Keys and Curses (Shadow Book 2) (9 page)

Ishtar looked thoughtful. “Sounds like someone’s been messing with you.”

Flower snapped to her usual inflexible certainty like a spring. “Impossible.”

Ishtar shrugged. “You keep telling yourself that.” She turned her attention to Nikifor. “And what’s wrong with him?”

Nikifor met her eyes and was troubled by the similarity to the eyes of the girl in his vision. He couldn’t even begin to frame an answer to her question.

“He’s a vibe addict.” Flower’s words were clipped and cold. “We came to seek the help of the Freakin Fairies to cure him.”

“Did it work?”

“Sort of, until they cursed him.”

Ishtar chuckled. “You must have been desperate. Freakin Fairies are completely nuts, you know.”

“Why do you seek our king, Ishtar?” Flower asked.

Ishtar’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you think? He killed my sister. He must die.”

Flower and Nikifor’s indrawn breaths were simultaneous and shocked. Flower went for a non-existent weapon. Nikifor fought back a blind panic. “You cannot kill the king!” he boomed.

Ishtar scowled. “Keep your voice down, Curse Boy.”

“But he’s right!” Flower shifted onto her knees. “The king is Shadow! You kill him, you bring our whole world to an end!”

“Says who? The king? He would.” Ishtar slammed a fist into her hand to punctuate the point. “My sister brought the vamp wars to an end by killing the vamp king, and for her troubles she was murdered. She must be avenged.”

“Hippy Ishtar died of wounds she sustained fighting the vampire king!” Flower snapped.

“That’s a lie, I was there, I saw her die and I saw the muse king walk away from her!”

“He would never have done that!” Flower flushed bright red. “He loved her!” She stopped and looked at Nikifor uncertainly. “Didn’t he?”

“I’m telling you, someone’s messed with you,” Ishtar said, before Nikifor could reply. “You need help.” She turned her gaze to Nikifor. “You, on the other hand-” she paused and heaved a sigh. “You helped my sister. And then she saved your life. I know, because her Freakin Fairy friend told me. He gave me something to give to you, should I ever see you again.”

“Freakin Fairy friend?” Nikifor’s voice wavered. He searched desperately back through his mind for something, anything, but all he found were whispers and shadows. “What friend?”

“He had a funny name. Tick Tock or Clockwork or something. He was a Silver.” Ishtar disappeared into the shadowed parts of the cave. She returned bearing a long parcel wrapped in tattered cloth, which she handed over the fire with a certain amount of reverence. “Guard it well, Muse. This is the weapon Hippy Ishtar used to kill the vamp king.”

Nikifor laid the parcel across his lap and slowly unwrapped it. Firelight danced off a silver handle. The rags fell away from double axe blades gone dull from years without use or care. He curled his hand around the shaft and lifted it further into the light. The whispers and shadows hardened to fragments in his mind. The blades smashed into stone carvings, high on a wall. Rubble rained down in front of him. “I remember this,” he said. “I remember this magnificent weapon! I remember-”

He was back in the Tormentor’s domain so fast it made his head spin, but the Tormentor was not there, just the girl with the long hair. She stormed toward him and grabbed his face with fingers so cold they bit into his bones. Anger bled through her words. “Your destiny is to kill the muse king!”

Nikifor yelled in terror and came back to himself standing in the cave, brandishing a double-headed axe.

Several Bloody Fairies launched themselves on him and knocked him to the ground. He heard Ishtar speak, although she sounded miles away. “Was he always this much of a loose wheel?”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The case of the girl with the pink hair was more than irritating, it was worrisome. The girl’s need to write battered against the veil between Shadow and Dream like a cannonball fired again and again and again. She didn’t understand why she wouldn’t just pick up her damn pen and make words.

She found her nose to nose with a young man with spiky blonde hair and thick glasses. Their faces were bright red. The girl’s clenched fists quivered. “I can’t believe you! You know how important this is to me, you could at least try to understand!”

“But it’s crazy!” he struggled to control his voice. “I know they’re just stories, and I know we both grew up on them, but look at the way your mother is already! You’re only going to encourage her!”

Stories? Flower scowled. This boy was the kind of human who didn’t need a muse. Narrow, closed off and probably obsessed with logic. No wonder her charge had such bad writer’s block.

“Don’t you talk about my mother, Drew Smithers!” The girl jabbed him in the chest with her forefinger. “There’s nothing wrong with her. Putting the stories down on paper would probably be good for her!”

“As good as a hole in the head!” They glared at each other like children about to come to blows over a toy.

Drew calmed down first. He took the girl’s hand. “Come on. All our lives we’ve kept each other sane when my mother and your parents-” he hesitated “-weren’t. I’m just concerned you’re going to get sucked into their fantasies and turn out like-”

The girl’s nostrils flared. The room went positively icy.

“Like what?”

Drew threw up his hands. “I’m not talking to you when you’re like this. Write what you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when it all goes wrong.” He stormed out.

The girl kicked the door closed after him and scowled at it for a full three seconds. Then she flung herself into her chair and picked up the pen that lay on the desk.

At last. Flower bent over her shoulder so she could whisper into her ear. “Don’t listen to him. You can write whatever you want. Just do it. Just write, for Shadow’s sake, you’re making me look bad.”

The girl put the pen to the paper. Instead of writing however, she scratched out six fat letters with jagged edges and elongated corners, colouring each one in as she went.

Flower stopped whispering, hypnotised by those letters. Her heart hammered and her spine prickled.

