The Shifting Price of Prey (4 page)

‘Shuffle,’ he ordered, Compulsion fuelled his voice.

‘I can’t one-handed—’ But even as I spoke, my fingers did an expert shuffle.

‘Toss them in the air.’

My hand threw the cards. The light in the room dimmed as they fountained up high like a mushroom cloud, before tumbling like glistening snowflakes on a winter’s night. I winced, expecting
them to clatter on to the desk, dreading the damage they could do to the fragile fairy body in its sandwich-box coffin, but they dissipated, melting like the snowflakes they’d mimicked,
fading away into the ether . . . Soon only five remained. They snapped into a line, hovering in front of me. Still blank.

I looked at Tavish. ‘What now?’

He picked up one of my scalpels, held it out to me, his hand shaking. ‘They need to be fed.’

‘Blood?’

‘Aye, doll. Blood for your question answered. Usual terms.’ Sweat beaded on his forehead.

I frowned. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Feed ’em,’ he urged, shoulders bowing as if with pain.

O-
kay
. I pressed my left index finger against the scalpel. The edge sliced the tip, dark viscous blood welled, scenting the air with honey and copper, and I readied for the pain but it
didn’t come. Odd.

‘Quick,’ he whispered.

I took a steadying breath. ‘I offer my blood solely in exchange for the answer to my questions. No harm to me or mine,’ I said and touched the first card.

A tiny tongue licked at my finger— Startled, I jerked my hand back, or would’ve without Tavish’s Compulsion holding me in place. The tongue licked some more, tickling, then I
felt a little mouth press against the cut, lips sealing around it. It started sucking my blood down, hard and fast enough that I could feel the draw on my heart. I shot an anxious look at Tavish.
He was hunched in his chair, the cobalt colour leaching from his eyes, leaving them pale and cloudy, his dreads turning dry and brittle, their beads clear as glass. Then a bead shattered, the
pieces hitting the floor with a soft ping. Uneasy, I tried yanking my hand from the card. I couldn’t.

‘What the hell’s happening, Tavish?’

‘Channelling.’

‘Channelling what? Something in the cards?’

He grunted.

I took it as a yes. And judging by the way his hand gripped mine, whatever it was, it was powerful. What the hell was in the cards if they could do this to him? And why hadn’t he told me
what to expect? Unless this wasn’t it?

‘Harder,’ he muttered. ‘Harder than I thought to stop you.’

‘Stop
me
? But I’m not doing anything!’

More beads shattered. He crumpled forwards, his head dropping to his knees, his hand a death-grip on mine. ‘The card? Is it changing?’

I dragged my attention back to the card. Thick gold mist topped it like a tiny thundercloud, and on the front the dark bruised red of my blood coloured the card from the bottom up, as if it were
litmus paper drawing it up. Which in a way it seemed it was, as there was still a thin white strip at the top.

‘Tell me when.’ Tavish’s words were a hoarse whisper.

The strip turned pink . . .

Brighter red . . .

Then the dark bruised colour of the rest of the card.

Suddenly the mouth released my finger with an audible satisfied sigh.

I cut a troubled glance at Tavish. ‘It’s let go—’

He toppled out of the chair, his hand slipping from mine, and curled into a foetal ball under the desk.

I flung myself to my knees, grabbed his head; his face was lined and shrunken like an old man’s.

Weakly, he pushed at me. ‘Talk to the card, doll,’ he ground out harshly, ‘afore she leaves.’

She?
But a stab of Compulsion had my body pulling back into the chair, my eyes fixing on the bloodstained card and my mouth said, ‘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 trap and restore their fertility back to them as it was before it was taken.’

The tarot card vibrated. The blood swirled away in wisps of reddish smoke until I could make out a picture. A dark-haired, hawk-nosed male in his thirties, dressed in a purple toga, his head
wreathed with a crown of golden laurels, lounged on an ornate throne. He held a silver-bladed dagger in one hand, and behind him a large golden eagle perched on a staff-like pillar. The
Emperor.

