The Bitter Seed of Magic (A Spellcrackers Novel) (6 page)

Angel grinned, showing small, white, even teeth, grabbed my hands and twirled us round. Her golden wings beat the air, and a backwash of honey and vanilla-scented wind blew my hair back and the dome blurred as she whirled us round and round, faster and faster . . . and as our feet left the ground, she let me go—

—and I flew through the air, crash-landed into the side of the dome and slid down into a crumpled heap. The proverbial stars blinded my vision in a rainbow of coloured lights, and as they cleared, I found her leaning over me.

‘They are all dying,’ she whispered, then danced away from me, the long tips of her golden wings dragging in the fluffy clouds.

‘Who’s dying?’ I croaked.

The wheeling crows cawed loudly, then dropped, their small black bodies plummeting down, morphing back into blood-splattered feathers as they fell.
Right, the faelings.

‘He is killing them,’ she shouted.

‘He?’

She raised her arms up to the blue-painted heaven. The old man’s benign smiling face had changed. And now a sharp-featured caricature of a horned Satan laughed down at us instead.

She crouched next to me and I froze as she fixed me with her pale gold gaze. ‘She prays for my help.’ Shadows shifted in her eyes and she touched her finger to my breastbone. ‘Her prayers disturb my thoughts. Put ashes in my mouth. Pierce my flesh.’ Her voice took on a deeper timbre. ‘You will stop this. You will answer her pleas. You will break this curse. You will give them a new life.’

I really hoped that didn’t mean what I thought. ‘What new life?’

Angel blinked, and a wide happy smile bloomed on her face. ‘She says to send you back now.’

She flicked her finger against my chest—

And I tumbled into freefall . . .

‘T
he sidhe’s not
fading
again, is she, satyr?’ A male voice: rough, remembered, hated—

Thin ropes snapped tighter around my ankles. Panic raced through my body; instinctively I jerked my legs against the bindings.

‘By all the gods, dryad!’ Another male voice: angry, worried, and reassuringly familiar. Finn. ‘I told you, keep your branches to yourself before I take an iron axe to your tree.’

The ropes slithered away, taking my panic with them. I was back in the humans’ world.
Finn
was here. Wherever
here
was. Finn meant safety—

Then my body chimed in with a barrage of complaints, too mixed up for me to work out what part of me was suffering the most – my stomach, my head, or my back, where I was laying on something cold, hard and unyielding; concrete, maybe.

A gentle hand brushed my face. ‘C’mon, Gen, you need to wake up now,’ Finn said softly.

‘Don’t want to,’ I groaned in a whisper. Opening my eyes was too much effort. ‘Everything hurts.’

‘Yeah, well,
absorbing
a circle will do that,’ he said, exasperation threading through the worry.

Yeah, and getting thrown around by a goddess doesn’t help much either. Still, I was alive, if not yet kicking. And thinking of being alive—‘The corvid faeling?’ I opened my eyes and stared up at Finn where he crouched beside me; his face was sombre, his usual moss-green eyes dark with sadness.

I sighed. ‘She didn’t survive, did she?’

He shook his head.

Damn. I didn’t think she had, not after seeing all the crows die, but I had to ask.

‘Hugh told me the doc isn’t sure if her head injury was deliberate, or a result of her being in the river.’ Finn’s light touch as he brushed away a tear from my cheek told me I was crying again.
Damn stupid tears.
‘You couldn’t have done anything, Gen; the doc said even if she’d been on the operating table while you removed the spells, he wouldn’t have been able to save her.’

‘They are dying.’
Angel’s voice rang in my mind.
‘He is killing them.’

I knew the poor corvid faeling wasn’t the first to die, and by the sounds of it she wasn’t going to be the last. Whatever was happening was ongoing, and it was down to the curse. Angel – or rather, The Mother – had been clear on that. They –
She
– had also been clear that
I
had to stop it.

And I was with Her one thousand per cent; the sooner faelings stopped dying the better. I just wished She’d given me more than a caricature of a photofit to go on.

I gritted my teeth and sat up. Vaguely, I registered I was outside, sitting on the concrete dock of Dead Man’s Hole, not far from the disused mortuary where the dead faeling had been found. There were still police and others milling about, so I couldn’t have been out for long . . .

