The Atermorpha family was fairly wide-ranging, with all sorts of colours and subtleties, but the main shape remained the same: Velma thought they looked rather like caterpillars, but with harder, chitinous shells instead of softer skins. The segmentation of their bodies was obvious on sight, the many rounded pieces of shell stacked up against one another in accordion-neatness, and their many arms sprang out from the shells themselves, as well as many pairs of legs that came out from underneath their bodies, like centipedes.

The thing she liked about Atermorpha – the thing that made the different species so funny-looking, and made her laugh – was how human the features of their faces were. They usually had two big eyes, albeit with far bigger disc-shaped pupils than humans had, but they tended to have lips and a mouth that smiled, even a white edge of chitin just inside their mouths that resembled teeth, as well as an outcrop of chitin on the centre of their face to resemble a nose.

They just looked funny – they laughed and they clapped their seven-fingered hands together, leaning back on just two or three pairs of legs and stacking their segments so they could sit up straight, and they were… Well, honestly, they were cute.

Oh, they were damned nuisances – they produced ridiculous amounts of slick, sticky mucus to insulate their nests and help them digest fabric, and the sound of their laughter was very loud and uncomfortably human-sounding. Their appetites were legendary – Velma knew a few stories about sticky imps eating royals in fairy stories out of house and home, going through sheets and curtains, let alone true stories of colonies establishing themselves in clothing stores and the like, but she couldn’t help but like them anyway.

Closing the third of the cat carriers on the sticky imps swarming over the piece of rug she’d tossed in the bottom, she groaned lowly, shaking her hand of the mucus clinging to her fingers, and wiped it off on a rag.

“Now what?” asked Stephen Whitely, the rather harried-looking father-of-five that had called her out. He was looking with uninhibited disgust and horror at the shaking cat-carriers, each of them rocking with the number of sticky imps crammed inside, and Velma walked back toward the house.

The betony was nearly burned to the end now, and she picked up the bowl, swilling it slightly and watching the shift of the remaining embers. “We’re going to add a little bit of water to this,” Velma said, “and get that paintbrush. All you need to do is dab a little bit on the doors and window frames – you don’t need much, and once it’s in place, you won’t need to worry about putting in more for at least another year.”

“And the eggs?” Whitely gestured to the neat pile of books Velma had pulled out from the centre of the sticky imps’ nest, each one of them encrusted with shiny green eggs, as hard to the touch as stone. She was fairly certain there were at least five or six hundred egg capsules across the brood, and thought it was fairly lucky she’d decided to come out when she had.

“I’m going to take those to the facility I was telling you about, as well,” Velma said, setting a wooden crate down and beginning to gently set each of the books inside, feeling the strange, smooth surface of all the eggs under her fingertips.

“They will destroy them, won’t they?” Whitely asked, anxiously. “I think they’re just— I think they’re just horrible. I mean, demons, in my home, demons! People will think we live in a sty!”

“They don’t mean any harm, Mr Whitely,” Velma said, doing her best to keep her tone even, “and your home is lovely. You know how they say you only get headlice if your hair is already nice and clean? Sticky imps are the same – they’re attracted to nice, heavy fabrics that are kept clean, dry, and relatively free of dust. Unfortunately, once they find a house with the décor they like, they devour it.”

“Disgusting,” Whitely muttered, looking green. “Thank you so much for coming out to have a look at them, anyway – my friend Rebecca has worked quite a bit with your aunt, and I didn’t know that she’d retired until after you got into contact. You’re very capable. You know, given your age.”

It was said with the slight edge of judgement she’d received each time she’d done a house call this week.

“You look very young.”

“In your twenties?”

“It must be such a lot for you.”

Velma held her tongue as she set the last of the books into the crate. It was the least of things to dislike Whitely over – the man was obnoxious, judgemental, sharp and impatient, and kept asking stupid questions while not listening to simple answers. People just didn’t expect any magic user of significance to be under the age of thirty or forty, and it didn’t help that she looked so modern in a lot of their eyes – when you were a white dude with permanent bags under your eyes and wearing wizard’s robes, people were probably willing to overlook that you were only twenty-something.

She did write £300 on the invoice instead of £150, but Whitely didn’t even blink as he opened the bank transfer app on his phone, and she couldn’t help but wonder how much extra she could have charged before he thought anything of it.

After wrapping the cat carriers in bin bags so that there was less chance of the sticky imps getting free, she put them in the boot of the car, placing the crate of egg-encrusted books on top. It was just before four o’clock, and she could see Whitely’s husband walking briskly to keep up with the rushing kids home from school, all of them sprinting toward them.

She didn’t dislike kids, but the Demon Protection Society closed at five, and so she was quick about waving them goodbye before getting into the car. It was going to be a tight call, she thought, to get to the sanctuary in time, but she’d told them in advance that she’d be coming.

Her phone rang as she pulled back off the motorway, and she tapped to answer the phone when it came up with an unknown number.

“Velma Kuroda speaking,” she said, glancing at the sign for the next roundabout and trying to remember if it was the first or second turning she was meant to take. “How can I help?”

“I have just heard word on the grapevine,” came the unmistakable Highlands accent from the other end of the line, “that you are acting as exterminator.”

“I am not acting as exterminator, Mr MacKinnon,” Velma said, not bothering to keep the scorn out of her voice. “I have a car full of sticky imps, and am currently driving them to the DPS in Basingstoke. Who the fuck knows you in Southampton?”

“I have contacts all over the place,” MacKinnon said snootily, and Velma scoffed.

“Yeah, I bet,” she said. “You strike me as a very popular man. What do you want?”

“I just thought you might like to know the house spirit you rescued is now quite contentedly watching over a charming two-bed in Cheadle. I’ve been sent a number of amusing photographs of it posing on the end of the stair’s bannister, where it apparently likes to imagine itself a gargoyle. It enjoys Disney movies, and apparently knows several very haunting lullabies that the children are quite in love with.”

That was… sweet.

She felt herself deflate, pressing her lips loosely together and tipping her head back against the seat headrest, and she listened to the silence at the end of the line. “That’s nice,” Velma said, albeit shortly, and took the second turning, vaguely recognising the signposting ahead. “Thanks for telling me. It’s… alright, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Hamish said. “Has its own shrine and whatnot, looks as though it’s going to be properly cared for, now. The children keep devoting bits of pastry to it. How many sticky imps did you pick up?”

