The Bitter Seed of Magic

‘I do not know, child.’

Great. I was either here at the whim of Miss Looney Tunes, which could mean I was stuck here, or The Mother, which might be much worse. There was only one way to find out. I took a deep breath, arranged my face in what I hoped was a suitably deferential smile (just in case I was addressing The Mother), and strode over to Angel. ‘I really would like to go back now, please,’ I said, ‘if you could arrange it? Or if there’s something you think I should know, then please could you tell me?’

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.

Someone really needed to buy her a digital camera.

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 …

Chapter Six

‘The 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.

‘You will stop this. You will give them a new life.’

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