The drive down to Falmouth was a long one.

She’d packed an overnight bag fit for three days, wanting to ensure she was allowing for the maximum she could expect, and then if she really had to stay for any longer, she could just pick up some of the essentials in town.

Hamish hadn’t really had any idea what would be in the storage locker, and had said as much when she’d asked – an old friend, another antiques dealer he’d used to work with when she needed restorations done, hadn’t had any family left, and had left a lot of her stock to be passed onto Hamish.

“Who was she? Your friend?”

“Well, her name was Anita Carr,” Hamish said – his voice sounded slightly distant over the phone, because he had her on loudspeaker, and now and then, she could hear the thin, grinding sound of tools on wood as he worked in his workshop. “I can’t say I knew her very intimately – she was a kind woman, but the sort that was often a little bit too leery of conflict, wanted too much to please everybody. I can’t tell you how many times she rushed something into me for restoration of some minor aesthetic detail in an object that she wanted repaired out of her own pocket, because she wanted the person buying it to be entirely pleased with it.”

The old man’s voice was thoughtful, pensive in the way that old people got, sometimes, talking about people that had died, and Velma wondered if she should really feel bad about asking, but he had said they hadn’t been close.

“Hmm, in any case, it was a friend of hers that sort of sorted out all her storage lockers and stocks, and passed all of them onto me – she thought I’d do the best with them, you know, and she didn’t want to risk passing them onto anyone mundane. Annabelle was a very organised woman, kept everything neatly labelled, keys, documentation, that sort of thing. Everything in Nottingham, London, all of that I could manage with, but I’m afraid I don’t know anyone well in Falmouth.”

“She didn’t live in Cornwall then?”

“No, no, not at all – she lived in Nottingham, out toward Sherwood Forest. I don’t recall her ever even mentioning work in Falmouth, truth be told.”

“So I should expect furniture, enchanted objects?”

“I expect so. She didn’t deal in cursed objects, and never kept hold of them, so there oughtn’t be anything along those lines.”

“No other lines of business?”

“Not that I know of,” said Hamish. “She gave a lot to charity – she grew up in a children’s home in Carmarthen, so she donated quite a lot to different orphanages and children’s societies in Cymru-Loegr, to the different protection societies for demons, magical species, and so on.”

“Okay,” Velma murmured. “Well, I’ll keep on for the drive, head straight in, and then I’ll let you know what I find when I get there.”

“Thank you, Velma,” Hamish said softly: he was closer to the phone, now, had it held to his face, judging by the change in sound. “See you.”

“See you,” Velma echoed, and flicked the radio on as she settled in for the drive.

*    *    *

“Hi, I’m here to look at this one,” Velma said, putting the receipt for the locker – which had been paid three years in advance, which seemed excessive to her, to say the least – on the desk, and then holding out the keycard for access to the storage facility. “I’m afraid Miss Carr died last year, and I’m checking out the locker for its contents. Here’s the letter from the new owner with his permission, and the proof of death.”

“Lot of papers,” said the receptionist, who was a dark-haired woman, pale but handsome, and Velma grinned, shrugging her shoulders. “Would’ve just pointed you in the right direction anyway, you know. This is… R11, so you’re going to be going down that corridor, turning right when you reach the elevator.”

“Got it, thanks,” Velma said. “Don’t suppose you have any notes on what’s in it?”

“Uh, let me see… No insurance, which means the contents would have been worth less than a thousand pound altogether, or at least, she would have signed a bit of paper saying that. It’s a contained unit, ten by thirty, with its own roof, so it’s not got an open ceiling like a lot of our units do. That’s all I got.”

“Thanks anyway,” Velma murmured, glancing down at the name badge pinned to her polo shirt, which was open to the lowest button and showed the hollows at her throat. “Chloe.”

Chloe gave her a grin, and Velma shifted her grip on her briefcase as she moved toward the corridor, maybe putting a little more of a swing to her hips than she needed to.