“About sixty, I think,” Velma said. This was different, all of a sudden, wasn’t exchanging barbs with the old man, but just him… asking. “But there’s easily hundreds of eggs in my boot as well. The guy that rang me out was a professional styler and decorator, so he was obviously a bit more sensitive than most blokes would be about their curtains getting eaten.”

“Well,” MacKinnon said. “I don’t suppose you have an opening in your no-doubt jam-packed date book? I can’t imagine you would have any interest in looking at mere antiques, after so exciting a week, but I must ask nonetheless.”

Okay. He wasn’t just reaching out to chat with her after all.

“Are you this much of a bitch with everybody, Mr MacKinnon, or is it just people you’re trying to hire?”

“Well, if it is too much, dear girl,” the old man said, catty as you please, “then—"

“What’s the job, Mr MacKinnon?” Velma asked, cutting through before he could go on with his waffle.

“I should appreciate for someone to have a look at a storage locker for me. A friend of mine died some time back, and bequeathed the contents to me – as the locker in question is in Cornwall, I haven’t yet made the trek out there. I wondered if I might ask you to go in my stead.”

“And do what?” Velma asked. “Inventory it?”

“An itemised inventory would be a start,” Hamish said. “I really have no idea as to the contents. If there were anything very valuable, I might ask you to bring it back with you.”

“I’m behind the wheel right now, because the DPS is just down the road from me,” Velma said, “but I’d need to set at least a day or two aside to go down to Cornwall.”

“I would pay for your fuel costs and organise a night’s accommodation in Cornwall, of course,” Hamish said. “On top of your fee.”

“Okay, what’s in this locker that you want me out there so desperately? The Ark of the Covenant?”

“You think perhaps it has moved from display in the Empyrean Museum in Harare,” Mr MacKinnon said, smooth and more than slightly condescending, “to a neglected storage locker in Falmouth?”

Velma opened her mouth, wondered if this man with several centuries under his belt had even heard of Indiana Jones, let alone seen the right movie, then closed it. “I’m free the weekend after next. You sure you don’t want to come? Little carpool down to Cornwall, get some sandwiches at the service, we could—”

The line clicked off. Velma nodded to herself as she pulled into the DPS’ mostly empty car park, pulling out her datebook from the shelf under her radio and scribbling down a note on the right date. She’d email the grumpy old bastard later, just to confirm.

He was just… annoying.

He was such an annoying old man, possessed by a legion of equally annoying demons, and it was… Velma made an irritable noise to herself, adding Hamish’s contact to the address book in her phone, and as she did so she heard a skittering from the back, some of the imps whining in their confinement.

“Just a second,” she called back, in what she hoped was a soothing voice. She really wasn’t sure how much they understood, if anything. “I’m gonna get you out in a minute.”

She shut the door closed – she hadn’t chosen a parking space, but backed in just before the glass double doors of the building, which was slightly off the main track of the road. There had been a sign directing her into the Demonic Protection Society, but it had been magically obscured, and there were no big signs here on the actual property, like there were at RSPCA locations.

“Afternoon,” she said as she stepped into the empty reception, looking to the extremely wizened, elderly woman behind the desk. “I’m Velma Kuroda, I called at about one o’clock today about some imps I’d be bringing in?”

“Ah…” the old lady said, reminiscent of a sloth in the way she slowly rose from the desk, so slowly that it made Velma wonder, for a moment, if she was seeing the old lady move in slow motion. She picked up a phone, dialling in what seemed like three hundred numbers before she said, “Mmm, Doc-tor? Yesssss. Mmm hmmm.”

Her eyes were solid blue, no pupil, no sclera, and Velma watched as the old woman melted down into a pool of yet more blue, sliding slowly toward the door.

“Ah, you’d be Velma Kuroda,” said a blond woman in her forties, coming out of the back office while pulling a glove onto one hand, putting out the ungloved hand to shake. “I’m Doctor Kim Eustace, I talked with you on the phone earlier. You’re certain these are conches viscosa?”

“Pretty certain,” Velma said, watching the blue slime drag slowly over the floor, out of the automatic doors and toward the car. “I have fifty-seven, I think – it was hard to count them when they move around so much, even once they were all packed into the cat carriers. I didn’t even try to count the eggs – I’d guess there’s a few hundred.”

Doctor Eustace, to her credit, looked genuinely excited as she pulled on her other glove, moving more quickly forward, and when Velma opened up the boot, she immediately pulled some of the black bag aside, peeking into one of the cat boxes. The demon slime was gelatinously moving toward them, still very slowly, but when Velma picked up the box of egg-encrusted books, it slowly stretched up toward her, arranging itself into a roughly flat surface.

“She’ll take the box off you,” Doctor Eustace said casually, waving her hand. “Marnie here likes eggs.”

Velma passed over the crate, and the slime – Marnie – began to move slowly toward the doors with it, a column of shifting blue slickness.

“She hasn’t got a great handle on using spoken language,” Eustace said, “but she understands everything well enough.”

“She’s a demon?”

“Mmm,” Eustace said, pulling out one of the cat carriers and looking with interest at the imps that lurched to the lattice front of it to look at her, sticking out their arms to try to grab at her hair, her coat. “They’re classified under insecta, but honestly, we tend to just call them goo-man, you know, like human? They’re great at mimicry, even if they’re slow, and they like being around people. These guys look healthy, well-fed.”

“The house was owned by an interior designer,” Velma said, stacking the other two cat carriers on top of one another and lifting them up from the boot, stepping back so that Eustace could pull it closed. “Lots of different fabrics, expensive ones – mix of vintage and contemporary, although to be honest, none of the vintage stuff was older than fifty years old, which in interior design terms—”

Doctor Eustace was looking at Velma very blankly, and Velma shifted her grip on the imps, feeling them rush about in the carrier, making low noises to one another. Some of them were repeating snatches of phrase – “Hello, hello?” and “Terms, terms!” – but they didn’t sound too frantic or desperate, more curious than anything else.

“Never mind,” Velma said. “They’re not really frightened or anything – do they not have natural predators?”

