The Bitter Seed of Magic

by Suzanne McLeod

  ‘You’ve come to court me? Somehow I don’t think you’re going to be much use in getting me pregnant – not that I want to get pregnant,’ I finished quickly.

  ‘I’m a dryad, silly,’ she giggled. ‘Depending on our tree – mine’s a cherry, Prunus avium – some of us come with a choice of both’ – she patted her breasts, then fluffed her skirt – ‘accessories, if you see what I mean. But I prefer to be female, mostly. Especially in the spring. People look at you odd if you’re male and dressed in white and pink.’

  Like the Barbie pink cycle helmet wouldn’t do it? ‘You’re a hermaphrodite.’

  ‘Actually, I’m cosexual, since I’m a tree.’ She gave a delighted laugh and clapped her hands together. ‘No one’s told you, have they?’

  Evidently, it wasn’t an aspect of fae life that my faerie dog-mother had decided I needed to know, for whatever reason. And there I’d thought Grianne’d told me everything at least thrice over in her lectures.

  ‘Right, so … you like girls, then?’ I said, thinking that having a fluffy-headed cosexual dryad hanging around me was hands-down a better option than Bandana, who came with an excess of sadistic testosterone built in.

  ‘Girls, boys – or both.’ Her grin stretched wider. ‘It’s spring, my sap’s rising, and I just love sex.’

  Oh, goodie. ‘What if I don’t love girls?’

  ‘Oh, but you do! We’ve all seen the YouTube of you kissing that female vamp last year.’ She fanned herself with her hand. ‘Gosh, that was hot.’

  ‘That was an act,’ I said flatly.

  ‘It was?’ Her exuberance visibly deflated as she regarded me doubtfully. ‘Um, well, I suppose I could change my appearance. But it’s been a long time since I’ve been male. It’ll take me a while.’

  I held my hands up. ‘It’s not an issue, okay? I said I’d let a dryad court me, so fine, we’ll court, but courting means exactly that: dating, getting to know each other, finding out if we like each other. Courting does not mean jumping into bed together in the next five minutes, or in the next five hours, or whatever. So, y’know, you can just stay as you are.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Disappointment flickered over her face, then it was gone, replaced by another wide smile. ‘So, do you want to go out and get some dinner? It could be our first date? We could chat about what the Morrígan told you.’ Her smile turned sly as she glanced down and lifted a foot; a gloop of blood dripped off her silver sandal. ‘I could clean this up while you get ready?’

  Not exactly what I had planned for my evening, but she didn’t need to know that yet. ‘Do whatever you like with it,’ I said, then added, ‘Just as a matter of curiosity, what’s Bandana?’

  ‘Bandana? Oh, you mean Algernon? He’s a willow, they’re dioecious, and he’s strictly male.’ She sighed. ‘He’s also a spiteful, bullying cad, though you know that, don’t you.’

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ I agreed, and closed the bathroom door, wondering how I was going to get rid of her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I turned the shower on and stripped my top off, then heard a high-pitched sound. After a couple of seconds I realised Sylvia was whistling while she worked – maybe the Disney books had been hers too; all we needed now were the seven dwarves to show up. I grimaced at my jeans. Better still, a nice Brownie who knew how to get bloodstains out of denim. I carefully unzipped them, peeled them and my briefs down and kicked them away. Then I stared at my stomach.

  A black handprint marked my flesh like a brand.

  Crap! The uncomfortable feelings hadn’t been because my jeans were wet, but because Tavish had tagged me with some sort of spell. No wonder his touch had felt like it was burning me. I looked, but the handprint didn’t change, so whatever the spell was, it wasn’t active. Tentatively, I placed my own hand on it. The skin felt leathery and rough, and itchy, as if it were healing; and one finger felt damp. I sniffed it … closed my eyes … sweet, spicy, Christmassy: cinnamon.

  Which didn’t tell me a damn thing.

  I slumped to the floor, and sat staring blindly at the tiles. I was so not having a good day.

  Half an hour later, after the long shower I’d been craving – during which questions had jabbed my mind like carrion crows at a fresh corpse – I wrapped myself in my towelling robe, grabbed a handful of cotton wool balls – the main ingredient of my ‘neutralise the cherry tree’ plan – and walked out into my living room.

