‘Such a tragedy, wasn’t it, Libby?’ Sylvia said.
I peered at the family tree. ‘I take it you don’t mean Ana’s marriage to the wizard, but about her mother being attacked and killed by the vamps,’ I said drily, ‘and Ana herself being caught by them.’
Sylvia gave a choked laugh that sounded like leaves rustling. ‘Gosh, yes, Brigitta was killed by the suckers, wasn’t she? I’d forgotten that. That was a tragedy too. So sad, such a lot of heartbreak in that family, and all because of the curse.’
‘Clíona brought it on herssself,’ the Librarian grouched. ‘If ssshe had not cast the droche guidhe, it would never have happened.’
‘So, what did happen?’ I asked.
There was another chime, and a yellowed newspaper popped into the air to hover next to the family tree scroll. For a moment it fluttered in the breeze through the open bedroom window, then Sylvia snapped her fingers and it became as still as a board.
I stepped up to it and began to read:FAERIE PRINCESS RESCUED FROM THE TOWER.
by ‘Thomas the Rhymer’
Our Man in the Fair Lands
A sidhe faerie princess and her child have finally been released after being kidnapped and held prisoner in the Tower of London.
The traumatised princess (age not specified) has been returned to the bosom of her family in the Fair Lands after the ordeal, while her baby daughter (5 months) is being cared for by extended members of the princess’ family in London—
A horrified chill crawled down my spine. I narrowed my eyes at Sylvia and her pink iPhone. ‘So who’s going to explain what that means?’
‘Well,’ Sylvia’s face squinched up like she was in pain, ‘you know what Algernon and his friends tried to do to you?’
Algernon had to be Bandana, the dryad. I hadn’t known his name, nor had I really wanted to. ‘You mean when they tried to kidnap and rape me?’ I said flatly, thinking that Sylvia hadn’t necessarily been blameless in that nasty incident.
‘Fiddlesticks, now I’ve made you cross.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘They weren’t supposed to do that. If I’d known that’s what they planned, I’d have told someone.’
‘Go on,’ I said, giving her a hard stare as I crossed my arms.
‘Well, it all happened about forty years ago. The Old Donn, he was the one in charge then, he was desperate to find a way to break the curse. As we all still are.’ She gave me a pointed look. ‘Anyway, short version, that’s when the idea of finding a sidhe willing to have a child came up, only Clíona wasn’t prepared to let us court any of her ladies, and none of the other queens wanted anything to do with the curse. So things were at a bit of a stalemate. But then Clíona’s daughter Rhiannon was visiting London. When the Old Donn and two of the other wylde fae found out she was here’ – she pulled another pained face and pointed at the hovering newspaper – ‘well, that’s what they did.’
Fuck, so I wasn’t the first! They’d already tried the ‘kidnap, rape and make the sidhe pregnant’ plan in an effort to break the curse with this Rhiannon—except their plan obviously hadn’t succeeded, since the curse was still in existence . . . but looking at the family tree, Rhiannon had given birth, to a daughter . . . and the newspaper had mentioned a baby girl . . . so—
‘Rhiannon wasss visiting the fossssegrim when the Old Donn took her,’ the Librarian’s voice hissed out of the phone. ‘Ssshe was already carrying hisss child.’
Shit. That meant—‘They abducted and raped a pregnant woman!’ I said, sickened.
Sylvia cringed. ‘Well, technically, yes.’
‘They either did, or they didn’t!’
‘They performed a fertility rite,’ the Librarian said. ‘Rhiannon agreed to it, but ssshe has never been in her right mind, and ssshe did not understand what it meant. It was a ssstrange sssituation.’
Rhiannon wasn’t in her right mind? Of course, they were talking about Angel – for a moment I’d forgotten Rhiannon and Angel were the same person, and that Angel was Ana’s grandmother.
Two more yellowed newspaper articles materialised in front of me with another chime. Their headlines proclaimed: BRUTAL SLAYING AT THE TOWER OF LONDON, and TRAFALGAR SQUARE’S FOUNTAINS TO BE EXORCISED.
I skimmed down the pieces. They detailed the killing spree that the fossegrim had gone on when he’d become unhinged at losing his lady love to the curse, and the fall-out that followed. Neither story carried any mention of Rhiannon, or their daughter. Those details had obviously been kept out of the news.
‘The fossssegrim exacted hisss revenge on the Old Donn and the others,’ the Librarian said. ‘But once the humanss heard about it, they called for him to be removed. An agreement wass finally reached whereby the fountainsss were Warded ssso that the fossegrim was contained for three decadesss. But he wasss unable to care for the child, Brigitta, so ssshe was given into the care of the witches, for her protection. Ssshe grew up with them, and when ssshe gave birth to Ana, the witches cared for her alsso.’
