The Bitter Seed of Magic

by Suzanne McLeod

  He loved Francine, she was so small and sexy, and she’d looked after him even before he got the Gift, like Genny looked after him now. If Genny was sunlight in a jar, Francine was dark, dark chocolate. He’d missed her, missed the Moths … he’d done something bad, but he hadn’t meant to, he was a good boy, but he’d just been so hungry … but she was here now, and Genny was here, they’d sort things out, make things right.

  Sunshine and chocolate.

  *

  ‘Darius?’ Weirdly Francine sank to her knees in front of me and reached out to cup my face, brushing away my tears.

  ‘I’m holding her hand, just like I promised, Francine.’ I felt my lips shape the words, but it wasn’t my voice, wasn’t my thoughts behind them. The voice and thoughts belonged to Darius … and so did the mouth, and the eyes I was using. I looked down at my hand where I held his. I squeezed, and Darius’ hand squeezed, not mine. I lifted, and Darius’ hand lifted mine. My hand was the limp one, the one it felt like I was holding.

  Shit! I was in Darius’ body.

  I sand-bagged a rising tide of panic. This wasn’t so strange, was it? After all, I’d been in someone else’s body before. All I had to do was stay calm, work out how this had happened, and find a way back to my own body …

  Which hadn’t been in too good a condition last I saw. I squinted past the blinding golden glow of magic and saw myself: the jagged end of the pole was sticking out of my upper stomach, and the wet, gory mess of my throat looked like a wild animal – or a rabid vamp – had chowed down on it …

  ‘Oh crap. That doesn’t look good, does it?’ I muttered.

  Francine turned my/Darius’ face away. ‘The sidhe, she is not lost yet. Her heart, you are still beating it, as I told you.’ Her words conjured the steady da-dum, da-dum of a heartbeat pulsing against my/Darius’ palm; it echoed up my/his arm and thrummed in my/his ears. A fainter echo sounded from within my unconscious, injured body. I/He nodded and gripped my limp hand harder, determined to not let go.

  ‘This is good, Darius.’ Francine leaned forward and kissed us …

  She watched as Maxim led the blonde child away, trying to shut her ears to the child’s loud, hysterical sobs, and her imploring face, knowing her own face didn’t show her sorrow, fear, and rage. She’d never had a child of her body, and with the Gift she never would, but she’d made up for it with all her pretty Moths, and it shattered her heart every time she lost one of them. But this child was special, she’d hidden her, kept her safe, loved her, but now Maxim had claimed her. She would repay the bastard. One day.

  … Francine broke the kiss, and I was on my own again in Darius’ head, trying to come to terms with the loss and pain of another memory shown me by the Morrígan.

  Then Darius’ own thoughts started chiming in, like a bizarre background track, and I suddenly realised I wasn’t alone but co-habiting. Darius was here with me – or I was with him – and he was very happy about it, delighted, euphoric even, in a strange, fuzzy sort of way. He was happy both of us were here, me and Francine. We looked at Francine, who was now bending over my still body, and panic bubbled up inside me until a knowing, satisfied thought from Darius squashed my fear. She was healing the wound at my throat by licking it.

  Francine would love my blood; it tasted so good, so sweet and thick. Hunger tightened our stomach, and something twitched between our legs … we looked down and grinned—

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I said out loud as I grabbed for a nearby piece of mattress and stuffed it between our/Darius’ legs, then wished I hadn’t as his pain nearly doubled us over. Darius choked back the lump in our throat, and his thoughts disappeared into a jumble of unintelligible expletives.

  Crap! The sooner I got out of him, the better … but I didn’t even know how the hell I’d ended up inside him in the first place, let alone how I was supposed to get back into my own body. My mind kept chasing the thoughts, looking for answers that weren’t there. And there was something else, something important. Worriedly, I looked around the room littered with bits of bed and mattress and tried to think …

  Finally it came to me: what had happened to Lucy, the Moth whose ghost I’d seen?

  Darius gingerly resurfaced. ‘Francine took her away.’ The words formed in my mind, along with his self-guilt and worry. ‘She said the other Moths would look after her.’

  ‘She’s not dead then?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘No,’ he said, almost overwhelming me with self-blame, ‘Francine said she’d be okay.’