She hated storage units. Walking down the long corridors of identical, red metal doors and long-spanning halls of more and more of them spanning off in every direction, especially under the brightness of the overhead fluorescent lighting, it made her feel a little dizzy, and she couldn’t help but think that if you were going to make a modern labyrinth, a place like this would be perfect.

A lot of the smaller lockers had hinge doors that would swing outward, but R11 had a roll-top door, and she put her case aside as she knelt down to unlock the three padlocks keeping it closed. She could feel the slight thrill of enchantment writ into the metal as she touched each of them – basic stuff to ward off tampering and rust, and to dissuade mundies from touching them.

It was a mundane storage unit, but that wasn’t so surprising – she did know of a few magical storage units, but she’d never been in one, because they were always for ridiculously huge spaces, often for storing vehicles or the like. Magical storage units tended to rely on different kinds of expansion charms, which magically expanded a space to make it bigger on the inside – really, what you were doing was creating an additional pocket dimension to hold it all, and the magic that went into it took years of study. You had to know how to do complex warding, which was a study-intensive branch of enchantment, and you also had to know how to weave spell work through it.

Ginchiyo had once described expansion work as trying to balance a pile of rocks in the eye of a tornado.

Suffice it to say, magical storage units were expensive, and mundane ones were cheap.

Taking a loose hold of the door’s handle, she pulled it up with her as she stood, drawing it up to slightly over her head before letting it go, and then she stood stock still, and stared.

The inside of R11 was… green. Not just green, in fact – verdant, one could even say. Thick, viridian moss grew up the walls, and knotted grass and flowers carpeted its floor, stopping two inches short of the door and leaving a strange, noticeable border of white where the original laminate floor of the locker could still be made out.

Trees, thick trees, grew up toward the ceiling – the locker was 10 by 30 by 30, so the ceiling was high – and spread outward until they touched one another or brushed against the locker’s walls, and some of them had ivy or mushrooms growing up their length. From the locker’s ceiling shone some kind of artificial sun, and inside the locker, it was humid, but not that much warmer than it had been out in the corridor – though when she stood under the fake sun’s light, she felt its warmth on her skin.

“Right,” she murmured to herself, stepping slowly inside, and she scanned the floor for any sign of fungus lines or mushroom rings, any uncanny border she shouldn’t be crossing, but she didn’t see one as she moved further in, touching the bark of an oak tree to assure herself it was real, and it was, although the bark was sticky with sap under her touch. Dragging back her hand and wiping it off on some bushes, she looked at the sap where it was dripping out from some bored holes in the tree’s surface.

Then, with a harsh, caterwauling screech, the thing that lived in R11 barrelled into her.

“Fuck,” Velma hissed as the wind was knocked out of her, thrown back onto her shoulders in the grass, and she barely got a glimpse of the thing, as big as a Labrador with the face of a wooden wildcat, two front teeth protruding from its mouth like a sabretooth’s, before it launched itself off her chest again. Groaning, she touched where its claws had dug into her chest, tearing the wool and drawing blood, and she moved quickly back on her elbows, not getting up as she tried to keep her eyes on it.

It moved fast, a streak of glossy black bouncing off the walls and ceilings, but it was cat-like in its make-up – it had four paws and a tail, and although its head was big and strangely square, with hard angles and folded back ears that made it look like it had made by an origami enthusiast, it had a feline face, as well: big yellow eyes – four of them, not two, but there were all sorts of cat breeds these days – and a cat’s nose and jaw except for the protuberant teeth and thick, white whiskers.

It kept letting out that horrible noise, a heavy growl deep in its throat as it bounced off of walls and tree trunks, and as it launched itself at her again, she rolled back over the border between the locker’s door and the corridor outside: it hit the empty air like it was hitting a glass wall, but it could obviously still see her, because it looked fucking furious.

Pacing up and down the edge of the locker, a jaguar in its cage, Velma could see it properly, now, could see the wings that sprouted from its back, grey-feathered things that couldn’t possibly let it fly, given how heavy it was and how they could only span a foot on each side, but probably let it glide or something, in a forested environment.