  Sylvia was standing under my beaded chandelier with her arms outstretched, eyes closed, mouth partially open, a relaxed, oblivious expression on her face. Her dress flared out like a huge white flower, fully repaired, and all her cuts and scratches were gone. Tiny green buds peaked out from under her pink cycle helmet, and small hair-like roots snaked out from her feet, ankles, even the silver sandals, and trailed through the puddle of blood, which was now much smaller than before.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she whispered breathlessly without opening her eyes, ‘but blood is such a good fertiliser I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘’Course not,’ I said, opening my hand and launching the cotton wool into the air with a quick push of my will to activate the spells. Security Stingers ~ the Ultimate Intruder Deterrent. The spells flew towards Sylvia like small pollen-thirsty bees, buzzing around her and wrapping her face and pink cycle helmet in a mass of fine, sticky, sting-laden threads. She jerked, her eyes opening briefly, then she sighed and they closed again, in sleep this time. Her clothes disappeared, leaving her standing naked, apart from her white shorts and the pink cycling helmet; both were obviously real, not part of her Glamour. She didn’t look that different, if you ignored her skin, now greeny-grey bark striated with small brown lenticels, presumably like the trunk of her tree. I waited for her to fall over, aiming to catch her, but she didn’t. When I looked down, I realised her roots had embedded themselves in my wooden floorboards and were holding her in place.

  I sighed. My landlord wasn’t going to be happy about the damage, but at least Sylvia wouldn’t hurt herself. I didn’t feel right leaving her there naked, so I managed to half-dress her in my robe. ‘Thanks for the dinner invite, Sylvia,’ I said quietly, even though nothing other than a salt-water drenching would wake her for a good few hours, ‘but I’ve already got plans for later, and they don’t include you.’

  I dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, both black in preparation for my later plans, snagged the day-old BLT sandwich (last night’s snack) and some orange juice from the fridge, then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of my computer and started Googling. Once I’d finished, I picked up the folder Victoria Harrier had given me and took out the police list of missing faelings. It went back a couple of years and it wasn’t difficult to see a pattern. The numbers and breakdown of the sexes of the missing faelings had stayed fairly constant until five months ago, when it had changed. Since then, the only faelings reported missing were female. The list noted that most were working girls – a.k.a. girls who were vulnerable and easy prey, the type no one would make much of a fuss about if they vanished. It wasn’t vamps. For one, Malik had given his protection to all fae and faelings; and two: for the most part vamps weren’t interested in gender when it came to blood or sex. The two dead faelings were just the tip of the iceberg. There were another fifteen missing, and they were just the ones that had been reported.

  I chewed my sandwich, staring thoughtfully at the computer screen. Were the others all dead too? Or were they still alive somewhere? I thought back to my trip to Disney Heaven. Angel/The Mother had said: they are all dying, not: they are all dead, which was sort of hopeful – if the girls could be found before he killed them, he being the photofit of the horned god, which could either be symbolic – since the horned god was also associated with fertility, and this was all to do with the curse – in which case the photofit wasn’t going to help much, or the picture could be literal: the killer had horns – and that, however much I didn’t want it to, came down to the satyrs. They were the only horned fae in London.

 
You will stop this, You will break the curse, and You will give them a new life. One and two were no-brainers, the third command … maybe it was just as literal? Maybe I was meant to save the missing faelings, therefore breaking the curse, and give them a new life, not actually pop out the next generation of London’s fae – or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

  Then there was goddess number two, the Morrígan. It didn’t take a genius to put together a fertility goddess who had a thing about ravens and who wanted me to remember losing a child, and a dead corvid faeling, to know that she was on the same case as The Mother. Finding and saving the missing girls would be so much easier if the pair of them had talked to each other, and given me more than cryptic clues to go on … still, one good thing about the whole horrific Alien baby show and Tavish’s dire pronouncements of doom, not to mention whatever nasty spells the pair of them had sicced on me, the Morrígan was adamant I shouldn’t get pregnant … as adamant as Clíona was, in fact … so maybe the Morrígan was working for Clíona in some way, as Sylvia had guessed?

