Faery Realms: Ten Magical Titles: Multi-Author Bundle of Novels & Novellas

by Rachel Morgan

  He was unmistakably staking out his territory, but Munro didn’t want to make it easy for him. “But not anymore.” His inflection landed somewhere between a question and a statement.

  “No,” Eilidh agreed. “Not anymore.”

  Saor slipped his hand over Eilidh’s. She seemed surprised at the gesture, but she didn’t take her hand away. “I will always be concerned for Eilidh’s welfare.”

  Munro ignored it as best he could. He had to find a way to keep his mind on the job at hand. He took off his jacket, tossed it across the back of a chair, and sighed. Work had been mundane, and he hadn’t gotten anywhere near the murder cases, except to ferret out the latest gossip.

  The two faeries waited patiently while Munro made himself more comfortable. He scrubbed his hand through his short hair. Eilidh was going away. He needed her. For the case, he told himself as quickly as the thought had formed. And she was going away to Skye, for fuck’s sake. With this…other faerie. He didn’t like it, but he could see the logic in it. She didn’t believe they could stop this blood faerie alone, so it made sense to ask for help. “When are you coming back?”

  “Soon,” she said, smiling as though she could read his conflicted emotions.

  Damn. He had no idea what soon meant to her, but he supposed it was all he could ask for.

  “Quinton,” Eilidh said. “The reason I wanted to speak to you before we left is that I asked my father some questions concerning your abilities.”

  “My what?” He knew what she was saying, but he stalled anyway. He really hadn’t given it more thought and instead just accepted that he could tell where Eilidh was all the time. The thing where he felt the life in the stone at the church and shaped the small rock? It hadn’t happened again, so he put it out of his mind, assuming it had to do with Eilidh and not him.

  “My father thinks you may be a druid,” she said.

  “A true druid,” Saor added, as though that actually explained anything.

  Munro laughed. “Aren’t those the guys that dance around at Stonehenge?” When both faeries stared at him blankly he added, “The circle of standing stones?”

  The glance that passed between the pair spoke volumes. They didn’t seem familiar with the word Stonehenge, but they knew exactly what the standing stones were. Of course, there were a couple dozen or more sites of ancient standing stones in Scotland alone. He never paid them any mind beyond a passing curiosity. They suddenly took on new possible meanings when he thought of them in terms of the faerie world, of which he knew nothing.

  “I do not know exactly what their practices are,” Eilidh said. “Although I am still quite young, having just passed my first century mark twenty years ago, I can say that I have never encountered a true druid before you. My father says it has to do with the Path of the Azure, the practice of which was outlawed by my people a thousand years ago during the Magical Amendment.”

  She’s a hundred and twenty years old? Damn. Munro nodded, but he really didn’t understand what this meant for him, if anything. It was hard to imagine himself as having abilities, as she put it. “Nothing happens except when you’re around. I just assumed it was you.”

  Eilidh shook her head. “I am not strong in the Ways of Earth, and stone is my weakest element. I could not do the things you suggest.” She paused for a moment. “Is there no one in your family with strange abilities? Although our spheres of influence are granted by the Mother and do not run in bloodlines, our strength often does. It would make sense for yours to do the same.”

  Saor stared at Munro, as though catching him in an untruth. “Stone is my primary strength. Show me.”

  Munro shrugged. “I don’t know how.”

  Eilidh said, “The rock. The one you shaped. Do you still have it?”

  He nodded and went to his bedroom to get it. When he came back, he handed it to Saor and sat down again. “I don’t know how it happened. Like I said, I thought Eilidh did it.”

  Saor turned the rock over in his hand and whispered to it. Munro saw a flicker in the grey surface that quickly dissipated. Saor met his eyes. “Find another piece of stone and bring it to me.”

  “I don’t really have anything stone that I can think of.”

  “Metal?”

  “I’m sure there’s something. Does it matter what kind of metal?”

  “No, any object of earth will show me what I need to see.”

