The Shifting Price of Prey (6 page)

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Anything else come in for tonight?’

‘You’re free as a—’ Katie’s eyes rounded with alarm as she pointed at the park. ‘Look, Genny!’

I looked. And saw nothing. ‘What?’

‘There! In those bushes!’ She waved frantically at a dark clump about fifty metres away. ‘He was naked. ’

I raced alongside the iron railings enclosing the park, through the entrance and ran towards the bushes, clenching my hand around my ring and releasing Ascalon. ‘Naked’ said the male
was probably some lowlife pervert so he wouldn’t warrant a killing blow, but as a scare tactic the sword would make him think twice next time he got the urge to get his junk out. And if he
was more than just a lowlife, like, say a peeping tom Autarch, then I was way happier being armed and dangerous.

I slowed as I neared the spot, sending my Spidey senses out. No one. Naked or otherwise. I’m fast, part due to my sidhe blood and part because I run daily, so I should’ve got some
sort of ping back. So either he’d disappeared into thin air – possible, but I couldn’t sense any magic either – or he was fast enough to sprint out of range. Which could
only mean a vamp. I scowled, ignoring the way my pulse was pounding harder than it should for a short run and debated whether it was worth poking about in the bushes. Katie shouted again.

‘There! Down by the trees.’

I spun towards the wooded area a couple of hundred metres away . . . No naked male, but a brief glimpse of a dark shape moving low and merging into the deeper gloom. My inner radar pinged:
‘human’ and ‘animal’. I started running then stopped as my senses zeroed in on the path coming from the far side of the wooded area. A man was walking his dog. His shoulders
were stooped under his beige-coloured shirt and trousers, and the dog – a yellow Labrador – padded slowly on age-stiffened legs. Even without being close enough to see the man’s
face clearly, it was obvious he was old. No way was he the flasher. Neither he nor his dog could move fast enough to get over there from the bushes.

I ran to the trees and did a swift check round. Had I seen something, or was my imagination on overdrive? Whatever, there was no hint of vamp, or of magic. Letting Ascalon slide back into the
ring, I jogged over to the man and his dog, said a brief hello, and confirmed he was as old and human as he appeared and hadn’t seen a flasher making a fast exit. Then I sprinted back to the
bushes, poked around and again found nothing. Rolling my shoulders to get rid of the tension, I jogged back to Katie.

‘Did you see him?’ she asked, expression worried.

Crap. Katie really didn’t need to hear I thought her flasher might be a vamp stalking me; it would knock her confidence way down. ‘Sorry, no. Probably scared him off with the
sword.’

She frowned at me. ‘He was weird.’

I snorted. ‘I think sick is the word you want.’

‘No. He was naked, but he wasn’t trying to, y’know, flash. It was more as if he was spying and he sort of fell over.’

I pursed my lips. ‘He fell over?’

‘Maybe not fell over exactly, but sort of crumpled downwards.’

‘Okay, that is weird. But he’s gone now,’ I said, aiming for reassuring. ‘So he can’t have been hurt.’

She hugged her helmet, still anxious. ‘Maybe. Did you see the animal under the trees? It was weird too. Dog-like, but not. And big.’

I gave her a considering look. Maybe my imagination wasn’t on overdrive. A big dog might account for the dark shape I thought I’d seen. ‘I didn’t get a clear look, Katie.
Sorry.’

She gave an almost imperceptible shudder. ‘Do you think the animal was something to do with the Carnival? They’ve got some odd exhibits. Maybe one of them escaped? The man
could’ve been looking for it?’

I hadn’t thought of that, but then my paranoia was stuck on vampire. Whereas Katie’s was stuck on finding an explanation that wasn’t scary. ‘Could be,’ I said, and
dug out my phone and called Carnival security, more to reassure Katie than anything.

The duty manager hadn’t had any escapees reported, so he took my rather sparse details, asked if I was sure they were animals and not some sort of fae, then thanked me and said he’d
check it out. He also suggested I phone the zoo. I did. And got almost the same response, albeit with the guarantee that they took security very seriously, and would have known if any animal had
escaped. They would, of course, look into it.

