Page 23 of Dead Serious Halloween Special

He scurries away and I turn to Aidan.

“I’m beginning to think someone might have spiked that punch with Viv’s magically laced gin.”

“You might be right,” he mutters. “They’re not actually going to make us walk the plank, are they? There may not be water down there, but it’s a long drop to the pavement below.”

“Don’t worry.” I try to force as much confidence into my voice as I can for his sake. “There’s no way Danny will let anything happen to either one of us.”

“Do you think Chan is okay?” He chews his lip and shifts uncomfortably against his bonds.

“Definitely.” I smile. “Did you forget who his boyfriend is? I’ll bet he’s awake and already stalking this way to tear Blackbeard a new one.”

“I hope so.” Aidan frowns in worry. “Not about the tearing him a new one, but I hope he’s awake and okay.”

“Look, it’s going to be all right, Aidan, I promise. They’ll all come for us. You forget we’ve also got two powerful witches. Olivia and Harrison are the real deal, plus we have the advantage that Olivia has dealt with these clowns before.”

I hear a loud, derisive scoff and crane my head around Aidan to see who made that noise. It’s only then that I see a wide barrel set close by, and on it is the small cylindrical cage containing the hobgoblin Puck.

His expression is thunderous. He has his fleshy jaw propped on one fist and he’s sitting cross-legged, giving me an unhindered view of something I could have quite happily gone my entire life without seeing.

“Got something to say?” I snap. “Considering you’re the one who got us into this mess.”

“It’s not my fault,” he says sullenly. “It’s all that Blackbeard’s doing.”

“Really? Because he wasn’t the one who stole the book from Olivia and hid it in the books for Harrison.”

“Blackbeard made me do it.” He glowered.

“What?”

“He’s powerful, that Blackbeard is. Maybe the most powerful of all the fairy-tale creatures. He’s learned to access the fae magic, but he couldn’t break himself out of the book. Need a human for that, but once you opened the book, it was just a case of finding you and stopping you from stuffing them all straight back in.”

“Me?” I stare at him. “How am I supposed to put them back in? I just see dead people. I’m not a witch.”

“Only the one who opened the book can put them back,” Puck replies.

“And so you served me up like a Christmas turkey,” I hiss.

“That’s your fault!” He grasps the bars of his cage. “I tried to escape. As soon as I arrived in that shop, I hitched a ride with that tall, brightly coloured woman with the ginormous yellow hair.”

“Ginormous yellow hair?” I mutter. “Do you mean Dusty?”

“I followed her and saw you for the first time.”

“That’s why you were at the mortuary,” I whisper. “Because Dusty was there. She’d been at the bookshop earlier with Bruce. So you followed her to Hackney.”

“I stuck with you, thinking I’d move somewhere else and switch.”

“Switch what?” Aidan asks, trying to avoid the line-of-sight view of the area between Puck’s legs.

“People. Keep up, boy,” he snaps peevishly. “I leapfrog from person to person. That’s how I travel in the human world unless it’s a powerfully magical place like Mercy; when I’m there, I can move freely on my own. That’s why I stayed so long. It was only when Marta, the keeper ofThe Gospodar, died that things started to get a bit hairy. I thought if I could abandon the book in one of the Old World countries like England, I could be free of it and then make my way back toMercy.I kind of think of it as my home now.”

“I’m sure Olivia will be thrilled to hear that,” I murmur.

“Anyway, I hitched a lift with you and that Dusty person, thinking you’d take me someplace else, but instead you brought me right back to the bookshop, where Blackbeard managed to get his hands back on me.”

“What a mess.” I blow out a breath. “What can we do?”

“Do?’ Puck scoffs. “You can’tdoanything. Now that Blackbeard is out of the book and in the real world, there’s no stopping him. He’ll have you fed to the sharks before the clocks chime midnight.”