“Christ,” she muttered, and as she leaned back against the wall, she picked her phone out of her pocket, dialling Hamish’s number as she tried to look at the wounds on her chest. The claws hadn’t dug in too deeply, thankfully, and they’d not torn at anything that much more important than her jumper – already, the blood was flowing a little less deeply on most of them, so she didn’t think she’d need stitches, but antiseptic was absolutely in order.

“Hamish,” Velma said, “was your friend Anita, by any chance, insane?”

She didn’t know if it was a good sign or a bad one that the old man jumped directly to business, his tone not changing at all from the usual casual and blasé. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. One sec, I’ll send you a picture.”

She snapped a few of them as best she could, blurry because of how fast the thing paced, and she put the old man on loudspeaker as she rifled through her case for her first aid kit, dragging her jumper over her head and pulling the torn edges of her vest down so that she could rub an antiseptic wipe over her new wounds.

“Ah,” said Hamish.

“Ah is not what I like to hear.”

“Panthera Omnipteryx. A winged cat of infernal origin native to the magical forests of the northern hemisphere.”

“Okay,” Velma said. “And is there any reason your friend would have this infernal winged cat in a storage locker?”

“I really don’t know. It looks well-fed.”

“Not encouraging.”

“Can it get out?”

“I hope not.”

“Are you alright?”

“I have ten new holes in my chest,” Velma said, “but they’re not that deep, and at least it didn’t try to bite me. What do they eat?”

“Well, they’re omnivorous – they’ve been known to eat insects, small birds, mushrooms, but those are all just additives to their diet. They mainly subsist on tree sap.”

“Right,” Velma muttered. “Do you have a number for the local DPS?”

“There are no demonic protection societies in the Kingdom of Cernyw,” Hamish reminded her, and Velma groaned, pressing a little more gauze against her chest before taping it in place. “You might try the Magical Species Society, but winged cats aren’t native to the forests of Cernyw, so I’m really not sure what they’ll do with it – they’re ordinarily found in the northernmost reaches of Loegr, and then across Alba. Cernyw is rather too temperate for them. Is it really the only thing in the locker?”

“I’m not actually sure,” Velma said. “I haven’t looked through it properly yet.”

“Why ever not?”

“Why ev— I’m hanging up now, Hamish. I’ll call you later.”

Sighing as she pulled her ruined jumper back over her head, Velma leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and stared the cat down. It was sat back on its haunches now, its head held high, and it looked at her with its four unblinking eyes.

“Fuck,” Velma said.

The winged cat softly growled.

*    *    *

“Hi, yeah, um, I just wanted to ask what you guys would be able to do about a winged cat?”

“Scottish?”

“I am, yeah.”

“… The cat.”

“Right,” Velma said, bashing her forehead against the wall with a quiet thunk and closing her eyes, keeping her phone against an ear. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Well, Scottish winged cats aren’t native to Cernyw.”

“Right in the name, isn’t it?”

“They’re an invasive species, Ma’am. We’d have it brought out to one of our facilities and humanely put down.”

Velma sighed, leaning her head against the wall as she looked into the storage locker, at the frankly stupid-looking animal that now had its four paws buried in the wood of the oak tree, and was gnawing at the wood, its yellow tongue greedily lapping up the sap that oozed forth.

“I was really afraid you’d say that,” she muttered, and pulled the storage locker door closed. “Thanks anyway.”

*    *    *

She had to push down the seats in the back of the car to make space for it, but she managed to get a reinforced carrier intended for large dogs from the pet shop, and then went into an enchanter’s off of the main street to get it actually reinforced. It was only simple work, nothing complicated, but anything that could keep in hell hounds – which were a mixed breed between mundane dogs and infernal wolves, for some reason a very popular pet even in Cernyw – should be able to keep in a winged cat.

She hoped so, anyway.

