The Bitter Seed of Magic (A Spellcrackers Novel) (18 page)

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?

And then there was Ana, or Annan, Clíona’s great-granddaughter, who
was
pregnant, and whose mother Brigitta was dead because of the curse (and the vamps), and whose grandmother, Rhiannon/Angel, had suffered at the hands of London’s fae because of it. So when it came to the curse, Ana had ‘victim’ stamped all over her, even without the Morrígan appearing as a
bean nighe
. But that didn’t mean she had anything to do with the missing faelings, other than she was a faeling herself. I sipped my juice. Maybe I’d find out more when I visited Ana tomorrow for our little who’s-the-vamp chat.

There was nothing more I could do about the missing faelings until tomorrow now, other than email Hugh some questions:

Someone was annoying Her with their prayers, enough to make Her do something, so it was a clue Hugh needed to know, whether it would lead to anything or not. He was the one really investigating the poor faeling’s death, after all. Then recalling another vague suspicion I’d had, I added:

I pressed send, and hoped that The Mother’s gag clause didn’t extend to cyber-space, not that I’d put much in the email. The message disappeared, but whether it would get there . . . I sent him a text too, just in case.

I closed the computer down, then padded over to the kitchen and touched the empty cut-glass fruit bowl on the counter. The bowl’s diamond-cut facets shimmered with a sudden rainbow of colours, highlighting the engraved glyphs. I dipped my hand in . . . and an apple, painted gold, appeared as my fingers passed its edge.

‘
Symbol of fertility
,’ whispered the bowl. ‘
The forbidden fruit. The poisoned gift. The healthgiver; an apple a day keeps the vampires away
.’

I sighed, exasperated, and withdrew my hand. ‘I’ve told you,’ I muttered, ‘I hate apples.’ And magical artefacts that had their own snide opinions. The bowl had been a boon from Clíona in return for finding Angel at Hallowe’en. The magical blood-fruit it produced was the equivalent of the humans’ G-Zav – faerie methadone for the 3V infection – and while it didn’t cure my venom addiction, at least with the blood-fruit, I was the one in control. So long as I didn’t let a vamp actually stick their fangs in me.

The bowl gave a small, irritated cough, and the apple was replaced by five gleaming, silver-painted blackberries. ‘
Sacred fruit of the Goddess. Fruit of the fae. Healer of wounds. Seeds of hope and rebirth
—’

‘Yeah, okay, I get it,’ I muttered and gathered them up. The blood-fruit burst on my tongue, sweet and tart with the faint liquorice flavour of vamp venom, the juice flowing down my throat like warm blood. My libido went straight to Red Alert – which was why I usually followed the blood-fruit with a cup of cold lamb’s blood: it knocked the annoying sexual cravings on the head. But despite Sylvia’s obvious enjoyment of the blood, I wasn’t prepared to lick it off the floorboards, and the feelings would wear off by the time I got to my evening’s appointment.

And as I was running short on daylight, I needed to get a move on.

I whipped my T-shirt off, turned it inside out and put it back on, then tucked my hair into my black baseball cap with its See-Me-Not spell; my standard operating procedure when I wanted to stay below the fae’s radar. It appeared to have been working, because even with Bandana following me, no one (including Finn!) had ever mentioned my outings.

I grabbed the padded backpack with the insulated compartment from under the sink, opened the fridge, and carefully transferred the three bags of blood –
my
blood – from the middle shelf. The blood-fruit controlled my venom addiction, but like anyone infected with 3V, my body still produced much more blood than it needed. Bags were way better than leeches (the slimy sort, not the fanged sort) at getting rid of it.

Time to go to Sucker Town, make my weekly donation, and see what insider info I could glean about Malik before the beautiful, over-protective, and maybe still angry vamp got my message at sunset.

‘S
ure you want to get out ’ere, luv?’ The taxi driver took my money with a morose expression. ‘Them vamps, they ain’t like regular people. One of me mates, ’is kid got mixed up wiv ’em and ’e ended up in rehab at that ’OPE clinic. An’ I gotta tell you too, luv, that you don’t get no human cab drivers after dark ’ere in Sucker Town, just them Gold Goblin cabs. Regulations, innit.’

Sucker Town: home to the B-, C – and Scary-list London vamps, venom-junkies and blood-groupies, not to mention the occasional marauding fang-gang. Of course, between the licensing laws, the Beater goblin security force and the local vamps wanting to cash in on the same tourist money the mainstream city centre clubs were raking in, the place isn’t as dangerous as it used to be, even six or seven months ago. And thanks to Malik giving me his protection, I was now probably safer in Sucker Town – which the rest of the fae avoid like vamps shun sunlight – than in any other part of London.

I gave the taxi driver a wry smile, tucked my cap in my backpack, and hitched it on my shoulder. ‘I’m sure. But thanks for the concern.’

‘Suit yerself, luv, yer funeral,’ he called even more glumly as he drove off, leaving a fug of exhaust fumes in his wake.

‘Everyone’s a comedian,’ I murmured and turned round to face the entrance of Sucker Town’s newest, hottest vampire establishment: the Coffin Club.