  Darius had only attacked the Moths because he’d been lost in bloodlust, and he’d only been lost in bloodlust because Mad Max had stolen my blood. ‘It wasn’t your fault—’

  ‘He didn’t steal the blood, Genny.’ Shame and regret curdled inside us. ‘I said he could have one bag out of three.’

  ‘Why?’

  His mind fuzzed for a second, then he said, ‘So he’d give me the job; it was to pay the blood-tithe.’ It wasn’t a lie, but there was something else there, something he didn’t want me to know. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think I’d need it, not with all the groupies, and I didn’t want to give him my Oath, or anyone else, but I kept getting booked for private parties, and then my head started going funny—’

  Images of his childhood mixed up with more recent ones of the private parties, or more precisely, the ‘anything goes’ orgies, flickered like a movie in my mind, telling me that Mad Max was effectively running a vamp brothel, letting humans into the rooms before the vamps woke up so they could prod and poke and—

  Rage and disgust made me want to go and stick another knife in the bastard’s chest.

  Darius shook our head emphatically. ‘It’s not like that, Genny. All the vamps love it; you get plenty of blood waking up like that. I did too, sort of, at the beginning.’

  I felt the desperate need in him to be honest with me and got another quick image that I could’ve done without: Darius really enjoying himself at what looked like a ‘Bride of Dracula’ hen party, if the outfits were anything to go by.

  ‘But then I started getting confused about where I was,’ he carried on, ‘and what was going on – I’m sorry, Genny, I’m really sorry.’

  More tears dripped down our face as recriminations filled us: his, for not asking for help, and mine for not checking up on him sooner. But now what mattered was getting back into my own body and sorting this whole mess out. I tried to piece together my thoughts … Only now we weren’t speaking, the background track of his thoughts grew louder and more intrusive, and my own thoughts kept getting lost in a fuzzy haze. He was relieved and happy that both Francine and I were here; he really loved both of us, and he really wanted us to like each other. We looked down at where she was bent over my body, and at the way the red leather moulded to her—

  Darius was getting entirely too happy about things again.

  I gingerly tapped the lumpy bit of mattress between his/our legs to distract him and mentally pulled myself away from his thoughts until he was just a muted whisper. My own mind cleared and I realised the ‘fuzzy hyped’ feeling had come from Darius; he was still high, from drinking my blood and getting hit by my Glamour.

  I looked at Francine, still bent over my throat, and at the jagged metal sticking out of my stomach. I was sidhe fae, I was still here; I could survive that, couldn’t I? So long as someone took it out soon? Except I was injured and stuck in a vamp (who was keeping me alive by holding my hand), in the middle of a vamp club, with only Francine to help; it wasn’t a win-win situation. How the hell was I going to get out of this? Another bubble of panic threatened to burst— then I remembered I had my very own personal Angel watching over me. An Angel with a hotline to The Mother. It was unlikely She’d let me truly die, at least not until after I’d completed her commands. And then there was the Morrígan too. Maybe if I prayed—

  ‘Genevieve?’

  My name was both a question and a call, and my heart stuttered in thankfulness.

  ‘Malik al-K
han.’

  As I spoke, Darius rushed back in alarm and we looked up. A monstrous figure loomed over us, half-obscured by writhing, angry shadows. Flaming eyes blazing bright stared out of a thin, harsh face, its pale skin laced with an ominous map of hungry blue veins, its lips drawn back over sharp white fangs. Hot fingers of mesma-induced fear lashed down our spine and Darius screamed in terror. Then, before I could grab our thoughts, we were spinning away in a fiery maelstrom of panic.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I fought my way out of the maelstrom, leaving Darius tucked away in the hidden corner of himself, and looked out of his eyes again.

  Francine was kneeling between us and Malik, who had dropped the fanged monster look; maybe he’d just used it to frighten the natives, although Francine could’ve told him he didn’t need all the flashy dramatics.

  ‘—blame is not his, my liege.’ Francine’s words suddenly registered. ‘I beg you to not kill him. Wait, and listen to the sidhe when she wakes.’

  Yeah, listen to her: killing him is so not a good idea – for either of us.