“Not in this dimension,” Eustace said. She was stumbling slightly with the single cat carrier as the imps rushed around inside – Velma had better balance and stronger arms than she did, apparently, but the doctor managed to make it back inside and down a corridor without letting the imps tip her over. As she led Velma into a plastic-walled cell, one in a row of a good dozen, she went on, “In the nether dimensions, sticky imps have all sorts of natural predators, but they were one of the first species to adapt to the colder temperatures and oxygen-rich atmosphere of Earth. There’ve been sticky imps here, in what we broadly call the mundane dimension, for about eight thousand years. These guys, conches viscosa, they don’t have to subsist on fabric – in other places, they eat plant fibres, but these guys have figured out it’s way easier and way tastier to find a nice home and eat the carpet instead.”

She flicked open the front of the first cat carrier, letting the imps rush out, and Velma stacked the other two carriers on top of the first, opening them. They moved in a swarm, the slimy collective bouncing off the walls and letting out their loud laughing noises.

A few of them rushed toward Velma, then let out screams and yelps when they smelt the betony still clinging to her clothes, rushing to the walls again. They left grey streaks of slime on the plastic, and Velma wrinkled her nose, laughing,

“What will you do with them?” Velma asked as Eustace idly peeled off the sticky imp clinging to her arm, stopping it from gnawing at the shoulder of her white coat.

“Well, we’ll have a look at the colony,” Eustace said, examining the sticky imp giggling between her hands. It wriggled and jumped when she tickled its undercarriage, making her smile, and she tossed it to join the rest. “See how healthy they are, measure them… If we’re allowed to release them, we’ll spay them all, tag them, and send them on their way, probably release them either on one of the heavily forested islands or in one of the Alban reserve parks. Alba are the best on demonic preservation, you see, the government across Loegr and Cymru are… Well,” Eustace muttered, gesturing for Velma to follow her to the door and letting her out first, closing it behind them. “We’ve made strides in recent years, don’t get me wrong. It used to be much, much worse. But it’s hard to get license to release demons like this, once they’ve been into a human household, because the assumption is that they’ll just try to get right back.”

“That’s true though, isn’t it?” Velma asked. “Like you said, it’s much easier for them to eat fabric than plants.”

“True enough,” Eustace said, “but the Alban parks account for that. They have infernal registers on the reserve borders – it doesn’t affect the complicated demons, you know, the ones that are sentient and use language and might be liable to go for a hike, but demons like these would be kept within the borders, and would get used to eating plant fibres again. The reserve parks tend to be smaller here across Loegr and Cymru, and they’re a bit less wild than the Alban ones – we use more of the land for ritual, there’s more territory ceded to fae nobility…”

Velma was quiet, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that she’d never learned much about kingdom politics. She had a magical Alban passport as well as her mundie one, of course, but it all struck her as difficult to follow. The mundies made it easy – different political parties, people voted, people won, whatever. But the lines between the king and king regent across Cymru-Loegr, or the king in Alba, or the queen in Cernyw…

And that was without even thinking about the situation across Ireland.

“Why wouldn’t they let you just take the imps up north?” Velma asked. “If Alba can do it, and they can’t—”

“Too much risk of escape,” Eustace said. “They’d say it was better to put them all down.”

Velma took this in. “But they’re not harmful,” she said. “They’re not dangerous. It’s not like they eat people.”

“King regent’s been in power a good few hundred years,” Eustace said. “He’s still in the past, as far as demons go.”

“Can you guys keep me updated? Let me know what the status is with them?”

“Of course,” Eustace said, bringing out her phone and holding it out for Velma to tap in her details. “And if you come across any other demon colonies, you can contact us, or any of the other DPS sites. It’s refreshing to have someone in contact with us who doesn’t just want to learn the best way to kill them.”

*    *    *

She had another job that evening. It wasn’t really a job to do anything – a woman her dad knew in Coventry had done a clear-out and didn’t own a car: she wanted to get rid of an enchanted vanity table but couldn’t drive it out to the disposal centre herself, and she couldn’t exactly leave it out for the binmen. Velma had offered to pick it up as a favour, but she figured she’d drive straight through up to Nottingham, drop it off with MacKinnon if it was worth taking, and then stay the night at her parents’.

“Is it broken?” Velma had asked as she’d examined the vanity table, but even as she’d said it, she’d drawn her fingers over the swooping, delicately carved patterns on the wood surface, feeling them glow to life under her touch. Light crested about the edge of the vanity’s mirror, illuminating it, and even as leaned over the surface, she saw the mirror’s view shift its angle, showing her the sides of her cheeks, her profile, without moving the mirror itself at all.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Mrs Worrall said. “No, it’s a lovely set of enchantments, you know – the mirror shows different angles, and shows your skin very close up, and here, there’s enchanted storage capacity, too…”

Opening up one of the drawers, she showed the compartments, and the magical belt that lined them – you could scroll through whatever was stored along the belt, and the other contents would move into magically-created space elsewhere in the vanity, so that the storage capacity was increased fourfold.

“But this was my daughter’s before she moved over to Australia, you see,” Mrs Worrall said, “and I don’t do much makeup myself. Thought you might be able to take it to someone who’d use it.”

“Yeah, I’ll take it for you,” Velma said. “Can I help you with anything else, or…?”

“No, no, just that!”

Velma nodded, giving the old woman a smile, and her smile widened when Mrs Worrall admiringly commented on how strong she was, taking the vanity into the boot of her car on her own.

It was dark when she pulled up outside of MacKinnon’s antiques, past eight o’clock, but the lights were still on inside the shop, and the doors were open.

Stepping inside, she stood with her hands in the pockets of her cardigan, watching MacKinnon work.

“You didn’t grow up with enchanted furniture, I take it?” he asked kindly, and both of his customers shook their heads. “It’s been making something of a comeback for trendy young people in recent years – used to be the typical housewarming present for a married couple up to the late eighteen hundreds, but what with all these mundane advancements, a good enchantment was dropped by the wayside.”

It was a couple, two women a few years older than Velma, the pair of them an exercise in contrast: the taller one, pale, thin, with heavily lidded eyes, was dressed all in red, scarlet jeans, a red bralette, a flaming leather jacket; the smaller woman was dark-skinned with a golden undertone and a shaved head, dressed in sunshine yellow, and the style of her jacket was the same as her partner’s, like they’d been made to match.

“We’re not married,” said the tall woman. Her voice was husky and low, as though she’d been gargling lit cigarettes, and Hamish raised his plump hands in a gesture of innocence, smiling.

“Oh, I know, I know, but… You never know,” he said mildly, with a surprisingly charming wink, making the smaller one laugh. Velma pressed her lips together to stop herself from huffing out a laugh, he went on, “Let me demonstrate this wardrobe for you, in any case.”

