Alasdair finds his grandfather in the ballroom, where he's recounting how he once managed to defeat his Arch, Power-Man, armed only with a paperclip and two rubber bands to a gaggle of mid-level supervillain sycophants.
Grandfather has trotted out the same story at every single Guild function and get-together he's attended since the turn of the millennium, and he's told it in exactly the same way each time - one hand holding a glass of brandy pressed close to his chest, the other swooping through the air as he describes every feint, blow and parry of their fight, his fat cigar leaving thick contrails of smoke hanging in the air behind it - but still his admirers hang rapt on every word, oohing and aahing and gasping whenever Grandfather makes one of his regularly scheduled pauses in the narrative, carefully-chosen to elicit just such a response.
It's quite a pathetic sight.
Alasdair elbows his way to the front of the crowd, loudly clears his throat and even waves to try and attract Grandfather's attention, but the old bastard ignores him until he reaches the denouement of his tale, wherein Power-Man is lying in a battered and humiliated heap at his feet, begging for mercy.
Some obsequious fucker or other breaks into actual, honest-to-god applause at the end of it, and Grandfather ducks his head, as though to disguise a blush that isn't actually there. His assertions afterward that his victory was "All in a day's work," and, "Nothing special," are just as false, as all of Grandfather's displays of modesty are. No-one thinks better of Grandfather's accomplishments that the man himself.
When the congratulations and expressions of admiration finally die down, Grandfather disperses his hangers-on with a few, soft words of farewell that are completely at odds with the imperious flick of the wrist that accompanies them.
As soon as the other supervillains have scattered, Grandfather discards the faint smile he'd been wearing, straightens his shoulders out of their bashful stoop, and he glares at Alasdair with all of his usual fiercely-concentrated intensity.
"Well?" he demands. "Was it him?"
"It was," Alasdair says. "The Cù Sìth had him treed over by the hedge maze."
"And was he coming in or going out?"
"Coming in," Alasdair says, even though he genuinely has no clue what the truth of the matter had been. He does know what Grandfather would prefer to hear, though.
Grandfather's eyes narrow suspiciously, nonetheless. "Are you sure?" he asks. "He wasn't carrying anything?"
Alasdair goes out of his way to avoid looking at Francis too closely from the shoulders down. Or the chin up. He could have been cradling Grandfather's entire art collection in his arms, and Alasdair likely wouldn't have noticed. His neck, the only safe harbour for Alasdair's eyes nowadays, hadn't been particularly illuminating on that score.
"No," he says anyway, because what Grandfather doesn't know won't get Alasdair exiled to Antarctica for the rest of his natural, doomed to freezing his bollocks off in the underground lair where Grandfather sends all of his minions who have displeased him.
"He could have had something tucked away in that froofy little utility belt of his," Grandfather says. "You did check that, didn't you?"
As Francis' utility belt is situated slap-bang in the middle of the danger zone that is his body, Alasdair hadn't so much as glanced at it, never mind touched it. "Yes, Grandfather," he says.
"And you patted him down?"
Alasdair's mind wipes clean of almost all thought at the mere idea of that. After a moment's stunned and increasingly uncomfortable silence, he eventually manages to scrape together enough of his meagre, remaining resources to stammer out, "No... No need. He was wearing that catsuit of his, and, well..."
Well, it might as well be painted on, which is the reason Alasdair has to be very guarded with his looking in the first place.
"Nowhere to hide anything in that, is there? Man's a crass exhibitionist," Grandfather says, his nose wrinkling in distaste. "And you put him in the dungeons?"
That's one thing that Alsadair doesn't need lie about or obfuscate. "Yes, Grandfather."
"I'll look forward to talking to him there later." Grandfather aims a single sharp nod Alasdair's way, which is as close to any sort of thanks or appreciation for his work as he's ever likely to get, and then adds, "Go find your brothers, and collect their reports. I want you to meet me back here in no more than twenty minutes to deliver them. Understood?"
"Yes, Grandfather."
"And then you're to resume your patrol. No reason to get complacent even if we have got the Frog under lock and key, is there?"
"No, Grandfather."