  As he stood to do as Saor asked, Munro noted that the male faerie still seemed as arrogant and smug as before, but now he appeared interested. Munro went to the kitchen. He didn’t want to take Saor something valuable because he didn’t know what the faerie was going to do with it. He dug around in a utility drawer and found an old padlock that had once been on his father’s shed. Somewhere along the line, Munro lost the key, so the thing was stuck closed. He didn’t know why he’d kept it, but he couldn’t throw it away. Then again, his dad wouldn’t have approved of being sentimental over something as silly as an old padlock. Munro plucked it out of the drawer and took it to Saor.

  The faerie set Munro’s stone teardrop on the table and took the lock. “A simple mechanism,” he muttered to himself. He held it between his hands and within a few seconds the u-shaped shackle disengaged from the body of the lock with a loud click. Munro shook his head. That explained how the two of them got into his house so easily.

  Saor handed it to Munro. “Did you see the flows?”

  “I’m not sure,” Munro said. “I saw a spark before, when you touched the teardrop, but the lock happened too fast. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  Saor snorted with disgust. “We can hardly help you if you are going to let your mind wander like a child. I suppose by our standards, you are a child.”

  Munro refused to rise to the bait. He snapped the lock closed to see if he could do what Saor had done. He tried to focus on the metal, but it seemed so unyielding that it didn’t want to bend to his thoughts. He sighed. “I don’t think it was me that did those things, Eilidh.” He held the lock in his hand and thought about his dad. How the old man would have laughed to see his son trying to open a lock with magic.

  “It’s all right, Quinton. It may take some time.” Eilidh gave Saor a pointed look. “Even a fae child has to learn over many years to master the flows.”

  Munro liked Eilidh comparing him to a child even less than he liked Saor doing it, but he could hardly argue. She was a hundred and twenty bloody years old.

  “If,” Saor said, “he has any talent at all.”

  Eilidh pointed to the teardrop. “What of this then?”

  Saor shrugged with perfect nonchalance. “Maybe he’s right. Maybe it was your influence. None of us truly understand your affinity with the Path of the Azure.”

  Eilidh frowned, but didn’t contradict him. Instead, she stood and Saor rose with her. “I’ll find out what I can and be back with all haste. I don’t know if these faeries will help us, or what they can teach me. But if we’re going to stop these killings, this is the best chance we have.”

  Munro nodded and stood to show them to the door. They left with little ceremony. He assumed saying goodbye was not a fae tradition, because they simply walked out when the conversation ended. He found it disconcerting on one hand, but on the other, he liked not having to find the right thing to say to Eilidh. He wanted to tell her to hurry back, to stay safe, but he couldn’t ask her to do either of those things, not if it compromised what she needed to do.

  He locked the front door and slid the deadbolt shut. Neither action made him feel better, considering how easily Saor opened the padlock. He couldn’t help but wonder if the blood faerie had the same talent. The thought certainly didn’t make him rest any easier.

  Munro felt surprisingly tired, considering he’d just had a couple days off work. Part of him worried about another seizure, but nothing had happened since then and he’d managed to go through the motions at work without any bother. In light of that, he decided on a bowl of soup and an early night.

  When
he went to the kitchen, he realised he’d been carrying the padlock around with him the whole time. He opened the junk drawer and tossed it in with the other remnants he couldn’t be bothered to deal with: rubber bands, the microwave oven instruction manual, duct tape, a box of nails, and dozens of other odds and ends. It wasn’t until he went to shut the drawer that he noticed the padlock was no longer a padlock. The metal had twisted and fused together in his hand. The shape was roughly hewn, but unmistakably that of a miniature grizzly bear, standing on its haunches, its head thrown back in a roar.

  Munro picked it up and turned it over. It had the same weight as before, but it seemed to have been moulded as a child would shape clay. He glanced toward the front door. He wanted to call Eilidh back, to show her what he’d done and ask all the questions he should have asked a half hour ago. But she was long gone, and he was on his own.