Gesturing with his fingers, he waved toward a slim wardrobe Velma had seen the last time she was in Mr MacKinnon’s shop, and Velma watched as the mahogany doors opened outward, revealing the great space inside, the twin mirrors on each door.

“Now, let me show you the enchantments,” Hamish said, conjuring a little light to glow from his fingers, and he illuminated the carefully carved symbols that were carved around the edges of each of the mirrors. “Do you know how enchantment works, did you study it at school?”

“I didn’t come into magic until I was into my twenties,” said the tall girl, shrugging her shoulders.

“Inheritance?” Hamish asked.

“Accident. I crashed my car into a fairy tree while I was visiting family in South Kerry. Got arrested and tried in the fae courts.”

Hamish’s face became very serious, his lips loosely pursed together, his gaze focused on her face. “How long did they give you?” he asked softly.

“Only two years,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t drunk or anything, and there were icy roads, so they were fairly lenient about it, it was just that… I actually swerved into the tree, because there were cows in the next field, and I didn’t want to hit any of them. The judge didn’t like the idea that I’d weighed a cow against them and the cow had won.”

She said it quietly, solemnly, and Hamish nodded his head, his expression mirroring hers. Velma’d never dealt with fae in all her life, but she knew people that had, and Ginchiyo had warned her about them, growing up. Their laws were complicated, as far as magical ones went, but they had much more power westward and up north than they did down the centre of England – of Loegr.

“I learned some magic from my grandmother growing up,” said the shorter girl lowly, her fingers brushing her girlfriend’s wrist, to comfort her, Velma supposed. “But it was all active magic.”

“Active magic. A very recent way of thinking about it, active magic versus passive,” Hamish said, with a wry smile, and he turned back to the wardrobe, spreading the fingers of his right hand and expanding the glow that came out from his skin, bone-deep, the light tinted slightly red where it came through the flesh of his palm. “An enchantment, my dears, is not so different to the circuits you learned about in school, hm? Each symbol is a component in the enchantment, and magic travels through them much in the way electricity travels through a wire: one creates a circuit. Once the circuit is made, magic tends to move constantly through it, looping over and over – thus the tendency to refer to it as passive or inactive magic. Once an object is enchanted, one does not need to provide energy in the moment: the enchantment merely lasts, usually for quite extensive periods, with little need of replenishment, as it draws from latent magical energy in the vicinity.”

“Do you know what all the symbols mean?” asked the shorter woman wonderingly.

“Yes, of course,” Hamish said. “I learned enchantment when I was a boy, although I studied a different school to this one – this being rather traditional Cymru enchantment. As a mode of enchantment, it has its roots in early faerie styles, but quickly developed its own little quirks and tendencies. It began to come into its own in the fifth century.”

“Because of the king regent?”

“He wasn’t king regent then,” Hamish murmured, and Velma didn’t think she imagined the catch in his face, the slight twist in his expression. “But yes. Myrddin Wyllt took much from the fae, when it suited him to learn from them.” Turning back to the wardrobe, he went on, “But the individual symbols don’t mean much, honestly. Some enchantments are put rather poetically, telling a narrative or at least something sweet to read aloud, but this isn’t one of them, I fear – the etchings you see here primarily create the space expansion in the wardrobes. It’s a slim little number, but can accommodate a good six times what its capacity ought be. Self-cleaning, dissuades moths, dust, magical creatures that might cause similar damage – small imps, pixies, and so on. And like so…”

Hamish placed his palm on the centre of the righthand mirror glass, and Velma watched as it lit from within, forming an image of Hamish himself. It moved and shifted, smiling out of the glass, standing straight with its hands behind its back, but it wasn’t a direct reflection, and Velma wondered what it was for until Hamish drew a symbol on the glass. The colours the reflection was wearing changed: its neat plum-coloured jumper was replaced with a woollen cardigan and a pressed shirt.

“Oh my god,” said the tall girl, leaning forward, her lips parting in fascination. “That’s brilliant.”

“It only works with anything you already have in the wardrobe,” Hamish said, gesturing to the dry-cleaning bag neatly pushed to one edge, “and I’m afraid it isn’t the most discerning of spellwork, so the way it displays size is often a little wrong – it was made on the assumption that one had tailors to hand, you see, so it will just tailor whatever is hanging to the reflection it’s given.”

“Do you have to learn a lot of symbols?”

“A few,” Hamish said. “The drawback to that, of course, is learning to become confident in drawing them on the glass, especially as symbols have to be drawn in a particular way – the movement of one’s finger or the brush one uses is just as important as the shape one produces. With that said, it’s a very flexible piece of magic as a result, and is a lovely introduction to the craft.”

“Would we both be able to use it? If it doesn’t understand size, I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Hamish said. “One can calibrate this for as many people as one likes, if one keeps coming up with symbols to use – all you do is paint the symbols you wish to use on the hangers, and then you draw the symbol in question over and over to cycle through garments. You could have a symbol for each of you and just make sure you’re using dedicated hangers. The gentleman who last owned this owned it alone, but separated his wardrobe for the seasons.”

“So everything has to be on a separate hanger?”

“I’m afraid so.” Hamish gestured a banishment over the glass, carefully closing the wardrobe doors, and he smiled in an easy, genial way. He could see the hesitation in their faces, their body language, Velma supposed, although they both still looked to her like they were smiling politely. “Not very practical for today’s more wide-ranging wardrobe, is it?”

“Not really,” said the smaller woman. “It looks really cool, but we were hoping for something a little more useful.”

Velma stepped forward, and Hamish looked over their shoulders, arching his eyebrow at her.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr MacKinnon,” Velma said. “But I’ve got that vanity I told you about. Enchanted with a mirror backlight and a variable focus on the glass, as well as the extended makeup storage?”

MacKinnon’s expression gave way to a small, subtle scowl as the young women shared an excited look, but he didn’t make any protest. He nodded his head, a crisp, sudden inclination of his chin, and Velma went out to bring the vanity in.

It was painted a creamy white colour, rose petals painted as though falling around the curves of its front legs, and as the women examined it, talking excitedly to one another about the mirror, Velma leaned in toward Mr MacKinnon and muttered, “Sixty percent.”

“I will be a generous man,” MacKinnon replied, “and allow you thirty. I believe I did tell you, Ms Kuroda, to telephone in advance whenever you wish to—”

“Old lady just wanted the thing tossed,” Velma said. “Figured you’d get a use out of it, although not as quickly as this. What are you going to give it to them for? Eight hundred?”

