Текст книги "The Shifting Price of Prey"

Автор книги: Сьюзан Маклеод

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The Shifting Price of Prey
(The fourth book in the Spellcrackers series)
A novel by Suzanne McLeod

For Mum and Dad

With Love

Chapter One

The garden fairy was as desiccated as a dead frog squashed by a passing car and left to dry in the summer sun. Its claw-tipped appendages, stringy arms and legs, big bulbous eyes and wide slash of a mouth made it look even more amphibian-like. With its large gossamer wings folded down its back, it wasn’t much bigger than a frog either, so there was plenty of room in the plastic sandwich box that served as its makeshift coffin.

Though, as I adjusted the angle of the lamp and bent over the marble-topped desk to peer closer, I noted, of course, that ‘it’ wasn’t correct. Judging by the lack of neck-frill, and the corkscrew-shaped penis pointing down past the fairy’s knees– ‘it’ was a ‘he’.

And ‘he’ was a perfect example of why September – mating season for garden fairies – is called the screaming month.

Except this was the middle of June.

Hatching time, not mating time.

The fairy’s death was a freak of nature– if I was to believe my ‘client’, Mr Lampy.

‘More like a freaking scam,’ I muttered, hoping my co-worker was digging up some much needed dirt during his sneaky look round, because so far, when it came to the dead garden fairy, Mr Lampy was looking annoyingly squeaky clean.

Regrettably the same couldn’t be said for his house.

I shot a disgusted glance around me. The large high-ceilinged room was home to a mismatched collection of wooden junk-shop furniture that was hosting enough multi-coloured fungi to devour a dead forest. The whole ground floor of the house was the same. Considering the Victorian terrace was in fashionable Primrose Hill, London’s celebrity-studded urban village, and had to be worth a good couple of million, it made for an unlikely combination. Of course, Mr Lampy was ancient so he’d probably been here longer than the house, or even the village, itself. Once a gnome’s settled their manor, it takes a lot to uproot them.

Not to mention that Primrose Hill (the actual park) has always been a major breeding site for garden fairies, and still was, judging by the occupants of the other eight sandwich-box coffins stacked to my left. The small creatures have long been valued by those with green fingers – like gnomes – as nature’s magical helper. While the fairies are alive and zipping.

Dead, they have another use, one that is illegal without a licence.

My job was to issue the licence, but only if the fairy’s death was natural, not induced.

I picked up the padded kitchen tongs next to the box and carefully turned the fairy over, the acid-free tissue paper beneath him rustling as I did. Despite looking like sun-dried roadkill, there were no obvious injuries to his little body. I reached out to gently lift his chin—

A low growl stopped me.

I squinted left into the unblinking, warning glare of the large ginger cat sitting to attention on the desk, the tip of its tail twitching over its front paws. The cat was close enough that I could see a tiny reflection of my angular features in its dark oval pupils. I glared back, my own catlike sidhe pupils no doubt mimicking the animal’s in the dimly lit room. Not that my glare fazed the huge ginger tom one bit. But then my maternal grandmother is a sidhe queen – something I’d learned only recently. I was still coming to terms with it since my queenly grandmother liked me a whole lot less than the cat appeared to – so maybe the cat’s unconcern was apt.

‘I’m wearing gloves, puss.’ I waggled my latex-covered fingers in front of its disapproving face. ‘I know better than to contaminate the merchandise, scam or not.’

It continued to give me the evil-feline stare, and I sighed. Why the hell I was talking to a cat anyway? It wasn’t like it could answer back; it was just one of the gnome’s trained gun-dogs, or rather gun-cats, used to retrieve dead fairies like the one in front of me before male-member shrinkage rendered it worthless.

Awareness prickled down my spine and I turned, expecting to find the gnome doing a lecherous eyeball of my arse from the doorway.

But the large room was devoid of life . . .

If, that is, you discounted the other dozen or so cats that made up the gnome’s clowder of fairy-finding felines, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves full of variously sized plastic boxes and glass tanks that held the gnome’s stock. Not all of which was as lifeless as the fairy in front of me and some of which had their own creepy eyeballs.

I opened the metaphysical part of me that seesthe magic, and looked, repeating the check I’d done on arrival. But the only active spells were the Buffer spell in the tiny crystal stuck to my phone and the mega-strength Knock-back Wards buzzing like electrified bars over the room’s tall sash windows. With all his stock, it wasn’t a surprise the gnome took security seriously.

I shrugged the ‘watching eyes’ feeling off, blaming it on the creepsville house and returned my attention to the dead fairy. I angled the light and this time ignored the cat’s growl as I lifted the fairy’s little chin. Sure enough his throat had been slit; a long slash from ear to ear. A wound that would have killed him instantly at the height of his frenzied fairy ecstasy.

