‘Ms Taylor.’ Helen clenched her hands, her multitude of rings chinking in anger. ‘There are no friendly trolls, inquisitive media or my ex-husband here to protect you this time, and my patience is wearing thin. I suggest you keep your mouth shut until I ask—’
A clock struck, sounding like the Westminster chimes of Big Ben. Helen and Jack started chanting under their breath and turned their backs to me. Magic shivered over us like a light snowfall, illuminating the dome of the ten-foot circle enclosing us and melting like cool kisses against my cheeks. I lay there counting the sixteen notes of the hour, waiting for the deeper gongs at the end to tell me how long I’d been here: one, two … ten, elev—
The eleventh gong cut out halfway through.
Four hours, give or take. Shit, that was a long time. C’mon, Malik, find the damn feather; the night’s not getting any younger.
In the silence that followed, I could hear the quiet rustling of people moving, the muted cry of a baby, quickly hushed, and the scrape of metal on stone.
The cold round me increased, and my breath fogged into the air as my teeth started chattering.
My stomach heaved as a spell rolled over us like an air pressure wave following an explosion.
Jack moaned and collapsed against Helen; she wrapped her arms round him and gently lowered him to the floor. As she stroked his hair back from his face, sadness and longing crossed hers, and I relived the memory of her grief as he’d been taken from her by Angel.
I scowled; I so didn’t want to feel sorry for her.
Then her sadness was gone and she fixed me with an irritated look. ‘You’re shivering, Ms Taylor.’
I didn’t bother to answer. One, it was obvious, and two, my teeth were going at it like they were one of those joke wind-up sets that clatter around until they run out of power and die. A not-so-cheerful thought.
She pulled her cardigan off and laid it on top of me, tucking it under my chin. ‘It will warm up in a minute,’ she said absently. ‘It’s just the after-effect of keeping this circle tuned to Between so we don’t go out of Time-sync.’
‘Time-sync?’ I asked, then braced myself for another magical shoulder-punch as her attention focused on me instead of her internal thoughts.
After a moment, she said. ‘Yes, Time-sync, Ms Taylor. Time here runs slow, around a day for every hour in the normal world. Until the clock finishes the chime we can’t get out, and no one can get in. The place is cut off until this time tomorrow.’
I digested that. Time in Between—like space and form—was malleable, of course. Not that I had much of a clue where to start with any of that, but that was less important than how long … in other words, how long before Malik, my super-powerful fangy back-up found the bloody Morrígan’s feather and caught a raven-powered flight to my (and everyone else’s) rescue. Still, the good news was I probably hadn’t been out of it for as long as I thought. The bad news— If it took Malik an hour, I could end up trapped here for twenty-four of them—
Panic bubbled inside me and I slammed a lid on it, hard. I’d been in worse situations; I could find a way out of this, I wasn’t dead yet—and to be honest, I was pretty sure me dead wasn’t part of Helen’s immediate game plan, so—
‘You have to pick your moment.’ Helen interrupted my thoughts. ‘It’s why it took us so long to get in without him knowing.’
‘Without who knowing?’ I asked cautiously.
‘Dr Craig, of course.’ She regarded me as if I was simple. ‘This is all his doing—although he had to force Ana—she’s his sister-in-law—to pull this patch of Between into being, he’s not powerful enough to cast this sort of magic.’
Ri-ight. Dr Craig was The Mother’s killer, so the ‘horned god’ in Her photofit was symbolic, as I’d thought. Someone really did need to buy Her a digital camera. I fervently hoped Hugh had already discovered that Dr Craig was the main perpetrator, and that he’d got him locked up in one of Old Scotland Yard’s cells, but part of me knew I couldn’t get that lucky. And my glee at Helen being a crooked cop wasn’t quite as satisfying now she’d got me in her shackles, only— Helen didn’t appear to be on the same baddie team as Dr Craig any more, not if she was hiding out in a circle. Plus she wanted something from me, something I needed to agree to if I was supposed to have all my faculties … and her daughter was missing. I took a mental leap and came up with—
‘So, Dr Craig’s holding Nicky hostage and I’m your ransom.’ I gave her a level look. ‘Have I got it about right?’
