Chapter 4: The Scent of the Key

Chapter 4: The Scent of the Key

The fluorescent lights of my office hummed with a renewed, almost smug, intensity. The air, no longer trying to freeze my blood, now just smelled of wet wool and my burnt tea. On the floor lay the sad, cracked remains of my ‘World’s Okayest Ghost Tour Guide’ mug. It felt like a review.

I collapsed into my desk chair, the cheap plastic groaning in protest. In front of me stood my new… associates. On the left, a being of cosmic finality wearing a £2000 coat. On the right, an exiled fairy-princeling in trousers that could cause retinal damage. I felt like the bewildered moderator in the universe’s strangest debate club.

“Right,” I said, rubbing my temples. The adrenaline had fled, leaving a headache in its wake. “Let’s just get this straight. You,” I pointed a trembling finger at Morana, “are Death. And you,” I gestured to Finn, “are an actual, honest-to-god fairy. And a thing made of shadows just tried to kill me because it was… what? Lost?”

“It was not lost,” Morana stated, her voice cutting through my flippancy. “And it was not trying to kill you. Not yet. That would have been… tidy. This was messy. It was an assessment.”

Finn chimed in, perching on the edge of Isla’s blessedly neat desk. He looked far too comfortable for someone who’d been moments from being turned into a Fae-sicle. “She’s right, you know! Think of it less as an assassination, and more as a wine tasting. It was having a little sip of your essence. A bit of an aperitif before the main course.”

I stared at him. “That is, without a doubt, the least comforting metaphor I have ever heard.”

“The question remains,” Morana said, ignoring Finn entirely as she focused her storm-dark eyes on me. “Why you?”

“Excellent question!” I threw my hands up. “I’d love to know. I’m a comedian who tells ghost stories to drunk tourists. My biggest secret is that I sometimes reuse jokes from the nineties. I’m not exactly a high-value target.”

“Oh, but you are,” Finn said, his emerald eyes glittering. “You just don’t know it. You’re not the gold, Daniel. You’re the key that opens the vault.”

I waited for the punchline. There wasn’t one.

Morana gave a small, impatient sigh, as if the Fae’s reliance on flowery language was a personal affront to the laws of physics. “Your soul has a unique resonance,” she explained, her tone clinical and precise. “There is a barrier between your world and… others. The Veil. For most mortals, it is an impassable wall. But for a rare few, their life force hums at a frequency that makes the barrier thin. Permeable. You are a Keystone.”

The word hung in the air, heavy and strange. Keystone. It sounded important. It sounded like something that gets stolen in a fantasy movie.

“You’re a living, breathing skeleton key, my boy,” Finn elaborated, warming to his theme. “You don’t just live in the world; you resonate with it. Things are drawn to you. The strange, the uncanny… the hungry. That little performance in the wynd last night? You weren’t just telling a story. You were ringing a dinner bell.”

My blood ran cold. My whole act, my career, my life—it had been sending out a signal. The faint whispers I’d sometimes thought I’d heard in the closes, the odd chills, the shadows that played tricks on the eye… I’d dismissed them as atmosphere, fuel for my stories. I hadn’t realised I was the one creating it.

“So the Bodach Glas…” I started, the pieces clicking into place with horrifying clarity.

“Was sent by its master to confirm the scent,” Morana finished. “To taste your resonance. Now that they know what you are, they will be back. Not to taste. But to take the key and unlock the door.”

“And what’s behind the door?” I asked, dreading the answer.

Finn grinned, a flash of sharp white teeth. “Power. Chaos. Armies. All the fun stuff.”

I buried my face in my hands. This was insane. I was a cosmic lockpick, and something with an army of shadow-monsters wanted to use me to start a war. I felt a hysterical laugh bubble up in my chest. I’d been worried about paying rent next month, and now I had to worry about being used to unleash interdimensional horrors. It was a classic case of escalating problems.