"Right, then," Grandfather says, dismissing Alasdair with the exact same brusque gesture he had used on his underlings earlier. "Hop to it."
"Yes, Grandfather," Alasdair says, swivelling compliantly on his heel.
Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir.
Baa, fucking baa.
As Michael will probably have secreted himself - along with a book and pilfered bottle of champagne - in one of his many hidey-holes at the very beginning of the party, to avoid the horror of perhaps having to speak to someone he's not directly related to, he won't have seen anything useful and there seems little point in attempting to seek him out. Instead, Alasdair heads towards the billiard room, where he'd last seen Dylan.
His brother is, as Alasdair suspected, still there, though he is no longer clutching a bottle of beer in a death-like grip as he leans stiffly against the small bar there in a failed effort at looking nonchalant and at perfect ease in his surroundings.
Now, he has his head bowed over his phone, and is frowning unhappily down at it.
"It was beeping at me about half an hour ago," he says by way of explanation for his behaviour when Alasdair joins him and breaks him from his reverie with a swift elbow to the side. "I think one of the alarms upstairs was tripped, but I can't find where it's supposed to tell you which one it was. There's just all these times listed, and little pictures of clock faces..."
Alasdair snatches the mobile from his brother's hand, because Dylan can't really be trusted to work any technology more complex than a calculator. "Wrong sort of alarm, you numpty. Jesus, look," he says, for easily the hundredth time in the six months since Dylan first received his newest work phone, "it's simple enough."
He opens the correct app, making sure, yet a-fucking-gain that Dylan is watching him carefully throughout, then examines the map of the house that the screen displays.
"The study," says Dylan, whose map-reading is marginally better than his phone-navigation, at least.
"Come on," Alasdair says. "We'd best check it out."
-
-
Grandfather's study looks, quite literally, as if a bomb has hit it: the door listing on its hinges, detritus littering the floor, and every drawer and door on Grandfather's desk hanging wide open.
Including the secret one. The one sealed tight with a supposedly impenetrable magical lock. The one Alasdair has never been allowed to see beyond.
He falls to his knees in front of it, and his stomach feels to fall even lower; tense, and cold, and lurching. The compartment that door had concealed contains nothing but a light coating of dust, excepting a small, rectangular clear patch at the centre of it, where something had obviously once been resting.
"Shit," Alasdair says, letting his head fall forward to bang against the side of the desk. He doesn't even feel the impact. "Shit, shit, shit."
"What is it?" Dylan asks, hurrying forward to drop into a crouch at Alasdair's side. "What have...?" He trails into silence as he too inspects the compartment and notices that same, damning space inside. "Fucking hell," he says, his voice breaking high and thin. "What did he keep in there? Do you know?"
"Not a clue," Alasdair says. "Must have been pretty fucking important, though, given the lengths he goes to to keep it hidden."
Dylan's eyes quickly dart away from the empty compartment, and he starts nipping at the side of his thumbnail, as he always does when he's unsettled. "Who do you think could have done this, Aly?" he asks.
"Well," Alasdair says, drawing out the word as long as he can because he doesn't really want to reach its end and have to confess. "I did catch Fran... the Frog sneaking around outside earlier."
"You did?" Dylan perks up a little. "So he's down in the dungeons, then?"
Alasdair checks the time on his phone. It's been almost quarter of an hour since he locked Francis up. He'll be long gone by now, no doubt. "Probably not any more," he says.
Dylan groans. "You put him in cell five, didn't you."
It's not a question; Dylan knows him too well for that.
It might have been a long time since they were... Well, he and Francis were never friends, precisely, but once upon a time they were friendly, or, at least, weren't the sworn enemies they're supposed to be now. Alasdair can hardly be blamed for harbouring some... fond feelings for the man. And Dylan definitely wouldn't be the one to do so.
"I would have done the same thing," Dylan says, squeezing his shoulder comfortingly.
Alasdair knows it's no empty reassurance, as neither of them trust Grandfather where Francis is concerned. They've admitted that much to each other; quietly, obliquely, and far away from the many prying eyes and ears in Grandfather's employ.