‘Spot on, Ms Taylor.’ She looked down her patrician nose at me. ‘But you can be quite clever, on occasion.’
‘So the real question is, since you’re not just handing me over now you’ve got me all trussed up’—I lifted my uninjured arm with its police issue silver shackle—‘what is it you want me to agree to before you do the swap?’
Her lip curled in disdain. ‘Craig’s interested in your childbearing capabilities.’
Of course he was. Everyone else and their dog was, so why not him? But— ‘What exactly does “interested in my childbearing capabilities” mean?’
‘Sit up and have a look.’
‘Why don’t you just do your magic-punch thing again? It’d be easier,’ I said flatly.
Her lips thinned, then she muttered and slapped her hand on my shoulder. I yelped, but the expected pain didn’t come; instead everything went warm and numb. ‘It’s not healed, so don’t try and use it,’ she said warningly. ‘And it won’t last long, either.’
Better than nothing. Using my good arm as a lever, I sat up.
Chapter Fifty
In the centre of the large mediaeval-looking room there were around twenty metal hospital beds, all in the half-reclined position and set out in a large circle. The beds were all occupied by young girls. As I studied the faces of those I could see, I realised they all were all wearing the same Doppelgänger spells as the two dead faelings found in Dead Man’s Hole. Sitting alternatively round the circle were the pretty ‘girl next door’ with her brown hair and freckles (Sally Redman’s spell) and the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde: Miranda, the teenage witch from Morgan Le Fay College.
‘Oka-aay,’ I muttered, ‘creepy or what?’ Then I realised something even creepier: they were all pregnant, and most of them looked like it wasn’t long to D-Day—or rather, B-Day? Not only that, half a dozen of the beds had small clear plastic cots next to them, complete with sleeping baby. And all the girls were silent and smiling, like this was the best place to be in the whole, wide world, like some sort of weird gathering of Stepford mums-to-be. Had to be some sort of Happy spell; twenty folk just wouldn’t sit that quietly. I looked, but there was no magic to see, not on the Stepfords, anyway.
But there was on the right side of the room. About halfway down was a modern pine grandfather clock dripping with spells. It clashed with the whole mediaeval look—suits of armour would’ve been more in keeping—but then, the clock had to be what was stopping the time—literally. Next to it was a door. I doubted it was the way out: it didn’t look large enough to get the hospital beds through, and they’d definitely been imported from the humans’ world—
‘You are now looking at the Merlin Foundation’s newest initiative to produce the next generation of wizards,’ Helen said, interrupting my escape-planning, ‘all done through a combination of IVF, magic and surrogate mothers. Craig has developed a method of creating test-tube babies that consistently produces powerful wizards, through sex and gene selection. A lot of wizards, especially those older ones whose chance at marrying a long-lineage witch disappeared when the Bride-Price was abolished, are happy to pay his fees.’
‘Dr Frankenstein Does Designer Babies, in other words,’ I muttered in disgust as I tried to focus on the far end of the room … there was something hidden there, behind a massive, curtain-like Look-Away veil. It had to be the way out, or at the very least, worth investigating … once I got out of the Witch-bitch’s evil clutches. ‘What’s with the Doppelgänger spells?’ I a
sked, more to keep her talking than any real interest.
‘They indicate who the baby’s biological mother is,’ she said coldly.
I shot her an appalled look. ‘Surely the biological mothers haven’t agreed to that many babies?’
‘Apparently yes.’ She stared impassively at the Stepfords. ‘The witches are being very well paid for their eggs. He’s even paying the faelings for their surrogacy services; they’ve all signed contracts; they’re here by choice.’
I snorted. ‘So he’s killing them to save himself a bit of money? Nice to know he’s got absolutely no ethics at all.’
‘He’s not killing them per se,’ she said, turning back to me, her blue eyes as cold as her voice. ‘The majority of them just don’t have enough fae blood. They die not long after giving birth—incubating baby wizards and then breastfeeding them sucks all the magic and life out of them.’
I stared at her, shocked. ‘But he’s a doctor; didn’t he work that out before he did his test-tube thing?’