‘Obviously not well enough,’ I muttered. Damn, poor Ana really was a victim of the curse, in more ways than one. Her grandmother Rhiannon was born to break it, her mother Brigitta was killed by the vamps, and Ana herself had ended up in a blood-house when she was fourteen. And despite her supposed rescue by her wizard husband, Ana was still under the thrall of some vamp, and still a victim of the curse. It was a situation I needed to sort out – once I worked out how to bypass the scary fossegrim. ‘So,’ I said, ‘I heard Ana now lives with her grandfather the fossegrim in Trafalgar Square. Is he really as mad as I’ve been told?’
‘Gosh, yes.’ Sylvia shuddered. ‘I’d stay away from him, if I was you. He likes to drown folk—’
‘He hass never hurt a female or a child, Sssylvia,’ the Librarian’s voice interrupted firmly.
Ah, good to know, since I was going to be visiting his granddaughter.
Sylvia frowned at the phone. ‘But I thought that was why Rhiannon was sent back to the Fair Lands, and why her daughter went to live with the witches?’
‘No, Rhiannon wass allowed home because none wanted to incur Clíona’s wrath again.’
I snorted. Allowed home, my arse. Then something struck me. ‘So if Rhiannon went back to the Fair Lands, why did she leave her daughter in the care of the witches?’ But even as I asked the question, the answer was there in front of me, on the hovering vellum of the family tree. ‘Brigitta was a full-blood sidhe, and you kept her because of the curse. Damn! She was going to be your next curse-breaking experiment. You tried to breed from her, didn’t you? And Clíona just let you.’ Anger welled up in me and I kicked at the book on the floor. It thudded into the wall next to the bathroom door, making Sylvia jump.
‘We are not as cruel as you sseem to think, ssidhe,’ the Librarian said in a conciliatory tone. ‘We had high hopess that Brigitta would break the curse, ssso like you, ssshe was given her choice of father. And ssshe chose one of the water fae, but when Ana, her daughter, was born, it was evident that the husband was not Ana’s father.’
I looked at the family tree again. Ana’s father was down as ‘unknown’, and Ana was a faeling. I laughed. It wasn’t a happy sound. ‘Brigitta stiffed you by getting pregnant by a human, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. Brigitta held usss all guilty for what happened with her mother and the Old Donn. Ssshe took her revenge thuss.’
I didn’t know whether to cheer for Brigitta or cry. The fertility curse had really screwed up her life, even before she’d been killed, and now it was screwing up Ana’s too. I really hoped I was wrong about a vamp still having his or her fangs in Ana; the poor faeling already had more than enough problems to deal with.
‘Sssometimess a fate cannot be changed,’ the Librarian said quietly, as if she’d read my thoughts, ‘but with forewarning it is posssible. What did the Morrígan ssshow you, sssidhe?’
‘Gosh, yes, do tell.’ Sylvia gave me an eager look.
‘Sorry, no,’ I said, and reached over and pressed the ‘off’ button o
n her phone. Whatever the Morrígan/Alien baby show was about, I wasn’t in the mood to discuss it after that sordid little tale. I fixed Sylvia with a look. ‘Thanks for getting rid of the books, Sylvia, but what exactly are you doing here?’
Her phone trilled the theme tune from Dirty Dancing. She cancelled the call and the phone vanished. Two seconds later the hovering family tree and the newspapers did too. The Librarian obviously didn’t want to leave them hanging around (no pun intended). Sylvia smiled coyly. ‘Is that, no, you won’t tell, or no, the Morrígan didn’t show you anything?’
‘You first,’ I said.
‘Fiddlesticks, that’s not fair,’ she pouted.
‘Up to you.’ I shrugged and looked down at my bloodstained clothes. ‘But if you’re not going to talk, then I’m getting cleaned up.’ I turned and headed for the bathroom, saying over my shoulder, ‘Don’t forget to shut the window on your way out.’
‘Wait!’ she called. ‘Wait! I’ll tell. You know you said one of us could court you so long as it wasn’t one of the Twig Gang. Well, here I am.’
I turned to see her standing with her arms outstretched and a big smile on her face. ‘Ta dah!’ She grinned. ‘Although I’m not as pretty as when I started out, thanks to your Ward.’
‘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 dogmother 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 peeked 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 lenti-cels, 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 t
he 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?
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