The Shifting Price of Prey [4]

by Suzanne McLeod

  ‘Shuffle,’ he ordered, Compulsion fuelled his voice.

  ‘I can’t one-handed—’ But even as I spoke, my fingers did an expert shuffle.

  ‘Toss them in the air.’

  My hand threw the cards. The light in the room dimmed as they fountained up high like a mushroom cloud, before tumbling like glistening snowflakes on a winter’s night. I winced, expecting them to clatter on to the desk, dreading the damage they could do to the fragile fairy body in its sandwich-box coffin, but they dissipated, melting like the snowflakes they’d mimicked, fading away into the ether . . . Soon only five remained. They snapped into a line, hovering in front of me. Still blank.

  I looked at Tavish. ‘What now?’

  He picked up one of my scalpels, held it out to me, his hand shaking. ‘They need to be fed.’

  ‘Blood?’

  ‘Aye, doll. Blood for your question answered. Usual terms.’ Sweat beaded on his forehead.

  I frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Feed ’em,’ he urged, shoulders bowing as if with pain.

  O-kay. I pressed my left index finger against the scalpel. The edge sliced the tip, dark viscous blood welled, scenting the air with honey and copper, and I readied for the pain but it didn’t come. Odd.

  ‘Quick,’ he whispered.

  I took a steadying breath. ‘I offer my blood solely in exchange for the answer to my questions. No harm to me or mine,’ I said and touched the first card.

  A tiny tongue licked at my finger— Startled, I jerked my hand back, or would’ve without Tavish’s Compulsion holding me in place. The tongue licked some more, tickling, then I felt a little mouth press against the cut, lips sealing around it. It started sucking my blood down, hard and fast enough that I could feel the draw on my heart. I shot an anxious look at Tavish. He was hunched in his chair, the cobalt colour leaching from his eyes, leaving them pale and cloudy, his dreads turning dry and brittle, their beads clear as glass. Then a bead shattered, the pieces hitting the floor with a soft ping. Uneasy, I tried yanking my hand from the card. I couldn’t.

  ‘What the hell’s happening, Tavish?’

  ‘Channelling.’

  ‘Channelling what? Something in the cards?’

  He grunted.

  I took it as a yes. And judging by the way his hand gripped mine, whatever it was, it was powerful. What the hell was in the cards if they could do this to him? And why hadn’t he told me what to expect? Unless this wasn’t it?

  ‘Harder,’ he muttered. ‘Harder than I thought to stop you.’

  ‘Stop me? But I’m not doing anything!’

  More beads shattered. He crumpled forwards, his head dropping to his knees, his hand a death-grip on mine. ‘The card? Is it changing?’

  I dragged my attention back to the card. Thick gold mist topped it like a tiny thundercloud, and on the front the dark bruised red of my blood coloured the card from the bottom up, as if it were litmus paper drawing it up. Which in a way it seemed it was, as there was still a thin white strip at the top.

  ‘Tell me when.’ Tavish’s words were a hoarse whisper.

  The strip turned pink . . .

  Brighter red . . .

  Then the dark bruised colour of the rest of the card.

  Suddenly the mouth released my finger with an audible satisfied sigh.

  I cut a troubled glance at Tavish. ‘It’s let go—’

  He toppled out of the chair, his hand slipping from mine, and curled into a foetal ball under the desk.

  I flung myself to my knees, grabbed his head; his face was lined and shrunken like an old man’s.

  Weakly, he pushed at me. ‘Talk to the card, doll,’ he ground out harshly, ‘afore she leaves.’

  She? But a stab of Compulsion had my body pulling back into the chair, my eyes fixing on the bloodstained card and my mouth said, ‘Tell me how to find that which is lost, and how to join that which is sundered, to release the fae’s fertility from the trap and restore their fertility back to them as it was before it was taken.’

  The tarot card vibrated. The blood swirled away in wisps of reddish smoke until I could make out a picture. A dark-haired, hawk-nosed male in his thirties, dressed in a purple toga, his head wreathed with a crown of golden laurels, lounged on an ornate throne. He held a silver-bladed dagger in one hand, and behind him a large golden eagle perched on a staff-like pillar. The Emperor.