  ‘The sidhe lies behind you and is near death, Francine,’ Malik said in his calm, not-quite-English accent. ‘What makes you think she will live to plead for Darius to keep his Gift?’

  As Francine started to talk in a soft, anxious monotone, I shot a quick assessing look at my throat: the wound in my neck was now a puckered mess of scabbed-over skin.

  Thank you, Francine! It wasn’t pretty, but maybe my body wasn’t as close to death as Malik’s words suggested, particularly as he didn’t appear to be overly worried. I narrowed my eyes at him. Now I wasn’t seeing him through Darius’ less-than-rosy blood- and fear-coloured glasses, he looked more like his usual beautiful self – other than his hair, which no longer curled like black silk over his coat collar but had instead been buzz-cut close to his scalp. It made him look harder, more dangerous, and at the same time oddly vulnerable. I frowned, concerned, remembering Mad Max’s comments about Malik being the Autarch’s newest torture toy … was it only his hair that was different … or was there a slight stiffness in the way he held himself?

  Uneasy, I studied him further. He was dressed as his übergoth persona: black leather trousers and a muscle-hugging T-shirt topped off with a long leather coat that flared and snapped in a nonexistent wind – a standard vamp trick, which, for some bizarre reason, was impressing the hell out of me right now, and filling me with envy …

  Until I realised it wasn’t me being envious but Darius, who was metaphysically huddled behind me. He couldn’t do tricks like that, not yet. Darius’ gaze slid admiringly over the muscles under Malik’s T-shirt. He also looked good enough to eat …

  … and our memories collided as we both remembered sinking our fangs into Malik, recalling the powerful, buzzing taste of his blood … our mouth watered, lust and hunger burned inside us, and something sprang to attention between our legs again, jolting me out of Darius’ reverie.

  ‘Okay, now that is so, so weird, and so, so wrong,’ I muttered in my head.

  ‘Not wrong.’ Our mouth stretched as Darius grinned lopsidedly, happily hyped-up again by the memory. ‘He’s fed us both, so it’s, like, normal that stuff happens.’

  ‘Normal for vamps maybe,’ I spluttered, ‘not for me.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re in me now, and the blood and sex bits get all mixed up.’ A certain part of our anatomy did its weird, excited flex again. ‘Even more right now, ’cos you really, really want to get into his pants.’

  ‘That. Is. None. Of. Your. Business!’

  ‘Hey, it’s not like I can miss what you’re feeling.’ He gave a sly laugh. ‘And it’s not like he wouldn’t know you were hot for him anyway; he’d smell it if he wanted to. We vamps got supersenses, y’know.’

  ‘Okay, eew! And really, so not helping.’

  ‘Want me to hitch you up with him?’ Our face muscles contorted as I tried to wipe our grin away and he wouldn’t let me. ‘I could, like, ask him if he’s got the hots for you too.’

  ‘No! Just, no! And, please, go away. I need to think—’

  ‘Darius?’ Malik crouched in front of us and I vaguely registered that Francine had gone. ‘Do you know what you have done here? What the penalty is for causing harm to the sidhe?’

  His attention accomplished what I couldn’t, and Darius’ teasing grin disappeared in the blink of one of Malik’s fire-filled eyes, and then Darius himself disappeared into some dark corner of his mind, leaving me on my own in his body.

  ‘Yep, he knows who you are all right,’ I grimaced, keeping my hand on the lumpy bit of mattress in my lap, even though things in that department had deflated rapidly. ‘But what I want to know is, do you think this counts as death number five, or number six?’

  He stilled, then reached out and tipped my chin up with his finger. ‘Your eyes glow gold with sidhe Glamour. I knew you could trap some of us in this manner, Genevieve, but I did not know you could possess another’s body this way?’

  ‘Yep, it’s a new one on me too,’ I sighed, relieved that he’d caught on quick, and Darius wasn’t going to lose his head just yet. ‘Look, I’m a bit hazy on the specifics of how I ended up inside Darius’ body, and I’d really like to get back to my own. Don’t suppose you’ve heard of anything like this before?’

  ‘Not without a demon or black magic being involved?’ He raised his voice in question.

  ‘No, no demon, nor anything like that this time,’ I said quickly, with a shudder.