  ∞

  In the following two days, Munro found out what the Dewer task force had learned from the second crime scene. He’d been asked to help canvas the Muirton area for more witnesses. Part of him feared someone would remember seeing him and Eilidh that night. He needn’t have worried though, because nobody seemed to have seen much of anything.

  One of the other teams discovered what they thought was something of interest. The Tayside Harriers, a local athletics group, regularly used the track behind the school. Several of the members reported seeing a couple of men hanging about for several hours. They were there when the athletes arrived for their semi-weekly training and were still hanging around when the athletes left a couple of hours later. That’s what had made them stand out. It sent the task force into a bit of a tizzy. It was certainly unusual, but what bothered everyone was that neither man fit the description of the latest victim. They started to ask if it was possible two men had been involved in the crimes.

  Serial killers were rare. Much rarer than most people thought. Scotland only had two confirmed serial killers he knew of in the past century. As far as serial killers working in pairs, Munro learned that male/male was the most common pairing, but it bothered him to see the task force going in a direction he knew was false. This wasn’t the work of a typical anti-social, abused-as-a-child loner or even a dysfunctional pair, but he couldn’t exactly tell them the truth. All he could do was keep his ears open. If nothing else, being close to the case might give him something that could lead him and Eilidh to find the blood faerie.

  Munro could feel Eilidh somewhere in the distance. She had gone so far he couldn’t tell anything more than a vague direction. If he didn’t know better, he’d likely not notice the compulsion to glance northwest a few times a day.

  He couldn’t get what she’d said out of his head. He didn’t understand it all, but obviously Eilidh thought he had some kind of abilities. The stone teardrop and the metal bear told him something had changed in him, but he didn’t know what. He thought about Eilidh’s question about his family. Could he have inherited the ability? His parents had been so normal. Granted, he’d been quite young when his mum died, but he’d surely remember something like turning padlocks into bears.

  The only real family he had left was his Aunt Judith over in Scone. He needed to get out of the house anyway. In the evenings, when he went home, he spent his time thinking about the case, wondering when the blood faerie would strike again. When he wasn’t doing that, he was wondering about Eilidh and if she was having any success in Skye. So now seemed as good a time as any to pay a visit to Aunt Judith. She’d be surprised and probably guess that something was up, but he assured himself he’d think of an excuse.

  He dropped in on her that night, and she filled him full of tea and Battenberg sponge cake. If, at any point in the evening, she’d sussed out that he wanted particular information on family magical ability, she didn’t let on.

  “You wait here, love. Let me go get that album. The one with photos of your mum and dad.” She seemed pleased to talk about family and the past. Her small, round face lit up as she spoke about Munro’s parents.

  She returned with an armful of ancient albums with vinyl covers and yellowing plastic sheets protecting the pictures. They went over each photo, Judith lost in reminiscing about his mum and dad, then her own husband Harold, who’d also passed on. When the conversation turned to her kids, he found his eyes glazing over a little, although he did make an effort to be polite.

  “Young Carol is pregnant again,” Judith said. Young Carol was Judith’s daughter, and she must have been in her mid-thirties. Everyone in the family still called her Young Carol though, because she was named after Judith’s own Aunt Carol. “She’s working for one of the local councils near Edinburgh still.”

  “Oh, really? Tell her I send my best wishes,” Munro said.

  “You could pick up the phone and tell her yourself,” Judith replied with a hint of scolding. Munro gave a shrug that showed he was duly chastised, and they moved on to talk about Judith’s older son Raymond, who worked in a bank. Judith couldn’t have been more proud. But that she didn’t mention her youngest, Frankie, made Munro take notice. After hearing one more story than he thought he could stand about how marvellous Young Carol’s children were, Munro politely asked about Frankie.

  Judith tutted. It was a small noise, but it spoke volumes. Munro hadn’t really kept up with his cousins. The older two had moved away, and although Frankie didn’t live that far, it hadn’t seemed like they had much in common. They saw each other on Boxing Day or New Year’s at Judith’s when Munro didn’t have to work, but ever since his dad died, Munro found excuses to miss family events.