  The Emperor on the card laughed; a loud arrogant sound that filled the large room. I started. The ginger tom leaped from the desk, its fur bottle-brush stiff, and at my feet Tavish whimpered. On the card a huge, fanged snake slithered up the staff and hissed at the golden eagle. The bird flapped its wings angrily and launched itself out into the room, soaring up to the ceiling.

  I repeated my question.

  The Emperor laughed again, pointed his silver dagger out of the card at me and bellowed, ‘He knows! He will tell you! For a price!’

  Of course he would. ‘Who’s he?’ my mouth demanded.

  ‘He is I!’

  ‘Who are you?’

  The Emperor gave another booming laugh. ‘I am the Emperor!’

  Great. Was it a tarot card or a pantomime villain? Next he’d be shouting, ‘He’s behind you!’ I gritted my teeth. Specific questions, Gen. ‘What’s the name you were given at your birth?’

  ‘My father named me—’

  An angry screech drowned his words as the golden eagle dived back into the card. The card exploded in a splatter of crimson as if a bullet had hit dead centre. Droplets of blood expanded out in a starburst of brilliant red light, their blinding afterimage searing my retinas.

  Crap. Crapcrapcrap.

  No way in hell was that supposed to happen . . . I rubbed at my eyes, crouched and desperately stretched out to Tavish under the desk. Who knew what harm the explosion of magic had caused him? I patted around but couldn’t feel him. Finally, as my vision returned I realised the only things under the desk were me, the ginger tom and some disgusting toadstools sprouting from the mouldy rug.

  Tavish was gone.

  A soft snorting noise made me turn. In the centre of the room, making the place seem small, stood a kelpie horse. The kelpie’s green-black coat was rough over hard, ropy muscles, its tangled mane glinted with dull gold beads, its black-lace gills fanned wide to either side of its arched, serpentine neck, and its eyes flickered with golden light.

  Damn. Tavish’s wylde side had come out to play. Perfect.

  I crawled out and stood with my back against the desk, cautious. I trusted Tavish, but he wasn’t the one in control of the kelpie. It was as if taking his waterhorse shape stripped away his couple of millennia’s worth of civilisation and left him as he must have been when he first came into being in the Shining Times: something feral and predatory, birthed from magic. Good news was: we weren’t near the river so the kelpie wasn’t likely to Charm me to ride it into the depths. Bad news: Tavish wasn’t exactly easy to communicate with in this form.

  ‘Um, you okay?’ I asked.

  The kelpie shuddered as if shedding water; its usual signal to changing shape. Its eyes flashed black, then back to the odd gold light. It shook again, pawed the scratched wooden floorboards with one camel-toed hoof and flicked its tail over its flanks as if dislodging irritating flies, then shot me a wild, white-rimmed look.

  ‘Guess that means no,’ I muttered, glancing round the room in case a helpful solution jumped out at me. The window was still buzzing with Knock-back Wards, the gnome’s cats were milling in a furry tide in front of the interior door, obviously wanting away from the kelpie but trapped by the spells on the threshold—

  The kelpie half-reared up, ears flat against its skull, and wheeled towards the door. The cats scattered, scrambling onto shelves or under furniture. The kelpie dipped its head, snatched up the spell crystal from the threshold with a disgusted snort and thudded out and away.

  I stared after it for a long moment, expecting Tavish to return in his human form or to hear the g
nome’s surprised shout on discovering a kelpie horse rampaging round his house.

  After a few minutes’ silence the ginger tom peered from beneath the fungi-covered sofa, its eyes wary, then it clawed its way out, stood with its tail up. It hissed at me as if to ask, ‘Scary horse-thing gone?’

  I sent my senses out. The gnome was still fast asleep but there was no ping telling me Tavish/kelpie horse was anywhere near.

  ‘Yep, looks like the scary horse-thing has gone,’ I muttered, wondering how a waterhorse without opposable thumbs had bypassed the doors and Wards.

  Frustration slumped my shoulders. Figured something would go wrong. No matter what I did with magic it always seemed to mess up, even with something as supposedly simple as a tarot reading. Still, maybe the rest of the cards would be more informative . . . I turned back to the desk.

  The tarot cards were gone.

