Blood Magic

by Jayne Hawke

  I, on the other hand, looked like a zombie. I hadn’t braved the mirror. Instead, I’d quickly braided my hair and hoped I didn’t scare too many people. Ethan handed me a huge travel cup. I hugged it tight and breathed in the heady aroma of caffeine with a kick of magic.

  “You’re my saviour,” I said.

  “I do my best,” Ethan said with a grin.

  I took a sip of the coffee and tasted the thick malty magic wrapped within it. The magic had barely touched my tongue before I was wide awake.

  “You got the good stuff,” I said appreciatively.

  “Only the very best for you,” Ethan said as he gently squeezed my knee.

  We drove through the city with rock music playing quietly through the speakers. The streetlights were still on as the sky slowly turned into a silvery blue where the sun was edging upwards. I’d been expecting Ethan to take us through to the expensive wealthy part of the city where the fae lived in their town houses and such.

  The city deteriorated around us. The terrace houses became more worn down, with boarded-over windows, broken doors, and grass growing up through large cracks in the pavement. Blood stained the walls and poisonous plants grew around the doorways as we made our way past shells of old cars.

  A small warped body sat beneath a slender tree, the head lolling to the side with empty sockets staring right at the road. Lumps had been pulled from the corpse, leaving it bloated and broken. I hadn’t spent much time around this part of the city. If someone, or something, went there, people tended to assume they’d never get it back and walk away.

  “There was a highborn here?” I asked.

  “No, it was a mongrel this time,” Ethan said.

  He parked in front of a patch of brambles that had grown between the falling-down wreckage of two houses. A group of people had gathered around the body.

  All conversation stopped when we got out of the car. Attention was entirely on us. The group dispersed, but I could still feel the eyes watching our every move. They hadn’t gone too far. They must have screwed up the scene, though. Any evidence would surely have disappeared with a crowd of that size.

  Still, we walked over to the body of a young woman around my age. Her skin was snow white and her pale brown eyes were vacant. There wasn’t a scrap of magic or life within her. She almost felt like a void. The problem was, we didn’t know if the murderer had done that, or if it was a witch taking what they could after the fact.

  Ethan crouched down and moved her head to check her neck.

  “You’re not seriously entertaining the vampire idea?” I asked.

  “We have to check every angle,” he said.

  He looked down the body for injuries and blood.

  “Can you feel any residue of our killer?” he asked.

  I exhaled slowly and stretched my magic out around the scene. It ached deep in my bones as I tried to dig into every inch of the area. There was nothing. Not a single thread of anything, which was weird. Normally, I could feel scraps of life from the plants, the sunlight, natural normal things. Not there.

  “It’s a void,” I said.

  Ethan sighed and stood up.

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “So, we have one more body and no leads?” I asked.

  “Looks like.”

  FOURTEEN

  Desperation. Anger. Fear. Righteous indignation. All normal for neighbourhoods like this, especially after a tragedy. All dangerous when brought close to the surface. A crowd of emotional people was surrounding us by the time we got back to the car. We were rich, slick outsiders, and we were stomping around the corpse of one of theirs - one of theirs who had been killed by another outsider. For all they knew, killed by us or someone we were there to cover for.

  I felt Ethan’s magic rising. I couldn’t blame him for being nervous and pissed off at people crowding around him when he was just there to keep more victims from piling up all over York. I was searching for something to say, something that would calm everything down, when a crowbar flew past Ethan’s head and smashed into the side of his car, leaving a nasty dent. After that, there was only one way it was going to end.

  “You sons of...” Ethan snarled at them, punching the nearest guy in the nose hard enough to send him straight backwards onto his back.

  He didn’t move, and for a second neither did anyone else. Even Ethan seemed surprised that he’d lost his cool. The crowd charged us after a stunned moment, an odd mixture of humans and fae part-breeds united by proximity and outrage. They had numbers, but we weren’t the soft-palmed socialites they expected.

  I gave Ethan a look I hoped would convince him to go easy on these people. I knew what it was like to be on the bottom and watch others sit so far above you that it was hard to even imagine their lives. Ethan didn’t. He was a demigod of death, born rich, powerful, and deadly, and he only fought one way.

  It wasn’t beautiful to watch, no ballet of death or elegant huntsman’s coup de grace. It was war the way they didn’t write poems about, mechanical, methodical, and thoughtless. I knew what he was, had gotten tingly at the badass I was giving myself to day by day, and it wasn’t as if I’d never killed. I was gifted at killing, dedicated to the art. Whatever he was, though, I wasn’t. I summoned a quarterstaff and used it to throw a half dozen rioters onto their backs long enough to stand between them and Ethan.

  “Stop. This isn’t necessary,” I said. “They aren’t trying to kill you, they just need to vent. This is nothing but a bar fight.”

  “I don’t get into bar fights.”

  He said it with no coldness, no maniacal glee. It was a soft, gentle reminder that we weren’t the same and nothing more. As he said it, he reached around me and pressed a wave of energy out. I was just enough, not an ounce of death wasted, and behind me a crowd of desperate, hungry, scared people fell to the ground.

