The Bitter Seed of Magic s-3

by Suzanne McLeod

  ‘Hang on a minute! I’m the one paying for this!’

  ‘Not up front, you’re not, Gen.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘And to get someone like her to drop everything, you’d need to be.’

  He was right, even if I was planning on footing the bill in the end (however long it took; a thought that had me wincing)—not that I was going to stand there and argue about it with him. Irate, I pushed past him. ‘Look, I’ll see you later.’

  He caught my wrist and pulled me back. ‘Gen, it doesn’t matter what he’s told you. All suckers are dangerous.’

  I jerked easily from his hold. Turns out anger works as well as chanting Helen’s name. ‘Right now, Finn, the suckers are the least of my worries. There’s no vamp in London who’d even say hello to me—or to any other fae or faeling—without Malik’s permission.’

  ‘Hell’s thorns, Gen!’ Consternation clouded his face. ‘There’s no way any vamp can guarantee that sort of blanket protection—’

  ‘He’s running London, so yes, he can. That’s the way vamps work. They either toe the line or their ashes feed the fishes. You know that.’

  ‘Feeding … Gods, I should’ve realised— That’s why you started to fade this morning—he’s been taking too much blood. Gen, I can’t let you do this; it has to stop—’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Finn,’ I stated, keeping my voice level. Of course I wasn’t feeding 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 horr
ific 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 matter.’

  ‘Ri-ight,’ I said, getting it. Oliver had blackmailed them—and, surprisingly, it had actually worked. Ana had been lucky after all; except something about the story felt off … I clasped the pentacle at my throat and frowned out the tinted window, absently noting we were driving through Trafalgar Square.

  ‘You were expecting a tragic ending after such an awful beginning.’ Victoria Harrier derailed my thoughts. ‘So far it hasn’t transpired. I intend to see that it never does. For the sake of my daughter-in-law and my grandchildren, I am going to help you to put an end to this terrible curse.’ She held out a box of tissues. ‘You’re crying …’

  ‘Sorry, didn’t realise,’ I muttered absently as I grabbed a couple and swiped at my face.

  She frowned, then decided to ignore me. ‘My aim is to give you any practical help I can.’ She picked up a manila folder and pushed it towards me. ‘Jane Bird’ was printed on the white label stuck on the front. ‘I know you’re convinced that the faeling found dead this morning is something to do with the curse, so this file contains photocopies of the police reports. The faeling hasn’t been identified as yet, but she is thought to be late teens, early twenties. She doesn’t match any missing person on the list—I’ve put a copy of their latest list in for you—but going by “Jane Bird’s” appearance, it’s possible she is related to the ravens at the Tower of London.’

  Her mention of the ravens reminded me of the bird at Tower Bridge this morning, and the one bobbing its head at me from the stone archway outside Old Scotland Yard. He/she/they had to be something to do with ‘Jane Bird’, it was too much of a coincidence otherwise. But I realised the raven—easier to think of it as only one bird—couldn’t be from the Tower: the Tower ravens agreed to have their wings clipped when they took the job and couldn’t fly for the duration of their contracts. Although that didn’t mean ‘Jane Bird’ wasn’t a relative. Something definitely to look into, I decided, and flipped open the file. The top sheet had Hugh’s signature on it.

  ‘That’s everything I’ve been able to obtain so far,’ Victoria Harrier said, her efficient tone suggesting that I should find it impressive. It was, sort of, if I hadn’t known that Hugh would’ve given me the same info soon anyway. ‘I’ve also arranged for you to meet with the Raven Master and the ravens tomorrow lunchtime. I will, of course, be with you, to forestall any future problems with your Conditional Caution and DI Crane’s own investigation.’

  A meeting with the Raven Master? Nice! Victoria Harrier’s practical help was, well, practical, except … I tapped the file as I narrowed my eyes at her. ‘You have to know that DI Crane doesn’t like me’—an understatement, but I was being polite—‘and while I noticed you and she don’t get on … well, to be blunt, you’re a witch, and you detest vamps, so how do I know you’re not just stitching me up in some way?’ Okay, so maybe I wasn’t being that polite.

  ‘A valid question, Ms Taylor.’ She smiled. ‘I hope I can put your mind at rest, if you’ll bear with me. I take it you’ve heard of the Merlin Foundation. But do you know what it does?’

  The Merlin Foundation financed the HOPE clinic where I volunteered, and others like it, plus it was into schools and other things. Its bureaucracy was something you had to experience to believe when it came to asking for funds: the doctors at HOPE were forever complaining about it. ‘I’ve heard it described as a sort of Magical Masonic Society devoted to charitable works,’ I said, going for diplomatic.