  Three hours later, I called it quits. While I’d waited for the tarot cards to reappear or Tavish to contact me, I’d got on with the investigation. I’d finished all the tests on the dead fairies – all of them were apparently dead from natural causes – checked out the gnome’s creepy stock, and had a good snoop round the house. And found no clues in the ‘incriminating’ department.

  I called Tavish. Same as the last however many times, his phone went straight to voicemail. Presumably, he was working off whatever was bugging him with a swim in the River Thames. I added another message to my earlier ones saying I was packing up, the tarot cards were still gone, and to call me.

  I wasn’t sure what to take from the Emperor card. Tarot wasn’t my strong suit (bad pun aside), but as any self-analysis was a non-starter – this was about the fae’s fertility after all – I went with a literal interpretation.

  The card had said: ‘He knows! He will tell you! For a price!’ And then, ‘He is the Emperor!’

  The Emperor, whoever he was, would do a deal for the info. Simple. Of course, whatever he wanted in exchange wasn’t likely to be simple at all. But I was doing the cart-before-the-horse thing. First I had to find him. Which would be so much easier if I knew who he was. Only, thanks to the eagle (or whatever the cards were channelling) cutting the reading short, I had no name, other than he called or thought of himself as the Emperor. Of course, that could be down to the tarot card’s standard depiction, so could be something or nothing.

  But I did have a couple of clues.

  The first was that, instead of the usual sceptre, the Emperor held a silver dagger.What that signified was anyone’s guess.

  The second clue was more enlightening. The golden eagle had been perched on a snake-entwined staff. I’d recognised it: it was the Rod of Asclepius.

  Asclepius was the Greek god of healing. According to myth, the goddess Athena, his aunt, gave him a gift of Gorgon’s blood to help him in his work. Only he didn’t just use it to heal the sick, he started bringing them back after they’d died too, thereby giving them what turned out to be a new bloodsucking immortal life. Hence all new vamps ‘Accept the Gift’ when they leave their human mortality behind. Turned out creating a new species was a fatal life-choice for Asclepius, though, since Zeus, his überdivine granddad, wasn’t too impressed by his grandkid overstepping his healing remit. He struck Asclepius dead with a thunderbolt. Then Apollo, Asclepius’s dad, got equally pissed off and decided to dispose of his son’s creations, whenever they stepped into his light, by burning them to a crisp. Which is why vamps don’t do storms or suntans.

  And why the Rod of Asclepius on the tarot card had to mean the Emperor was a vamp.

  ‘So I’m looking for a vamp with delusions of majesty,’ I muttered, which left the suspect pool wide open. Though since I couldn’t imagine how some unknown vamp would have the answer to releasing and restoring the fae’s trapped fertility, the ‘Emperor’ would more than likely have some connection to London’s fae, and/or to me. Which narrowed the suspects down considerably. In fact, to the one vamp who did the whole royal thing ad nauseum. The psychotic, sadistic, murdering sucker I was supposed to marry when I was fourteen. The Autarch.

  Panic rose up to close my throat. I forced it back down and told myself I was jumping to conclusions. I’d never known the Autarch to be called ‘Emperor’; he was always called a prince. And just because I thought I knew all the vamps in London, didn’t mean I did. There was probably some other vamp I’d never heard of who was the Emperor. Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that, Gen. I stifled the scared voice in my head. I needed more info before I let the possibility that I might finally have to face my own personal blood-sucker nightmare, turn me back into that terrified teenager who’d run away. And the quickest way to get that info was to talk to the vamp in the know.

  Malik al-Khan. London’s Oligarch and my ‘owner/protector’ . . . according to the vamps’ icky ‘property’ database, anyway. What our relationship actually was . . . was complicated and confusing, and needed working out. Not just between us, but in my own head. And in my heart—

  I halted my thoughts before they strayed any further into that particular emotional minefield. This wasn’t the time or place. Still, I couldn’t quite stop the eager leap of anticipation at having a reason to contact Malik . . . I snagged my phone, and, getting his voicemail, left a brief message for him to call me. That done, I put my phone away. As I took a steadying breath, noticed the ginger tom was crouched on the edge of the desk, hackles raised, gaze fixed on the window.

  Peering round the edge of the sash window was a dark-haired figure, tall and broad enough to be male, his face in shadow.

  For a moment my panic-induced paranoia screamed, the Autarch, then my sensible, prosaic head took over: the watcher was more likely to be a poacher casing the gnome’s joint for his magical valuables.