“Omnivorous?”

“That isn’t a traditional beginning to a phone call, you know,” said Hamish.

“What do they like most?”

“I couldn’t say, I’ve never conducted a survey.”

“I’m in a butcher shop, Hamish, just tell me what to buy that this cat would be pleased to eat.”

“Something pungent, I expect. Liver, perhaps. Why—”

Velma hung up the phone, and said to the butcher, who was looking at her bemusedly, “I need to get a cat into a carrier. Your stinkiest meat, please.”

“Gotcha,” he said cheerfully.

The calves’ liver smelt disgusting.

But—

Well.

It was worth a try.

*    *    *

“Oh, good, you’re alive,” said Hamish.

Velma’s arm was bound in bandages and she had a bruise on her chin from where the cat had thrown itself against the edge of its cage – it hadn’t been able to get out, because she’d copied the enchantment put on its enclosure after hunting high and low for the symbols, but it had off-balanced her. She’d had to sit on top of the thing to keep it still as she scrolled through her phone for an enchantment that would contain its impacts too, and keep the container steady as she carried it wrapped in a cloth.

Chloe, the cute girl on the desk, had asked concernedly if it was a pet bird, and Velma had avoided the question by complimenting her bangs.

“Barely,” said Velma. “I managed to look through the rest of the locker – no antiques, no furniture, nothing like that.”

“Well, I’ve been inquiring into the matter,” Hamish said mildly. “Apparently, Anita purchased a house and garden in the eighties that she ended up selling on – largely because its previous tenants had left their pet behind.”

“This thing is not a pet,” said Velma.

As if in agreement, the four-eyed demon cat growled and narrowed all four eyes at her in the car mirror.

“Yes,” Hamish said, “I rather think Anita came to that conclusion as well. Are you aware that it’s illegal to transport a non-native magical species across the boundary between Cernyw and Loegr without express permission from the crown and a suitable license?”

“Coming through Exeter now,” said Velma, who had looked it up and seen that was the case, and couldn’t be fucked dealing with the shit in Cernyw. She’d called up a few other magical nature charities and all of them had said the same thing – that the cat was an invasive species and they would have to put it down.

“You don’t plan to turn back?”

“Any cop that pulls me over is welcome to get the cat out and try arresting it,” muttered Velma, gripping tightly to the steering wheel. There was a sort of stubborn squeeze in her chest because she just couldn’t fucking bear it, the idea of a woman, as part of her dying legacy, for decades, having set up a self-sustaining storage locker for this cat to live in, and then it dying at the end of it.

No fucking wonder the thing was half-crazed. She couldn’t imagine it, being alone like that, with no animals of a similar species, with no company at all, nothing, just—

Just loneliness.

Her stomach felt sick.

“You don’t need to drive all the way to Alba,” said Hamish. “When you come past Taunton, instead of going on for Glastonbury, you’re going to go north to Burnham-on-Sea. I’ve a contact there that’s going to meet you.”

“A contact?” Velma repeated. “What am I, a fucking spy?”

“He’s got a boat, and he’s willing to ferry the cat north to Scotland in exchange for a favour.”

“What’s the favour?”

“You have to do a job for his husband.”

“Who’s his husband?”

“You won’t like him.”

Velma narrowed her eyes as she looked at the road ahead of her, and then asked, slowly, “Like… Is he, uh, creepy? Or… Why won’t I like him?”

“I wouldn’t want to taint your opinion one way or the other,” said Hamish in that catty way he had of saying things sometimes, especially when he was very obviously fucking lying. “Merely my prediction, that’s all. I’ll forward his contact number onto you – shall I give yours to him?”

“Don’t bait the hook and then stop fishing, old man, what the fuck? Why won’t I like the husband?”

“Safe trip,” said Hamish, almost audibly laughing, and hung up the phone.

The cat growled fiercely, a growl that become a hiss, sort of at everything.

“Yeah,” Velma agreed. “Too fucking right.”