by Helen Harper
‘That’s not the point.’
Of course it was the point. There had been no harm done and I had the impression when we last met that we’d got on alright. Maybe we weren’t bosom buddies but, if Artemesia played her cards right, I might allow her to become my friend one day.
As if she could tell what I was thinking, Artemesia’s mouth tightened. ‘It’s one thing to meet you in a neutral location but it’s quite another when you enter my home and snoop around.’
‘Even if you kick me out,’ I said, ‘I still know where you are. And you did allow Timmons to tell me your address. Not that I’m going to reveal your location. I told Carduus where you were last time because I was sure that you’d have already left and it gave me an opportunity to gain both his and Rubus’s trust. I have no reason to blab again and I’m not going to snoop. But we should stay here because all your equipment is here and we might need it. Besides, I did as you requested: I didn’t bring Lunaria.’
Artemesia’s lips moved silently. I peered at her. ‘Are you counting to ten?’ I asked. ‘Does that actually work?’
‘Not in your case, no.’ She sighed. ‘It’s so much freaking work to pack up everything. I’m going to have to do it all again now.’
‘You really don’t need to.’
Her shoulders sagged. ‘I really do.’ She shook her head. ‘Even if you promised not to say anything about where I am or what supplies I have and what experiments I’m doing, those Truth Spiders…’
I grimaced. ‘The Truth Spiders only work if you ask the right questions. So far, Rubus hasn’t done that.’
‘All the same, you’re still Madrona the Madhatter. You betrayed our side once before.’ She bit her lip. ‘I want to trust you. I think that even Morgan trusts you again now, and if he can manage it then the rest of us probably should.’
I ignored the sudden leap in my chest. ‘But…?’ I prodded.
‘But there’s too much at stake. You’re still with Rubus.’ She looked away. ‘It’s too risky to have you here. There are things I’m working on that Carduus would kill to get his hands on. If he got even an inkling about some of my projects, we’d lose more than you could imagine.’
I could imagine a fair bit. I gnawed the inside of my cheek. ‘How about,’ I said quietly, ‘if I gave you information that you could hold over me? If I allowed you to have the upper hand?’
‘I don’t possibly see—’
‘I’m responsible for the borders closing,’ I interrupted.
Artemesia’s jaw dropped. Yep. Of everything she might have expected me to say, I bet she hadn’t thought it would be this. ‘What?’
‘I have even more power and ability to be evil than you could imagine,’ I told her.
‘I …’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it.’
I laughed harshly. ‘Well, I can assure you that it’s true. Rubus told me.’
‘And you trust him? Seriously?’
I dropped my gaze. ‘He used a Truth Spider on himself.’
Artemesia didn’t say anything. I looked up, expecting to see both horror and disgust displayed on her face but she seemed more fascinated than appalled. ‘What did you do?’
I told her everything that Rubus had told me. I was taking a massive gamble but somehow I had the feeling it would pay off.
When I’d finished, Artemesia took several steps backwards. I thought at first that it was because she wanted to put as much distance between us as she could then I realised that she needed to sit down.
She half fell onto a stool. ‘It’s all making sense now,’ she breathed. She turned her head towards the back of the room. ‘Did you hear all that?’ she asked.
I stiffened. What the gasbudlikin bastard…?
There was a faint thud and Morgan appeared from round the back of a set of shelves. ‘I did.’ His expression was grim.
I put my hands on my hips. Unbelievable. My gaze swung from Artemesia to Morgan and back again. ‘This is why you didn’t want me to come in! You’re having an affair! Were you naked back there, Morganus?’ I demanded. ‘Is that why it took you so long to appear?’ Without giving him a chance to answer, I glared at Artemesia. ‘How long has this been going on for? I hope the sex is worth it. I hope he’s bringing a good al-dente noodle to your spaghetti house and that he’s properly cleaning your cobwebs with his womb broom.’
I couldn’t bring myself to look at Morgan. ‘He’s got the body for masterfully negotiating the forest chasm, so if you’re not squealing when he’s paddling up coochie creek then I want to know about it. You deserve only the very best, Artemesia. You could have told me, though. I might be the Madhatter but I only want everyone to be happy.’