  All I wanted to do was go home.

  FIFTEEN

  I expected him to be silent, even grim when we returned to the car, but he wasn’t. The anger he’d felt when he started the fight had gone long before it ended, and now all he wanted was to move on with our day in full expectation that I understood his perspective and, if not agreed with him, at a minimum saw the matter as settled.

  I let go of the feeling of it, reminded myself that we had been acting in self defence, put a fresh coat of paint on my sense of him and a lid on the sensation of disconnection the whole thing had caused me. Maybe I’d have to deal with it later, but not yet and maybe not ever.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to take you home. I’m still fighting over the contract with Bella. She is trying to use this to make a power grab. I do not enjoy doing this paperwork; I want to be investigating with you.”

  I wrapped my hand around his on the gearstick.

  “Anything I can help with?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, I just need to face her in the board room. Matt should be home early today, though.”

  “He hasn’t screwed up as he?” I asked.

  Ethan laughed.

  “No, he’s doing great. His mentor just gave him reading for the afternoon.”

  I sighed in relief. This apprenticeship meant the world to Matt. I didn’t know what I’d do if he lost it.

  Ethan pulled up in front of my house and leaned over. I dug my fingers into his hair and pulled him in for a deep kiss. I lost myself in him, the way his soft lips caressed mine. Goosebumps formed where his fingers trailed down the back of my neck and held me close to him. For a moment I was tempted to climb into his lap, but that wasn’t me. Not in broad daylight.

  “Is there any chance I convince you to stay at the pack house tonight?” he asked huskily.

  I was seriously tempted. The beds were huge, very comfortable, and came with sound-proofed rooms. The fun we could have...

  I kissed him tenderly.

  “Not tonight.”

  He caressed my cheek.

  “We have all the time in the world.”

  “You didn�
��t have another run in with that elf did you?” Matt said when he saw the state of me.

  “No, we went to the camp. Another fae showed up drained of blood. The locals didn’t appreciate our presence and jumped us.”

  Matt frowned.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve handled worse. Anyway, how’s the apprenticeship going?”

  He burst into a brilliant grin.

  “Oh, Kit, it’s amazing. My mentors, Jack and Ruth, are just incredible. The things they can do with alchemy! I haven’t done much practical stuff yet, but I’ve seen some of their work. Did you know that they were the ones who captured the very first youth potion? And Ethan let them keep the rights to it! He didn’t make a penny off it. He’s a seriously cool guy. I think I want to specialise in offensive alchemy, though, the stuff that can help keep you safe.”

  “You’re my baby brother. I’m supposed to keep you safe,” I said.

  He wrinkled his nose.

  “You’re out there fighting with rogues and assassins. I want to help.”

  “Whatever makes you happy,” I said.

  And I meant it.

  “You should get a shower. We can talk about it more when you’re clean.”

  “Are you saying you don’t like the stench of whatever-this-is?” I said with a laugh.

  “Can anyone like that?”

  He had a point. The smell of rotting meat, putrefying cheese, and a hefty dose of ammonia was enough to get to anyone.

  As I stood under the hot water, I tried to piece together everything we knew and everything we were missing. Thus far, the victims had been fae and completely drained of blood. The highborn fae had seemed as though it was a hit for some incredibly potent blood. The mongrel’s blood wouldn’t have had that much magic, though. At best, they were a half-breed, but even then the fae had developed ways to inhibit half-breeds’ magic. They hated impure fae. There were even those that rallied against the fae mixes, those who were the offspring of puka and a sidhe or what have you.

  I dried my hair, relieved to see that I looked normal and smelled like violets. We were missing something big here. The mongrel could have been convenient, but there hadn’t been any other convenient murders with that M.O.

  The murderer clearly didn’t just like easy kills, given the difficulty of the first one. The mongrel wouldn’t have had much of anything to offer. Maybe they just pissed the murderer off and so the murderer took the blood because they could. That put us back to them being an enemy of the highborn fae. The list was agonising long, from fellow highborn fae through to witches and god touched who wanted to remove fae from the earth plane.

  Groaning, I knew this meant that I’d be spending my afternoon researching and digging. Maybe there was some of that wonderful dark chocolate left to make it a little easier.

  SIXTEEN

  I couldn’t get the idea of Mom’s grimoire out of my head. She must have had one somewhere. There was a whole life that she’d hidden from me. I was still coming to terms with that. When I really thought back to my childhood with her, I realised that she hadn’t worked normal hours. Sometimes, she hadn’t come home until the early hours of the morning. Of course, I was a little kid, I didn’t know that wasn’t normal.

  There had to be somewhere that she would hide the grimoire, and a reason my father kept that all hidden from me. Was he scared of what I’d become? We hadn’t done anything with Mom and Dad’s room. It remained bare, waiting for them. I hadn’t stepped foot in there in a couple of years. I needed to, though. I had to see if there was any trace of Mom’s grimoire, of her secret life.

