The Shifting Price of Prey [4]

by Suzanne McLeod

  ‘Okay,’ I said, resolving it would be done in the eight hours or less. I was going to make sure of it. That timescale would see us out of here at around ten. Plenty of opportunity after that for an ‘unofficial’ visit to the ambassador, if Hugh authorised it, to see if there was any way I could help the kidnap victims. And still leave me enough time to rush home and get ready for my ‘date’ with Malik.

  ‘I’d better get on with it, then.’ I gave Mary a determined smile, grabbed an empty crystal and smacked my hand on the nearest box.

  ‘Great. I’ll go and check on the rest of the girls,’ she said, then strode off down the hall.

  Seven and a half hours later, I sighed in relief as I picked up the tape-cutter knife and opened the last box.

  Something white zoomed out to hover in front of my face.

  A tarot card.

  I snatched up the tape-cutter and ran my finger along its serrated edge. Blood welled, scenting the air with copper and honey, and I pressed the bloodied tip to the blank card. The little mouth latched on, sucking up like a starved vamp. Like before, it tickled, but didn’t hurt. Unlike before, I stayed silent until the mouth stopped feeding.

  The image appeared on the card. A tall, thin minaret tower, with a covered lookout encircling its top, watching over a building with a shining gold-domed roof. At the building’s base, tiny figures were running around in panic as they tried to keep from being barbecued by the flames and lightning shooting down from the night sky.

  The sixteenth card: the Tower. Symbolising change, crisis, and chaos. Unsurprisingly, as the building depicted was the minaret at London’s Central Mosque, the one near Regent’s Park, where the Bangladeshi ambassador was praying for the safe return of his wife and child. Not that I needed the card to tell me the ambassador was in trouble. But the card did tell me that he and the kidnap victims’ all had something to do with finding the fae’s lost fertility.

  Now that was surprising, shocking even. But before I had chance to process the idea, the little mouth stopped feeding.

  Heart thudding with anticipation, I repeated my original question. ‘Tell me how to find that which is lost, and how to join that which is sundered, to release the fae’s fertility from the pendant and restore it back to them as it was before it was taken.’

  One of the tiny figures jumped out of the card to land on the stack of leaflet boxes. It was the ambassador in his crumpled business suit and orange and black striped tie.

  ‘He knows! He will tell you! For a price! The beasts are coming! They come for you!’

  Right. Nothing new there. Maybe time for another open question. ‘What does the Emperor want with me?’

  ‘He seeks Janan!’

  Hmm, a nice specific answer, just not an overly informative one. Still, a name was good. ‘Who is Janan? Where do I find Janan?’

  ‘Janan is Beloved of Malak al-Maut! Janan will come to you!’

  Janan will come to me? ‘Who is Malak al-Maut? When will Janan come to me? Why does the Emperor seek Janan?’

  ‘Malak al-Maut is to be revered. Janan will come when the time is nigh! The Emperor seeks to use Janan!’

  Revered? Time is nigh? Sounded way too End Of The World for my liking, especially with all the fire and lighting shooting through the sky. ‘How does the Emperor intend to use Janan?’

  A jagged fork of lightning struck the minaret, setting the mosque on fire and illuminating a huge (compared to the rest of the card’s tiny figures) wolf standing in the shadows. The wolf stalked to the edge of the card, the whites of its human eyes stark in its grey-brown furred face, and growled, the sound raising the hair on my nape. The ambassador turned and fled back into the card, rushing straight into the heart of the small inferno. The wolf – werewolf – chased him.

  And the card flared into bright flames then exploded into ashes that dissipated into the ether.

  Fifty minutes later, my taxi rumbled to a halt at the entrance to London’s Central Mosque.

  I peered out of the window and was relieved to see that the mosque wasn’t on fire and that the golden dome was shining serenely against a backdrop of twilit grey sky, unmarred by shooting flames or jagged forks of lightning. Not that I’d really expected any of that, but it had crossed my mind that the ambassador and the mosque might be under a physical attack rather than a metaphorical one.

  Of course, that could all change now I was here.