My vision blurred, a wave of dizziness hit me and I dropped my head to my knees.

Finn draped my jacket round me. ‘Take it slowly, okay?’ he said, his voice low with concern as he rubbed my shoulders.

Part of me wanted to melt into that concern. It would be so easy. He was my friend, and more – or at least both of us wanted him to be more. Trouble was, ‘more’ to me meant going out on a few dates, getting to know each other a
lot
better, and having fun finding out if the attraction between us was as hot and magical as it seemed. But thanks to the curse, Finn’s ‘more’ meant he wanted to court me, to jump the broom with me—To make a baby with me. And that wasn’t the only problem with whatever our relationship could be. Magic and fae genetics might make me a full-blood sidhe, but my father was still a vamp. Most fae – the majority – are wary of vamps, and rightly so, but Finn hated vamps with a passion. If it wasn’t for the curse, would he still want ‘more’? Still want
me
? I wanted to believe he would, but . . .

But yearning after him like a Glamour-trapped human wasn’t going to get me any answers. Or stop the killer. Or
crack
the curse.

If
I took Danu’s command to mean what I thought it meant, and
if
I ignored all the problems that came with me having a child, then me getting pregnant should
crack
the curse and stop any more faelings dying because of it. They were pretty big ‘ifs’, especially considering the life-altering consequences involved. But even if they turned out to be not so
iffy
in the end, the faeling from three weeks ago and the corvid faeling today would still be dead, and whoever killed them would still be free. The murderer might be motivated by the curse – which wasn’t in any way a justification – but that didn’t mean once the curse was gone, that he’d stop killing. Odds were he’d find another reason to justify his actions. And faelings could still end up as victims, even without a curse making them easy targets. So before I changed my mind and got all positive about the whole baby-making/ curse-breaking business, I needed to find the murderer.

And that meant I needed to talk to the police and tell them about my tête-à-tête with The Mother.

And that meant talking to DI Helen Crane.

Yeah. Like that was going to work. The Witch-bitch wouldn’t give me the time of day, even with Hugh backing me up, so I was going to need help: someone she wouldn’t ignore. And that someone was sitting right next to me.

I rested my cheek on my knees so I could look at Finn. ‘The faeling’s death is to do with the curse,’ I said quietly.

His hand on my shoulders stilled. ‘How do you know?’

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out – not because I didn’t want to tell him, not because he wouldn’t believe me, but because The Mother’s commands obviously came with a gag clause, one that currently had invisible hands around my throat doing their best to strangle me. Why the hell would she do that? Unless . . . she didn’t want me inadvertently tipping off the murderer.

‘Sorry,’ I finally gasped, ‘can’t tell you!’

‘“Can’t”, or “won’t”?’ Finn was good. He caught on quick.

I reached out, squeezed his knee and shook my head.

A thoughtful frown lined his forehead and I studied him as the invisible hands relaxed their hold on my throat. He was worth studying. With his strong, clean-cut human features, his short bracken-coloured horns standing about an inch above his dark-blond wavy hair, his broad shoulders and honed muscular body, he looked like every human’s wet dream of a sex god – if their idea of a sex god was dressed in a dark chocolate-coloured business suit, with a cream shirt open enough at the neck to offer a tantalising glimpse of luscious tanned skin sprinkled with sleek sable hair, that is. But the handsome-human look was just that: a look, or rather a Glamour – not a spelled glamour, like the one on the dead faeling, but a true Glamour, made from his own will and self-perception.

Finn’s fae self is wilder, more feral, more gorgeous . . .

At the thought, magic bloomed inside me and lust and longing spread a rising heat through my body, catching me by surprise. A faint sheen of gold rippled over my fingers where they still rested on Finn’s knee as the magic reached out to him and I snatched my hand back in horror before he noticed. This so couldn’t be happening – not now, not after the magic had been quiet for so long. Crap. The last thing I needed was for
it
to join in and play matchmaker. I screwed my eyes shut, determined to push the feelings away.

It felt like trying to push back an incoming tide.