The noisy slap-slap of bare feet on wooden boards signalled the gnome’s imminent return. I pulled off the surgical gloves with a snap, tucked them into my jacket pocket, and sat down quickly on the overstuffed guest chair.

‘Refreshments, Ms Taylor,’ the gnome said as he bustled into the room. He rounded the desk and placed a tea tray covered in a lace-edged cloth next to the fairy’s plastic coffin.

I stifled a shudder. Small yellow-green things speared through with cocktail sticks had been stuck hedgehog-like into a tin-foiled potato; they were still writhing. The sickly sweet smell steaming from the cup and saucer wasn’t any more appetising. Only the opaque lumps of what looked like unpolished quartz seemed vaguely edible.

‘Mead-soaked slugs. Nettle tea with lavender blossom honey, and raw sugar crystals.’ The wrinkles in the gnome’s round face deepened as he beamed, nearly blinding me with the brilliance of his ultra-white human dentures.

Vodka, bacon sandwiches and liquorice torpedoes are more my snack of choice, but even if he’d offered those I wouldn’t have trusted them. I’d only agreed to his ‘refreshments’ so I could examine the fairy without having the gnome’s beady little eyes crawling all over me. He’d spent the whole time since I’d arrived addressing my chest – and not just because it was on a level with his face. Nor because I have much to address; I’m slender, verging on skinny. And this not being my first visit, I’d deliberately covered up, buttoning my shirt to the neck and wearing the jacket of my business suit, despite it being too warm in the summer weather. Irritatingly, it hadn’t stopped him ogling. Or copping a feel of my butt as he’d ushered me in (which got him a swift elbow to the temple; annoyingly it only made his ogling more enthusiastic). So the idea of checking out the dead fairy while he watched was way too icky.

‘Thank you, Mr Lampy,’ I said politely, since even if he was currently suspect he had paid the Spellcrackers.com fee up front so was, until proved otherwise, a client, though not one I wanted any of my staff subjected to. ‘But the glass of water I asked for would’ve been fine.’

‘Ah, but I know this is what you fairies like, Ms Taylor.’ He pushed the plate towards me, the edges of the mustard-coloured lichen mapping his bald pate crinkling with encouragement.

‘I’m sidhe fae, Mr Lampy,’ I said, more sharply and less patiently than I had the first three times I’d corrected him. ‘Sidhe fae are not related to garden fairies.’ Something you’d think a gnome, one of the Others should know. ‘We have more genes in common with an ordinary human than a chimpanzee does. While garden fairies are more closely related to insects and amphibians.’

‘Of course they are.’ He gave me a sly wink and tapped the sandwich box. ‘But these little beauties can tap into the magic, much as you yourself can, unlike even the most extraordinary of humans.’ He clasped his fat little hands and rested them on his shirt-straining pot belly. ‘It’s what makes them so desirable.’

Ugh.Dried garden fairy parts – smoked, snorted, imbibed or injected – are the equivalent of magical Viagra, and not just in the obvious, sexual way, but in the boosting-your-magical-abilities way. The resulting power spike is said to be a hundred times better than sugar (the standard way to amp up magic), a phenomenon discovered in 1835 by Jacob Sabine, a prominent Victorian naturalist and wizard. By the end of the nineteenth century, garden fairies had gone from being as common as dragonflies to near extinction, only to be saved by Sclalter’s Intervention, the Parliamentary Bill passed in 1902 which now protected them.

I’d fine-combed the legal stuff, hoping for something to nail the gnome with.

Unfortunately, the gnome was an accredited conservationist and therefore an authorised dealer. He was allowed to trade as a way to independently fund his fairy preservation work. Once licensed, the fairy would be worth around a grand. Given its rarity for this time of year, the gnome could probably charge three, maybe five times that. Add in that the Carnival Fantastique was in town, and ten times probably wasn’t beyond the realms of the gnome’s greedy calculations. Which was a hell of a monetary incentive to find a way to fast-track nature. The only thing stopping him coining it in was me.

Anyone would think he’d be more politic about things. But that’s gnomes for you.

‘It’s very early in the year for the fairies to be . . . active,’ I said, opting for euphemistic vagueness.

The gnome hit me with another denture-filled leer. ‘But you’ve examined the body haven’t you, Ms Taylor? So you can confirm that his death was part of normal mating and entirely unassisted.’

It was– if you ignored the fact that the male fairy’s near decapitation had been assisted by the female fairy’s neck-frill stiffening during fertilisation. Black widows have nothing on garden fairies.