  The word from Hugh, via Mary, when I’d asked if I could talk to the ambassador, had been that the diplomatic situation was too delicate without it being fully authorised by someone much higher up the food chain, and then they’d want to know why. Which meant filling them in on the tarot cards and the fae’s trapped fertility. Something I was pretty sure the fae would object to. I got the unspoken message. If I wanted to find out what the ambassador and his missing wife and child had to do with the fae’s problems, I was ostensibly on my own. Plausible deniability meant that if my visit ended with the shit hitting the fan, the only one it would stick to was me.

  So I’d skipped out of the Harley Street crime scene and grabbed the taxi here, giving Mary the excuse (that she could repeat, if need be) I had to rush for a date.

  It wasn’t a lie. I did have a date – at midnight, with Malik.

  And I did have to rush. I checked the time – ten forty: I had an hour and twenty minutes. It should be enough time to have an ambassadorial chat, head home, get ready and then walk to the Blue Heart vamp club in Leicester Square. Only knowing my luck and London’s traffic, it probably wasn’t.

  I offered the driver an extra tenner on top to let me use his phone. After a brief haggle, he agreed one handsfree call for twenty quid; not that he wasn’t trusting, or was trying to rip me off, of course. Oh no, he was just worried my magic touch would nix his phone.

  Yeah, and trolls keep cats as pets.

  I gave him the number and we both listened for the pickup.

  ‘Malik al-Khan.’

  My heart gave its usual leap at the sound of his remote, not-quite-English accent.

  ‘Hi,’ I said brightly, conscious of the driver’s avid curiosity (which I suspected was another reason he’d refused to hand over his phone). ‘It’s me. I just wanted to let you know I’ve had an urgent appointment come up, so may end up running a bit late for our meeting at midnight.’

  There was a pause and I suddenly wondered if I should’ve given him a heads up that ‘me’ meant me, or if I was going to end up embarrassed when Malik asked who was calling. Relief flashed through me as he said, ‘Genevieve,’ then continued in a slightly perplexed tone, ‘Why are you calling from another’s phone?’

  ‘Mine’s fried,’ I said, ‘so the taxi driver’s letting me use his. For a fee. Handsfree,’ I finished flatly, partly as a tacit warning, but also as the bitch in me wanted to see the disappointment in the driver’s eyes.

  ‘That is . . . generous of him.’ The thread of amusement in Malik’s cool voice almost surprised a snort from me. ‘Where is this urgent appointment?’

  ‘London’s Central Mosque. It’s in connection with the situation we discussed the other night.’

  ‘Then thank you for letting me know, Genevieve. I will see you later.’

  The phone went dead.

  I blinked. I’d been sort of thinking about asking for his help, like maybe he could send out a search party if I was more than an hour late. Evidently that wasn’t to be. Still, at least he knew where I was. And why. Which was some sort of failsafe. And my own disconcertion at the call’s quick end was nothing compared to the driver’s dissatisfaction. No doubt he’d been hoping for some juicy gossip to sell to the papers.

  But I’d be stupid to rely only on Malik as a backup, so, after another haggle, I grudgingly gave the driver sixteen pounds and thirty-nine pence (the rest of my cash) and he sent a text to Tavish for me:

  T no 3 appeared. Am at LC Mosque, Regent’s Park on spec. All connected somehow. Will ring b4 midnight. If not, come find me.

  Backup me
ssage sent, I hitched my backpack over my shoulder, hopped out and waited until the money-grubbing taxi driver had driven away. Then I pulled out a grey pashmina I’d liberated from a cloak cupboard at the plastic surgeon’s (no doubt abandoned from last winter) and covered my head. Not only was it respectful, but people tend to ignore what they expect to see. With luck, it would get me far enough into the mosque to find the ambassador, before his henchmen caught my scent and tried to stop me.

  I walked through the mosque’s entrance gates and followed the short path through the near-hundred-foot-high archway and up the few steps into the wide expanse of paved courtyard. A string of open arches to my right showed a covered corridor leading to the main door; the other sides of the courtyard were watched over by rows of tall, arched windows, their glass plain. The whole building was a mix of blocky sixties concrete architecture married to the traditional patterns of Islam. It didn’t make anything pretty, but it was solid and imposing. The courtyard lights were bright enough to banish most of the shadows without bathing the space in the glare of spotlights. The place was almost empty of people but was filled with the same quiet, weighty peace that infuses most places of worship. A certainty of faith in a higher power. Allah might not be my god, but, nonetheless, his presence was felt here.