Unbidden, tears rose to my eyes and I dashed them away furiously. ‘I’m not angry. I’m happy that you’re together. I’m thrilled.’ I jiggled around. ‘See? This is my happy dance.’ I used the tips of my fingers to push my mouth into a smile. ‘When’s the wedding? Can I get an invite? Can—?’
Morgan walked over to me and put a finger against my lips. ‘Hush. I was here because I was meeting Artemesia to talk about what we can do to guard against any potential betrayal by Mendax. And to discuss whether his oath breaker will actually work or not.’ Something indefinable glittered in his eyes. ‘We’re not together.’
I hiccupped. ‘You’re not?’
‘No.’
I stepped back and sniffed. ‘It’s not like I care. The pair of you can do whatever you want, it’s got nothing to do with me. Some people would say that you’re perfect idiots but I say you’re not perfect. In fact—’
‘Maddy,’ Morgan said. ‘Shut up.’
I snapped my mouth closed. Well, someone got out of the wrong side of bed this morning.
The corners of the lips crooked up. ‘So much for all that open honesty,’ he murmured.
Artemesia cleared her throat. ‘Perhaps we should get back to the revelation that Madrona is responsible for all the border closures.’
I’d forgotten my admission in the wake of her and Morgan’s non-sexual relationship. Uh-oh. I scratched my head awkwardly. ‘I don’t remember any of it,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’
Morgan’s eyes held mine. ‘You were nineteen. And foolhardy.’
‘Nineteen,’ I argued. ‘Not nine. I should have known better.’
‘I can imagine,’ he said softly, ‘that the guilt over your mistake was tremendous. I could feel you pulling away from me, you know. As the months passed and the borders didn’t re-open, you became more and more distant – and more and more nasty. You already believed you were villainous so it wouldn’t have taken much for Rubus to persuade you on to his side.’
‘He blackmailed me on to his side.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But I reckon you were relieved to go. You wanted to punish yourself for what you did.’ He raised his shoulders in a heavy shrug. ‘We can’t change the past, Maddy. You did what you did. We can only do better in the future.’
I stared at him. ‘That’s it?’
‘What do you want me to say?’
I threw my hands up in the air. ‘That this is my fault! All this is my fault! All these faeries are trapped here because of me and a stupid stunt that I pulled! If Rubus gets his hands on the sphere, floods this place with magic and kills all the humans in the process, then that will be my fault too.’
‘No,’ Morgan said, with the apparent patience of a saint. ‘That will be down to Rubus. No one is forcing him to be a genocidal prick.’
‘I caused this situation, Morgan. Me. He’s just reacting to it.’
‘Actually,’ Artemesia interrupted, ‘as much fun as it would be to place you in the villain’s box, I’m with Morgan on this. You made a mistake and you’ve been paying for it ever since. You didn’t deliberately shut us all in here. It was an unintended consequence.’
‘Maybe I did do it deliberately. Unless my memory returns, we’ll never know for sure what I did.’
‘If you did it deliberately, Rubus would have made
sure that you knew it.’
‘So I committed manslaughter rather than murder,’ I said. ‘Go me.’ What I didn’t add was that I waited a decade before escalating my sins to premeditated murder by killing Charrie. I was irredeemable. Both Morgan and Artemesia must see that.
‘You screwed up,’ Morgan told me. ‘Everyone does at some point or other.’
Artemesia’s eyes travelled to Morgan. ‘If only we’d known…’
I huffed. ‘If only you’d known what?’
‘We couldn’t know the reason for the border closure. We thought that maybe we’d displeased the authorities in Mag Mell. Maybe something was terribly wrong in this demesne and we just couldn’t see what. Now that we know the real reason why we’re stuck here, I feel a whole lot better.’
‘So it’s a good thing that I fucked us all?’ I demanded. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
Her expression remained calm. ‘You forget that we’ve lived with this situation for ten years. Knowing the reason behind it doesn’t change the situation but potentially it makes it easier to fix. If we can get your memory back and find exactly what it is you did,’ her face glowed, ‘we can work to re-open the borders ourselves, without any freaky sphere crap. Truthfully, Madrona, this is fantastic news.’
