The Six Dots

She’d been at this for hours.
At least the human whose office she was in was just as stumped, but then again, they couldn’t see or hear her kind which put them at a distinct disadvantage. She could definitely relate to the not being able to see part right now.
She stared at their map and six red dots stared back at her. The cheap and tawdry bits of plastic were hardly a fitting tribute to the six lives cut short in the last two months, but she was working on rectifying that. There had to be something she was missing.
She allowed her vision to pull back to the dozen or so blue dots that represented possible sightings. Initially she’d been sceptical, things like this don’t happen anymore. Maybe back when they’d first allowed the humans to move their boulders and destroy their mounds in order to expand their towns into cities but certainly not now.
Certainly not in her sveit, but seeing them all laid out like this?
Someone was trying to send a message.
Some gob-shite was trying to shatter the truce.
Not on her watch!
Think! The blue dots were as bad as things usually got around here, a youngster would forget to hide from the humans and a couple of drunks would end up with a weird picture on their camera phones. Lords below! She hated those things!
She closed her eyes and let her head tilt backwards until it tapped against the wall and her short hair skimmed her shoulders.
“The humans are itching for a piece of this one,” the Aðalvarðstjóri had told her, “but you know how it goes, it’s up to us Huldufólk to deal with Huldufólk crimes! I’ve told them I’ve got my best officers on the case, but there’s only so long before the press gets wind of it and they’ll have to be seen to do something. They’ll probably call in some hotshot from the mainland.”
She’d always wondered how those meetings went, it must be hard when half the people involved can’t be seen or heard by the other.
Hang on, she thought, what did the Aðalvarðstjóri say about calling someone in?
Her golden eyes snapped open as she sprang forward, once again staring at the dots. It couldn’t be that, surely?
She ran a slender finger across the map, tracing the pattern that the killings had followed. It damn well was!
“Call in” was what made her see it, one of the girls had been moved after she’d died which skewed things a bit but it was still there clear as day; a blood-gate! Some toe-rag was killing off human girls to try and summon something nasty right into the middle of what the humans called Árborg! Well bugger that! She was going to have them burned with steel for this!
She muttered in the old tongue to open a skrying pool in a cup of coffee the human officer had left unattended,
“Darren!” She barked, “I don’t give a tiny rat’s arsehole what time it is you knob! That bloke who’s killing all them pretty little girls whose chests you stare at when you think I’m not looking is trying to open a blood gate in my sveit and I’m not having it!” She was already out the door of the office and heading down the corridor, “Meet me at the station with the meanest bunch of our bastards you can round up… I know where he’ll be heading next!”
Olaf awoke with a start as the door to his office banged against the frame. He’d have to get someone from maintenance to fix the damn thing, it was always doing that.


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