  As was the ambassador.

  He was near the mosque’s main door, huddled in a patch of shadow, hemmed in by a male and female. Briefly I wondered where his henchies were, and why they’d left him alone, then checked out the couple. The male was mid-twenties, tall enough to loom over the shorter ambassador, with the black curly hair and dark complexion of the Mediterranean. The female was in her late teens and petite, a pretty dark-eyed brunette with hair that waved over her shoulders, but unlike her Mediterranean pal, her skin was almost vamp pale. The male was dressed in a vest, shorts and flip-flops, clothes not entirely out of place in midsummer in London. The girl was also in flip-flops, legs bare, but then things got odd. Her top half was draped in a hip-length fur jacket more suited to the depths of a Russian winter.

  Even without the jacket’s out-of-season strangeness, its colour would’ve snagged my attention. It was grey-brown; the same shade as the Emperor’s werewolves on his website picture. And the werewolves on the tarot cards. So was this female a werewolf? Wearing a wolf, or even a werewolf-skin coat? If she was, it seemed to be verging on cannibalistic to me, but hey, what did I know?

  Nothing for sure, other than that the Tower tarot card had led me here and showed the ambassador being chased by a werewolf. So whatever was going on had to do with the fae’s fertility, the Emperor, and the ambassador’s kidnapped wife and child. But however I joined the dots, I couldn’t figure out what picture they made.

  I kept my head down and glided behind a pillar so I could see without being seen, frustrated that I couldn’t cast a Listening spell, or at least chance getting near enough to hear without spooking them. Though, really, one look at the ambassador’s face told me he wasn’t getting good news, while the confident calm of the couple said they were entirely happy with whatever was being discussed . . . The female seemed to be doing all the talking . . . a ransom maybe? Except ransom demands weren’t usually delivered in person, were they? Something to ask Hugh’s negotiator. Later. For now, I watched and sent out a careful ping with my Spidey senses.

  All three hit me as human.

  Damn. My gut still said the girl, and probably the male with her, were werewolves, but then I’d never met any, so maybe I couldn’t tell. Not a particularly comforting thought when I was used to knowing who was what, no matter what shape they wore.

  After a minute or two’s more quiet chat, the girl held her hand out, offering something to the ambassador.

  He stared for a long moment, hope and fear warring in his expression, then held his own palm out.

  She dropped whatever she was holding with a satisfied smile, and I caught a glint of gold.

  He clenched his fist, nodded, then backed away. He quickly retreated through the entrance into the mosque’s interior.

  The girl turned her satisfied smile towards the tall dark male, lifted a pale hand to caress his cheek, then the pair headed for a high archway that led out of the courtyard to the far side of the mosque. If I remembered right, there was a gate there that opened out on to the road.

  Indecision nipped at me.

  Did I go and talk to the ambassador as I’d originally intended, find out what he was hiding, and what the werewolf girl had given him?

  Or did I chase the werewolfy pair?

  Interrogating the ambassador was the sensible, safe option.

  Only he wasn’t going anywhere.

  The werewolves were.

  But chasing after a couple of werewolves on my own was, well, chasing after the big bad wolves and asking for trouble, especially since I didn’t have my damn phone on me so couldn’t call for help. But if they were the Emperor’s werewolves, then the fur-coated female and her curly-haired pal could lead me straight to the vamp himself. Maybe even to the kidnap victims. And just because I was following the werewolfy pair didn’t mean I had to follow them all the way to their hideout. Or that I was going to be in danger. If things started looking iffy I could turn tail; after all, I knew how to run. Plus, if it came to a fight, well, so long as the pair didn’t take their half-and-half beast form they were as vulnerable to injury and death as any other human or animal.

  And I had my ace up my sleeve, or rather my sword in my ring— Ascalon.

  But first I needed to leave a few breadcrumbs for my kelpie backup.