  She was a blood witch; what if she was tied into this whole blood-draining thing? I mentally steeled myself and headed up the stairs. The door was so innocuous. It was just a plain door like mine and Matt’s. Yet my heart hammered against my ribs and my throat went dry when I reached out to the handle. It felt as though I was violating their privacy, but the time had come. I needed answers.

  Exhaling slowly, I opened the door. The room inside made my chest ache. I remembered scrambling onto that bed and cuddling with mom on rainy Saturday mornings. We’d watch the cartoons together while Dad made us breakfast in bed. Now it lay barren and silent. It felt as though a grey film lay over everything. The bed was nothing but a bare mattress on a simple bed frame now. The simple white linen with little blue flowers along the edges that Mom had loved so much was long gone.

  Stepping through the doorway took effort. Once I was inside, something clicked within me. I needed to do this. Walking across the small space, I began with the chest of drawers that sat next to the bed. It had been covered in a beautiful baby-blue cloth once. Now it looked almost ghostly where the sunlight had bleached the pale wood. I opened the top drawer, unsure what I expected to see in there. A note. The grimoire. Some painful memory.

  It was empty. There was nothing but a thin layer of dust. I ran my hand over the smooth wood to check for a false bottom or compartment and found nothing. The same was true of the two drawers below it.

  I couldn’t shake off the band around my ribs making my breathing short, or the weight in my limbs as I tried to be cold and logical about everything. The wardrobe was next. We had donated all of their clothes to a local charity once we knew they weren’t coming home. We had waited a long, agonising year before I had made that journey. It had taken everything I had to stop the tears from falling as I handed over the bag of clothes.

  Once again, I checked for false compartments and false bottoms. There was nothing. Not even a thread of magic to give me some idea about Mom’s own magic.

  I moved back to the bed and dropped onto my stomach so I could search under there. It was a tight squeeze, but I made it. I sneezed thanks to the dust under there, but I wasn’t finding anything. I was ready to crawl back out when I spotted a handwritten note with a faded address on it.

  The handwriting was Mom’s. I recognised the elegant looping script. The address was near the river and said ‘perfect!’ beneath it. My hand trembled as I read it again and again. It was the very last piece of her that I had. That address could hold the secret life she’d hidden for so long.

  Did I really want to know what lay there?

  I had tucked the slip of paper into my pocket. It had felt as though it was burning through my jeans while I tried to focus on digging into the fae. My mind kept skipping back to possibilities. She was a blood witch. She could have been some awful being that tortured people. I remembered the dealer that had the decaying bodies in his bathroom. What if I found something like that, or worse, at Mom’s address?

  Of course, there was a good chance that the address would be taken by someone else now. There hadn’t been anyone to pay rent or maintain the place in years. I didn’t know if that would be better or worse, though.

  “What’s wrong?” Matt asked as he put his tome on alchemy down.

  “I went looking for Mom’s grimoire. I found an address,” I said.

  “Are you going to check it out?”

  “I think so? I don’t know yet.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I handed him the slip of paper.

  “It’s down by the river. One of the bigger places, I think.”

  “What if she wasn’t the amazing, warm woman I thought she was?” I asked softly.

  “She’ll always be your Mom. The way you and your Dad talked about her tells me she was amazing no matter what her magic was like,” Matt said with a gentle smile.

  “I don’t want to ruin my memories of her. They’re all I have left.”

  “When you’re ready, I’ll go with you. You’re not in this alone.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I tossed and turned again. I woke up hoping that Ethan was going to bring another one of those magically enhanced coffees. To my surprise, the sound of cooking was coming from the kitchen. It was still firmly dark, and Matt wasn’t an early riser if he could help it.

  I padded down the stairs in my favourite old hoodie that was soft from years of wear and
my least flattering pyjama bottoms.

  “You’re up early,” I said blearily as I walked into the living room.

  Frowning, I noticed that the man standing at the stove cooking pancakes had blond hair. I grabbed the closest thing to hand, a frying pan near the sink. The elf turned around and greeted me with a brilliant smile.

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d be up in time,” he said.

  I swung the frying pan at his head. The cursed assassin was in my kitchen cooking pancakes as though we’d known each other our entire lives. He ducked and frowned at me.

  “The pancakes are almost finished. You are hungry, aren’t you?”, he said as he side-stepped and ducked beneath my next swing.

  “What are you doing in my kitchen?” I snarled.

  “Making pancakes,” he said gesturing at the pancakes.

  “Why?”

  “Everyone likes pancakes.”

  “You’re an assassin.”

  “Why can’t assassins like pancakes?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. It was far too early, I hadn’t had enough sleep, and there was an assassin making pancakes in my kitchen.

  The elf went back to the stove and served the pancakes on a plate with lashings of maple syrup.

  I glared at them. There wasn’t any magic in them, but who knew how many poisons he’d slipped in there?

  “I don’t poison people. It’s undignified.” He sat down opposite me. “Anyway, if I was going to kill you this morning I’d have done it by now.”

  The pancakes did smell amazing. They were perfectly golden, and the syrup was drowning them. I tentatively took a bite. They melted on my tongue in a pool of maple syrup and fluffy vanilla. Damn him.