‘You don’t want to kill me?’ I asked her doubtfully.
‘Of course I want to kill you. I kind of want to hug you too.’
I stepped to the side just in case she dared. ‘I’m evil,’ I said in a small voice.
‘Yeah, you are. But maybe only a tiny bit.’ She grinned at me.
This wasn’t going at all as I’d expected. It was my turn to sit down before my legs gave way.
‘So what do you need me for?’ Artemesia enquired.
‘Huh?’
‘You came to see me for a reason,’ she prompted. ‘What is it?’
Oh. ‘There are two things. Your uncle reckons he might have an amnesia-curing potion.’ I screwed up my face, trying to remember what he said he’d used. ‘Uh, with anemone and mugwort and, uh…’
Artemesia rolled her eyes. ‘Lavender?’
I nodded. ‘ I think so.’
She sighed. ‘I know both the spell and the magic he’ll have bound the potion up with. It won’t do a thing to help your amnesia but it will give you the runs for several days. Carduus is a moron.’
The runs? Nice. I wasn’t surprised, though. I shrugged, lifted up the plastic bag and pulled out the dust bottle. There wasn’t much inside but I was hoping there would be enough. ‘The other thing is that you created dust,’ I said. ‘You made it to help us.’
‘And my uncle changed it to harm us.’ Her expression hardened. ‘There’s an example of someone not making a foolish mistake but a deliberate act designed to induce pain.’
‘Can’t you just flood the market with your version, rather than his?’
Artemesia ran a hand through her hair. ‘But my version isn’t addictive. That’s the reason why his pixie dust worked and mine fell by the wayside. He got everyone hooked until his dust was the only one they wanted.’
‘I have some of his here. I thought that maybe you could try and reverse-engineer it. Find out what’s in it that makes it addictive and I can do something to pollute the ingredients in Carduus’s lab so that his pixie dust is weaker than yours. Then everyone will come back to you and, more to the point, their addictions will fade away.’
Artemesia rolled her eyes. ‘It’s really not that simple. You say it like all I have to do is wave a magic wand and, hey presto! Frankly, if it were that easy, I’d have already tried it.’
Morgan rubbed his chin. ‘Maybe you can’t reverse-engineer it, Arty, but I bet that with that original sample you can find a way to counteract its addictive qualities.’
‘You mean find an antidote? I’m a one-woman band here, Morganus. I can’t do everything at once! You two aren’t the only faeries in the city, you know. There are others who have needs as well as you two.’
I placed the bottle on the nearest table. ‘I know it’s a long shot,’ I said. ‘But I thought that it would be worth a try.’
‘I can’t create more time. There are only so many hours in the day.’
‘I can slow down time!’ I beamed. ‘I can help with that.’
Artemesia looked horrified. ‘Have you been doing that? You have to stop. It’s terribly risky.’
I’d been hoping for a bit more adulation. ‘I’ve only done it a few times.’
‘Well, stop! It’ll cause havoc. The more you do it, the more chance there is that the magic will adversely affect this realm.’
‘Morgan did it once too,’ I said sulkily. ‘It’s not just me.’
She glowered at him. ‘You know the risks.’
‘It was a one-off situation,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, just sometimes, the ends justify the means.’
I gazed at him. ‘Have you been eavesdropping on me?’
Morgan just looked confused. ‘Huh?’
I dismissed it. ‘Never mind.’ But it vexed me that Morgan sounded heroic when he said that to Artemesia; when I said it, I sounded like I was making an excuse.
Artemesia picked up the dust bottle, holding it gingerly as if were some kind of nuclear bomb. ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said. ‘But it won’t be quick. You lot keep giving me more and more things to do and I can’t possibly do all of them. Reverse-engineering my uncle’s pixie dust, as satisfying as it would be to ruin all his work, is at the bottom of my to-do list.’
She turned. ‘I’m taking this round the back,’ she said pointedly. ‘It’ll take me ages to label it properly and make sure it’s safe. You two will have plenty of time alone to sort out whatever crap is going on between you. I don’t have time for this dust – and you two don’t have time for this dance.’ With that, she disappeared.
