The Shifting Price of Prey (23 page)

‘It is.’ I grimaced. ‘And sensitive.’

‘Sensitive?’

‘Yeah, it’s set to activate if it senses we’re under threat,’ I said, then as talking was easing the anger tensing my muscles I added grudgingly, ‘Turns out it
can’t tell the difference between fear and excitement. The Ward went into lock-down after I signed up Harrods.’

Impressed delight lit his face. ‘You got the contract with Harrods?’

‘Yep.’

He grinned, leaned in as if he were going to kiss me then, as I shifted back, clasped my shoulders instead, giving them a congratulatory pat. ‘Way to go, Gen!’

‘Thanks.’ I’d worked hard to finalise that deal, and I was proud of it. Now I’d given the police the heads up about the source of the Harrods’ mutating Magic Mirror
spell, it was going to be a nice little earner. I nodded at the dome. ‘It took us two days to get the Ward back on track.’

‘Us?’

‘Me, Sylvia and Ricou.’

‘Ah,’ he said, a muscle spasming in his jaw. ‘I’d heard you were living together. How’s that working out?’

An odd note in his voice made me frown. ‘Better than I thought it would. Why?’

He cast another look at my bedroom window. ‘Can we talk about it inside? Or is that a problem?’

‘Why should it be a problem?’

‘Not here, Gen,’ he insisted.

He sounded . . . jealous? Of Sylvia and Ricou? That was . . . weird. And way out of line. He was the one who’d stopped writing not me. I blew out a furious breath to calm myself then
stepped back into the magical dome. The Ward slapped shut behind me. I turned, took a moment to
focus
, and shoved my left arm through the Ward’s plastic-feeling side. ‘You need
to hold my hand with your left, and remember: stay calm.’

He stared at my hand as if I’d offered him raw meat to eat (something I’d never do, since Finn’s vegetarian) and it clicked he was glaring at Malik’s rose-shaped bruises
circling my wrist, though why was beyond me; he knew they were there. I raised my brows and wiggled my fingers impatiently. He grasped them and I went to guide him through, then stopped him with a
warning look. ‘Oh, one more thing, the Ward will strip away your Glamour, so you might want to make sure your clothes are real.’

‘I don’t make a habit of walking around undressed, Gen.’ Amusement glinted in his eyes, and for a moment the teasing, light-hearted Finn I loved was back. ‘At least not
since that time you
called
my clothes along with a spell.’

‘That was nearly a year ago,’ I huffed, aggrieved. ‘And it was an accident.’ It had been our first Spellcrackers job together. I’d been mortified at my erratic
magical ability that I hadn’t taken time to enjoy the naked Finn eye-candy. ‘And it only happened the once.’

‘Twice.’

Oh, yeah. Except the second time I’d given in to temptation and done it deliberately. Not that it got me anywhere; Finn had been even quicker at zapping his Glamour back in place than the
first time.

I gave a louder huff, and tugged him towards me.

He stepped into the Ward. It held him, the power in it tasting and testing. The air around him flashed with emerald sparks, and I squinted against the glare as his Glamour peeled away in stages,
as if it took time to reveal his true form. His T-shirt disappeared. His shoulders and chest broadened, the muscles hardening and becoming more defined. His jeans morphed into a pair of
olive-coloured cargo trousers, loose enough to conceal the tail I’d glimpsed only once and which, like all satyrs, he was shy about. His features sharpened, taking on a feral edge, his hair
turning from dark blond to a ruffled sable, his horns lengthening, curving and twisting sinuously a foot above his head. His eyes were the last to change: the softer moss-green of his irises
flowing into the whites and shading them pale chartreuse as his pupils elongated and flattened into dark horizontal slits.

For a moment I caught my breath, stunned. I’d seen his true form before, but only when he’d been fighting, hurt or angry enough to lose his hold on his Glamour, and while his human
shape was clean-cut handsome, now he was— well, jaw-droppingly gorgeous didn’t begin to cover it.

‘Like what you see, Gen?’ he said, grinning like a fertility fae who thought he was on to a sure thing.

Annoyance smacked into me and I shut my mouth. Damn satyr. He’d somehow fudged the Ward: his whole slow-Glamour-strip deliberate.