The Emperor on the card laughed; a loud arrogant sound that filled the large room. I started. The ginger tom leaped from the desk, its fur bottle-brush stiff, and at my feet Tavish whimpered. On
the card a huge, fanged snake slithered up the staff and hissed at the golden eagle. The bird flapped its wings angrily and launched itself out into the room, soaring up to the ceiling.

I repeated my question.

The Emperor laughed again, pointed his silver dagger out of the card at me and bellowed, ‘He knows! He will tell you! For a price!’

Of course he would.
‘Who’s
he
?’ my mouth demanded.

‘He is I!’

‘Who are you?’

The Emperor gave another booming laugh. ‘I am the Emperor!’

Great. Was it a tarot card or a pantomime villain? Next he’d be shouting, ‘He’s behind you!’ I gritted my teeth.
Specific questions, Gen.
‘What’s the
name you were given at your birth?’

‘My father named me—’

An angry screech drowned his words as the golden eagle dived back into the card. The card exploded in a splatter of crimson as if a bullet had hit dead centre. Droplets of blood expanded out in
a starburst of brilliant red light, their blinding afterimage searing my retinas.

Crap. Crapcrap
crap
.

No way in hell was that supposed to happen . . . I rubbed at my eyes, crouched and desperately stretched out to Tavish under the desk. Who knew what harm the explosion of magic had caused him? I
patted around but couldn’t feel him. Finally, as my vision returned I realised the only things under the desk were me, the ginger tom and some disgusting toadstools sprouting from the mouldy
rug.

Tavish was gone.

A soft snorting noise made me turn. In the centre of the room, making the place seem small, stood a kelpie horse. The kelpie’s green-black coat was rough over hard, ropy muscles, its
tangled mane glinted with dull gold beads, its black-lace gills fanned wide to either side of its arched, serpentine neck, and its eyes flickered with golden light.

Damn. Tavish’s wylde side had come out to play. Perfect.

I
crawled out and stood with my back against the desk, cautious. I trusted Tavish, but he wasn’t the one in control of the kelpie. It was as
if taking his waterhorse shape stripped away his couple of millennia’s worth of civilisation and left him as he must have been when he first came into being in the Shining Times: something
feral and predatory, birthed from magic. Good news was: we weren’t near the river so the kelpie wasn’t likely to Charm me to ride it into the depths. Bad news: Tavish wasn’t
exactly easy to communicate with in this form.

‘Um, you okay?’ I asked.

The kelpie shuddered as if shedding water; its usual signal to changing shape. Its eyes flashed black, then back to the odd gold light. It shook again, pawed the scratched wooden floorboards
with one camel-toed hoof and flicked its tail over its flanks as if dislodging irritating flies, then shot me a wild, white-rimmed look.

‘Guess that means no,’ I muttered, glancing round the room in case a helpful solution jumped out at me. The window was still buzzing with Knock-back Wards, the gnome’s cats
were milling in a furry tide in front of the interior door, obviously wanting away from the kelpie but trapped by the spells on the threshold—

The kelpie half-reared up, ears flat against its skull, and wheeled towards the door. The cats scattered, scrambling onto shelves or under furniture. The kelpie dipped its head, snatched up the
spell crystal from the threshold with a disgusted snort and thudded out and away.

I stared after it for a long moment, expecting Tavish to return in his human form or to hear the gnome’s surprised shout on discovering a kelpie horse rampaging round his house.

After a few minutes’ silence the ginger tom peered from beneath the fungi-covered sofa, its eyes wary, then it clawed its way out, stood with its tail up. It hissed at me as if to ask,
‘Scary horse-thing gone?’

I sent my senses out. The gnome was still fast asleep but there was no ping telling me Tavish/kelpie horse was anywhere near.

‘Yep, looks like the scary horse-thing has gone,’ I muttered, wondering how a waterhorse without opposable thumbs had bypassed the doors and Wards.