“I’ll offer it at nine-fifty,” Mr MacKinnon said, “we’ll see if they haggle.”

“People our age don’t, usually,” Velma said.

Mr MacKinnon released a disapproving noise, giving Velma a sharp look, as though this fact was somehow caused by Velma herself, and she was orchestrating the lack of haggling among her generation just to upset old men in antique shops. The girls came back toward them, smiling, and Velma stepped back as Mr MacKinnon moved forward to deal with them, fiddling with some of the things on his desk.

He had a very neatly appointed date book, bound in dark leather, and the two girls were written in, in a sloping, graceful hand, 8pm, Annabella Hartley & Josephine, ref. Jane Buggle. Enchanted home furnishings.

“Have you eaten?” Mr MacKinnon asked, crisply, after Velma had helped the Annabella and Josie get their vanity into back of their Subaru, and come back into the shop. Velma stared at the old man, waiting for some other addition to this question, but none came.

“Uh, no, not yet,” Velma said, “I was just going to drive over to Mum and Dad’s, and—”

“Ridiculous,” MacKinnon said, moving over to the front door with an air of finality and locking it with a click. “It’s nine o’clock at night. You can’t possibly drive on an empty stomach – when did you last take something in?”

“I ate a sandwich at one,” Velma said, baffled. She followed the old man, not really sure what else to do, as he led the way through an archway, pushing the red curtain that hung in it aside, and beginning to ascend a narrow, steep staircase.

“Preposterous,” MacKinnon was saying as he bustled up the stairs, never once softening his irritable tone. “Starving yourself and driving halfway across the country, and declaring you will starve yourself for some while longer.”

“I’m not starving myself,” Velma said, “and you don’t need to feed me, Mr MacKinnon, I’m going to—”

“Hush,” MacKinnon said, and turned off the staircase. Velma came up a bit more slowly to the landing, which was carpeted in a Turkish rug pattern, dark reds and yellows making the dark space seem even darker, and she glanced up the next flight of stairs, which led up and into what seemed like complete darkness. “And you might as well call me by my forename.”

As she crossed the threshold of Hamish’s flat, which seemed to be neatly settled above the shop, she had to step back from the cloud of chattering demons that rushed past her, toward the modest kitchen.

“Yes, yes, I know, I was gone for oh-so-long, almost an hour, how dreadful, and a whole ten feet beneath you, at that, such an unbearable distance,” Hamish was saying, voice dripping with a venomously affectionate sarcasm as he was beset by alastora, and Velma smiled down at her Mary Janes as the little demons hopped over his jumper and wrapped themselves around his shoulders, pulling at his hair, stuffing themselves into his pockets and down the front of his shirt collar. The tone of his voice was somewhat contrasted by the gentle way he put out his hands for the alastora to perch on, and the way he stroked their backs, between their wildly flapping wings. Their noise became lower in volume as they calmed down, apparently reassured that Hamish was alive and well, and she could hear him talking absently away to them as he moved around the kitchen.

Velma stayed in place for a moment, slowly closing the landing door behind her. MacKinnon’s flat, to her surprise, was not sparsely appointed, with sleek, bright colours like his shop was. It was dark, cosy, and infinitely more comfortable, with dark floral wallpaper on the walls, and an emphasis on dark, luscious red fabrics. The sofas and armchairs were overstuffed and comfortable, each with tartan blankets casually thrown over their backs, and a fireplace roared cheerfully from beneath a dark slate mantel: the lamplight was shaded in golds and rose pinks, and made the whole room feel that much warmer.

There was a safety cage around the old-fashioned, big fireplace, with a few radiator cat beds hanging from it, and when she took a step forward, craning her neck, she could see three alastora were still sleepily curled up in one of them, wrapped around one another and yawning softly as they crammed themselves as close as they could to the fire.

“Do they hurt themselves, if you don’t have a cage on the fire?” Velma asked as she came toward the kitchen, watching Hamish pour out two cups of tea, even as he tossed alastora, one by one, into the sink, peeling them out of where they’d tangled themselves in his cardigan.

“Oh, no, they don’t hurt themselves,” Hamish said. “Sorry wee idiots do get covered in coal dust, ash, and smut, and trek it all about the house.”

Velma laughed, and Hamish let out a low, exhaled noise through his nose that might have been a laugh, if you were willing to be very generous about the definition.

“You really don’t have to feed me, Mr MacKinnon,” Velma said as Hamish handed her a mug of steaming tea, black, and MacKinnon let out a scornful noise, picking up the rest of the kettle. As she watched, he poured the steaming-hot water into the sink, and the alastora laughed and scrabbled on the metal surface, falling over one another and wrestling to be under the spray.

“There’s stew in the oven, so I will,” Hamish said firmly, without looking at her. His lips shifted infinitesimally up at their edges as he poured boiling water over his demons, and the alastora were… cute about it. They hopped up and down, wetly flapping their wings, and when one jumped out of the water, straight to her, Velma reacted reflexively, catching it out of the air.

It peered up at her, gormless, and she felt how hot it was to the touch, much hotter than the mug of tea held in her other hand. She opened her palm, expecting it to scramble free, but it just sat down against the heel of it, looking up at her with curiosity in its six bright eyes.

“How much did they pay?” Velma asked, putting her mug down on the counter so that she could hold the alastor with both hands, and between her cupped palms, it laid down on its back, yawning exaggeratedly before it curled its wings around its head, forming a leathery little cocoon. It didn’t weigh much – it felt deceptively light for its frame, like every beetle she’d ever held.

“Nine-fifty,” Hamish said darkly.

“So I get four hundred?”

“Three-eighty,” Hamish corrected immediately, giving her a disapproving look, and then he glanced down to the alastor cupped in her hands, his expression softening somewhat. “They do bite, you know,” he said half-heartedly, even as he swilled the scalding hot water in the sink behind him with his fingers, making the alastora crammed into the sink vocalise and fall over one another as they splashed in it.

Some of them had already gotten bored, moving back into the living room, although a few of them had stuffed themselves back into Hamish’s cardigan pockets, piling themselves on top of one another.

“This one’s asleep, I think,” Velma said. “I think it likes me.”