‘He did trials on Ana. The daughter is hers and her husband’s, but the sons are all Craig’s, both biologically, and by way of being his experiments. Ana is strong enough to survive the surrogacy because of her sidhe blood, but he wasn’t successful with any of the other faelings, until he put together this set-up’—she indicated the large stone-walled room—‘here in Between. It keeps them alive just long enough.’
‘Fuck,’ I said in revulsion, ‘I don’t know which of you is worse, him for killing them off, or you for covering up their deaths. And all because you didn’t want anyone to know that you had a child with a vamp.’
‘Despite what you think of me, Ms Taylor, I don’t condone the death of innocents. I didn’t know the full extent of what was happening until recently, and Jack’s birth is only a small part of it.’ She cast a poignant look at the still sleeping Jack. ‘Did you know vampires are infertile?’
‘Well, Maxim isn’t, obviously,’ I said, ‘otherwise your boy wouldn’t be here.’ Not to mention me. ‘But what the hell’s that got to do with anything?’
She laughed. ‘You really don’t know, do you? I always wondered if you were actually that clueless, and now I see you are. But then, you wouldn’t have spent all this time looking for a way to crack the fertility curse if you’d known the truth …’ She trailed off, giving me a sly look.
I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. ‘You’ve got my full attention. What truth?’
‘Jack is Clíona’s grandson,’ she said, giving me a self-satisfied look. ‘His father, Maxim, is Clíona’s son—the one the vampires took from her.’
I gaped at her in astonishment for a moment, then it clicked into place. ‘Maxim’s the reason why she laid the droch guidhe curse—but he’s supposed to be dead?’
‘Which is what she and the vamps wanted the rest of the other fae to think.’
‘She? Clíona knew her son wasn’t dead?’
‘Not immediately, but by the time she found out the truth, it was too late. She’d already laid the droch guide.’
I frowned down at the stone-flagged floor, trying to see the whole picture. ‘So he was a vamp, and not dead, but why keep it a secret?’
Helen’s lips thinned in derision. ‘Don’t you mean: why didn’t she tell the fae that she’d been so blind that she’d fallen in love with a vamp’s blood-pet, had a son with him, and then blamed the lesser fae when the vamps took her son from her and made him a vampire? And then cursed them to know the grief in her heart, a curse which made all their faeling children into vampire victims? A curse she could not remove?’
Ok-aay, so I could see how Clíona owning up to that so wouldn’t go down well.
‘Instead,’ Helen carried on with an air of imparting great news, ‘she tried to break the curse by having another child.’
‘Yeah, I heard,’ I said, remembering what Grianne, my faerie dogmother, had told me during my side-trip to Disney Heaven, why Clíona had given birth to Angel. ‘A child for a child.’
‘Oh, so you do know some of the story then.’ Helen sniffed. ‘Of course, actually producing another child was where Clíona ran into difficulties. The vamps hadn’t just given the Gift to Maxim, but they’d given it to his father too, so of course he’d been made infertile.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘you keep saying that, but you only have to look at your own son to know it’s not true.’
Helen’s superior expression reached new levels as she shook her head. ‘Unlike you, I do know what I’m talking about. Vampires are infertile. The only way a vampire can make anyone pregnant, including a sidhe, is by using a lot of concentrated fertility magic. Clíona isn’t a fertility fae, so when it came to having a child to break the curse, she entered into a bargain with the Morrígan for a Fertility spell.’ She gave me a smug look. ‘Where do you think they got the fertility from?’
Horror seeped into me as I realised what she was saying. ‘Clíona and the Morrígan stole the fae’s fertility?’
‘They borrowed it,’ she confirmed briskly. ‘Clíona was supposed to give it back, but when she sent her daughter Rhiannon to return the Fertility spell, the spell was lost.’
Rhiannon was Angel—and she’d lost the spell! Fuck, no wonder London’s fae were dying. And everyone was blaming it on the curse—which was sort of at fault—but if they didn’t know their fertility had been stolen, they couldn’t look for it. That was a huge secret Clíona—and anyone else who knew about it—was keeping. Only why would they? Why not tell everyone and get them searching?
