Peter looked up at that, but clearly didn’t have an answer. Gregory, his false identification badge pinned to the outside of his jacket, went into the shop to have another look around.
“They didn’t look like criminals,” one of the customers was saying to a policewoman who was interviewing her. “They just looked like a bunch of old ladies and one young one. They ran around the counter and into the back, and then a bloke dashed in shouting at them to stop, and went in after them. That’s all we saw.”
Gregory passed the investigation team, moving around the counter to the doorway of the supply room. The room was filled with metal shelving units on either side, with the usual accoutrements scattered about—wheeled bucket and mop, cans of industrial cleaner, boxes of napkins, straws, and cup lids, which he assumed had been stacked tidily but were now splayed out in disarray. The back wall held a sink with a notice about washing hands, a small desk stacked high with take-out boxes waiting to be assembled, and huge drums of cooking oil. There was no exit door, no window, no possible way out of the room except by means of magic.
Gregory stepped into the room, intending to test whether he could sense any sort of residual magic, and came face-to-face with an anomaly: smack-dab in the center of the room was a portal. He glanced at the policeman who was at the rear of the room, tapping the walls in order to find who knew what, then back at the portal. He approached it. He’d never seen a portal in person, Travellers not having much of a need to visit places like Abaddon or the Court of Divine Blood (what most mortal people thought of as hell and heaven, but which were in reality quite a bit different), but he knew that what he was looking at had to be a portal. He circled it, examining it from the back. It appeared the same as the front.
He glanced again at the mortal, who didn’t seem to notice the oddity at all, and then returned to Peter’s side.
“I figured out how they got out of the shop,” he said in a conversational tone.
“Magic,” Peter said, in the middle of sending a text message, no doubt to his wife.
“Not really. There’s a portal in the room.”
“A what?” Peter stopped texting to look askance. “I looked in the room. There was nothing there but what you’d expect to see in a storage room.”
“Smack-dab in the center of the room is a long oval that runs from ceiling to floor. The air in it is thicker, and twisted in long ropes that seem to spiral down in a never-ending pattern. If that’s not a portal, I don’t know what is.”
Peter looked thoughtful. “It does sound like one. But I swear to you that it wasn’t there when I looked in the room earlier.”
“I didn’t see anything, either, until I got within a yard of it. How far into the room did you go?”
“Not very far—just enough to see there was no exit and no place to hide. Damn. We’re going to have to find out where the portal leads to.”
“The cop in there didn’t seem to see it.”
“He wouldn’t.” Peter finished up his text message and punched in a phone number. “Portals are generally warded and protected so mortals can’t see or access them. If this one didn’t appear to you until you were right on top of it, it’s probably heavily protected. Dalton? It’s me. Gregory and I have found a portal in Cardiff. In a doughnut shop. Can you find out where it leads to?”
A small car pulled up. Gregory watched a familiar woman get out of the car and march over to the nearest police officer. She flashed some sort of a badge.
“Probably has identification set up through her boss like we do,” he said softly, his eyes narrowing as she entered the shop.
“Uh-huh. Got it. You’re sure? Damn. Thanks. Yes, we’ll wait until you get permission. So long as there’s no other exit for her to leave there, we should be OK until we are allowed in.” Peter stopped Gregory as he was about to follow the red-suited minion of Death into the shop. He didn’t like the woman at all, and worried that she might see the portal if she went far enough into the room. “Dalton says the records say the portal is to Anwyn.”
“What’s that?”
“Some sort of Welsh afterlife.”
“Great. So we’ll have to fight our way through dead people to get Gwen.” He started forward again, only to be stopped once more.
“It’s not that easy. We can’t go in.”
“We can’t? Do you have to be dead? Gwen wasn’t dead, nor was her victim and the other women.”
“No, you don’t need to be dead to go to the afterlife, but some agreement with the Akashic League and the L’au-dela prohibits the Watch from marching in there and arresting people.”
“What’s the Akashic League got to do with it? I thought they headed up ghosts and ghouls and the like . . . oh. Afterlife. Dead people.”
Peter nodded. “We can’t legally enter Anwyn without permission of the person who runs it.”
“Who’s that?”
“According to Dalton, there are legends about Anwyn. Ah, here’s the file Dalton said he was sending.” Peter looked at his phone, reading aloud. “Arawn is the king of Anwyn, the Welsh underworld where tradition says he has ruled in peace for several centuries. Let’s see . . . there’s a bit about him switching places with a mortal for a while. . . . Ah, here’s something interesting. It’s written that a powerful lord named Amaethon ab Don and his brother, Gwydion, started a war with Arawn when Amaethon stole a dog, a lapwing, and a roebuck from Arawn. There’s something about trees, and the length of the battle, and a guessing game held to find the name of a warrior—your usual folklore stuff.”
“How long is it going to take us to get permission to go after Gwen?” Gregory asked, feeling antsy. He didn’t like the fact that the red-suited reclaimer had been in the shop so long. Had she seen the portal? Had she entered it? Did she have permission to do so?
“Don’t know.” Peter gave him a grim smile. “But it looks like we’ll be on stakeout here for a bit to make sure that Owens doesn’t pop back through the portal and make a run for it. I’ll give Kiya a call and let her know we won’t be back tonight.”
He moved off to do so. Gregory frowned at the entrance of the doughnut shop, every muscle in his body urging him to follow Gwen. But he was already on shaky ground with Peter over the time theft episode, and to blatantly disregard the laws of the Watch would finish his budding career for good.
Hours passed. Each one seemed like an entire week to Gregory, and each subsequent hour seemed to bring more and more anguish. Death’s servant hadn’t reappeared, which meant she’d gone through the portal after Gwen. And there he was, stuck playing a waiting game, unable to do his job. It was pure torment, a veritable storm cloud of frustration.
“Stop it,” Peter said at one point as the sun was about to rise. The two of them were in their car, waiting for the official permission and to make sure that Gwen didn’t try to escape from Anwyn.
“Stop what?”
Peter nodded toward the front of the car. Gregory glanced out, pursing his lips a little at the flash of lightning across the pale bluey-pink sky.
“Sorry. I’m just frustrated.”
“We both are, but making freak lightning storms isn’t going to help.”
“I didn’t mean to. It just happens sometimes when I’m distraught. You keep a good control over your emotions. I’ve never seen you make it storm.”
“I can’t.” Peter gave a little shrug and a half smile. “I think it’s because I’m mahrime.”
Gregory was silent for a moment. Until he’d met his cousin, he’d never had trouble with the Traveller belief that those of impure blood—those with only one Traveller parent—were unclean, but now he felt the full injustice of the attitude. It reflected just one of the ways he felt the Traveller society as a whole needed enlightenment. “You can’t control lightning at all? But you have the mark.”