Chapter 2: Terrible Tea and Trickster's Tales

Chapter 2: Terrible Tea and Trickster's Tales

Sleep, when it finally came, was no escape. It was a suffocating plunge back into the rain-slicked courtyard, the man's bulging eyes staring up at me, the garish yellow of his poncho a splash of madness in the gloom. And always, the symbol. The jagged, spiralling brand on his skin burned behind my eyelids, a shape I knew as well as my own reflection, yet had never seen outside the fractured landscape of my own nightmares.

I woke up with a gasp, the thin fabric of my t-shirt soaked in cold sweat. My flat, usually a comforting sanctuary of untidy books and empty mugs, felt alien and menacing. The familiar groan of the old building settling sounded like footsteps in the hall. Every shadow seemed to stretch, to coalesce into a waiting shape.

My cynical, rational mind was screaming for a foothold. It was a copycat killing. Some sick bastard had been on my tour before, heard the story, and decided to re-enact it. The symbol? A coincidence. A one-in-a-billion chance. But the explanation felt thin, a paper shield against a tidal wave of visceral dread. And it didn't explain the woman with storm-grey eyes. The way she’d looked at me, as if I were a puzzle she was tired of solving.

The feeling of being watched was the worst part. It was a physical sensation, a prickling on my skin, a weight at the back of my neck. I spent the day jumping at car horns and the caw of crows, seeing menacing figures in every passerby. By the time dusk began to bleed into the sky, I was a frayed nerve ending masquerading as a human being.

I was heading for the corner shop, needing the comforting banality of buying milk, when I saw it. A flicker of movement in the reflection of a pub window. Not a person, not quite. For a split second, I saw a figure standing across the street, half-hidden in the deep shadows of a doorway. It was tall and unnaturally thin, wrapped in what looked like a grey shroud. Its skin was the colour of wet ash, and its face... its face was a blur of ancient sorrow. Then it was gone.

My heart seized. It was impossible, a trick of the light, my sleep-deprived brain playing havoc with me. But the image was seared into my mind. I stumbled back, gasping for air, the name clawing its way up from the forgotten depths of my grandmother’s scary stories. The Bodach Glas. The Grey Man. Death’s herald.

That was it. My flimsy shield of rationality shattered into a million pieces. I didn’t go for milk. I ran.

I burst into the tiny, cluttered office of 'Edinburgh’s Eerie Encounters' like the devil himself was on my heels. The room was an explosion of Fiona’s personality: cheerful posters of Highland cows, half-dead plants she was trying to nurse back to life, and stacks of papers threatening to avalanche onto the floor.

Fiona looked up from her computer, a smudge of ink on her cheek and her wild red curls escaping their messy bun. "Dan! You look like you've seen a ghost. And I mean a real one, not one of our paying customers."

Her smile was so normal, so wonderfully, blessedly mundane, that it almost broke me. "Fiona," I gasped, leaning against the doorframe. "Something's happened. Something bad."

The cheerfulness vanished from her face, replaced by a sharp, focused concern. "Sit down. You’re white as a sheet. Kettle’s just boiled. I’ll make you a cup of tea."

"No, Fi, not the tea," I groaned, sinking into the rickety visitor's chair. Fiona's tea was legendary for all the wrong reasons. It tasted like she brewed it with boiled socks and sheer optimism, a concoction of strange herbs that left a metallic tang in your mouth.

She ignored my plea, bustling around the kettle with a determined air. As the weird, earthy smell of her chosen brew filled the small office, I told her everything. The murder. The way the man was killed, just like my story. The woman in black. The symbol. And finally, my voice dropping to a shaky whisper, the grey-skinned figure in the doorway.

I expected her to laugh, to look concerned for my sanity, to suggest I take a few days off. Instead, she set a steaming mug of her awful tea in front of me with a steady hand. Her expression was grim, devoid of any trace of her usual sunshine.

"You saw the Bodach Glas," she said. It wasn't a question.