“They aren’t very discerning creatures,” Hamish said, and Velma felt her mouth drop open, but he didn’t stick around to rub salt in the new wound, moving back toward the oven and crouching down to open it up. It was a dark green pot, the sort of one you could use for the stove and the oven, and whatever stew it was, it smelled incredible.

“Slice some bread from the loaf in the box,” Hamish said, nodding to the bread board toward the edge of the kitchen, and Velma awkwardly set the alastor down next to her mug, where it immediately crammed itself against the mug’s side, giving her a mournful look, as though accusing her of leaving it to freeze to death.

“I’d wash my hands,” she said, “but washing them in alastor water doesn’t seem like it’d make much difference.”

She aimed this comment more at the alastora themselves than at Hamish, and the demons looked up at her blankly, glancing between her and Hamish, who was either ignoring her, or hadn’t heard.

It was a heavy, brown bread, made with nuts and grains, and it felt very fresh under her hands. She put a small piece in her mouth, chewing thoughtfully – she didn’t normally like brown bread, but this was good, moist and rich, and she swallowed, amazed at the taste of it.

“Where do you get this stuff?”

“I make it,” Hamish answered primly as he ladled stew into two bowls. “Two loaves a week usually suffice between us. Butter is in the cold cabinet.”

“You mean the fridge?” Velma asked, moving toward where Hamish was pointing, and then clasping the right cupboard door when he nodded his head in confirmation, tugging it toward her. “Oh,” she said, tracing her fingers over the complicated, swirling symbols carved around the inside of the door, and feeling the cold that radiated from it. It felt more natural, somehow, than standing in the cold of a fridge – it almost smelled like morning dew, or like a wet, cold sunrise, and she reached for the butter dish. Of course he had a butter dish. Holding it in her hand, feeling the additional cold that radiated from it, she looked between the symbols neatly marked on the butter dish’s lid, and the ones on the cupboard. “These aren’t Cymru style, are they?”

“They’re fae enchantments,” Hamish said, tone on a strange knife-edge between casual and defensive. “The fae modes are very different to human ones, this one particularly.”

Velma turned back to look at Hamish for a moment, taking in his red cheeks, his relatively pale skin, his thinning, yellow hair. Hamish met her gaze, and didn’t break it, raising his chin slightly and looking at her very seriously.

“What?” he asked.

“You don’t look very fae, that’s all,” Velma said.

“I suppose I don’t, as you would know it,” Hamish said, turning back to the bowls as he moved out of the kitchen, leading the way to a modest dining table against one edge of the wall. It would have sat four, but only had two dining chairs either side, and Velma set the butter dish and the chopping board with the bread on it against one side. There was a tablecloth on the table already, as well as place settings with leather mats, forks, knives, spoons. They were all polished to a shine, and Velma looked down at them, thoughtfully. “The truth about being fae, dear girl, is that it’s not about blood, not in the way being human is. It’s about the magic one uses, the world one learns magic in, where one comes to adulthood…”

“Is that what the girl, Annabella, meant earlier? She said two years.”

“That will have been a serving sentence, I expect, working in a fae establishment, on a farm or in some sort of workshop. They’re all about that sort of thing in Ciarraí,” Hamish said, reaching for a piece of bread and beginning to butter it liberally. Velma expected the alastora to flock around, maybe to beg for food, but they were all piled up beside the fireplace, now, sleeping together in a ball of leathery bug-demon. “Knowing what a fairy tree was and being of Irish blood will have been enough for them, from their legal perspective, to classify her as ready for a fair trial, you know. Two years in this dimension – in the fae realm, I would guess sixty years, perhaps more. She’ll have learned magic, of course, will have learned skills, but…”

Hamish went quiet, focusing on his bread, and Velma hesitated before picking up a fork, speaking a piece of thick, juicy pork and bringing it up to her mouth. It was good, salty and beautifully spiced, and she focused on eating for a few minutes, the silence… awkward.

“Is that what happened to you?” Velma asked.

“Is what what happened to me?”

“Did you get convicted of a fae crime?”

Hamish sighed, looking at her exasperatedly, and then said, “You know, for most fae, the concept of crime is… Let us say, quite removed from the human understanding of it. In any case, things were very different when I was a boy, without all these protections for humans and such forth – in Cymru-Loegr, of course, these matters are very different indeed, what with the affect the king regent tends to take to such things.”

The silence, this time, was very awkward, as Velma kept silent, and Hamish looked at her expectantly, then narrowed his eyes when it became clear to him she didn’t really know what he was talking about.

“I don’t really follow politics,” Velma said, slowly.

“My dear girl, Myrddin Wyllt took the regency in 1656. It isn’t exactly a recent development.”

“I wasn’t born yet.”

“That’s not the excuse you think it is.”

“Well, where were you in 1656?”

“I was in Losga, which is a fae kingdom at the base of Ben Nevis. In human terms, I was around thirteen years old, but I’d already been amongst fae for some decades. Fae often stole children that took their fancy, in those days.”

“They kidnapped you, and now you’re all pro-fae?”

“I’m anti-human,” Hamish said casually. “The two standpoints are not quite the same.”

“I’m human,” Velma said.

“It’s one of your more minor flaws, I’m sure,” Hamish replied, without missing a beat. “Eat.”

 “How long have you known my aunt?” Velma asked, after a few minutes of eating in silence. She looked past Hamish to the alastora, still piled neatly on top of one another, sleeping soundly in their little stack, and Hamish hummed at the question, considering it.

“I met Ginchiyo when she was…” He stared into the middle distance, his blue eyes narrowing slightly behind the glass of his spectacles, and then he gave a slow nod of his head. “She had just turned twenty-one, I believe. Those were rather different times in this business, the sixties and seventies – it wasn’t that there was no regulation at all, but the way in which those regulations were kept and enforced, it was far laxer. The digital age has done much for the magical community, as much as it has the mundane one, you know – the two communities inspire one another, and influence one another in their way.”

“You know that job with the sticky imps the last week there? She said that back in the eighties she’d have gotten a lot more money out of the same colony, because she’d just have let it go between different houses in the same town, then have a town meeting.”

Hamish chuckled. “Your aunt is a liar,” he said mildly.

“Excuse me?”

“Ginchiyo would never,” the old man murmured, his lips curved into what looked like a genuinely fond smile. “Some of her competitors, certainly, employed such practices, but not her. Back when she and Kimi worked together, the two of them often quarrelled about things like that – Kimi was always somewhat more concerned with their bottom line, being the accountant between them, and the worst the atermorpha would do was cosmetic damage, you know, it wasn’t as though they could harm anybody. But Ginchiyo was ever so concerned with how the imps might be hurt, let to bounce around like that.”

