreamily fixed on the water. Come to that, it’s a grand place for a man. Almost anywhere in the Great Glen, where nature holds sway is beautiful, but here by the loch is where his heart is. From the marshy woodland behind the castle, he hears the repeated cry of a cuckoo. A new day begins.

  The walker and his dog take the path down to the shore. The retriever normally greets the loch with great enthusiasm, enjoying a short swim in the cold waters before shaking off with a doggy grin. The loch is never warm enough for wild swimming – at least not if you have a human metabolism. Today, however, the dog hangs back.

  The walker frowns down at the retriever, puzzled. His gaze is caught by a strange depression in the sandy soil. He turns on the spot and realises that the impression is so large, both he and the dog are standing in the centre of it. A prickling of awareness creeps across the back of his neck and the dog whines.

  The man lifts his head. A huge wake travels across the surface of the loch. A V-shape in the water bigger than anything caused by one of the boats that traverse the surface. There’s no boat in sight in any case. His heart beats faster, breath stilling in his throat. The loch has form for strange currents and unexplained waves. He has lived here all his life and not thought on the stories much, though.

  The retriever presses against his shins, shivering, but he has not attention enough to spare for the dog. A smooth ridge of water rises from the surface, spilling over on itself. The mist parts for a split second and a streak of sunlight glints on a monstrous, gleaming black hump as it disappears back into the waves its passage has caused.

  The man stares, pulse pounding in his temples but there is nothing to see except the choppy waters of the disturbed loch.

  Chapter One – Better Sidekicks

  So far, I’d managed to not set fire to or otherwise damage Professor Greyson’s computer. I couldn’t even smell smoke. I grimly held on to the triumph of that personal victory as he continued to talk. It was no mean feat but I’d been working on my control of the telekinetic aspect of the Touch for the last six weeks, and it was rare for me to have a slip now. Greyson didn’t like me, and after months of rebuffed efforts to get him to accept me, I was returning the favour. Right now, he was really testing my usually even temper.

  A faint breeze stirred some loose leaves of paper on his desk and I clenched down on the Touch even harder.

  “You turned down the opportunity for a position with Evergreen Technologies,” Greyson said, tone leaving me in no doubt of his disgust. “I’m at a loss as to why you now think your opinion on the subject is a desirable commodity.”

  Pain in my temples forced me to unclench my jaw. “All I’m saying is that we have no idea what exactly Evergreen Tech wants from us. I think we should be cautious about sharing our research.”

  Greyson let out a sudden, harsh laugh. “Ms Matthews, surely you are not a conspiracy theorist?”

  “Er...no...?”

  “The way you’re talking, you might be mistaken for one.” Greyson folded his hands, a smug air rising from him like the stinking miasma from week old rubbish left in the sun. “Evergreen has generously donated a large amount of funding to this enterprise. They’ve offered two members of our team seconded positions so that the lines of communication are always open between us. In addition, they are demonstrably keen to work with us.”

  I kept my expression stony-smooth. Reading between the lines, Greyson was saying that Evergreen Tech might well use our research and our findings, but that the team – and more specifically he – would still be credited. And that was what he cared about. Money and recognition. Maybe physics for the sheer joy of it had been his passion once, but now he was definitely swerving towards the Dark Side. The problem was that I had evidence Evergreen Technologies – or a hidden subgroup within the company – was definitely up to no good. Since I’d acquired this knowledge illegally, I couldn’t exactly hand it to Greyson. Or the police. And the greater part of it was still encrypted, despite my best efforts.

  “As scientists, we still have a responsibility to take care with our discoveries,” I tried again.

  For a moment, Greyson looked unutterably weary. His face sagged into wrinkles that weren’t normally noticeable and it occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I annoyed him so much was because I represented what he had once been.

  “Ms Matthews, I have spent thirty-five years in the field of Physics research. Do you mean to insult me by suggesting I have never stopped to grapple with moral quandaries when it comes to handling information?”

  My face heated. In my frustration, that was exactly what I’d suggested, and I’d allowed my personal dislike of the man to blind me to his viewpoint. “No. I’m sorry.”