Trouble was, the magic
liked
Finn; it always had done. Of course, it didn’t help that he didn’t just
look
like a sex god; he was one, or at least descended from one, since his long-ago satyr ancestors were worshipped as fertility deities – until the archetypal horned god image was relegated to the dark side and characterised as all that was evil.

Oh, and renamed Satan.

Damn it! If The Mother thought I was going to suspect Finn, the ultimate white knight and all-round good guy, of having anything to do with the faelings’ deaths, then She was nuttier than Angel.

But there was more than one satyr in London, and Finn’s herd, like the rest of London’s fae, were desperate to hear the pitter-patter of tiny hooves – so desperate that nine months ago they’d shelled out big-time for the
Spellcrackers.com
London franchise, and made Finn the boss –
my boss
– as a pre-emptive nuptial gift, to give us time to
get to know each other
(and making Finn their number one prospective curse-
cracking
daddy in the process). I didn’t know how much money was involved, but I knew they were up to their eyes in hock to the Witches’ Council. That amounted to a lot of desperation.

I opened my eyes. ‘Finn, what’s the head count of the herd?’

‘Ninety-three.’ His gaze sharpened. ‘Why?’

Too many suspects. I needed some way to whittle them down. ‘Just wondering.’

‘Wondering what?’

The invisible hands grabbed my throat. I shook my head again.

He gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. ‘Okay, then.’ He slid his phone open with a quiet click. ‘Then if you can’t tell me, maybe you can tell Helen.’

Stupid irrational jealousy spiked as he said her name. I wanted him to call her: it was the right thing to do, to tell the DI in charge about a clue that could help solve the faelings’ deaths, and maybe prevent more. That was a solution I wanted more than she did, going by her recent stonewalling. The fact that
Helen
was still Finn’s number one speed-dial, despite being his ex for however many years, and that she never seemed far from his mind despite him saying it was over between them? Well, actions speak louder . . .

He snapped his phone shut. ‘Helen wants us to meet her at Old Scotland Yard’ – the Met’s Murder and Magic squad HQ – ‘and she needs you to give a statement about today.’ He gave me a sympathetic look. ‘Do you think you’re able to get up yet, Gen?’

‘Sodding hell, satyr, stop mollycoddling the bloody sidhe.’ The loud, sneering words snapped my head up. ‘She’s got to be taken care of, and if you’re not up to it, then I am.’

Damn. I’d forgotten about the dryad.

I
glared past Finn’s broad shoulders at the tall, thickset dryad. His arms were crossed, and he was smiling down at me with too many bark-stained teeth showing in his mahogany-coloured face for it to be anything but menacing. To be honest, he could’ve been sitting on the floor crying into the purple bandana wrapped round his clipped scalp and I’d have still felt threatened. Five months ago Bandana and his vicious little dryad gang had tried to kidnap and rape me. He’d used the fertility curse as his
extenuating circumstances
.

I stifled a shudder, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing my fear. ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ I demanded.

‘He was here first, Gen.’ Finn shot him a scathing look. ‘Apparently he walked in and pulled you out of the circle as it imploded.’

Bandana grinned wider. ‘You should thank me, sidhe. You tried to swallow too much magic and it was ripping you apart. If it hadn’t been for my hold on you, you would have
faded
.’ His long ankle-length brown coat split into a cape of thin whip-like willow branches that shifted in the spring breeze. I suppressed another shudder as the sensory memory of his branches tightening around my arms and legs surfaced. My stomach roiled. I pushed Finn away and hunched over, vomiting up a stream of brackish-tasting liquid.

‘Oh, and I poured salted river-water down your throat while you were out of it,’ I heard Bandana say happily through the noise of my own retching. ‘Didn’t want the magic to have any nasty lingering after-effects.’

‘You’re the only nasty lingering after-effect round here,’ I spat out when I could, wishing, not for the first time, that I’d blasted the whole of Bandana into wood shavings when he’d tried to kidnap me, instead of just his appendages.

Finn held out a bottle of water. He’d just
called
it, so it was ice-cold from the fridge. I thanked him, rinsed my mouth and gave it him back – and it disappeared. Clasping his offered hand, I hauled myself up and stood swaying as another bout of dizziness hit.