  “Is Frankie not well?” Munro asked.

  “I tried with him,” Judith finally relented and said. “Lord knows, I tried.”

  After some gentle probing, something Munro did every day at work, Judith revealed that Frankie turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. He’d dropped out of university in the first term, which Munro vaguely remembered hearing some years before. That had been a blow to her, but then he’d not taken up much of a trade. She encouraged him to try to get an apprenticeship, but he ended up working in a local video store during the day and spending his nights with “some band”.

  “He’d always been quite good on the drums,” Munro offered.

  She rolled her eyes and went on a familiar tirade about how his Uncle Harold had converted their garage to a sound-proof room, only to have Frankie and his mates spend more time practicing elsewhere.

  “It’s not just the music though,” Judith confided with a tired sigh.

  “No?”

  “I always wondered if he was a bit touched in the head. I shouldn’t say it. Harold wouldn’t like it, I can promise you that. But he just isn’t like the rest of us. He has a funny way.”

  That didn’t really say anything about Frankie being magical or not, but “touched in the head” was probably how Aunt Judith would describe a druid, to be fair. Munro finally left amidst promises of coming by more often and definitely making Boxing Day this year. He promised he’d give Carol a call too. But he couldn’t shake the sense that he should get in touch with Frankie. He couldn’t imagine Carol or Raymond the banker were true druids, but Eilidh hadn’t given him much to go on.

  It seemed a long shot, and Munro wasn’t sure what he hoped to gain. But if magical abilities ran in bloodlines, and someone in his family tree could explain what was going on, it would be worth making a bit of an idiot of himself to find out. He’d start with Frankie. If that proved to be a waste of time, he could hop down to Edinburgh over the weekend to see Carol or Raymond next.

  Chapter 12

  Eilidh and Saor did the sensible thing. They stayed close to the roads, but tried to avoid traffic. Saor, still attuned to fae nocturnal habits and not comfortable away from the healing essence of the Otherworld, let his path diverge from Eilidh’s a few times. She also knew he would sometimes wander into the forests alone at night, while she slept near a roadside restaurant or car park. It wasn’t comfortable and it didn’t smell nice, but th
e further north they went, the human settlements grew more sparse and gaps in the kingdom territories grew fewer. Saor argued that they should move at night for that very reason. He didn’t want to sleep when they would be most vulnerable. Eilidh pointed out that their passage through the territories would be more likely to be noticed at night. They compromised by only stopping for a couple of hours at a time.

  Saor was unhappy about sticking to the roads because of the smells and the added distance, but he had less reason to be cautious. He didn’t have a death sentence hanging over his head. Even though the fae had much stronger constitutions than humans and slept less, the trip wearied Eilidh. She was not accustomed to keeping the incredibly fast pace. In her church tower, she often dreamed of running through the highlands the way she and Saor had done during their childhood. But the time away from her homeland had taken its toll. Running two hundred miles tired her in a way it wouldn’t have thirty years earlier.

  Saor was aloof, and she could tell he had something on his mind beyond his annoyance at the human encroachment into fae territory. The fae didn’t own property, of course, not in the way humans did. They did, however, respect certain boundaries, especially those created by the ebb and flow of magical mists from the Otherworld.

  He didn’t share what was bothering him until they stopped for the last time before approaching the Isle of Skye. They’d run for days, sometimes having to go long distances out of their way to avoid a cluster of fae or an Otherworld gateway. Once they got to the smaller roads, the lands were awash in fae magic, and there was no longer anywhere to hide. Even the human homes dotted around were not enough to disrupt the flows.

  Eilidh had grown more uncomfortable with each passing mile. Saor watched well, and his affinity for the earth helped him sense even the delicate footsteps of any fae within a quarter mile. The extra expenditure of energy tired him though, and the strain of worry made Eilidh snappish and edgy. She was surrounded now. If they were caught, she had little hope of escape.