But as I thought about it, the tail-end of Helen’s memory replayed itself in my mind: Angel kissed baby Jack’s head … and a pendant was hanging round her neck … The huge sapphire pendant that Helen always wore. The one that was even now shining like a captive star beneath her blouse. Damn. No one who knew about the Fertility spell needed to find it, because they all knew where it was.
So the million-pound question was: why hadn’t anyone taken it back?
‘You’ve got the Fertility spell,’ I said slowly, itching to reach out and rip the pendant from her neck.
‘Yes.’ She cradled the sapphire in her hand.
Finn’s words came back to me when he’d told me about Helen getting pregnant with Nicky: ‘We were just fooling around …’
‘You used it to trick Finn, didn’t you?’ I accused, then a disturbing thought hit me. ‘He doesn’t know about the pendant, does he?’
‘No, of course not—’ She paused, then sighed. ‘I did consider telling him, but I had a baby daughter, a new husband, and status in the Witches’ Council at last … and then Craig demanded to know how I’d had another child. He blackmailed me into telling him. Since then he’s been using the Fertility spell in his experiments.’
‘You selfish bitch!’ Bile rose in my throat. ‘London’s fae are dying. Faelings have died, not just the two most recent ones, but all those who ended up as vamp victims. Don’t you care?’
‘Faelings have always died at the hands of the vampires, Ms Taylor,’ she said bluntly. ‘It’s sad, but no one can save them all. But what’s more important now is saving my daughter.’
‘You do know that there’s no way out for you in all this, don’t you?’ I gave her a frank look. ‘It won’t be long before the police know all about Dr Craig and his experiments, and your involvement in them. The note you left me indicates you’ve got some connection to the vamps, so you’re finished with the Witches’ Council.’ And Finn will probably never forgive you for putting his daughter in danger—but I kept that comment to myself. ‘But you could make it go easier if you help me. All I need to do is find the entrance, then I can crack it open and let the police in to rescue Nicky and all the other faelings.’ I waved at the Stepfords. ‘Then they can all have their babies with a lot more care than this.’
‘No, Ms Taylor,’ she said firmly, not even considering my idea. ‘The Time-sync spell means it will be another twenty-four hours before any help can get here. By then it will be too late for Nicky.
This way you’ll end up as Craig’s next experiment, and not her. I’d say I’m sorry, but I’d be lying. But I will sweeten the deal for you,’ she added. ‘If you’ll give your word to do what Craig wants, I’ll tell Nicky about the pendant, so she can tell her father.’
I did consider her proposition. It would save Nicky, and Finn and the rest of London’s fae would know their fertility had been stolen and where it was—and where it had been. And unlike Nicky, Dr Craig’s experiment wasn’t going to end up with me pregnant, not with the Morrígan’s Chastity/Contraceptive spell Tavish had sicced on me. But the spell was also the reason I couldn’t agree to Helen’s terms, even if I wanted to. I couldn’t give my word to let myself be impregnated, or even act as a surrogate, or whatever Dr Craig wanted, not when I knew it to be impossible, and when I couldn’t lie.
Damn. It was a no-win either way.
I needed an Option Three.
Helen leaned towards me. ‘Oh, and if you’re worried about having to have sex with him,’ she said, ‘don’t be. One: you’re much too old and flat-chested for his tastes, and two: he’s a scientist, and his experiments have to be done just so. So do you agree, Ms Taylor?’
I took a deep breath, looked at Jack, still curled up asleep on the floor—
And I punched Helen, a hard uppercut to the jaw. Her head snapped back and, satisfyingly, she crumpled like yesterday’s news.
Spell shackles might stop you using magic (not that I had any), but they don’t stop you using your fists.
Yep, Option Three worked for me.
Chapter Fifty-One
‘So, has she told you, my lady?’ Jack’s question startled me and I almost swallowed the key I had between my teeth, the one with which I was trying to unlock the shackle on my uninjured arm. I looked up to find him regarding me gravely out of his indigo-coloured sidhe eyes. Damn.
The Bitter Seed of Magic s-3 Page 33