Before I could call him on it, a loud splash came from the pond behind me.

I swung round, adrenalin speeding my pulse as I dug a handful of dog biscuits from my robe’s pocket.

The pond’s occupant – a gigantic eel called Bertha – had risen five feet above the water’s surface and was doing her usual swaying snake-charmer’s dance. Briefly I
wondered if I could make a run for the bedroom before she saw me, only my luck was out. She drew back in her ready-to-attack stance, her eyes flashing a malevolent acid-yellow, her mouth yawning
wide to showcase her pointed teeth. Her extremely sharp and painful pointed teeth. Bertha and the pond might be eight feet away from me, but I had two sets of teeth marks in my right calf and a
deep bite in my left buttock to prove
that
distance wasn’t a barrier. Not when Bertha hated me with a single-minded passion that went way past murderous. Which was sort of my fault.
I’d stabbed her with a bull’s horn. She hadn’t been herself at the time, and I’d been acting in self-defence. But Bertha wasn’t big on extenuating circumstances. She
wanted her pound of flesh— literally.

Going for distraction, I pelted her with half-a-dozen biscuits. Most of them fell uselessly into the pond, but one caught Bertha under her gills. She hissed.

‘Isn’t that Bertha, Ricou’s pet?’ Finn asked in a bemused voice.

‘Yep.’ I threw another biscuit. It bounced away in another lucky hit above her left eye.

‘What’s she doing in your pond?’

‘Stopping any unwanted visitors from using it as a gateway.’

Bertha shook her head, and slithered over the pond’s edge on to the grass.

‘Safer not to have the pond,’ he murmured.

‘Sylvia needs the water,’ I said. ‘Now she’s pregnant she’s drinking around twenty gallons a day and there are way too many additives in tap water.’ A biscuit
hit Bertha’s nose:
nearly on target
. ‘And Bertha adores Sylvia, she’d never hurt her.’
Unlike me.
The next biscuit sailed into Bertha’s open maw. She
snapped her jaws shut and, radiating bliss, she wriggled back into the water and disappeared, leaving its surface black and ripple-free.

Relieved, I headed for the open window, ducked through the Ward and stuck my left arm out to Finn.

He shot a last puzzled glance at the pond, started to climb in after me, but froze halfway through and said in a soft voice, ‘You should’ve told me if I was interrupting,
Gen.’

Crap. I’d forgotten about the rose petals.

‘Y
ou’re not interrupting,’ I said flatly once we were both in the bedroom. My bed with its scattering of crimson rose petals was
like an accusation between us.

‘Okay, I’m not,’ he agreed, but his expression said he didn’t believe me.

Irritation stabbed me. Finn was definitely giving off the jealous vibe. Question was, why? Our ‘couple’ status wasn’t ever a done deal. And was
so
not now. So him
putting on the angry, aggrieved boyfriend act was nowhere near cool. Nor did I appreciate his thinking I was jumping into bed with Sylvia and Ricou. Only . . . even without the wrongness of it, the
brooding jealous thing wasn’t like him so who had woken up his green-eyed monster by yanking his chain? Because someone had: Finn had been acting like a suspicious jerk since he’d
turned up. My bed with its clichéd romantic gesture was just another nail, as far as he was concerned.

I stuffed my annoyance down as I gathered the petals into an old shoebox; I’d take them with me if/when I went to see Malik later. Right now I’d sort out the infuriating satyr in
front of me. Cinching my robe tighter, I fixed him with a glower. ‘What did you want to talk about, Finn?’

He jerked his head at the shoebox. ‘What’s with them?’

‘You first.’

He gave the bedroom a critical scan as if he expected to find someone else there, though with Malik’s dark spice scent still hovering like a silent ghost, maybe he had cause. ‘Are we
alone?’

My irritation spiked again. ‘Ricou’s out. Sylvia’s in
Between
, through the wardrobe in there.’ I pointed to the living room. ‘And there’s a dryad
standing sentry in the wardrobe’s wood, but otherwise, yes.’