After all, Francis' mother had up and vanished from those very same dungeons five years ago, never to be seen or heard of again. Francis certainly seems to believe that Grandfather had a hand in her disappearance - by all accounts, he'd announced his suspicions in front of the entire Council of 13, Grandfather included - but no-one in the Guild believed that good old George Kirkland, vaunted in the supervillain community for his honour and integrity, could possibly be involved in such a thing. Turning against one of his own? It was unthinkable.
Francis' claims were investigated, but only perfunctorily and very soon dismissed. Consequently, Francis broke with the Guild and their rules, and Alasdair and Dylan began to wonder.
Alasdair pushes the compartment door closed with one finger, and it melds seamlessly together with the wood surrounding it, leaving no indication that it's there at all. "We can only hope that he doesn't check inside it very often," he says. "Might buy us enough time to retrieve... whatever it was that was in there before he ever notices it's gone."
"Let's hope so," Dylan says, with a small, tremulous smile.
There'll be hell to pay if they can't, and it'll fall on both Alasdair and Dylan's heads for their failure to properly work their phones and secure master thieves, respectively.
"You Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo all this crap off the floor, I'll go and fetch my toolbox; see if I can get the lock and sensors fixed up."
Dylan nods his assent, and then straightens up and spreads his fingers wide, preparing to cast magic. Alasdair leaves him to it, and heads out with the intention of going down to his workshop in the cellar.
He only gets as far as the bathroom just before the stairs, however, because he hears a faint noise emanating from within it. Even though the third floor is out of bounds for the night, it's likely just one of Grandfather's guests who's either taken a wrong turn, or else is too drunk to care about that stipulation. Francis is surely too much of a professional to return to the scene of the crime, but Alasdair could be lucky. He might have slipped up, just this once.
He cautiously eases the door open slightly, and peers through the gap it creates. Disappointingly, he sees only Arthur kneeling hunched over the toilet, his arms wrapped around the bowl.
Alasdair throws the door open the rest of the way, strides inside the bathroom, and slaps his brother hard in centre of his arched back. "Too much champagne, Wart?" he asks with feigned sympathy.
"Keep your fucking voice down," Arthur snaps. "My head's pounding. And no," he adds, sounding primly offended, "that's not because I'm drunk. I got accosted by a superhero in Grandfather's study."
"A superhero?" Alasdair asks, intrigued. That could solve everything. "Which one?"
Francis might well have been 'coming in' rather than 'going out', and not actually their culprit, after all. A superhero would likely give up their spoils far more easily, given the right sob story and a quick tug on their heartstrings.
"Well, he said his name was Alfred Jones," Arthur says. "Or 'Captain Awesome', if you prefer."
"Never heard of him," Alasdair says, shaking his head.
"Neither have I. I think he might be unlicensed."
"Fantastic." Alasdair sighs deeply. "So we won't be able to track him through the League even if he was the one who robbed us."
"What makes you think we were robbed?" Arthur asks. "I know it's a mess in the study, and the... Captain was ransacking it, but I didn't see him actually take anything."
"Maybe he did it whilst you were knocked out." Alasdair gestures towards the bruise purpling Arthur's left temple. "Or it could have been the Frog. He's been lurking around here tonight, too." In answer to the question that Arthur's furrowed brow and parted lips suggest he's about to ask, Alasdair says, "I did have him locked up downstairs, but you know what he's like. He's probably escaped by now. Either way, we're fucked."
"How so?" Arthur asks.
"Grandfather's secret compartment's been cleared out."
Arthur's face drains of blood, and he starts trying to scramble unsteadily to his feet. Alasdair holds him still with a firm hand against his shoulder. "Don't bother," he says. "Dylan and I have got everything in hand. We're going to set the study to rights as best we can, and, fingers crossed, Grandfather won't even think to check if anything's missing for the time being."
"And then?"
"And then, first thing tomorrow morning, we'll go and pay Dylan's horrible boyfriend a visit," Alasdair says. "We're going to need some help tracking down the Frog and this Alfred bloke, and you know as well as I do that he's the best in the business, unfortunately."