  And then there was Ana, or Annan, Clíona’s great-granddaughter, who was pregnant, and whose mother Brigitta was dead because of the curse (and the vamps), and whose grandmother, Rhiannon/Angel, had suffered at the hands of London’s fae because of it. So when it came to the curse, Ana had ‘victim’ stamped all her, even without the Morrígan appearing as a bean nighe. But that didn’t mean she had anything to do with the missing faelings, other than she was a faeling herself. I sipped my juice. Maybe I’d find out more when I visited Ana tomorrow for our little who’s-the-vamp chat?

  There was nothing more I could do about the missing faelings until tomorrow now, other than email Hugh some questions:

  The missing faelings since Hallowe’en – how many have corvid

  blood, or connections to the Morrígan?

  And do any have dealings with any of the satyrs?

  Check out Ana (Victoria Harrier’s daughter-in-law) – possible future victim.

  I went to press send, then stopped and added:

  Did any of them worship The Mother?

  Someone was annoying Her with their prayers, enough to make Her do something, so it was a clue Hugh needed to know, whether it would lead to anything or not. He was the one really investigating the poor faeling’s death, after all. Then recalling another vague suspicion I’d had, I added:

  Maybe have someone look at yesterday’s circle; I think there was something wrong with the way the yew was laid out …

  I pressed send, and hoped that The Mother’s gag clause didn’t extend to cyber-space, not that I’d put much in the email. The message disappeared, but whether it would get there … I sent him a text too, just in case.

  I closed the computer down, then padded over to the kitchen and touched the empty cut-glass fruit bowl on the counter. The bowl’s diamond-cut facets shimmered with a sudden rainbow of colours, highlighting the engraved glyphs. I dipped my hand in … and an apple, painted gold, appeared as my fingers passed its edge.

  ‘Symbol of fertility,’ whispered the bowl. ‘The forbidden fruit. The poisoned gift. The healthgiver; an apple a day keeps the vampires away.’

  I sighed, exasperated, and withdrew my hand. ‘I’ve told you,’ I muttered, ‘I hate apples.’ And magical artefacts that had their own snide opinions. The bowl had been a boon from Clíona in return for finding Angel at Hallowe’en. The magical blood-fruit it produced was the equivalent of the humans’ G-Zav – faerie methadone for the 3V infection – and while it didn’t cure my venom addiction, at least with the blood-fruit, I was the one in control. So long as I didn’t let a vamp actually stick their fangs in me.

  The bowl gave a small, irritated cough, and the apple was replaced by five gleaming, silver-painted blackberries. ‘Sacred fruit of the Goddess. Fruit of the fae. Healer of wounds. Seeds of hope and rebirth—’

  ‘Yeah, okay, I get it,’ I muttered and gathered them up. The blood-fruit burst on my tongue, sweet and tart with the faint liquorice flavour of vamp venom, the juice flowing down my throat like warm blood. My libido went straight to Red Alert – which was why I usually followed the blood-fruit with a cup of cold lamb’s blood: it knocked the annoying sexual cravings on the head. But despite Sylvia’s obvious enjoyment of the blood, I wasn’t prepared to lick it off the floorboards, and the feelings would wear off by the time I got to my evening’s appointment.

  And as I was running short on daylight, I needed to get a move on.

  I whipped my T-shirt off, turned it inside out and put it back on, then tucked my hair into my black baseball cap with its See-Me-Not spell; my standard operating procedure when I wanted to stay below the fae’s radar. It appeared to have been working, because even with Bandana following me, no one (including Finn!) had ever mentioned my outings.

  I grabbed the padded backpack with the insulated compartment from under the sink, opened the fridge, and carefully transferred the three bags of blood – my blood – from the middle shelf. The blood-fruit controlled my venom addiction, but like anyone infected with 3V, my body still produced much more blood than it needed. Bags were way better than leeches (the slimy sort, not the fanged sort) at getting rid of it.