I shuffled my feet as silence descended between Morgan and me. ‘You hid from me,’ I said quietly. ‘You conspired with Artemesia to keep me away from this place so I wouldn’t discover you were here.’
Morgan didn’t move a muscle. ‘You decided you were a bad person because you made a mistake.’
‘A catastrophic mistake.’
He waved his hand. ‘You made a catastrophic mistake and then decided it defined who you were. You thought that one mistake made you a villain so that’s what you became. It’s still in you now – I can see it inside you. Deep down, you don’t believe you can be good so you make the effort to be bad because that’s all you think you deserve.’
‘Hey!’ I protested. ‘I’m not all bad! I am trying to stop Rubus, after all.’
He smiled slightly. ‘You are. Maybe, just maybe, there really is a superhero inside you.’ His expression sobered. ‘I felt guilty,’ he said. ‘I asked you to come home with me and a couple of hours later all but demanded you return to Rubus instead. I have no right to make demands of you but I did it because my brother has to be stopped. You might be the only person who’s capable of doing it. I asked Arty to keep my presence quiet because I didn’t think you’d want to see me. I wouldn’t blame you for that.’ He sighed. ‘I expect it.’
I stared at him. He felt guilty? I was the one who’d consigned us all to a lifetime trapped in this demesne. I was the one who’d dropped him the first time around to be with Rubus. A trickle of discomfort filtered through me. I didn’t deserve Morgan. He was far too good for me.
Then I remembered that I was the Madhatter. He was lucky I was even deigning to have this conversation with him, let alone entertain visions of hot-blooded, sweat-soaked sex.
I sniffed. ‘I’ll permit you to grovel.’ I looked him up and down. ‘On your knees.’ Morgan laughed. I put my hands on my hips. ‘I mean it!’
His lazy smile returned. He took a step towards me. ‘I’ll get on my knees if that’s what you really want, Maddy. Or I could stay on my feet and run my hands through your hair, down your back, across your breasts…’ He licked his lips. ‘I could press my body against yours so you can feel just how hard
you make me. Even just the thought of you affects me.’ His voice was growing huskier by the second.
Involuntarily, my eyes drifted downwards. Oh. I swallowed. I supposed it was only natural. I was indeed remarkably sexy. I looked up again, losing myself in Morgan’s mesmerizing emerald gaze. Then I bit my lip. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘But will you just hold me?’
If I’d thought that Morgan was going to be disappointed that I wasn’t ordering him to strip off, I was mistaken. Despite his body’s physical response, his features softened with warmth and kindness. He covered the distance between us and wrapped his arms round me. I put my head on his shoulder and inhaled, closing my eyes.
Orgasmic.
Chapter Sixteen
‘So you still won’t tell me which actor I’m meeting?’ Rubus asked from the back seat of the car. ‘I won’t be happy if it ends up being Sammy.’
‘I’ve never watched the show,’ I admitted. ‘But I do want to.’ As soon as I had some time and I wasn’t running around trying to save the world. ‘I don’t know who Sammy is.’
‘The dog. Sammy is the dog.’ Rubus wrinkled his nose. ‘I can see how you might find it amusing to sit me down in front of a bowl of Pedigree Chum but I assure you, Madrona, it will not go well for you if you do.’
I was almost disappointed that I’d not asked Julie if there were any animals on St Thomas Close that I could pressgang into meeting Rubus instead of her. I rather liked the idea of seeing him trying to engage a pooch in artful conversation. ‘It’s not the dog,’ I told him. ‘I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.’
‘I hate surprises,’ he growled.
That’s what I was counting on. ‘You’re going to meet her in ten minutes. I suppose I can tell you who it is now.’
Rubus leaned forward, green eyes wide. ‘Go on then.’
I used the dashboard to beat a drum roll and build up tension. Rubus looked irritated, as if he was worried that I’d leave fingerprint smears on his pristine interior. Not much of a music lover then. ‘It’s the one you mentioned. The one you wanted it to be.’