Finn snapped his fingers and at the same time as his T-shirt (disappointingly) reappeared, I felt a Privacy spell settle around us. He cast another look around, his gaze hitching on the shoebox
before coming back to me. ‘My brothers have been telling me things. About Sylvia and Ricou living here. With you. That the three of you might be an item.’

Wow! The rumour mill had been working overtime, and now I knew what had stoked Finn’s green-eyed monster. Not to mention that it made a lot of stuff crystal clear. Briefly I wondered what
came first, Lady Isabella wanting Spellcrackers and coming up with her Sylvia-seducing-me plan, no doubt with her dryads spreading spurious pre-seduction gossip. Or if Isabella had got the idea
from the satyrs, who’d probably put it about that I was up to all sorts of shenanigans with my flatmates as justification for demanding their investment back. Gods save me from London’s
fae and their squabbles.

‘Well, it’s true,’ I agreed, anger sharpening my voice. ‘Sylvia and Ricou do live here. And you know why? Its neutral territory. Living here means that neither the naiads
nor the dryads feel left out of the pregnancy, and Sylvia and Ricou don’t have to spend all their time smoothing ruffled feathers.’ Not that there were any feathers involved, just
scales and twigs, mostly. ‘Not that it’s any of your business,’ I added, even as I wondered if his brothers’ tittle-tattle had anything to do with why Finn had stopped
writing. ‘But hey, seeing as your brothers have been in a chatty mood, maybe they told you they want Spellcrackers back, too.’

Confusion crossed his face. ‘What?’

‘The herd wants Spellcrackers back,’ I said slowly, like I was talking to an idiot. Which I was. ‘You made them sign it over to me, but now the curse is lifted so is the reason
for giving it to me. If they think I’m an “item” with someone else, someone who isn’t a satyr . . . well, no doubt they’re even more determined not to lose out on
their original investment.’

He sunk down on to the bed, dropped his head in his hands. ‘Gods, I should’ve realised they’d try something: I know what they’re like.’ He sighed and looked up at
me. ‘I should’ve got them to agree to back off before I went. But with Nicky and everything, I just didn’t think. I’ll sort it now. I’m sorry. Gen, this isn’t
how I hoped our getting back together would go.’

He was sorry! He’d sort his family! He’d expected something like this! He thought we were getting back together!

I threw my hands up, warring between fury and disbelief. ‘Finn, I wrote to tell you what the herd were up to. When you didn’t write back, I did wonder if the satyr messenger service
wasn’t passing my letters on, which I was obviously right to. But hell, didn’t you wonder why I wasn’t writing to you? Didn’t you think about trying some other way to
contact me? Or asking me what the hell was going on?’

Bewilderment clouded his moss-green eyes. ‘How could I? We were out of time sync.’

I blinked. ‘Since when?’

‘Since two weeks after we got there. I’ve only just got back.’ I stared at him. The Fair Lands have their own timelines, sometimes in sync with the humans’ world,
sometimes not. A day here could be months or even years there, or the other way round, depending on who was controlling the magic. And if Finn had been out of time sync, it could explain his
silence.

‘I did write to you, Gen, but I’m guessing you didn’t get my letter.’ He reached out to take my hand. ‘I’m sorry. I can understand your being angry about
that, and with the herd being stupid idiots about Spellcrackers.’ He paused. ‘You must have thought my silence was deliberate?’

I looked down at my hand in his. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to leave it there or take it back. Three months of thinking he’d ditched me wasn’t something I could do an emotional
one-eighty from in a few seconds. And okay, Finn might not have been totally responsible for his hurtful silence, that was down to his brothers, but he hadn’t seemed too surprised that
they’d screwed things up for him. And he’d come over here channelling the green-eyed monster on his brothers’ say so. He seemed to be letting them mess in his life way too
often.

‘I did think your silence deliberate,’ I said pointedly, then pulled my hand from his and crossed my arms. ‘It hurt, Finn.’

He flinched, then he straightened his shoulders and said softly, ‘Gods, Gen, I truly am sorry.’

‘So am I,’ I said, keeping my voice neutral.

He nodded, understanding I wasn’t ready to forgive him. The silence between us lengthened, turning awkward, then I sighed and asked, ‘Why go out of time sync?’