  Time to go to Sucker Town, make my weekly donation, and see what insider info I could glean about Malik before the beautiful, over-protective, and maybe still angry vamp got my message at sunset.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Sure you want to get out ’ere, luv?’ The taxi driver took my money with a morose expression. ‘Them vamps, they ain’t like regular people. One of me mates, ’is kid got mixed up wiv ’em and ’e ended up in rehab at that ’OPE clinic. An’ I gotta tell you too, luv, that you don’t get no human cab drivers after dark ’ere in Sucker Town, just them Gold Goblin cabs. Regulations, innit.’

  Sucker Town: home to the B-, C- and Scary-list London vamps, venom-junkies and blood-groupies, not to mention the occasional marauding fang-gang. Of course, between the licensing laws, the Beater goblin security force and the local vamps wanting to cash in on the same tourist money the mainstream city centre clubs were raking in, the place isn’t as dangerous as it used to be, even six or seven months ago. And thanks to Malik giving me his protection, I was now probably safer in Sucker Town – which the rest of the fae avoid like vamps shun sunlight – than in any other part of London.

  I gave the taxi driver a wry smile, tucked my cap in my backpack, and hitched it on my shoulder. ‘I’m sure. But thanks for the concern.’

  ‘Suit yerself, luv, yer funeral,’ he called even more glumly as he drove off, leaving a fug of exhaust fumes in his wake.

  ‘Everyone’s a comedian,’ I murmured and turned round to face the entrance of Sucker Town’s newest, hottest vampire establishment: the Coffin Club.

  I looked up at the sun, half disappeared behind the row of warehouses, and at the shadows creeping over from the other side of the quiet industrial park, and an anxious itch crawled down my spine. Instead of going in the club, I walked along the side of the building past the life-sized posters advertising the club’s vamps until I came to Darius, the vamp I’d come to see. Except he wasn’t called Darius any more, not officially, anyway, but William, as in William Wallace. In the poster he was dressed in full kilt and regalia (minus the blue face paint). He looked great, but then, the tall, tawny-haired vamp had always looked like he’d just stepped off the front of a romance novel, even when he’d been a human blood-pet.

  Darius and his Moth-girl girlfriend, Sharon, had come to my rescue on All Hallows’ Eve during the demon attack. Darius survived, but sadly Sharon didn’t – but as she died, she had asked me to watch over him. I owed them both, big time, so it was an unspoken promise I was determined to keep.

  Trouble was, watching over him had got complicated – and not in the way I’d thought it would. The first time I’d checked up on him, a couple of weeks after the attack, I’d come loaded up with so many defensive spells that I glowed brighter than the Christmas lights in Rege
nt Street. Malik might have given me his protection, but even so, not taking precautions is just plain stupid. I expected the vamps to stalk me like cats scenting a mouse; instead, every one I came across tripped over their own feet and shoved each other out of the road in their panic to run away. I knew it wasn’t the spells scaring them off – vamps can’t see magic – which left me curious about exactly what Malik had done.

  Darius had filled me in. Turned out, at sunset on Guy Fawkes’ Night, Elizabetta, head of the Golden Blade blood, had called together all four of London’s blood-families to witness her ascension to Oligarch and Head Fang of London’s High Table (I’d killed the last one a month earlier, so the position was vacant). Standing on the dais in the Challenge ring, surrounded by her bladesmen, Elizabetta had held her five-foot-long bronze sword aloft, then shouted for any who would oppose her to come forward. Right at the very end of the required minute’s expectant silence, just as she started to smile in triumph, her chest erupted in a spray of blood and bone, leaving a fist-sized empty hole where her heart had been; her head ripped itself from her neck, Exorcist-style, zoomed fifty feet straight up into the night sky and vanished; then her body combusted in white-hot flames. Within minutes her burning ashes were scattered by a nonexistent wind.

  ‘No one knows how Malik al-Khan did it,’ Darius had told me, wide-eyed with hero worship, ‘I mean, he weren’t there, and no one saw or felt a thing. Then he does this big appearing act on Tower Hill with her head in one hand and her heart in the other. He took half an hour to walk to the Challenge ring – they had a ’copter up filming him all the way. Elizabetta’s head was still screaming at him, right up ’til he stood on the dais and threw her head in the air and it exploded into ashes. ’Course, no one challenged him after that.’