I stared at her, my mouth dry. "You... you believe me?"

"Of course, I believe you," she said, pulling on her coat. "My gran used to say that seeing the herald means you're standing on a threshold. That something has noticed you." She looked at me, her gaze steady and serious. "Drink your tea. It'll help settle your nerves. Then we're going to see someone."

The tea was as vile as I remembered, but there was an odd warmth to it that spread through my chest, calming the frantic tremor in my hands. It didn't settle my nerves so much as numb them.

Fiona didn't lead me to a police station or a hospital. She led me through a maze of cobbled wynds I didn't even know existed, away from the tourist-trodden paths of the Royal Mile. We stopped before a shop that seemed to be leaning against its neighbours for support. The sign, barely legible under layers of grime, read 'A. Blackwood - Antiquities & Curios'. The window display was a chaotic jumble of dusty taxidermy, tarnished silver, and teetering stacks of leather-bound books. It looked like it hadn't seen a customer since the reign of Queen Victoria.

The bell above the door gave a dissonant jangle as we entered. The air inside was thick with the smell of old paper, beeswax, and something else… something sharp and electric, like the air after a lightning strike.

"Alistair?" Fiona called into the gloom.

A shuffling sound came from behind a bookshelf that reached the ceiling. An old man emerged, a mischievous twinkle in his sharp blue eyes and a shock of white hair that seemed to have its own gravitational field. He wore a dusty tweed jacket and held a chipped porcelain teacup in one hand as if it were a permanent extension of his body.

"Fiona, my dear girl," he chirped, his voice a smooth, cultured purr. "And you've brought a friend. He smells of fear and your truly abominable tea. What seems to be the trouble?"

His gaze fell on me, and for a second, the charming old man act dropped. His eyes were ancient, holding a depth of knowledge that made my skin crawl. He wasn't just looking at me; he was reading me like one of his dusty old tomes.

"He's been marked, Alistair," Fiona said quietly.

I showed him my trembling hand, and then, with a dry throat, I sketched the symbol from my nightmares onto a dusty ledger with my finger.

Alistair's cheerful facade dissolved completely. He set his teacup down with a soft click and his eyes narrowed. "Ah," he said, the single syllable heavy with meaning. "So, the Unseelie Court has finally tired of the cold war."

My head was spinning. "The what? Unseelie Court? What are you talking about?"

Alistair gestured to a pair of worn leather armchairs. "Sit. This is not a story for standing." He began to pace, his movements surprisingly fluid for a man his age. "There are worlds layered over your own, Mr. MacLean, like pages in a book. Thin Places. And between them is a Veil. For centuries, that Veil has been upheld by a truce between the two great Fae Courts—Seelie and Unseelie. Summer and Winter. Growth and Decay."

He paused, fixing me with his intense blue eyes. "That truce is broken. A rogue lord of the Unseelie, a creature that calls itself the Soul-Eater, is trying to tear the Veil down. It wants to let the raw chaos of its world bleed into yours."

"The man who was killed..." I started, the pieces beginning to slot together with horrifying clarity.

"A casualty," Alistair said dismissively. "A statement of intent. The Soul-Eater's minions, creatures like Redcaps and the Bodach Glas, are already slipping through the cracks. The murder was a ritual, a way to weaken the Veil in that spot. But it wasn't the goal."

He stopped pacing and leaned in close, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "The Soul-Eater is not just tearing at the seams, it's hunting. To truly shatter the Veil, it needs a key. Not a physical object, but a confluence of energy, a bloodline that is tied to the very fabric of the Veil itself."

A cold, heavy certainty settled in the pit of my stomach. I knew what he was going to say before the words left his mouth. I didn't want to hear it, but there was no escaping the intense, knowing look in his ancient eyes.

"That brand you see in your dreams, the symbol on that poor man's hand," Alistair said, his voice soft but utterly final. "It's a hunter's mark. The killer isn't just hunting for a key, Mr. MacLean. It's hunting for you."