‘I’ll agree it looks like it,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t stop it being much earlier.’

‘I think it’s a side-effect of global warming.’ The gnome’s eyes behind his glasses watered, as he gave me his version of an innocent look.

Global warming, my arse.‘I see.’

Of course, there was always the other, illegally assisted alternative. That somewhere, the gnome had a hothouse dialled up to tropical, and had used it to accelerate the fairy’s life cycle, then trapped him in an airtight box with a rubber frog and a handful of foxglove flowers a.k.a. fairy catnip. As soon as the excited, albeit confused, fairy lost consciousness, the gnome had slit the fairy’s throat and left him to dry out with a sachet of silicate crystals. That was the modern way: the Victorians used to use live frogs and rack the comatose fairies in small oak-lined smoking bins.

Trouble was, as the Victorians had discovered, garden fairies are almost impossible to breed in captivity. They need natural light. Which means glass. And they zip. Zipping into glass at the fairy equivalent of fifty miles an hour is like bugs hitting a car window. They splat.

The only time captive breeding had succeeded on any scale was when the Victorians had relocated Crystal Palace to Sydenham Park. An accident had placed it right on top of the local fairy hatching ground. So if the gnome did have a hothouse, it would have to be at least the size of a football field. Something that huge was hard to hide, even with magic. But my gut said the gnome was up to something. And I was determined to prove it. Only every time I’d moved out of his ‘office’ during my last inspection, he’d stuck to me like some of his nasty lichen, so now I was back, with my invisible-to-the-gnome co-worker in tow.

I unpacked my kit – measuring callipers, scalpels, pestle and mortar, ultra-violet light, magnifying glass and various potions and test spells I needed to complete the extensive tests prior to granting the licences – carefully lining up the items on the marble-top table under the gnome’s eager, creepy gaze.

Ugh.Last thing I wanted was him rubbernecking my every move for the next couple of hours.

‘This is going to take some time,’ I said firmly as I placed the last, most important item on the table: a packet containing the manmade crystals I’d superglue to each fairy’s head (the least valuable part), each crystal holding the actual Licence spell. The crystals were clear just now, but would glow viridian green once activated. ‘And I prefer to work undisturbed, Mr Lampy. I find there’s less chance of contamination or error that way.’ I paused, baring my teeth in a wide smile; he might not be a goblin, but he’d recognise the threat. ‘I’d hate to have to resample anything because I was distracted.’ In other words: leave me alone or I’ll chop large expensive chunks off your stock.

The gnome got the message. ‘Of course, Ms Taylor. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.’

I needed him like a vamp needed a suntan! He scuttled away and I settled down to work until my co-worker reappeared. Hopefully with something incriminating that would spell bad news for the nasty gnome.

Chapter Two

Thirty minutes later a familiar brush against my senses had me looking over my shoulder again to see a clear crystal appear on the room’s threshold. The crystal started to glow with the pink blush of dawn and the heady scent of peat and whisky shimmered through the room, sending desire shuddering through my body. I braced my hands on the desk, let the power ride me to the soft edge of pleasure, then bit back a frustrated cry as the spell set, leaving me wanting.

The cause wasn’t the spell: it was a simple Privacy one. Anyone could buy five of them from the Witches’ Market in Covent Garden for under a tenner. No, my reaction was down to the person who’d activated it. Tavish, the kelpie, defacto àrd-cheann– Top Dog, or in Tavish’s case, Top Water Horse – of London’s fae, and my co-worker/employee . . . when the inclination took him.

It didn’t matter what spells Tavish set; if I was near it was like getting blasted with magical pheromones. The longer we worked together, the more potent it got. I’d learned the hard way not to block it, as all that did was make my frustration worse. Not that he was doing it deliberately: in fact, when I’d brought it up, he’d looked dismayed then concluded it must be a side-effect (caused by my usual random reactions to magic) of the protective Chastity spell he’d taggedme with three months ago (he’d removed the Chastity spell soon after, once the threat was gone) and should fade in time.

Only the ‘side-effect’ wasn’t fading.

The second time I’d mentioned it he’d proposed we ‘swim in his lake’ and sort it out that way. But rather than his idea being one of his usual semi-serious suggestions we have sex, he’d been obviously reluctant.

Which confused the hell out of me.

Until it clicked that while Tavish had never missed an opportunity to sic me with his kelpie power and I’d often found myself gazing at him like a Charm-struck human, he’d always had an ulterior motive for hitting on me; the infertility curse afflicting London’s lesser fae. The fae had expected me to have a curse-breaking baby and, Tavish, as àrd-cheann, had been number one prospective daddy. But Tavish had only volunteered as ‘daddy’ to protect me from the rest of them. Something I was grateful for despite my annoyance at being kept in the dark about his whole take on the curse situation.