Velma was quiet, focusing on her meal. She was aware of the tension in her shoulders, the stiffness in her back.

“I don’t mean to speak ill of her,” Hamish said. “Merely that I think Ginchiyo rather likes to appear more the careless rock star than she really is. She’s a very caring woman.”

“Mmm,” Velma agreed. “She is.”

“And Kimi—”

“You know we don’t talk to Kimi anymore, right?” Velma broke in, raising her eyebrows, and Hamish raised his own, looking back at her. “None of us, not even Ginchiyo?”

“I… did not,” he said delicately, and looked as though he were about to say more, but instead just inclined his head, waving one of his plump hands. To his credit, he seemed genuinely disarmed, and regretful for bringing it up. “In any case, Ms Kuroda, I have no doubt that you would be more than capable of following in your aunt’s footsteps, if it suited you.”

“High praise,” Velma said. “Even though I’m no good at classification?”

“These things come with time,” Hamish allowed. “It’s your personality that needs the most refinement.”

Velma let out a huff of surprised laugh, and said flatly, “Thanks.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

“Why are you like this?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re just such a twat.”

“I do not suffer fools, Ms Kuroda.”

“Am I a fool?”

“You’re sitting at my dinner table, dear girl, for a meal I invited you for. What do you think?”

“I think you’re a very strange old man.”

“That’s a fair criticism,” Hamish said, standing to his feet. “Wine?”

“No, thank you.”

“Because you’re driving.”

“I just don’t like it.”

Here, Hamish gave her a disapproving look, but said no more about it, disappearing around the corner before returning with a bottle of red wine, pouring out a glass. Stirring in their places, Velma could see a few of the alastora look up curiously to see what Hamish was doing, but none of them moved, staying in their messy little pile.

“Ginchiyo didn’t start out in antiques, of course,” Hamish said. “She was an enforcer, in her early days. She only really focused on antiques and enchantment when she was, oh, I don’t know, twenty-five, twenty-six? She told me her father, Fuyuki, was a carpenter back in Kobe.”

“That’s right,” Velma said. “But not of furniture – he worked on shrines. But when they’d repair roofs, she, Kimi, and my grandfather, they saw a lot of antiques, stuff kept in the temples, and learned a bit about it as they went.”

Hamish nodded his head. “Well, in any case, she was an enforcer first – at your age.”

“I never knew that,” Velma said. “An enforcer, what is that, like a bodyguard?”

“Sometimes,” Hamish said, setting the bottle down and sinking into his seat again. “She would accompany individuals as an armed escort, or a guard – protection work, you know. She wasn’t quite as formidable at that time as she is today. Perfectly capable with her fists at the time, with enough magic to throw behind it, but nowadays she’s more of a warrior mage in the case of a skirmish. I believe the company she was with became tailored increasingly toward working with bailiffs and so on, and that put her off immensely.”

“What sort of skirmishes?” Velma asked. “Are you telling me my aunt gets into fights?”

“Oh, I’m certain I said nothing of the sort,” Hamish said immediately, taking a sip of his wine. “But it must be said that the woman protects what’s hers.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Not like she does.”

Velma laughed, and Hamish smiled slightly, setting his glass down.

“You really are set on this path to curation?” he asked quietly. It wasn’t said with superiority, or said like it was meant to needle, this time. He sounded like he genuinely wanted to know, and Velma inhaled, leaning back in her seat.

“It’s not easy to break into, if you’re not already some posh Oxford lad,” Velma said. “Think it’d be pure waste if I wanted to do it all this time, put in all this work, and then decided to go into the family business.”

“There is the magical side of art curation,” Hamish offered.

“What, dealing in haunted Mona Lisas? Work alongside fae princes instead of human sons of lords?”

“They are much of a muchness in that sense, yes,” Hamish allowed.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you always buy and sell antiques?”

Hamish stared at her for a long moment, like the question itself was a surprise, like he wasn’t used to being asked about himself – maybe he wasn’t. In his flat, she hadn’t seen photographs of any friends or family, and there was no hint of any of that downstairs, either.

“No,” he said. “No, when I first went into business, I owned a small shop in London, and primarily focused on enchantment and restoration. I did quite well at it, but at the turn of the last century, around about 1908, 1909, there was a workers’ strike at several of the London factories, to protest working and living conditions. The Renfrew Strike. These were mostly demonic workforces, and the backlash that ensued was…”

Hamish trailed off, his expression very serious, and Velma looked at him, watched his face, the distant look in his eyes. He didn’t go back to speaking immediately, but lifted his glass once more to his lips.

“There was a lot of anti-demon sentiment, but also anti-fae sentiment, because the factories in question were mainly fae-owned. This is complicated territory, you see – there are plenty of people who are unsettled by fae, but we do good work, we own a lot of important business, even if our law isn’t palatable to humans. Many a time, though, there’s the unscrupulous dealer who uses the excuse of fae law to get away with the worst things one can imaginable, and this was very much the case here – the conditions those demons were living and working with, they were… In any case, there was a good deal of backlash against both fae business owners and demons in general, and I rather got it from both ends.”

With one delicate, beautifully manicured hand, Hamish gestured to the alastora asleep in their pile, and said, “My demons and I are bound up in each other, and there is no breaking our connection. Those who don’t despise my fae background despise these creatures connected to me, or vice versa.

“So I moved up here, to Nottingham, and elected not to advertise myself so directly as a fae craftsman, but instead as a salesman. I still primarily do restoration and enchantment, even now, but at the time it was easier to fly under the radar, so to speak, as naught more than a merchant.”

“How long were you there?” Velma asked.

“Forty years, nearly,” Hamish said softly. “I set up shop when I first came to England, rented the flats above… I rather thought I’d be there all my life, but one can never assume these things will be set in stone. And in any case, but for a few minor hiccups in the beginning, I love Nottingham far more than I ever did London. The people here are unbearably English, but not quite so dreadfully southern.”

Velma choked on a mouthful of bread, covering her mouth to keep from spitting it over the table, and Hamish really did smile, this time, if only for a moment. It emphasised the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, making them crinkle.

“Why don’t you live in one of the fae cities, if you prefer fae life to human life?” Velma asked, wiping her mouth. “Are they not interested in antiques?”