I looked up at the sun, half disappeared behind the row of warehouses, and at the shadows creeping over from the other side of the quiet industrial park, and an anxious itch crawled down my spine. Instead of going in the club, I walked along the side of the building past the life-sized posters advertising the club’s vamps until I came to Darius, the vamp I’d come to see. Except he wasn’t called Darius any more, not officially, anyway, but William, as in William Wallace. In the poster he was dressed in full kilt and regalia (minus the blue face paint). He looked great, but then, the tall, tawny-haired vamp had always looked like he’d just stepped off the front of a romance novel, even when he’d been a human blood-pet.

Darius and his Moth-girl girlfriend, Sharon, had come to my rescue on All Hallows’ Eve during the demon attack. Darius survived, but sadly Sharon didn’t – but as she died, she had asked me to watch over him. I owed them both, big time, so it was an unspoken promise I was determined to keep.

Trouble was, watching over him had got complicated – and not in the way I’d thought it would. The first time I’d checked up on him, a couple of weeks after the attack, I’d come loaded up with so many defensive spells that I glowed brighter than the Christmas lights in Regent Street. Malik might have given me his protection, but even so, not taking precautions is just plain stupid. I expected the vamps to stalk me like cats scenting a mouse; instead, every one I came across tripped over their own feet and shoved each other out of the road in their panic to run away. I knew it wasn’t the spells scaring them off – vamps can’t see magic – which left me curious about exactly what Malik had done.

Darius had filled me in. Turned out, at sunset on Guy Fawkes’ Night, Elizabetta, head of the Golden Blade blood, had called together all four of London’s blood-families to witness her ascension to Oligarch and Head Fang of London’s High Table (I’d killed the last one a month earlier, so the position was vacant). Standing on the dais in the Challenge ring, surrounded by her bladesmen, Elizabetta had held her five-foot-long bronze sword aloft, then shouted for any who would oppose her to come forward. Right at the very end of the required minute’s expectant silence, just as she started to smile in triumph, her chest erupted in a spray of blood and bone, leaving a fist-sized empty hole where her heart had been; her head ripped itself from her neck,
Exorcist
-style, zoomed fifty feet straight up into the night sky and vanished; then her body combusted in white-hot flames. Within minutes her burning ashes were scattered by a nonexistent wind.

‘No one knows how Malik al-Khan did it,’ Darius had told me, wide-eyed with hero worship, ‘I mean, he weren’t there, and no one saw or felt a thing. Then he does this big appearing act on Tower Hill with her head in one hand and her heart in the other. He took half an hour to walk to the Challenge ring – they had a ’copter up filming him all the way. Elizabetta’s head was still screaming at him, right up ’til he stood on the dais and threw her head in the air and it exploded into ashes. ’Course, no one Challenged him after that.’

‘So why aren’t you worried about speaking to me?’ I asked, my thoughts swinging between stunned, impressed, and wondering uneasily if Malik’s show was all just smoke and mirrors, or if he really was that powerful.

‘I’m Blue Heart blood,’ Darius said, ‘but I’m not part of any blood-family, ’cos Rio gave me the Gift, but she never did the Oath of Fealty part of the ceremony.’

Rio, his sponsor, had given him the Gift for her own nefarious purposes, then dumped him, and since baby vamps are dependent on their masters for top-up feeds to keep their new vamp bodies alive, Darius’ immortal future was looking short and bleak – until a sorcerer took a fancy to him and turned him into a fang-pet.

The same sorcerer whose soul I’d eaten.

‘So I never swore an Oath then’ – he swept a hand through his tawny hair – ‘and I’ve never swore one to anyone else since, not even the sorcerer. No one owns me now, no one can tell me what to do any more, not even Malik al-Khan, which means I can talk to you, and he can’t do anything, ’cos I never swore I wouldn’t talk to you.’

Vamp rules and regs: they live and die by them.

‘I’m au-ton-o-mous!’ He drew the word out proudly. Not only had Darius’ stint with the sorcerer resulted in him bypassing the dependant baby vamp stage, it also gave him some backbone. Before that he’d been a ‘yes’ guy, verging on ‘victim’. Now he was proud of standing up to the one vamp everyone else was running scared of, and I was proud of him too. I silently vowed to make sure he didn’t lose his head over it like the original William Wallace.

But the next time I checked up on Darius, after Christmas, was when things got complicated. Whatever magic the sorcerer had used to keep Darius’ Gift alive had worn off, and with only six months on his vampire clock, he was too young to survive on just human blood, so he’d fallen into bloodlust. Luckily – or unluckily, depending on which way you look at it – the Moth-girls in the blood-house where Darius lived had bound him in heavy chains before he’d attacked anyone. As he wasn’t a danger to humans, none of the other vamps could legitimately rescind his Gift, but since he didn’t have a master to rescue him, and the Moths couldn’t find one to take him on, all that meant was he got the chance to die slowly in agony.

One personal blood donation later, and Darius was almost back to his old self. Turns out, my sidhe blood is as good as a master vamp’s, judging by the quick results. So now Darius is my fang-pet, and regular donations of my blood are keeping him alive and well; hence the three bags of blood sloshing around in my backpack, his usual weekly allowance. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’ve spent eleven years making sure I don’t end up a vamp’s blood-slave, my will subjugated by 3V to my master’s. Now, I might not be the slave, but I was still tied to a vamp by my blood. Having a fang-pet isn’t something I want to last for eternity, but so far I haven’t found a solution.

And I wasn’t going to, standing here worrying about going in to see him – although it wasn’t actually Darius I was worried about seeing.

I told myself to stop being a coward, and started walking back down to the Coffin Club entrance.