The Bitter Seed of Magic

reassuringly.

Relief filled me, then Bandana being first on the scene clicked in my mind. His presence wasn’t likely to be a coincidence. Ignoring the fear that sliced through my gut, I shot him a disgusted look. ‘You’ve been following me, haven’t you?’

‘No one ever notices a tree, unless we want them to.’ His cape of branches rustled proudly. ‘Not even those who stand in our shadow.’ He spread his arms out and turned a slow circle, magic dripping from his fingertips like raindrops from twigs. ‘Something else you should thank me for, sidhe.’

My attempted rapist was stalking me.

I swallowed, hoping I wasn’t going to vomit again. I had to stop him.

Finn let go my hand and took a step forward, his fists clenched. ‘You and the rest were to keep your distance until the Summer Solstice, dryad. That was what was agreed.’

I had to get him to leave me alone. Just as soon as I could move without falling over.

‘That was before dead faelings started clogging up the river,’ Bandana sneered. ‘What happens if she’s next? You might be first in the queue, satyr, but snagging pole position means sod all if the sidhe’s dead. We have to protect our future.’

I needed a plan.

‘Gen’s more than capable of protecting herself most of the time, dryad,’ Finn growled, and I mentally cheered him on, ‘but if she does need help, you’d be last on her list.’

Bandana wasn’t even on the list.

I took a steadying breath and nudged Finn’s arm, telling him to stay out of it, then, moving slowly, I walked towards the dock’s handrail until I was out of sight of the press, not wanting to rely on Bandana and his Unseen spell. I looked down at the river—the tide was in, and the water eddied brown and murky just below the dock—then turned to face Bandana. ‘I want you to take a message to Lady Isabella,’ I said calmly. Lady Isabella wasn’t high on my list of BFFs, but since she was Head Dryad and Bandana’s graft-mother, I knew he’d pay attention.

He strode over and stood next to the railing, legs apart, branches flexing, leering down at me. ‘What’s the message, sidhe?’

‘Tell her I don’t want you or any of her other thugs following me.’

He made a noise like branches creaking in the wind: laughing. ‘You forget I just saved your life or something, sidhe?’

Talk about bigging himself up! My life hadn’t ever been in danger, not that I bothered to tell him that. Instead I focused on the group of uniforms by the dock and called the Stun spell from Constable Martin’s baton. She didn’t notice as the green firefly of magic shot towards me. Luckily, I caught it easily this time and held it up between us. ‘Now, I can be civilised if you think you can persuade Lady Isabella I’m serious. Or I can leave you here for her to find.’ I hit him with a ‘just give me an excuse’ look. ‘I’m easy, so it’s your choice.’

‘Lady Isabella won’t be happy if you do anything to me,’ he sneered, the tips of his whip-like branches flaring warily around him.

I shrugged, bouncing the Stun spell on my palm. ‘That’ll make two of us then, seeing as I’m so not happy right now.’

‘You’ll be even less happy if something happens to you,’ he said, keeping a watchful eye on the Stun spell, obviously calculating whether he could dodge it from this close.

‘A point I happen to agree with,’ I said matter-of-factly, ‘which is why there’s a more interesting part to my message.’

He stopped watching the spell and frowned at me.

‘So here’s the deal: I’ll agree to the dryads courting me’—his yellow eyes widened, and behind me I heard Finn stifle a groan—‘but I won’t accept you or anyone else in your gang who took part in your little “rape the sidhe” excursion. Got it?’

Bandana’s expression turned sullen for a moment, then he nodded sharply. ‘Got it, sidhe.’ He looked over my shoulder at Finn. ‘Well, satyr, seeing as the sidhe’s all hot for some real wood in her bed, looks like you’re missing more than sap in your pencil.’ He laughed, and the mocking, creaking sound was repeated by the nearby trees. ‘But hey, no hard feelings; drop by sometime and I’ll give you some tips on how to get it up.’