Of course, I didn’t need his protection any more, not since the true reason for the fae’s infertility had become common knowledge during the Tower of London Abductions case three months ago (codenamed ToLA by the police); their lack of fertility wasn’t due to a curse, but rather their fertility had been stolen. And, thanks in part to Tavish’s Machiavellian plotting, I’d recovered it.

Which was when Tavish had stopped hitting on me.

His reluctance hurt. Though, with the curse hanging around like an impatient Grim Reaper bent on eradicating London’s fae, I could understand why he’d faked fancying me. And it wasn’t as if I wanted us to be an item: Tavish is hot, and there’s a definite chemistry between us, at least on my side, but all my heart truly felt for him was friendship.

Of course, there was another reason why Tavish’s ardour might have cooled . . . stabbing him in the gut with a five-foot bull’s horn, and leaving him to the Morrígan’s tender ministrations probably hadn’t endeared me to him.

But whatever the reason I was no longer on his ‘SILF’ list, I didn’t want to complicate things for either of us by ‘swimming in his lake’, so I’d kept my confusion to myself and pretended the inconvenient and frustrating ‘side-effect’ had faded, in the hope that it actually would.

I blinked as Tavish suddenly appeared on the other side of the desk, shedding the Invisibility spell he’d been wearing, then did a double take. When he’d gone invisible and piggybacked after me into the gnome’s house, he’d been sporting his usual Sam-Spade-pinstriped-suit-and-Fedora work outfit. Now he was poured into a black unitard, pewter-coloured cobwebs decorating the super-tight Lyrca covering every part of him, including his head, hands and feet. He should’ve looked ridiculous in the costume; instead it left nothing to my libido’s imagination and he looked . . . disturbingly jumpable– Down, girl!Briefly I closed my eyes. How the hell had he even got himself into it, not to mention—

‘Tavish, why are you dressed up as a bad-ass Spider-Man?’

He stripped his hood off and the lacy gills either side of his neck snapped open like black fans. He shook out his green-black dreads; they writhed around his shoulders as if objecting to being contained, beads flashing from cobweb pewter to a clear sun-drenched turquoise.

‘Och, doll,’ he said, giving me his shark’s grin, serrated teeth white against the green-black of his skin. ‘The fancy dress shop dinna have a Cat-Man costume, so what else should I be wearing to be all sneaky and stealthy?’

Having him ‘work’ with/for me was like employing a two-year-old sometimes; still, most of my clients loved his ‘eccentricities’. I shot him an exasperated look. ‘You were invisible. It didn’t matter what you wore.’

‘Maybe. But where’s the fun in that? And look.’ Tavish lifted his hand and shot a stream of magic at the high ceiling. It expanded into thin filaments, attached, and then with a leap he was above me, crouched upside down on the ceiling, giving me an excellent view of his, oh-so-gorgeous arse.

Crap! Either I was as bad as the dirty-minded gnome, or Tavish’s magical pheromones were hitting a new high. I was going to have to find a way of getting rid of the damn side-effect, and soon. I dragged my attention back to the dead fairy then decided that staring at his appendage probably wasn’t the ideal way to cool down my libido.

I fished a bottle of water out of my backpack, took a long drink. Spidey impersonation aside, at least now Tavish had finished his search I’d find out if he’d dug up any incriminating evidence on Mr Lecherous Lampy.

‘Any luck?’ I asked, sitting down.

‘Nae a glint, doll,’ he said, disappointing me. He dropped silently down, lifted the gnome’s heavy throne-style chair as if it weighed nothing, set it next to mine and slumped into it. His long, angled features took on a despondent air. ‘’Tis near like an untouched tomb upstairs, all inch-thick dust and empty, echoey rooms. Gnomes don’t care too much for air twixt them and their earth.’

The huge ginger tom growled, subjecting Tavish to the same evil-feline stare it had me. Either it didn’t like Tavish talking about its master, or maybe a giant Spider-Man looked like a tasty banquet. Tavish snorted, baring his teeth at it. The cat decided its paws needed cleaning.

I huffed. Figured Tavish would be more intimidating than me. ‘So if there’s nothing to be found, what’s next to investigate?’

His gills closed as if in defeat. ‘’Tis the nature of others to die.’ He plucked a slowly wriggling slug off the silver-foiled potato, held it up. ‘All of them live too short a life: slugs, garden fairies, humans, even the lesser fae.’ He dropped the slug into the tea then raised his eyes to mine; his were now a solid murky grey. ‘You’re nae but a youngster, doll, but you’ll discover it soon enough. They’re nae like us, the rest all fadetoo easily.’