  She laughed. ‘I know it’s sometimes seen as secretive, but then, it’s been around a long time. And you’re quite right that it’s devoted to a tremendous amount of valuable charitable work, but it is the older, more private side of the Foundation that I want to tell you about.’ She smiled, and proceeded to give me a history lesson. ‘The Foundation came into being back in the fourteenth century, when the witch persecutions were at their worst. The Witches’ Council devised a plan: a select number of witches would marry into the higher echelons of our country’s ruling classes and produce sons—more wizards, of course: Great Wizards, who would grow up to occupy positions of influence, able to protect their witch relatives, and who would also marry witches chosen by the Witches’ Council, to ensure our magical legacy would continue. That tradition still carries on today, albeit in a somewhat different form.’

  I had a vague memory of my old boss, Stella, mentioning the Witches’ Council had approached her about marrying a wizard when she’d been younger, and offering to pay her a Bride-Price, a kind of huge reverse dowry, but she hadn’t liked the guy—he was a stuffy prig—so she’d said no.

  ‘Now the Foundation is far-reaching, and with its backing, and that of their own families, many of its members occupy positions of power throughout the government, financial and legal sectors.’

  ‘In other words, nepotism rules.’

  ‘Exactly, Ms Taylor,’ she said. ‘My husband is a wizard, as are my sons. With their connections in the Foundation and my own in both the magical and legal communities, I can assure you that Helen Crane will not cause you any more problems, even if she didn’t have her youthful indiscretion to count against her.’

  It sounded good, but— ‘What youthful indiscretion?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Helen’s son, of course,’ Victoria Harrier said, ‘the one Mr Panos was talking about. Like me, Helen Crane is from a powerful witch family; she was chosen to marry a wizard, but instead she— Well, Helen developed an infatuation with some boy, and in the age-old way she found herself pregnant. The boy apparently took fright at the responsibility, and once Helen’s son was born, her family, backed by the Witches’ Council and the Foundation, agreed she should give him up to the sidhe.’

  I frowned. ‘But her son was still a wizard?’

  ‘One with no significant family connections. So you see, she’s not looked upon kindly by the Foundation.’

  Part of me was starting to feel some reluctant sympathy for the teenage Helen, if not the current one. Another part of me was still trying to assess just what Victoria Harrier’s true priorities were.

  ‘I hope that reassures you, Ms Taylor, that I have your best interests at heart when it comes to dealing with any problems you might meet, especially if they pertain to the fertility curse. I have my grandchildren to consider.’

  There was still something not quite right about what she was saying; I just couldn’t pin down what it was.


  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I understand that despite not being able to tell us why, you are convinced that “Jane Bird’s” death is to do with the curse?’

  ‘Yes.’ Damn goddess and her gag clause.

  ‘And of course, I understand your reluctance to leave the investigation of “Jane Bird’s” tragic death to the police, so I will do all I can to help you with it. The sooner her cause of death is discovered and settled, the sooner you’ll be free to move onto other more certain solutions to stop the curse.’

  The penny finally dropped, with a loud splash. She didn’t just want to help; she was a fully paid-up member of the ‘get the sidhe pregnant’ brigade. And with her daughter-in-law being part water fae …

  ‘Let me guess. Lady Meriel is one of your connections in the magical community?’

  She leaned forwards and patted my knee in what I was supposed to believe was motherly concern. ‘Lady Meriel appreciates that it is only natural for you to be worried about having a child under the circumstances, and that you are not going to make the decision to become pregnant until you’ve exhausted all other avenues. If I can help expedite those avenues for you, maybe it will make the final decision easier and quicker for you.’

  The limo slowed to a halt and I glanced out the window. Trafalgar Square again. The driver had to be deliberately going in circles so Victoria Harrier could take her time talking to me on Lady Meriel’s behalf. Figured. Absently I scowled at the crowd of tourists gathered round one of huge bronze lions. They were roaring with laughter at the pixie pack dancing a jig along the lion’s broad back. Automatically, I made a mental note: about a dozen of them. Another week and Trafalgar Square would be overrun and the council would be calling Spellcrackers to banish them. Pixies are sort of ugly-cute, even if they are a pain to catch, and I always got the job— Except this time I wouldn’t. Not now I’d resigned. A sick feeling roiled in my stomach. But it wasn’t only the loss of my job making me feel ill, it was the goddess’ command: You will give them a new life.