Anger and disgust ripped through me. He really wasn’t worth the ground he was planted in.

‘Try keeping it up like this,’ I muttered and before he could react I slapped the spell on his chest. Burned mint scorched the air as green lightning arced around him, shoving him back against the railing as it stunned him. Impulsively, I dropped to a crouch, hooked my hands behind his ankles and used his own momentum to heave him up and over the railing. The splash as he hit the water echoed through the loud buzzing in my head as my legs gave way and I collapsed onto my knees, gasping; the exertion was too much, too soon after being jerked around by The Mother. I knelt there, watching in a satisfied daze as the fast currents of the Thames whisked Bandana’s unconscious body away. Lady Isabella would still get my message, just not quite so quickly.

After a few minutes, I realised Finn was again offering me a hand. I looked up to meet his gaze.

‘Lady Isabella’s not the only one who’s not going to be happy,’ he said quietly, belying the flash of anger in his eyes.

No, she wasn’t. I wrapped my fingers round his and let him help me up. ‘He’s a willow; a trip down the river isn’t going to kill him. Unfortunately.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant, Gen.’

‘I know,’ I said, reluctantly pulling my hand from his and stepping back.

‘Why, Gen?’ A muscle twitched along his jaw, but beneath the anger, I could see the hurt, and remorse pricked at me. ‘Why did you do that, why agree to let them near you, when I’ve done everything in my power to keep them away from you? To keep you safe?’

He had. For the last five months he’d kept a gentlemanly distance from me, while managing to convince the rest of London’s fae he was my boyfriend/lover/whatever. He’d also convinced everyone to respect our privacy after the trauma of Hallowe’en and Grace’s death—‘privacy’ being a nice euphemism for: no, we weren’t going to have sex in the middle of a public fertility rite for all to witness, no matter how much they all considered that a great idea. I owed him a hell of a lot for that, and I’d find some way to repay him, but—

‘I’m sorry, Finn.’ I held my hands out. ‘I wish things were different, that we could work this out just between us, but two faelings are dead because of the curse. I’ve got to find out what’s happening and stop it. It’s time I started talking to the rest of them.’ And why the hell I hadn’t done that before now was something else I needed to find out.

‘Hell’s thorns, Gen, they’ve been desperate to talk to you. The only reason they haven’t is because every time I asked you, you said you weren’t ready to deal with them yet.’

‘I did?’ I said, astonished. Damn, there was too much that I seemed not to be doing. Almost as if it wasn’t me in control …

‘You should’ve told me you’d changed your mind.’ Finn raked his fingers through his hair, his expression troubled. ‘We could’ve organised things, kept it all on a formal basis. But now you’re going to have every dryad in London turning up on your doorstep. And they’re going to want to do more than talk. Then there’s the naiads; they’re going to send their own candidates to court you once they hear. I’ll talk to the herd Elders, see if …’

His voice faded as suspicion dragged an elusive memory from a dark hole in my mind. There was something about a … spell around my wrist? Yeah, that was it. I pushed my jacket sleeves up and looked at my arms. The right was clear. The left was patterned with a blood-coloured band of rose-shaped bruises that encircled my wrist like a monochrome tattoo. The ‘tattoo’ marked me as Malik al- Khan’s ‘property’ and protected me from other vampires. As vamps go, Malik was a good guy … although my recent memories of him were a bit on the hazy side, which was never a good sign around vamps; it probably meant he’d been using his vamp mind-mojo to make me forget what I was only now remembering. But that was a problem for later. As for his mark, well it was a convenient thing to have—if I ignored the whole ‘he hadn’t asked, and I wasn’t any sucker’s damn property’ issue. I’d got so used to it that I never even noticed it now, but as I squinted at it sideways, I found what I was looking for: the spell, hidden beneath the rose-shaped bruises. As I focused, the spell grew brighter, twisting up my forearm like the stem of a briar rose, its multitude of tiny thorns pricking painlessly into my flesh and vanishing into my