“They are,” Hamish allowed. “Although my work isn’t as special amongst other fae – granted, I’m an expert in my field, but one of the thing that sets me apart from most human enchanters is that I use a variety of fae modes as well as human ones, and most of my competitors are human. Amongst other fae, that wouldn’t be unique at all – in fact, I’d probably be best off advertising my ability in the Cymru mode, or one of the others more popular amongst humans, to set myself apart. But fae look very poorly upon magical symbiosis – there’s very few protections for the possessed in fae law, and a great distaste for demons in general.”

“Magical symbiosis,” Velma repeated, and when Hamish stood, moving to pick up their empty bowls, she intercepted him, bringing them through to the kitchen to wash up.

“An umbrella term,” Hamish said, setting his glass on the counter and watching as Velma began to wash up the two plates. As soon as she turned the water on the top, a handful of alastora scrambled in from the other room, shoving themselves under the spray and whining pitifully when it was only lukewarm, so she turned it up, until steam came up from the water, and they laughed and giggled under its spray. “Isn’t that too hot for you?”

“No,” Velma said, scrubbing lightly over one of the bowls with a wet sponge, working around the alastora to do so.

“That should be scalding you.”

“I don’t get scalded – my family, on my mother’s side, we’re pyrokinetics. Heat doesn’t do anything to me.”

“Ginchiyo never mentioned it.”

“Why would she? She can’t do it, she’s my father’s aunt, not my mother’s.” She could see the curiosity in his expression, but maybe he thought it was impolite to ask about, because he didn’t say anything more, just giving a prim nod of his head and moving across the room. As she looked back to the sink, she asked, “Can you, um, can you explain magical symbiosis to me? Is it rude to ask?”

“No, no, not at all,” Hamish said. “Magical symbiosis, in broad terms, refers to any two or more individual beings who are, in some way, magically tethered to one another in such a way that if one party is harmed or killed, it will significantly, especially life-threateningly, affect the other party or parties. Now, that could be applied, as a term, to say, a pair of magic-users bonded to one another, or something similar, but ordinarily, we expect it to be between different species.

“Across Cymru-Loegr, there’s a legal distinction between what is considered a symbiotic relationship and what is considered a possession. The specifics are rather buried in legalese, but the distinction is mainly in the extent to which the “dominant” individual—” here, Hamish moved his fingers to make airquotes, and Velma pressed her lips together to keep from laughing, “is in command of his symbiote, and the extent to which the symbiote is beholden to him. If the individual cannot control his symbiote or symbiotes, he is considered possessed.”

Hamish’s kitchen had two sinks that shared one tap, and siding to it, and she glanced around for a tea towel, but couldn’t see one. “Where can I dry these? Do you not have a drying rack?”

“Open the cupboard above the sink,” Hamish said, and Velma glanced back at him, but then pulled open the cupboard, and felt herself smile. The drying rack was mounted between the wood framing of the cupboards either side, but rather than a wooden floor, it had a muslin bottom, to let air flow through. Setting the two dishes on the rack, and their forks in the tub, she closed it. “It means the alastora don’t shatter anything.”

“Right,” she said. “Um, sorry, what’s… Why does it matter if someone is symbiotic versus possessed?”

“It affects a few elements. Broadly, it affects the rights of a possessed individual – it’s legal to discriminate, to a certain extent, against someone who is possessed when it comes to job or rental applications, for example, because they are considered a liability, owing to their lack of control over an extension of themselves.

“Police forces are permitted more force, when apprehending those who are possessed – they are permitted to use certain chemical and magical methods to subdue their subject with very little provocation, whereas symbiotics retain more of their right to be arrested without being drugged to the gills and bound in a magical straitjacket.”

“What the fuck?”

“Mmm,” Hamish said, draining the last of his wine. “I know.”

One of the alastora let out a plaintive chitter of sound, sitting on the very edge of the sink’s counter, staring up at her with its four arms outstretched, its little hands grabbing at the air. She hesitated for a second, not quite sure how to respond, but then she put out her hand, and the alastora fell forward into her palm, sprawling on its belly with its face mashed against her skin, its wings loosely wrapping around itself.

“That’s… actually very cute,” she murmured, bringing it up to her chest, and the alastora actually fucking yawned, showing all its little teeth as it curled up against her. “Aren’t these guys meant to be more… you know, feral?”

“Rather,” Hamish murmured. “Their scientific name is alastor domesticus, but that’s really a demonologist’s in-joke more than anything else – of the species of alastora, these are the most aggressive, and often the most dangerous to humans. These are highly-evolved predators, you understand – in the infernal dimensions, while not at the apex of their food chain, they are certainly far more predator than prey.”

As he spoke, he absently scooped one of the sleeping alastora out of his cardigan pocket, rubbing his thumb idly over its chin: it chittered softly, curling up in his hand, and he sighed. “We’ve reached an understanding, I suppose – when first I was faced with them, they were frenzied, frightening things. In time, with exposure to one another, I suppose they’ve mellowed, and I… Well. They’re still rather fiercely behaved outside of this flat, I’m afraid.”

“You can’t train them?”

“Training demons isn’t the easy work a dog trainer might have you believe,” Hamish murmured, and dropped the alastor in his hand back into his pocket. “When will you be free to drive down to Falmouth?”

“Uh, in a few days,” she said, pulling out her diary. “You’re sure you don’t want to go yourself? I can drive you, if it’s that.”

“No, no,” Hamish murmured. “I trust your judgement.”

“Do you? Didn’t get that impression before.”

“You think I’d have asked your assistance if I didn’t?”

“Is this a fae thing? The… you know, the way that you are?”

She expected him to be offended, insulted, but he actually smiled. “We can seem truculent, by human standards.”

“I thought fae were meant to be— you know, charming.”

“Charm is for those we’re trying to best in conversation, for conversational opponents – for customers, for rivals, for strangers. You are, at this point, none of the three: we’re equals, you and I. I don’t need to charm you any more than I wish to deceive you – I can be direct, I hope.”

Hamish had said it very casually, very evenly, but Velma couldn’t help feeling stunned, her pen hovering over the blank pages in her diary. After a moment of this, Hamish looked at her askance, seeming surprised at her silence.

“Ms Kuroda?”

“Velma,” she said, after a second. “Velma’s okay. Hamish.”

“Velma, then,” Hamish murmured, and handed over the keys.