The Bitter Seed of Magic

Malik—hell, I hadn’t even seen him until last night. But maybe I had been overdoing it on the donations. It was something to think about later, but— ‘And even if you did, it’s still none of your business.’

‘I’m your boss, Gen, so it is my business if you can’t do your job because you’re too weak.’

Damn. ‘It always comes back to that, doesn’t it?’ I tried to ignore the hurt, furious that I hadn’t even seen it coming this time, and dug out my Spellcrackers.com ID card, grabbed his hand and slapped it on his palm. ‘I resign,’ I said. ‘As of now.’

He looked down in shock for a moment, then he held the ID card back out to me. ‘I’m sorry, Gen. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No, you shouldn’t.’ I glared at the ID card. I loved my job.

‘I’m worried about you, that’s all,’ he said, sounding defensive. He grabbed my hand, put the card in my shaking palm. ‘Look, take it back.’

I hesitated, wanting to curl my fingers round the thin bit of plastic … but I didn’t want my job held to ransom every time I did something he didn’t like.

‘Don’t do this, Gen,’ Finn pleaded, ‘not over some sucker. He doesn’t care about you; all he’s doing is using you.’

No, he isn’t—it was them—London’s fae, Clíona, the goddess—they were the ones using me, or wanting to anyway, with the damned fertility curse egging them on. But Finn was one of the good guys. My fingers started to curl—

— and something sharp tugged inside me, made me almost scream with pleasure—magic.

I shot a look at Finn, caught a spark of emerald in the deep moss-green of his eyes, and realised he’d done it deliberately. Anger flashed white-hot: I’d had enough of everyone trying to force me to do what they wanted.

I dropped the card, then turned and walked towards the limo, ducked my head and climbed inside.

Victoria Harrier got in after me. ‘Are you ready to go?’ she asked calmly.

I nodded. The door clicked shut, cutting out Finn’s calls to come back. Within seconds the limo was moving, and we were enveloped in quiet, air-conditioned luxury. Outside the tinted windows, London seemed far away. Tears pricked the back of my eyes and I swallowed down the ache in my throat. Time enough for a pity party later.

After the killer was found and the curse was cracked.

Chapter Twelve

‘Was that a good idea, resigning like that, Ms Taylor?’ Victoria Harrier asked a few moments later, breaking the silence.

I stopped staring blindly out of the window and finally noticed the inside of the limo. Victoria Harrier sat kitty-corner across from me on the back seat. The usual limo bar area had been replaced with a James Bond-style mobile office: a couple of high-end laptops, a ‘does-everything’ printer, three telephones on cradles and various other gadgets sat next to neat piles of stationary and files. I looked: Buffer spells protected every electrical item. More spell-crystals were stuck to the doors and the opaque smoked-glass screen that partitioned off the driver: no doubt for privacy. It was all just as fancy—and expensive—as Finn suspected.

‘If you’re worried about your fee, I’m good for it’—sooner or later—‘but since you’re Malik al-Khan’s lawyer, he’s probably already guaranteed it.’ I recalled my earlier suspicions. ‘Although I am curious about why a witch is working for a vampire—I thought the Witches’ Council’s ancient tenets forbade it?’

‘I’m your lawyer, Ms Taylor.’ She pressed a button and a table slid out in front of her. She reached for one of the laptops and powered it up. ‘I’ve never worked for Mr al-Khan. I haven’t met him, or spoken to him, and I hope I never do. I detest vampires and everything about them.’

I looked at her, amazed. ‘Then why did Sanguine Lifestyles hire you?’

‘You have my services because I’m one of the best criminal defence lawyers in Britain,’ she said briskly. ‘I have excellent contacts within the justice establishment, and I have quite some influence within the Witches’ Council, something I was able to use to your advantage when it came to dealing with DI Crane.’

‘Yeah, I get that,’ I said, ‘and I never expected you’d be anything less. But then, I thought Malik was paying your bill.’

‘Sanguine Lifestyles approached one of my colleagues,’ she said, her fingers tapping the keys. ‘My colleague is a first-rate lawyer, and he does a tremendous amount of very lucrative work for the vampires. He mentioned the job, and I convinced him to pass it on to me. My reputation is as good—maybe even better—than my colleague’s, and once I’d explained the circumstances to him, he was happy to agree.’

‘What circumstances?’ I asked flatly, wondering whether I should be worried that my lawyer had shanghaied me when she clearly realised I didn’t detest vampires quite as much as she did.

She turned the laptop around. The screen showed a smiling family portrait: an attractive man—the father, presumably—in his mid-forties, delicate-looking blonde wife probably in her late twenties or early thirties (going by her kids), although she looked younger. Three boys, I guessed around ten, nine, and eight, all with their dad’s brown hair and serious smile, a pale, waif-like girl of about seven with curling blonde hair like her mother’s, another child, maybe three years old, with a wild crown of brown curls, and a very obvious bump under Mum’s clingy dress. Five and a half kids seemed like half a dozen too many to me, but then, I didn’t even want one, so who was I to know?

‘My son Oliver, his wife Ana and their children: Charles, Edward, Andrea, James and little Henry,’ she said fondly. Oliver bore such a distinct resemblance to her that her words were more confirmation than anything else. It also confirmed that as the son of a witch, Oliver was a wizard.

‘Nice-looking family,’ I said, waiting with apprehension for the tale that obviously went with the picture.

‘My daughter-in-law, Ana is a faeling,’ she said. ‘Her mother was a water fae.’

Damn. The wife was a faeling, which meant the kids were too, and all of them susceptible to the curse. I studied the picture again: there didn’t appear to be a pair of gills, a flipper or a fishy eye in sight, so she and the kids seemed to have inherited more human genes than fae. My dread went up another notch as I wondered which one had fallen victim to the vamps.

‘When Ana was fourteen,’ Victoria Harrier carried on, touching the screen with a gentle fingertip, ‘her mother disappeared, on the way home from work one night. She was found in the Thames three weeks later.’

‘Vampires,’ I said redundantly.

‘Yes. I looked up the police report later. It was horrific reading. There were at least six of them; they drained her dry, then tossed her away like an empty drink can.’ She looked down, clasping her hands together as she composed herself for a minute, then carried on, ‘Ana understandably went a little wild after that, substituting anger for her grief, except—’ She stopped, and drew in a calming breath. She smoothed her skirt down over her knees, then resumed talking. ‘You know about the curse, Ms Taylor, so you can imagine how well a fourteen-year-old’s attempt at fighting back turned out.’

Actually, I could, and I was amazed Ana had not only survived, but had ended up with a husband and a large brood of kids. I’d have bet on her living a short, painful life as some vamp’s blood-slave. Maybe she’d been lucky.

‘Oliver—my son—found Ana in one of those blood-brothels in Sucker Town.’ Her lip curled, although I don’t think she realised it. ‘Blood-houses, I think they call them. She was sixteen. She’d been there more than two years by then. Oliver’s very quixotic in nature. He set out to save this beautiful, sweet, damaged girl; he got her out of Sucker Town, into rehab at the HOPE clinic, and then of course he fell head over heels in love with her. A year later they were married.’ She smiled proudly at the laptop screen. ‘That was taken not long ago to mark their ninth wedding anniversary.’

‘The vamps at the blood-house just let her go?’ I exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Of course,’ she said, closing the laptop with a smug snap. ‘Oliver was working with the law firm responsible for updating the licensing laws for vampire premises. He didn’t give the owners of the blood-house any choice in the