Taking One’s shortcut wasn’t a pleasant ride. When they burst through the opening and into the mortal land, Lily doubled over and fought back the need to retch.

“Oh, but I am good!” said One, not paying her any mind. “Look! I brought us right to the gate!”

Lily managed to straighten and look around her. She stood in the Green, where every summer the Highland games took place, and just in front of her loomed the iron gates to the parish church. It was an old temple, built sometime in the nineteenth century over the ruins of Aboyne’s original church, and it was all hard lines and massive planes. It didn’t look inviting like other buildings from the same period would, but foreboding.

The low stone wall circling the grounds and enclosing hundreds of crooked headstones and moss-covered crosses didn’t help.

“How can I enter?” she asked One.

The sprite shrugged. “Through the door?”

“It’s the dead of night. The door will be locked.”

“Well, how do you expect me to know how to get someplace I cannot even get close to? It is your task now, not mine.” One’s wings whirred and she shot up.

“Wait!” She didn’t, and Lily was left staring at a pitch-black sky, surrounded by twisted silhouettes of trees and centuries-old dead.

Her brilliant idea didn’t seem quite so brilliant anymore and the hairs in the back of her neck stood up. She had visited this place during the day, of course, back when she was a kid. It was very centric and you were never alone. Now, in the darkness, she was alone and she wished she’d feel that way. The eerie sensation of being observed nagged at her and made her knees wobbly.

Hoping against all hope, she tried the front door of the church. It didn’t budge, of course. She dried her palms against her jeans.

Okay. Let’s try the back door. It’s on the other side of the wall, so perhaps they don’t lock it.

She began to circle the outer wall of the cemetery. Her steps took her away from the open Green and under the trees, and the discomfort increased. Lamplight was nonexistent this far from the streets and the moon couldn’t make it beyond the canopy, sparse as it was. She stumbled over rather than saw a rock by the wall, dislodged from the oldest part of it.

That’s it. I’m not looking further.

The climb wasn’t too hard, only five feet or so of eroded stones that offered plenty of ridges to act as hand and footholds, and still Lily stumbled.

She dropped on the other side and overgrown ivy tangled her feet. She caught herself on a granite Celtic cross that stood sunken in the vegetation. It had an inscription, but it was too eroded to read.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to whoever had been buried there.

She had known she would feel fear, but she hadn’t anticipated the wrongness that came with breaking into a church in the dead of the night, falling on top of ancient graves and disturbing the sleep of the dearly departed. They had departed, they couldn’t care anymore. And she might be sneaking in, but she didn’t have unholy intentions in mind, and surely God would understand her reasons.

Still.

She hurried along, picking her path to avoid the graves as best she could, and reached another door into the church. Locked as well, and she was not going to break a stained glass to enter. There she drew the line.

Options. There had to be more.

The minister’s office. It wouldn’t take her to the church proper, but it was connected.

She walked around the building as fast as she could, reached the side eave, and saw the much smaller door she was looking for. A quick trial showed that it, too, was locked. The Aboyne community didn’t take risks with their parish, it seemed. But there was a window, not of stained glass but something more modern. Lily stood on her tiptoes and heaved. It was closed, but they hadn’t thrown the safety lock and it gave.

When she dropped down on the other side this time, she didn’t fall on anything. The minister’s office was draped in shadows, but the dark hulks suggesting furniture were few and far between. Office table, narrow locker-style cabinet, couple of chairs… there couldn’t be much more.

Which was good. If she had to go through the minister’s belongings to find a magical horn of faerie make, she’d feel much more like a burglar and less like a rescuer.

The door connecting the office to the church was open and Lily slipped through. Her sneakers squeaked against the polished floor and the sound echoed in the empty space. Moonlight filtered through the stained glass and lit up the place in a colorless glow that would make the search, if not easier, at least less impossible. The pulpit stood like a lone sentinel in front of a sea of upholstered chairs, more prominent even than the simple altar at its side. High galleries adorned three of the four walls, each supported by marble columns and each with their wrought iron stairs to reach the upper seats. Other than that, it was empty.

