Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

"What do you mean, the rest of it?" Her voice was rising in pitch with her anger.

"I mean they want us to make things for them. Iron things."

She looked from one man to the other and neither of them would meet her gaze.

Ben turned to Blackbird. "You'd best show them. They won't believe you otherwise."

Blackbird nodded. "Rabbit, perhaps you could show them what you showed me in the Underground station this morning?"

"What, here?"

"Here, please, and now," she insisted.

"Do you mind telling me what this is about? Jeff? What's going on?" Meg's voice was getting more edgy by the second.

"They're not 'uman, Meg, not like us." He shook his head, unable to meet her questioning stare.

She looked at us, pulling her daughter to her, as if she was unprepared to believe what she was hearing but unwilling to risk that it might be true.

"What do you mean, not human?" she asked him.

I had done this before, but not for an audience and I wanted it to look good. Yet as soon as I started to focus I realised something was different. Something about how it felt reminded me of the moment out on the Way when I had become lost in the void. I had called it and it had answered. Now when I called, it answered as if I had never broken that connection. It was right there waiting for me, always present. The image flashed into my mind of being haloed in cold white fire, hanging in space, and I felt something tense inside me, something huge.

The lights in the room dimmed as I drew on it and at the same time the dogs in the next room started baying in long mournful howls. Everything went still. The hum of the fridge, the background noise of a TV in another room, everything just stopped, leaving the sound of the dogs isolated in the stillness. The electric lights flickered and died and gallowfyre flooded into the room.

"Shit! Shit!" The boy stood up at the end of the table and backed away, knocking the chair over in the process.

Just as in the vision Kareesh had showed me, a piece of mistletoe hanging over the door of the room with the dogs in it flickered into life, glowing green in the half-light in response to the magic building up like a thunderhead in the room. Cold white fox-fire danced into being on the worktops, bouncing like playful stars along the edges until the entire room sparked with it.

"Jeff?" Meg shepherded her daughter away from us towards the end of the kitchen where the old man and his son watched us with grim faces. "Jeff, make him stop?"

"It's what they are, Meg. They're Fey. They won't hurt us. They need us." His face looked grim in the swimming light.

I barely heard him. The void sang in my veins like a heavy chorus. I felt the hunger of it building. I felt its need swelling within me. The room burned with cold flickering fire and that fire knew me, sang to me.

A voice came though the swell of it.

"Rabbit? Can you hear me, Rabbit? Let it go. Let go of it now." Blackbird coaxed me down like a policemen talking a jumper down from the ledge of a tall building.

I released it, pushing it back, and it flickered and died. Regret accompanied that release. I knew I couldn't hold it forever, but part of me wanted to, wanted to revel in it and bathe in that ethereal glow.

The lights came on and the fridge juddered into life. The background noise re-established itself. Blackbird's hand rested on mine for a moment.

"Are you well enough?" she asked.

I nodded, shaken by the intensity of it.

"What have you done?" Meg asked the question of the two men, glancing at us as if we might leap out of our seats and bite her.

"It was done a very long time ago, Meg. We just carry the burden, as will they." The old man indicated the children. "We're not just Highsmiths, we are the High Smiths of the Seven Courts of the Feyre. We have the land and the house and all that goes with it. In return we work iron for those that can't abide it. I didn't know if they would come in my lifetime, but they're here and we must pay."

"What happens if we don't pay? What happens?" The question was initially to the men, but then redirected to us.

"Mrs Highsmith, we haven't come here to threaten you or your family, but to seek your help. If no one will help us then there may be worse times ahead for all of us, human and Fey alike."

Her appeal was interrupted by a mobile phone ringing. Everyone jumped at the sound and then listened to it ring until the boy, James, pulled it from his pocket and answered it.

"Hullo?"

He listened for a moment and then continued.

"Yeah, the power's been down here as well. It must have been some sort of problem with the supply."

He glanced at his father and then at me and then mouthed a single word to his mother, presumably the name of the caller.

"It's fine now and we're all OK," he said. "Yeah, thanks. Did it? Yeah, me too. I'll talk to you later. Bye."

He looked at his mother. "That was Jaz. The power was off in the village and for miles around. Her mum wanted to know if it was off up here too." He looked over at me again. "I think she was just ringing to see if we were all right."

"You mustn't speak of this James," his mother instructed him. "Tell no one, understand. You too Lisa, not even your best friends, OK?" They both nodded solemnly.

"What do you want from us?" She addressed Blackbird and I directly.

"We need to get something remade." She unzipped her bag and pulled out the wooden box, placing it on the table and sliding it towards the far end within their reach. "It's been broken for some time, but we've only just found out."

The old man stepped forwards and unclipped the catch. He lifted the lid of the box and the wrongness spilled out of it. Blackbird hissed between her teeth.

"Snapped clean through," the old man commented professionally, holding up the handle end. He showed it to his son who took it from him and examined it. "It shouldn't break like that. Any idea what happened to it?" he asked us.

I was grinding my teeth together at the jarring dissonance it created in the room. It was Blackbird who answered for us.

"We think it was dropped." Her expression of distaste echoed my own.

"Still, it shouldn't break like that. What do you think Jeff?"

Jeff held it up to the light. "I think it was cooled too quickly. Look at the way the discoloration's taken here." He scratched his nail on the flat of the blade near the break.

Their love of the dark metal was a reflection of our own distaste. It came to me that it was what was wrong with the house. It was nicely fitted-out, but it was steeped in iron. When you looked, there were nails hammered flat into the beams, an iron trivet sat on the worktop next to the stove. Everywhere, little bits of it were incorporated into the fabric of the house.

"Can you fix it?" Blackbird's question was straight to the point. We wanted to spend as little time near the knife as possible.

"No, once broken is broken. You can't weld it or even reforge it. The iron's too pure to work it after it's cooled. We can make you another though. We've got the metal, haven't we, Jeff," the old man offered.

"That would be excellent. When can you do it?"

"We can do it tomorrow. It'll take about a day to make."

"You'll have it in the morning," Meg Highsmith interrupted, "even if they have to work all night."

They both looked at her, then at each other. Then the old man nodded.

"Tomorrow then, but late morning," he agreed. "Lisa, go light the forge, will you?"

The girl nodded seriously to her grandfather and went around the room the long way around the table to avoid us, slipping out into the yard and the last of the daylight.

The old man dipped into the box again and pulled out the other knife.

"This must be the Dead Knife. I've never seen either, though I was told about them, of course. This one is something different, though." His voice had a tone of respect in it. He passed it to his son, who gave him back the broken Quick Knife to replace in the box. Once the broken parts were seated in the recess made for them, he closed the lid and Blackbird and I could relax. He smiled at our obvious relief at the closure of the box.