Frustration slumped my shoulders. Figured something would go wrong. No matter what I did with magic it always seemed to mess up, even with something as supposedly simple as a tarot reading.
Still, maybe the rest of the cards would be more informative . . . I turned back to the desk.

The tarot cards were gone.

Three hours later, I called it quits. While I’d waited for the tarot cards to reappear or Tavish to contact me, I’d got on with the investigation. I’d
finished all the tests on the dead fairies – all of them were apparently dead from natural causes – checked out the gnome’s creepy stock, and had a good snoop round the house. And
found no clues in the ‘incriminating’ department.

I called Tavish. Same as the last however many times, his phone went straight to voicemail. Presumably, he was working off whatever was bugging him with a swim in the River Thames. I added
another message to my earlier ones saying I was packing up, the tarot cards were still gone, and to call me.

I wasn’t sure what to take from the Emperor card. Tarot wasn’t my strong suit (bad pun aside), but as any self-analysis was a non-starter – this was about the fae’s
fertility after all – I went with a literal interpretation.

The card had said: ‘He knows! He will tell you! For a price!’ And then, ‘He is the Emperor!’

The Emperor, whoever he was, would do a deal for the info. Simple. Of course, whatever he wanted in exchange wasn’t likely to be simple at all. But I was doing the cart-before-the-horse
thing. First I had to find him. Which would be so much easier if I knew who he was. Only, thanks to the eagle (or whatever the cards were channelling) cutting the reading short, I had no name,
other than he called or thought of himself as the Emperor. Of course, that could be down to the tarot card’s standard depiction, so could be something or nothing.

But I did have a couple of clues.

The first was that, instead of the usual sceptre, the Emperor held a silver dagger.What that signified was anyone’s guess.

The second clue was more enlightening. The golden eagle had been perched on a snake-entwined staff. I’d recognised it: it was the Rod of Asclepius.

Asclepius was the Greek god of healing. According to myth, the goddess Athena, his aunt, gave him a gift of Gorgon’s blood to help him in his work. Only he didn’t just use it to heal
the sick, he started bringing them back after they’d died too, thereby giving them what turned out to be a new bloodsucking immortal life. Hence all new vamps ‘Accept the Gift’
when they leave their human mortality behind. Turned out creating a new species was a fatal life-choice for Asclepius, though, since Zeus, his überdivine granddad, wasn’t too impressed
by his grandkid overstepping his healing remit. He struck Asclepius dead with a thunderbolt. Then Apollo, Asclepius’s dad, got equally pissed off and decided to dispose of his son’s
creations, whenever they stepped into his light, by burning them to a crisp. Which is why vamps don’t do storms or suntans.

And why the Rod of Asclepius on the tarot card had to mean the Emperor was a vamp.

‘So I’m looking for a vamp with delusions of majesty,’ I muttered, which left the suspect pool wide open. Though since I couldn’t imagine how some unknown vamp would have
the answer to releasing and restoring the fae’s trapped fertility, the ‘Emperor’ would more than likely have some connection to London’s fae, and/or to me. Which narrowed
the suspects down considerably. In fact, to the one vamp who did the whole royal thing
ad nauseum
. The psychotic, sadistic, murdering sucker I was supposed to marry when I was fourteen.
The Autarch.

Panic rose up to close my throat. I forced it back down and told myself I was jumping to conclusions. I’d never known the Autarch to be called ‘Emperor’; he was always called a
prince. And just because I thought I knew all the vamps in London, didn’t mean I did. There was probably some other vamp I’d never heard of who was the Emperor.
Yeah, you just keep
telling yourself that, Gen.
I stifled the scared voice in my head. I needed more info before I let the possibility that I might finally have to face my own personal blood-sucker nightmare,
turn me back into that terrified teenager who’d run away. And the quickest way to get that info was to talk to the vamp in the know.

Malik al-Khan. London’s Oligarch and my ‘owner/protector’ . . . according to the vamps’ icky ‘property’ database, anyway. What our relationship actually was .
. . was complicated and confusing, and needed working out. Not just between us, but in my own head. And in my heart—