  The male jerked out of sight, and I rushed to the window.

  The house’s small front garden had once been a grassed square with shrubs around the outside, but the plants were now choked and overgrown, the grass knee-high with weeds. But, despite the jungle, there really was nowhere for anyone to hide. And other than one of the gnome’s cats disappearing into the bushes, the garden was empty. As was the road in both directions as far as I could see, and the open grassy space of the Primrose Hill park opposite.

  Crap. I’d missed him—

  A human couldn’t disappear that fast.

  I sent my Spidey senses searching for any Others nearby, but all I picked up was the gnome at the back of the house . . . I closed my eyes and concentrated . . . There, distant enough that they had to be a good few houses away, the ping of a vamp—

  Fuck. Maybe my first guess had been right, and the peeping tom/poacher was the Autarch.

  Except, even with the sunset starting to paint the sky red and orange, it was still too bright and therefore too dangerous for any vamp to be out – Apollo’s crispy critter look is never a healthy choice for a sucker – so the vamp was probably just a local waking up. Although, my paranoia reminded me, while I’d never heard of any vamp having the ability to walk around during the day, that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t possible. And a daywalking Autarch had starred in not a few of my nightmares over the years.

  I shuddered at that scarily uncomfortable thought and gave the empty garden a last once over, mentally filing ‘Autarch is stalker is Emperor’ for later discussion with Malik. We were going to have a lot to talk about.

  I packed my stuff up and woke the sleeping gnome (eventually, though it took a cast-iron frying pan bouncing off his head; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that satisfying) with the bad news that he’d have to wait a couple more days for his dead garden fairy licences (despite the lack of evidence, I’d decided to play it safe), and that he might have a poacher problem. Which, since something had punched out the cat flap in his back door – the kelpie? Could he shapeshift that small? – had the gnome shoving me out of his house in frenzied alarm so he could fix it and reinforce his Wards.

  Outside, I perched on the gnome’s low garden wall. As
I waited for my lift, thoughts of trapped fertility, tarot cards, disappearing kelpies, peeping toms and daywalking Autarchs circled my mind like the gnome’s anxious cats. My shoulders started to itch with the feeling I was being watched. I smoothed my thumb over the emerald ring on my right hand, and the large square-cut gem, guarded by baguette-cut rubies, warmed with a tingle of magic. The ring’s mediaeval gold setting was ugly and heavy, but that was its only downside. I took a quick scan, double-checking the road was still empty (not wanting to panic any bystanders), and clenched my fist.

  A ball of green dragonfire erupted from the ring, and a sword sprang into my palm. A Roman gladius. Just over two feet in length, its two-edged blade a mix of steel and silver tapering to a sharp point. The sword was made for cutting, slashing or stabbing. And on the blade was an engraving of a dragon crouching along with the sword’s name: Ascalon. The sword was blessed and bespelled and would cleave through anyone, other than an innocent, killing them instantly.

  Ascalon had been a present, of sorts, from an old flame a couple of months ago; he’d taught me to use it as a teenager, and since he’d given it to me, his current girlfriend – a fencing teacher and fitness instructor – had insisted on sparring with me thrice weekly (read beating me into the ground) to bring my sword-skills back up to scratch. Not that I minded; the sword was more than useful, and it came in the super-handy, concealed carry-size.

  I lifted the sword in a warning salute to whatever/whoever was causing my ‘being-watched’ itch (be it just my paranoia or something more) then let the sword slip back into the ring, loving the fact I finally had a weapon I could take anywhere, and unlike the flick-knife I once carried, one that wouldn’t get me into trouble with human law. Even better, the ring came with its own See-Me-Not spell and would only work for me.

  Maybe I should show the gnome the sword, next time he grabbed my arse.

  Yeah, that would make him keep his filthy hands to himself. I grinned and let my paranoia relax slightly, breathing in the scent of a night-blooming jasmine and admiring the view of London’s skyline, its lights sparkling against the darkening sky. A warm summer breeze lifted the sweaty hair at my nape and brought me the faint sounds of bells, whistles and the rhythmic clank of machinery mixed with excited shouts and screams: the 24/7 fairground was in full money-making swing at the nearby Carnival Fantastique in Regent’s Park.