The Key

“I don’t care if it’s called a—”

“Jog a little to the right there,” Jarrah suggested quite calmly, and put her hand on Stefan’s powerful shoulder. Stefan did as he was told.

The truck or lorry or whatever it was called let go a horn blast that could have shattered a plate glass window and went shooting past so close that, bang, it knocked the left side mirror off the little red car.

“The mirror!” Xiao cried.

“Enh,” Stefan said, and shrugged. “I wasn’t using it anyway.”

He wasn’t. As far as Mack could tell, Stefan wasn’t even using the windows, let alone the mirrors, and was more or less driving according to some suicidal instinct.

The car had seemed like a bad idea from the start, but Mack didn’t like to come across all bossy, or like he was a wimp or something. One of the problems with having twenty-one identified phobias—irrational fears—is that people tend to think you’re a coward. Mack was not a coward: he just had phobias. Which meant there were twenty-one things he was cowardly about—tight spaces, sharks, needles, oceans, beards, and a few others—but he was brave enough about most things.

So when it had been pointed out to him that having made it by train from London to Edinburgh, Scotland, the best way to get from there to Loch Ness was by car, he’d gone along. To demonstrate that he was not a huge wimp.

How was that going? Like this:

“Gaaa-aah-ahh!” Dietmar commented.

BAM!

Rattle rattle rattle rattle.

Thump!

The car hit the low curb guarding the center of the circle, bounced over the lumpy grass, swerved around some sort of monument, narrowly missed a pair of Mini Coopers—one red, one tan—and bounced out of the other side of the circle and onto the main road.

Mack, Xiao, and Dietmar all took the first breath they’d inhaled in several minutes.

Stefan said, “Is there a drive-through in this country? I’m starving.”

And Jarrah said, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse and chase the jockey.”

Jarrah and Stefan: obviously they were not quite normal.

Having survived the traffic circle, the gang found a gas station that also had food. They bought prepackaged sandwiches and sodas. They topped the car off with gas. And that’s when Mack noticed a van he had noticed earlier. There was nothing remarkable about the van—it was beige, which is the world’s least noticeable color. But Mack was a kid who noticed things and he noticed that this van had a dent on one side. A small thing. But what were the odds that there were two tan vans with the same dent?

He had first noticed this van way back just outside Edinburgh, and now that Mack looked closer, it seemed the windshield was tinted. Which would be a perfectly normal thing where Mack was from—the Arizona desert, where the sun shone 360 out of 365 days—but was pretty strange here in Scotland, where the sun shone 5 days out of 365.

“That van has been following us,” Mack said as the five of them leaned against their car eating.

No one questioned him. They’d all learned that when Mack noticed something, he noticed it right.

So they leaned there and watched the van. Which maybe was watching them back.

“I’ll go ask them what’s up,” Stefan said.

“No,” Mack said, shaking his head. “Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe they’re just going to the same place we are.”

“That is perhaps likely,” Dietmar said. “Loch Ness is very famous, and people will be coming from all over to see it.”

Dietmar spoke flawless English but his accent was strange at times, and Mack had to struggle to resist mocking him. As leader of the group, Mack had to behave in a very mature way. Mostly he did. But in his mind he was saying, “Zat iss peerheps likely,” in a snooty voice.

He didn’t dislike Dietmar; Dietmar was fine. But it wasn’t possible to like everyone equally. Dietmar was very smart and made sure everyone knew it. And he was better-looking than Mack—at least Mack thought so, since Dietmar had perfectly straight blond hair while Mack had boring curly brown hair. As a result of that, Mack was pretty sure Xiao thought Dietmar was fascinating.

Mack, however, found Xiao fascinating. So he didn’t really want her to find Dietmar more fascinating than him. Mack wasn’t exactly sure why he found Xiao so interesting. A year ago he would have barely noticed her if he’d met her. But lately he had looked with slightly more interest at girls. It wasn’t a really focused attention just yet. But it was attention.

Possibly it was because he had seen Xiao in her true form. She was, after all, a dragon. Not a fire-breathing, leathery-winged type, but the less terrifying and more spiritual Chinese dragon, with a father and mother who didn’t need to breathe fire to scare the pee out of Mack.

Xiao could turn effortlessly into her current form: a pretty girl. But she insisted the other shape, the somewhat large, turquoise, snakelike form was her true self.

“Dietmar,” Xiao said, “what do you think we should do?”

“Me?” Dietmar squeaked. Because he did that sometimes when Xiao talked to him. Squeak.

It was really annoying.

“Yes, Dietmar, I am asking your opinion,” Xiao said patiently.

“I think we should not confront them. We should merely watch and be prepared.”

“I agree,” Xiao said.

“I think Stefan should go knock on their window and ask them what’s up,” Mack said. That was not what he had thought or said, oh, sixty seconds earlier, but it was what he thought now.

Stefan hesitated. He looked at Mack. Then he looked at Jarrah, who gave a brief nod.

The Aussie girl and Stefan had a special bond. It was the mystical bond that joined the kind of people who think it would be fun to strap rockets to bikes and fly over the Grand Canyon.

That’s not some made-up example. That’s from an actual conversation between Stefan and Jarrah.

Stefan swaggered over to the van and tapped on the window with his knuckles. Mack tensed. The van window rolled down.

Stefan talked to someone, leaned in to listen, then stepped away as the window rolled back up. He came back to report to Mack.

“It’s a bunch of fairies.”

“Fairies?”

“Like with wings?”

“I think so,” Stefan said. “They say they have a proposition.”

“A proposition?” said Mack.

“That’s what they said,” said Stefan.

“A van full of fairies,” Mack repeated.