“Okay,” I said, looking up. My mind was racing, the comedian’s instinct to deconstruct and analyse finally kicking into gear. “So, we have a ‘what’ and a ‘why’. We’re missing the ‘who’. Who sent it? Who wants to turn me into their personal can-opener?”

Finn and Morana exchanged a look. For the first time, they seemed to be in agreement on something: their mutual ignorance.

“The creature was a construct,” Morana said. “Its connection to its master was severed the moment I unmade it. There is no trail.”

“It’s not a Fae creature by nature,” Finn added, a flicker of concern crossing his face. “But the magic used to bind it… it had a whiff of the Courts. The Unseelie, most likely. They’ve always had a taste for that sort of brutish, gloomy aesthetic.”

Unseelie. The name sounded as unpleasant as it was foreign.

“So, what? We put an ad in the paper? ‘Cosmic Keystone seeks evil overlord for questioning. Must have own shadowy minions’?” my sarcasm was my only shield, and it was wearing thin.

“No,” Finn said, hopping off the desk. A spark of his old excitement returned to his eyes. “We go shopping.”

I blinked. “Shopping? For what? A bigger pointy award?”

“For information, you delightful simpleton!” he declared. “There are places, hidden away in the cracks of your lovely, grey city, where deals are struck and secrets are sold. A market. Not for your kind, usually. But with me as your guide, and…” he glanced nervously at Morana, “Her Ladyship as our… collateral… we might just learn who’s in the market for a Keystone.”

Morana’s expression soured. “A Fae market,” she said, the words tasting like poison. “A nexus of chaos, broken promises, and riddles that pass for currency. I would sooner audit the damned.”

“But they’ll have whispers, Lady Morana!” Finn insisted. “Someone will have heard something. A powerful player making a move, seeking an artifact, hiring a specialist to bind a Bodach Glas… It’s our only lead.”

Morana was silent for a long moment. Her gaze was distant, as if calculating a million possible outcomes. She looked at me, her eyes unreadable, and I felt like a variable in a vast, cosmic equation. Finally, she gave a stiff, reluctant nod.

“The logic is sound,” she conceded. “Though the method is… distasteful. Very well. Lead the way, Trickster. But be warned: if your path leads us into a trap, I will not be so lenient a second time.”

Finn gave her a dazzling, slightly manic grin. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Now, Daniel, I’d recommend leaving the pointy thing here. Where we’re going, the only weapon you’ll need is a quick wit. And try not to promise anyone your firstborn child. They take that sort of thing very literally.”

He strode to the door, all renewed confidence and blindingly pink trousers. Morana followed, a silent, dark ship in his vibrant wake. I hesitated, looking around my wrecked office. My normal life. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. And I was about to leave it behind to go shopping for secrets with Death and a fairy.

Taking a deep breath, I followed them out, closing the door on the shattered mug and the smell of burnt tea. Finn led us not towards the bustling streets, but down a narrow, forgotten alley behind the building, one that smelled of damp bins and regret.

“The entrances move, you see,” Finn said cheerfully over his shoulder. “You just need to know how to look.” He stopped in front of a section of crumbling brick wall, covered in moss and faded graffiti. “It’s all about perspective.”

I watched as he placed his hand on the wall and whispered something, a string of syllables that sounded like splintering ice and birdsong. The graffiti on the bricks began to glow with a faint, green light. The lines writhed and reformed, the solid wall shimmering like a heat haze. An archway, dark and impossibly deep, bloomed into existence where solid stone had been a second before.

“Well,” I muttered, my heart hammering against my ribs. “The joke’s on me after all.”

I followed them into the darkness, leaving the grey Edinburgh morning behind. The scent of ozone and wildflowers, Finn's signature fragrance, mingled with the cold, earthy smell of the grave that clung to Morana. Together, they smelled like a storm breaking over a cemetery. It was, I decided, the official scent of my new, terrifying life.