His words seeped into my heart like acid trickling through half-healed cracks. My friend Grace had died. She’d sacrificed herself to save me. I missed her . . . and every day suffered the loss and pain and anger that she was gone too soon. Tavish’s eyes carried the same suffering. I’d never seen him like this.

It pushed my worries about the gnome away and I reached out, grasping his hand. ‘Who did you lose?’

He blew out a soft sigh. ‘Och, ’tis nothing, doll. ’Tis maudlin, I am, for nae other reason than the wee dead mannie here, taken afore his time.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s more than that.’

He looked down at our joined fingers then nodded as if he’d come to a decision. ‘We’re nae any closer to finding the way to release the fae’s fertility.’

Trepidation fluttered in my stomach. When I’d recovered the fae’s stolen fertility it was trapped inside a sapphire pendant. I’d given the pendant to my friend Sylvia, a dryad, for safekeeping, and now she and Ricou, her naiad partner, were expecting the first full-blood fae in eighty years. They were ecstatic.

The rest of the lesser fae not so much.

Oh, they were overjoyed for the coming baby (though some weren’t happy about its mix), but with the fae’s fertility still trapped in the pendant no one else could conceive without wearing the thing and, being a cautious lot, no one expected Sylvia to take the pendant off until after her baby was born. The practicalities of the situation were awkward. Much more terrifying was the threat the pendant could be lost or stolen again, condemning them all to die.

Tavish squeezed my hand, expression intense. ‘You’re the key to sorting it all, doll, you ken you always have been.’

Yeah, and didn’t I know it. It was my sidhe queen grandmother, Clíona, who’d laid the original curse – that they should also know the grief in her heart –on London’s fae eighty-odd years ago, in revenge for the fae not protecting her mortal son from the vampires. Later, in a fit of remorse, Clíona had secretly ‘borrowed’ the fae’s fertility (evidently her feelings of remorse only went so far) in an attempt to break the curse by having another child. My mother.

Long story short. My mother’s birth didn’t break the curse, and as a result of Clíona’s continuing ‘attempts’ to ‘put things right’ without dropping herself in the shit big-time, the pendant with the fae’s fertility was lost. It was found just long enough to enable my conception, and then stolen.

Now, thanks in part to my family connection with it, I’d recovered the pendant.

It should have been the happy ending everyone wanted. Trouble was the pendant carried only half of the spell trapping the fertility and before the fertility could be released, the other half still had to be found. Until it was, Clíona’s original curse was just on hold, not broken. All the fae had to go on was a riddle from the Morrígan:

That which was taken, must be recovered.

That which is lost, must be found.

That which is sundered, must be joined.

Half-arsed as it was, the riddle wasn’t hard to work out: the fertility had been taken, and was now recovered. The rest of the trap was lost, we had to find it and join the two halves together then, hey presto, the fae’s fertility would be restored. Except no one knew what the other half of the trap was, never mind whereit was. Just once it would be great if the goddess-in-the-know had handed over specifics like a picture, or maybe even a map with a big red X marking the spot. But the Morrígan obviously hadn’t been feeling that helpful. So Tavish and the rest of London’s fae had been searching, magically and mundanely, to find it. So far all they’d found was a big fat nothing.

Of course the sensible thing would be to ask Clíona what they were looking for. Only sense doesn’t come into it when all the parties involved have been refusing even to acknowledge each other for more than half a century. I’d have asked her myself if not for the fact I was ‘an abominable stain on her royal sidhe bloodline’ and she was determined to be rid of me. That she hadn’t succeeded in killing me off yet was due in no small part to Tavish. Something else I owed him for.

I frowned at him. ‘Thought you said you’d had some foretelling that if I helped search I could screw things up; that the fae’s fertility could end up trapped or lost permanently, and if that happened the curse would never be broken?’

‘Aye, I did.’

‘What’s changed then?’ I asked.

‘Nae a thing, doll.’

‘So why now?’

‘We’re running out of ideas.’ Frustration turned his beads black.

‘So you’re prepared to risk me helping, even though it could all go wrong?’

‘Aye, but only in a small way. One I dinna think will cause any harm.’

I took a swig of water as dread settled like iron chains over my shoulders. I didn’t want to get sucked back into it all again. But if I was honest, the fae’s fertility problems weren’t something I could or even should turn my back on. It was my family who’d started the whole ‘stolen fertility’ ball rolling, way back when. And I wasn’t the one hurting in all this. The fae were. And as Tavish said, I was the key. If he needed my help, however small—

‘Okay,’ I told him briskly. ‘What do you want me to do?’