The Bitter Seed of Magic

And with a mounting sense of déjà vu, I followed Hugh to the large white sand and salt circle drawn in the centre of the cave-like room.

In the centre of the circle was the new victim. Unlike Sally Redman, the dead raven faeling, this girl was lying spreadeagled on her back, and naked. She also looked younger, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. I wanted to cover her up and give her back her dignity, but that wouldn’t help find who’d done this to her. It wouldn’t make them pay. I pressed my lips together and studied her. Inside the circle drawn by the police was another one, marked out in red chalk, and inside that was a red chalk pentagram. She’d been laid out with some precision on top of the pentagram, her head to one of the five points, her limbs spread out towards the other four. Around the inner pentagon formed by the crossing of the lines were more red chalkmarks, half-obscured by her body: a joined chain of five rings. My heart lurched with dismay as I made them out, and instinctively I touched Grace’s pentacle at my throat.

I looked up at Hugh and murmured, ‘The pentacle drawn underneath her matches mine.’

He nodded. ‘I recognised the design, Genny. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it. Someone wants you involved—or implicated.’

I swiped away a couple of tears. Damn it, I really needed to find out why I kept crying and sort it—soon. ‘Is it possible someone’s using the girls to try and crack the curse? Or that they want you to think that I am?’

‘It appears sensible to think there’s some connection, Genny,’ he agreed, ‘but it’s not necessarily anything metaphysical.’

‘Why?’

‘The pentagram looks to be ritualistic,’ Hugh rumbled, ‘but Constable Martin assures me it isn’t. The points don’t face in any direction that could call power, and the design has enough confidence in its execution that she doesn’t think it’s sloppy work. We both feel that the pentagram is there to draw our attention to the curse and to you.’

‘Well, if someone’s trying to implicate me, then there’s always your boss,’ I muttered, looking around. ‘Speaking of DI Crane, shouldn’t she be here trying to remove me from her crime scene?’

‘Detective Inspector Crane is … no longer in charge of this case,’ he rumbled, his voice almost too low for me to hear.

‘Really?’ I gave him a surprised look. ‘What happened?’

‘She’s taking time off to deal with some personal problems.’

I wondered if the ‘time off’ was entirely her decision. But why Witch-bitch Helen Crane wasn’t here didn’t matter; not having her breathing down my neck was good news for me. But even without my own evil witch nemesis around, the other witchy occupants of the cave-like mortuary were still watching me closely enough to send wary chills down my spine. Not to mention that while we’d been talking, Constable Martin with her neat bun and just-kissed lips had walked round to stand on the opposite side of the circle. With her was another, older witch. She was giving me the once-over with sharp hazel eyes, and was too flamboyantly dressed in flowing fortune-teller chic (the fringes of small silver coins on her skirt and shawl were full-moon bright with spells) to be police. And since her presence had been shouting ‘power’ at my inner radar from the moment she’d come in, I was betting she was from the Witches’ Council.

Ignoring her, and the rest of the witchy crew, I turned to Hugh. ‘So, do you want me to check this victim to see if she’s tagged with any spells?’

‘Please, Genny.’

I looked. It was almost an anticlimax to see the same two spells as before: the dirty-white silly-string spell which cocooned the girl’s body, and underneath it, the faint out-of-focus waver of a Glamour spell.

‘Looks like the same spells that were on Sally the raven faeling,’ I said.

‘That’s what Constable Martin thought, but I wanted your opinion too.’ Hugh laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you think you can you remove the spells intact, Genny?’

I looked at the salt and sand circle. It was for containment, plain and simple, with no added extras.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘so long as I can do things my way, and I don’t have to worry about anyone mixing silver or anything else in the circle under the pretext of Health and Safety.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ Hugh said reassuringly. ‘What do you need?’

‘The main spell seems to be some sort of preservative/stasis effort. The raven faeling’s injuries didn’t appear until after I removed it yesterday; it was only then she started to bleed. So the first thing’s a doctor.’ The poor girl needed someone better than me to resuscitate her if she turned out to be not as dead as she looked.

Hugh indicated the flamboyant hazel-eyed witch. ‘Witch Juliet Martin here is our official doctor on call. She has both the necessary medical and magical expertise.’

Witch Martin came around the circle and held out her hand to me. ‘Please, call me Juliet.’

I hesitated a moment—most folk with magical ability don’t do skin-to-skin contact, for fear of being inadvertently (or otherwise) tagged with a spell—then took her hand. Her shake was firm. ‘Genny Taylor,’ I said redundantly, since she obviously knew who I was. I looked enquiringly across the circle at Constable Martin.

‘My daughter, Mary,’ Juliet confirmed with a warm smile.

Nice to know we were keeping it all in the family.

I narrowed my eyes at Juliet. Time to test just how accommodating she was going to be. ‘Can you cope if I put the spell in a plastic bucket?’

She gave me another warm smile. ‘Indeed I can, Ms Taylor.’ She sent one of the WPCs off to fetch one.

Now for the important part.

I took a deep breath, stepped into the circle and crouched near the girl’s head. Her blue eyes stared sightlessly up, for a moment reminding me of Malik, wrapped in the rug under my bed, and I briefly wondered what I was going to do about him and his orders, then I dismissed him. Time enough to deal with the beautiful vampire when he woke up for the night; right now I needed to concentrate on the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde in front of me, who looked much too young to die. Of course, that could just be her Glamour spell; underneath that she was probably something else entirely. But like Sally, the dead raven faeling, I couldn’t tell. However the Glamour spell had been stirred, it had some way of camouflaging her essence as well as her physical appearance.

The more I stared at her, the more she looked oddly familiar. I frowned, trying to place where I’d seen her —

‘She’s in the reality show filmed at Morgan Le Fay College,’ Juliet said as she joined me in the circle. She put down her doctor’s bag, then carefully tucked her flouncy skirt underneath her and crouched on the other side of the girl’s body. ‘Her name is Miranda Wheater. She’s in the sixth form.’

I clicked where I’d seen Miranda before: on the front of the glossy magazine Sylvia had shown me before the Librarian had taken back the fae’s curse-cracking books. The girl—or witch—had been in a jacuzzi, complete with a fancy cocktail and half a dozen older men, and the headline had shouted something about a curse, which was obviously why the fae had added the magazine to their collection.

I looked from Juliet to Hugh. ‘I take it someone’s checked on Miranda’s whereabouts?’

‘Miranda is thankfully alive and well and at the college,’ Juliet assured me. ‘This child is someone else. There has been a spate of this type of appearance-altering spell, where the wearer has chosen a figure in the public eye who hasn’t given their consent to any doppelgänger spells. The Witches’ Council has received a number of complaints about them. While it is not as important as finding out who is responsible for this poor girl’s death, finding which witch has been casting the spells might provide us with some valuable information in both cases.’

‘Which witch for which’ spell made me think of Ricou and his Johnny Depp Glamour. I filled Hugh in, and suggested Ricou might be able to help. The WPC returned with my plastic bucket, and Hugh sent her back out to fetch him.

‘How do you intend to do this, Genny?’ Juliet asked.

‘Can you see what looks like thick silly-string all over her?’ I asked, lifting a strand. She nodded, which was a small relief; not everyone saw the magic the same way. ‘Then it’s probably easier if you just watch.’