The girl threw the pen down, picked up her hockey stick and swung it a couple of times. The very air in the room grew charged and electric. Flower knew that feeling, but couldn’t for the life of her remember how. She grabbed at the girl to try and stop her, but her immaterial hands touched nothing.

The air shimmered. A smoky grey that she knew all too well hardened in the room. It was barely two weeks since she’d left that very smoky grey behind in Shadow City.

“Stop!” she yelled. “Stop it, you’re opening a doorway!”
The girl noticed nothing. She sighed, put the stick over her shoulder and left the room. The doorway in the air closed as though nothing had ever been there.

Flower looked back at the notebook again, still hardly able to believe the one word her charge had managed to write.

Ishtar.

She woke in the cave with a suddenness that left her head spinning. It was dark except for the few glowing coals in the fireplace. Nikifor slept fitfully under the guard of two fairies, themselves dozing. Bats rustled softly in the roof. Frogs chirped far away in the night.

Only Ishtar was awake, sitting hunched over the fire, her eyes a mere gleam in the darkness.

“Ishtar?” Flower made her way to the fire and sat across from her.

“What, Muse?”

The urgency of her question made Flower clench her fists in her lap. “Who is the girl with the pink hair? Do you know her?”

Ishtar snorted. “What are you babbling about?”

“There’s a human in Dream. At least I think she’s a human. She’s one of my charges, but she won’t write. Not a word until tonight, and then she wrote your name.”

Ishtar picked up a short dagger and used the tip to clean dirt from under her nails. “My name?”

“She wrote Ishtar.”

“That’s the clan name of everyone you see here and a good many more besides.”

Flower thought about this. “Could she be a Bloody Fairy? Have any of your clan ever gone to Dream?”

Ishtar’s voice hardened. “My sister Hippy was the only one of us ever to go to Dream, and she came back and was murdered for her efforts. No self-respecting Bloody Fairy would live in that place. Or have pink hair.”

Flower sighed, deflated. “I suppose.”

“Got you rattled, this human.” Ishtar shoved at a log on the fire with her dagger, sending red sparks sputtering toward the roof.

Flower shrugged. She wasn’t about to confide in Ishtar that the girl had almost opened a door into Shadow. Only the king could advise her on this, which made the search for him all the more desperate.

“What were you doing near that mine?” Ishtar asked. “That place is crawling with Moon Troopers and fetches.”

“Eight hundred Freakin Fairies are missing from the village.”

Ishtar nodded. Apparently, that was not news to her.

“I believe they’re being held in the mine. Maybe the Moon Troopers are forcing them to work it.”

“So?” The word was so casual as to be callous. “Serves the Freakin Fairies right for being so obsessed with quicksilver.”

“So what’s the Guild thinking?” Flower wished she could slap even a shred of sympathy into the woman, show her what was at stake, but it was no good getting angry at a fairy unless you wanted to be driven to a nervous breakdown. “What do they need that much quicksilver for, and who ordered the fairies to be enslaved?”

“My money’s on your king,” Ishtar said. “He set up the Guild, he’s calling the shots.”

“No!” Flower slashed her hand across the flames, a movement that caused Ishtar to half-rise, then slowly sit down again.

“You’re very certain.” Ishtar slowly resumed cleaning her nails.

“There has not been a direct order from the king in months. Maybe years. Somebody else has taken over. He may be imprisoned or even hurt.”

“Let’s be positive about this,” Ishtar said. “He could be dead.”

“If he was dead we wouldn’t be here. Nothing would be.” Flower pushed tendrils of hair from her face. She had to convince the fairy. She had to convince someone, so that she wasn’t the only person in Shadow who knew what was going on. “Ishtar, those Freakin Fairies are being held against their will. Nikifor and I are going to get them out of there, and if you and your warriors were to help-”

“You’d be less likely to die trying?” Ishtar turned her attention to sharpening the dagger on a stone. “True. But I’m not wasting any Bloody Fairy lives on a pointless mission like that. Our objective is to kill your king, nothing more, nothing less.”

“Why is it pointless?”

“Because they’re Freakin Fairies,” Ishtar said. “Stupid creatures. They’ll just go and get themselves kidnapped again. Besides, I’d never live it down.”

Flower gritted her teeth. She could have had the fairy arrested on the strength of all this years ago, if she’d thought for a moment she was a serious threat. “And how long have you been trying to kill the king now?”

“Twenty-five years.” Ishtar sounded quite proud of the fact. “Last I heard we’re number two on the Guild’s most wanted list.”

“Well I wouldn’t know, that was never my department.” Curiosity overtook her. “Who’s number one?”

“Right now?” Ishtar chuckled. “You are. Why do you think I let you both live? Having you two running around will keep the Moon Troopers off my back for a while.”

Flower lay sleepless on the cold stone cave floor for the rest of the night. She didn’t want to think about being number one on the Guild’s most wanted list, so she thought about fairies instead, and how irritating they could be.

If only they’d try to get along with each other. Really, if the clans would just cooperate, they had so much to gain. The Bloody Fairies for example, instead of losing their homes and villages because they spent so much time picking fights and going to war, could protect the other clans. They could have been defending the Freakin Fairy villages while the Freakin Fairies went about making them all shiny things from quicksilver. And the Bloomin Fairies, who loved to grow food and farm, could feed the lot of them while the others saw to their protection and provided them with resources. The Blasted Fairies she wasn’t so sure about. Nobody’d even seen one in decades, if indeed they were anything more than an urban legend.