  “The danger of being shut down through lack of funding is far greater than the department passing on dangerous discoveries for nefarious uses.” Greyson’s patience was at an end.

  Mine wasn’t in much better shape. The smell of overheating plastic reached my nose, and I forced my recalcitrant psychic gift to come to heel. I thought about telling the professor that Evergreen Technologies were involved in buying up large land blocs via shell companies posing as housing developers. That they had arranged for the deaths of those who didn’t want to sell, or who threatened to compromise whatever their end game was. That they were willing to engage with supernatural means to achieve these things.

  I let out a breath. I couldn’t tell him a damn word of that.

  “If that’s all Ms Matthews, perhaps you would be so good as to get back to doing the work you were admitted to this team to perform,” Greyson dismissed me.

  I bit back further protests. It had been a long shot. Greyson was never going to listen to
me. And I was dangerously close to losing my grip on the Touch.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said, in as civil a tone as I could manage. The office door banged shut behind me.

  ✽✽✽

  I’d perked up by the time I reached St John’s College. So what if Greyson was unpleasant. It was hardly much of a secret that we didn’t get on. From the sound of things Evergreen Technologies hadn’t got their greedy corporate mitts on any of our group’s research yet. Professor Greyson might be blinkered enough to take funding from them, but I had time to find other ways of keeping anything important out of their hands.

  A bell rang somewhere inside the campus as I climbed the steps to the atrium, and half a minute later, a flood of chattering students poured out of various lecture theatres. I propped myself against a wall as the noisy throng surged past and then poked my head through the door of lecture room 4B.

  Steve was busily wiping down the white board, which appeared to be covered in facts about the line of succession in fourteenth century France. It must have been an absorbing topic, since he didn’t immediately turn to find out who was in the doorway. Steve is one of those people who’s been brushed with the Touch a little harder than most, making him a ‘sensitive’. I once asked him what that entailed and he explained that he sometimes saw ghosts if the manifestation was strong enough, he had strong intuitions and could occasionally pick up what someone else was feeling. I’d noticed that he always seemed to know when I was present too, which made sneaking up on him difficult.

  But not this time. I grinned to myself, casting around for any straggling students. The coast was clear. I called a tendril of the Touch up from where it slept inside me and threw it out in a motion so practised that it was now as easy as breathing. A second board eraser rose spookily into the air, floating just above Steve’s shoulder. Barely suppressing laughter, I sent it zooming forward to cut a wide swathe through the remaining notes on the white board.

  Steve jumped back, uttering a little cry of alarm.

  “I am the ghost of Able Mabel,” I intoned, my sepulchral tone breaking under the strain of holding back snorts of laughter. “The mayonnaise goes on the table.”

  Steve turned, his expression unimpressed. “Amy.”

  “Don’t say my name like that,” I protested.

  “I haven’t the least idea what you mean.”

  “Like you’re saying ‘Amy’ but what you really mean is ‘oh, it’s you’.” I moved toward him, pleased the board eraser stayed floating exactly as I’d intended. I was getting good at this.

  “You credit me with paragraphs of meaning contained in a single word,” Steve said.

  “Well, that’s what you sound like. I blame all those Chronicles you read.”

  “Are you going to finish cleaning the board or did you merely do that to vex me?”

  “Mostly to vex you, but I don’t mind helping.” I grinned. “Check out my Matilda impression.” I flicked a finger and the hovering eraser zoomed merrily back and forth until all the notes were gone. “Ta dah!”

  Steve smiled wryly. “You’ve become very adept at that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Let me know when you can flip an armoured car.”

  “Why? So you can play at X-men too?”

  “Actually I was thinking that might be the time to leave the country,” Steve teased.

  “Hey!”

  The eraser dropped out of the air and Steve caught it deftly, setting it back in its holder. “It’s a delight to see you as always, Amy, but do I owe the pleasure to anything in particular?”

  “Why? Should I have brought you an apple?” I folded my arms. “Bex says you haven’t been answering her texts. She asked me to collect you on the way to the museum. Apparently, she wants both of us there tonight.”

