doe had become a girl who had to be Elaine, and one of the lions had become a dude I didn’t recognise at all, another had turned into an ox, another an eagle, and the last one had somehow managed to transform into a different lion.
Symbolism could go fuck itself.
“Be ye welcome,” said the unfamiliar dude. “Now wot I well ye—”
“Oh just shut up.” I should probably have been more diplomatic but I was beyond through with this shit. “I’ve had a really long, really strange week. I’ve fought a vampire, stabbed a faery, nearly frozen to death, and been read poetry by a surprisingly hot estate agent. All I want to do now is take this girl back to London so I can use her to hopefully try to bring my friend back from the not-exactly-dead. And I don’t need some prick in a robe talking medieval at me. And I don’t need signs or portents or omens. Now fuck off. Legitimately, seriously, fuck off and take your”—I waved my hands in a way that indicated the whole gathering of … things—“whatever this is with you.”
He gave me an oddly sincere look. “Shall I at least set my—”
Whatever he was about to suggest, I was beyond giving anything like a shit. “No. Get the fuck out of my head, life, and general vicinity.”
With which the guy who used to be a lion, the ox who used to be a lion, the eagle who used to be a lion, and the lion who used to be a lion—which I still didn’t understand at all—disappeared into the mist, leaving Elaine slowly stirring on the floor. I let Patrick go to her, because stopping him would have been borderline impossible.
Since she was all of sixteen, I let her get away with her first words on waking up being “where am I?”
“You are safe, Elaine,” Patrick told her. “Yelena came for us, but she is gone now.”
They embraced for longer than even bordered on necessary.
“So...” I tried. “I’m Kate, these are Sofia and Flick and… I need your help.”
She looked up at me with these blue lamb’s eyes. “But why could you possibly need me?”
“If you’re about to say I’m just an ordinary girl then I swear despite the incredibly poor optics, I will punch you.”
“But I am just an ordinary girl.”
I wimped out on the punching her thing. It would have been really, really problematic. “No, you’re not. You’re—like—the holy grail or something which I know sounds absurd but your boyfriend is a vampire, and you’ve woken up from what I’m guessing was a very confusing dream about lions in the middle of a misty valley with a faery princess and the Delphic oracle.”
Flick waved a hand. “If it helps, I actually am completely normal. Which, I’ll be honest, hasn’t been great for my ego.”
“Anyway,” I went on. “I know this is a lot to take in but the long and short of it is that we need to put you in a car and take you back to London so that you can save a magic queen from a coma she was beaten into by a cockney gangster wizard so that she can get on with maintaining some kind of cosmic balance that is stopping everything going utterly to shit.”
Flick blinked. “Oh.”
“It helps if you don’t think about it. Also I’ve found hard liquor works but—”
“Kate!” Sofia was giving me a disapproving look.
“But as I was just about to say, you’re probably a bit young and I obviously don’t recommend you solve your problems with alcohol because then you’ll wind up bitter and alone and with everybody you care about dead. Like me.”
Patrick helped Elaine to her feet, and we made our way back to Elaine’s parents’ house by a mixture of my hunter’s instincts, Sofia’s sense of direction, and a fair amount of bickering. Once we were inside, Sofia vanished into the kitchen and made a round of teas for those who needed the caffeine-slash-comfort, which was basically everyone, and I crashed down into an armchair and began to seriously reconsider my policy of running around woods and fighting monsters at my time of life, and also my policy of ever getting up ever again.
“So what do we think?” I asked when everybody was settled and those who wanted to be were enteaed. “Do we head off now to keep ahead of the game or rest up overnight so we don’t all die in an ironic car crash.”