  I bit at my finger, the one with the nearly healed scab from where I’d given blood to the last tarot card, and touched a drop of honey-scented blood to the pillar.

  Then I hightailed it after the werewolves.

  The archway they’d passed through led me to another, smaller, paved area, some summer-browned grass, and, as I’d thought, to a short flight of steps and a gate to the Hanover Gate road. Hoping the furry couple hadn’t jumped into waiting transport, I stuffed the pashmina into my backpack, jogged quietly down the steps, took a moment to leave my blood on the gate as I closed it and then checked both directions.

  Relief swam through me as I saw the werewolfy pair were nearly at the end of the road, on foot, and heading towards Regent’s Park.

  I went after them, not worried about being seen or heard; there were enough folk around and, even at this late hour, the traffic was as busy as ever, not to mention the noisy whistles, clanks and excited shouts drifting over from the Carnival Fantastique in the heart of the park. I kept far enough back that I guessed I was out of scenting distance, in case they could do that in their human forms, while cursing my lack of knowledge about werewolves in general.

  The pair turned right on to Outer Circle, the road which runs all the way round the park, and moved at a fast walk until they reached the temporary car park set up for Carnival visitors. For a moment I thought they planned to pick up a car, or head for the Carnival crowds, but instead they took the path past the kiddies’ boating pond and over the two-step bridge to the far side of the boating lake. I hung back as they reached the vehicle-turning space before one of the park’s large and exclusive private houses, watching to see which way they went next.

  They took the south path.

  It ran along the curving shore of the boating lake, and for a good long stretch had dense bushes to either side, and was pretty much deserted at this time of night. A perfect place for an ambush. Was this their intended route? Or had they twigged they were being followed?

  ‘Okay,’ I murmured, ‘do I call it a bust and head back to the mosque and the ambassador, or keep tailing you?’

  The ‘ambush likely’ path met a crossroads at a point further on where they could choose to head up to the Carnival, go straight on across the park and ultimately out of it into Primrose Hill village. Or they could turn and cross the bridge towards the Inner Circle, the area containing the Queen Mary’s Gardens, a whole heap of the park’s
utility and college buildings, and two more large, exclusive private houses. Houses which were just the type a vamp with delusions of imperialism would pick for his temporary residence.

  If the houses were hosting the Emperor and his gang, then they would take the bridge at the crossroads. Only I wasn’t stupid enough to head down the creepy, ambush likely path after them.

  But I didn’t need to. I could go the long way round through the more open parkland, which would make it easier to see anyone coming and, if I sprinted, still get to the crossroads before them and lie in wait. Yeah, it risked losing them but tailing them was looking more and more like a long shot anyway.

  ‘But first,’ I muttered, ‘a little added insurance.’

  I fished inside my T-shirt, hooked out the chain I was wearing and pulled it over my head. The tiny blue-glass bottle that had contained the Morpheus Memory Aid potion dangled from the chain like a pendant. I’d salt-washed the bottle and filled it with Tavish’s disgusting werewolf repellent. Not that I was planning on anointing myself with the stuff – it stank enough that everyone, including werewolves with sensitive noses, would know I was about – but the bottle was fragile enough that it was easily broken. If anyone came at me with nefarious notions, werewolf or not, I’d crush the bottle and even if the obnoxious smell didn’t drive them away, it would give me a couple of seconds’ distraction.

  And a second was all I needed to release Ascalon.

  I placed another ‘I went this way’ drop of blood on the ground. Then, gripping the tiny bottle in my left hand, its neck chain wrapped round my wrist, and holding my right hand with Ascalon’s ring at the ready, I started running, sprinting over the summer-dry ground as silently as possible.

  The bushes on my right grew denser as I raced past, leeching away the light and shifting with amorphous grey shadows that seemed to be keeping pace with me. Shadows that reminded me of the animal I’d seen on Primrose Hill the other night, the one my Morpheus-Memory-enhanced dream had shown me. My mind told me it was down to my imagination, to being hyper-aware of my surroundings, and that the grey shadows I kept glimpsing out the corner of my eye, and the hair-raising rustles and snaps I could almost hear coming from the thick vegetation, really weren’t a pair of huge werewolves licking their lips as they loped alongside me.