  Steve pulled face. “I bet that’s not how she phrased it.”

  “She might have said something about digging you out of the history department and blowing the dust off you.” I arched an eyebrow. “Have you been dodging her calls?”

  “Of course I have. There’s only so much cataloguing I can bear to do in one lifetime,” Steve said vehemently.

  “Says the historian.”

  “I’m serious, Amy. If I have to alphabetise another stack of her wretched father’s papers...”

  “Relax Dr Thornton – that was all finished a week ago. You’re safe.”

  Steve gave me a pitying look as he shrugged into his coat and grabbed his bag. “Rebekah has been hinting about clearing out the attic. How many crates did she say were still up there?”

  “Thirty-nine at least.” I felt the blood drain out of my face at the prospect. “You don’t think she wants to start that tonight, do you? It’s Friday. Easter holidays start on Monday!”

  “I suppose we’ll find out,” Steve said darkly.

  We made our way out into the bright April afternoon. It was sunny but still cool in the shade. The sky above the warm, red bricked Oxford streets was a gorgeous azure blue and the cherry trees along the walks were gowned in soft pink and white petals. It made me think of Arncliffe and the way the small orchard behind the vicarage would be full of sweet-smelling apple blossom.

  “I love spring,” I said, a little wistfully. “Everything is so beautiful.”

  Steve nodded. “‘You never enjoy the world aright ’til the sea itself floweth in your veins, ’til you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars’.”

  “William Blake?” I hazarded a guess.

  “Thomas Trehearne,” Steve said, with a faint smile. “I have a soft spot for metaphysical nature poets.”

  We walked in companionable silence until we reached a dingy little cul-de-sac called Ivy Road. Halfway up, we stopped outside a sagging Victorian Building with a wide set of steps leading up to the front entrance. A sign over the door spelled out the legend Harker & Blackthorn – Museum of Folkloric Antiquities & Natural History in peeling paint. There was another plaque bearing a list of admission prices fixed to the wall by the main entrance, but I’d never seen anyone visit the museum. I doubted anyone knew it existed, aside from me, Steve and Rebekah herself. Since the admission prices were in shillings and pence, it was a good bet that no one had even looked at it in years.

  Rebekah Harker is a tall, somewhat intimidating woman in her mid-twenties. I wasn’t sure if it was her competence, her fierce intellect, her sharp tongue or her sheer physical perfection which gave her a forbidding air, but I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. She was Steve’s distant cousin by marriage, as we’d discovered two months ago when I found myself thrown into a life and death struggle with a supernatural parasite. There are some experiences that bond people together for good. Rebekah was now a firm friend, which made nearly dying in my sleep almost worth it.

  This afternoon, Rebekah was dressed in cargo trousers with many pockets and a figure-hugging sleeveless top. Her long, glossy dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and there were smudges of dirt on her gold tinted skin.

  “I don’t think you’ve ever looked more like Lara Croft that you do right now,” I said, by way of greeting.

  “What?” Rebekah said distractedly. She was peering at a partially unfolded ordinance survey map. “Who is this Croft person you keep banging on about?”

  “Lara Croft!” I protested. “Tomb raider? Super-hot female Indiana Jones?”

  “Who?” Rebekah frowned at me.

  “Oh my God. You did not just say you don’t know who Indiana Jones is,” I said. “Do you just not watch films or play games?”

  “Amy, I am never going to follow one of your obscure references if it pertains to a computer game,” Rebekah said. “Hello, Stephen. All up together with the backlog?”

  Steve mumbled a hello, face reddening. Judging from the blade-thin smile curving Rebekah’s mouth, she was well aware that his excuses for not helping catalogue her father’s notes were insubstantial.

  “Have you been in the attic?” Steve said warily.

  “Yes, but that’s not why I called you over here. I need you both to go home and pack up whatever you need for a week-long stay in the Highlands. Warm clothes, good walking shoes. Amy you’ll need your laptop.” Rebekah folded up the map. “We’re leaving tonight. I’ve hired a people carrier, so we’ll drive up in relative comfort if not style.”