Where would Mackenna hide the horn? Not in plain sight because that would risk someone relocating it to an unsafe location. So it wouldn’t be where people would stumble upon it by accident either. Most ancient churches of the Midlands would offer a hundred nooks to store a small object out of sight, but the interior of Aboyne’s parish church was almost aseptic. Perhaps it was because it had to be restored and could no longer be considered ancient.

Lily shook herself. By standing there and thinking architecture, she’d solve nothing.

First the galleries. The steps going up and down. The banners hung upon the walls. The underside of the seats of every chair. The underside of every seat in the main eave. The back of the portrait. The pulpit. The altar. The organ. She couldn’t see very well, but she felt her way through it all, looking for a hollow sound, a raised border, a shape out of the ordinary.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

She should have brought a flashlight. She should have thought to pick one up and throw it in the knapsack. Granted, it might have called a neighbor’s attention, but this groping and fumbling in the dark couldn’t be much better.

The dark wouldn’t last forever, either. Lily could almost feel the first hints of predawn creeping up on her. Soon, the graves outside would be covered in morning’s dew and the sky would go gray and she’d be out of time.

She might be out of time already, taking into account the way its passage didn’t have an exact correlation between mortal and faerie worlds.

She felt like a rendition of Alice’s White Rabbit. Late, late; rushing around in circles and managing nothing. There was not a hint of the horn in the church. And really, when she stopped to think about it, it made sense. Mackenna was a very proper woman—except for the odd bits concerning faerie lore, of course. Still, even those bits had made her more polite, gentle, and self-aware than average. You didn’t overstep your boundaries when dealing with faeries, and so Mackenna had never overstepped hers when dealing with normal people, either. Imagining her breaking into a church and hiding something there, like a pirate’s cache, was just wrong. The church might be for the whole congregation, but it didn’t belong to any one member and she wouldn’t have been comfortable putting something of hers in a public place, no matter how faerie-proof it was.

But if Cadowain had been wrong and the horn wasn’t here, then where was it?

Hallowed ground.

Of course. Of course!

Mackenna didn’t own the building, but she did own a plot of its hallowed grounds, didn’t she?

Lily ran back to the minister’s office. She put one of the chairs below the window and used it to climb out with less struggling. Perhaps the next morning they would notice someone had broken in and hadn’t touched a thing, and perhaps by night she’d be laughing at their confused looks with her grandma while they scratched their heads and tried to understand. It didn’t matter.

She hit the outside floor with a thud that left her breathless for a moment, and she used it to get her bearings. It was one place she hadn’t been to since she was little, but the impression of the cemetery in her child’s mind was quite drastic and she recalled to the last detail the visits she and Mackenna had paid to that place every Friday afternoon. Her feet took her there by memory, not stumbling or hesitating once and slowing only when in front of the correct Celtic granite cross.

It looked much like the one she had fallen on top of before, but it wasn’t as old. Ivy and overgrowth had been kept in check with a firm hand and weeds hadn’t dared to invade the tomb yet. The carved name was smoothed by the elements but still starkly visible. It said “Cormag Kirk. More beloved than forever.”

Her grandfather’s grave.

She knelt in front of it and ran her fingers over the corners where they sunk into the ground.

There! Upturned soil, the vegetation pushing up again but not quite equal to the older grass. The dirt packed, yes, but not settled.

She began to dig with her bare fingers, her blunt nails cracking and the scratches in her knuckles reopening. She cleared one inch, then another, and then she touched something rough. A burlap bundle, stained as brown as the earth itself.

It resisted, but with a harsh tug, she pulled it free and shook the dirt out. It was very light, about a foot long, and Lily parted the cloth with trembling fingers and baited breath.

And there it was, bone and bronze and mother of pearl and gold.

The horn of the Wild Hunt.