  He tilted my/Darius’ head up further, peering closer into my/his eyes, and his dark spice scent twisted a curl of desire inside us. ‘And you are sure you did nothing to cause this, Genevieve?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, pressing down on the bit of mattress, seriously hoping Darius didn’t choose this moment to do anything stupid. ‘One minute I’m hitting the painful high point of being necked on, then the next I’m hearing voices – or rather, hearing thoughts and memories in my head, only now it’s not my head …’ I trailed off.

  ‘You have thought of something?’ His expression turned quizzical.

  ‘I had a visit from the Morrígan earlier today …’ I frowned, thinking it through as I spoke. ‘She sicced some kind of memory spell on me. Darius triggered the spell – it seems to be triggered by touch; his isn’t the first memory I’ve picked up on – but maybe with me pushing my Glamour into him, the spell had some sort of drastic side-effect?

  ‘What are these memories?’

  ‘Sad ones,’ I said, softly, ‘from their pasts. And the spell is still working, even though I’m in Darius’ body,’ I added, recalling the memory of Francine’s, the one of Mad Max dragging away the blonde girl (who was vaguely familiar from somewhere) when Francine had kissed me – or rather, Darius.

  ‘I see,’ he said, releasing my/Darius’ chin with something like apprehension. And I wondered what memory he didn’t want me to know. ‘We will discuss this later, Genevieve. For now, we should concentrate on healing your body and restoring you to it safely. I will examine your injuries to see what can be done.’

  ‘Works for me,’ I said, more than happy to let Malik use his handy healing powers on my body.

  He moved closer to my body and carefully tore my T-shirt. Watching him gently probing my injury was surreal enough to make my/Darius’ stomach churn squeamishly, so instead I fixed my gaze on the ripped-up doorway, and thought about the Morrígan and the memories instead. Was I just picking up any memory to do with grief and childhood, or were the memories clues to the dying faelings and, therefore to the curse? And if so, what did they mean, and what was I meant to do with them? And where had I seen the girl in Francine’s—

  Francine herself reappeared from wherever she’d been, and derailed my thoughts. She wasn’t alone. She was dragging a groaning Mad Max behind her, like a child trailing a gigantic rag doll.

  ‘My liege.’ She dipped her head at Malik. ‘Maxim, he is the only possibility. Fyodor, he is staked. There is none other here above fift
y.’

  Malik eyed the groaning Maxim for a moment, then stood and moved to one side. ‘Maxim will be sufficient.’

  Francine kicked and shoved Mad Max – she really didn’t like him – until he was lying alongside my body. With her two bronze blades still jutting out of his chest, and the metal pole in my stomach, we looked like a couple of gruesome extras in a low-budget horror flick.

  I leaned over and poked him suspiciously. ‘What’s Mad Max sufficient for?’ I asked as he fixed me with a malevolent glare from the one blue eye which wasn’t quite swollen shut.

  ‘Mad Max?’ Francine’s mouth fell open, her eyes widened and she backed up, crossing herself in panic until she was plastered against the wall. ‘You are not Darius! What voodoo is this?’

  ‘It’s not voodoo, Francine,’ I said, ‘just a side-effect of the magic.’

  ‘Voodoo is evil.’ She crossed herself again, sweat beading on her forehead.

  ‘Be calm, Francine.’ Malik’s pupils flared with tiny flames and her face smoothed over. ‘Darius is not harmed; he has allowed Genevieve to share his body for now.’

  ‘As you wish, my liege,’ she replied blandly.

  ‘Did you just mind-lock her?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘No,’ Malik and Francine said in unison.

  I waited for Malik to say more. He didn’t, and I realised that was all the answer I was getting. ‘Trust me, Francine, I’d much rather be in my own body’ – I looked down at it – ‘well, maybe not quite this minute, but as soon as Malik’s healed me.’

  ‘I believe you should return to your body before it is healed further, Genevieve.’ Malik started to brush a hand over his forehead, his ‘I’m considering’ gesture I recognised from when his hair was longer, then hesitated before running a palm over his new buzz-cut. ‘It is possible that with the blood connection between you and Darius, and your attempt to control his mind, that your spirit slipped out to avoid the pain, much as the Moths do.’