‘Nothing, but they’ll let me know,’ I told Katie as I came off the phone. ‘I think we should tell the police about the flasher.’ Which the naked male was, whatever
else he might be, and as such needed to be reported. ‘Can you describe him?’

She twisted the strap of her helmet, chewed her lip, frowning at the bushes. ‘Dark, wavy hair. Pale-skinned. Tall-ish . . . I think.’

‘And definitely naked,’ I prompted.

‘Yes, but I didn’t see anything, y’know, important, just enough that I could tell he didn’t have clothes on.’

I gave her a comforting hug, and phoned the police.

An hour later, we waved them goodbye. They’d taken our statements and I’d managed to let them know, without Katie hearing, my suspicion the flasher might be a vamp.
They’d said it wasn’t unusual to get flasher reports from the park and they’d do a more thorough check during daylight. Then they wrapped the bushes up in enough blue and white
tape that it looked like the vegetation had been a victim of an over-excited troupe of maypole dancers. The coppers’ parting shot had been to ask if we wanted a police liaison officer to
contact us to arrange some counselling.

‘Counselling,’ Katie muttered miserably once we were on our own again. ‘We don’t have to, do we? It wasn’t like I even saw anything.’

I hugged her again. ‘It’s only if you think you need it, hon.’

‘Yeah, well I don’t. I had enough counselling last year.’

When the vamp kidnapped her
. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to. That counselling hadn’t been fun, but it had helped, which was what mattered.
‘Hey.’ I gave her shoulders another consoling squeeze. ‘Wanna hit the Rosy Lea for coffee and a fry-up?’

She eyed me dubiously from under her lashes. ‘You don’t do coffee and I don’t do fry-ups.’

I grinned. ‘Semantics.’

She huffed and handed me her spare helmet. ‘You gonna tell Mum about tonight?’

‘Do you want me to?’

She heaved a sigh. ‘No. I’ll tell her. She’s gonna freak out, though.’

Yep, Paula would. But in a good way, Then again, what mother wouldn’t? She was as protective as I was about Katie, apart from when it came to Katie’s new boyfriend, Marc. But before
I could say anything, a bird-like warbling sounded. Katie started, grabbed for her phone. She frowned then shot me a bemused look. ‘You’re never gonna believe this, Genny!
Someone’s pulled a “Harry Potter” in Leicester Square!’

‘A what?’

‘A “Harry Potter”. At least that’s what they’re calling it on Twitter. Tavish’s bots picked it up. Look!’ She held her phone out.

The display showed a video clip of the Empire’s façade. The huge poster over the cinema’s entrance advertised
Conan the Barbarian
. On the poster, a half-naked,
muscled-up Conan was looming high above the battling hordes, actually swinging his sword at his legion of attackers. As the video clip played, Conan’s adversaries stopped attacking and
traipsed off into the wings as if taking a tea break. Conan looked around in satisfaction, hoisted his sword over his shoulder and followed, leaving the poster advertising nothing more than an
out-of-focus vista of an empty, rocky plain.

I looked at Katie. ‘That is a poster, isn’t it? Not some new vid-screen the cinema’s using?’

‘Definitely a poster.’ She tapped her screen. ‘And it’s definitely a prank of some kind; there’re already apologies and reassurances on twitter that it’ll be
fixed soon.’ She gave me an expectant glance.

‘You’re right,’ I said, answering her unspoken question. ‘It sounds like an ideal job for Spellcrackers, if we can—’

Katie’s phone gave another bird-like warble at the same time my phone beeped with a text – from Leandra, the witch who monitored our night phones.

Leandra had sent the text to every witch on Spellcrackers’ books. I raised my brows at Katie. ‘Jobs, plural?’

‘Yep. The rest of the posters are the same. Well, according to Twitter, anyway. Going by the ton of tweets, it looks like it might even be trending soon.’

‘Going by the tweets,’ I corrected, ‘it looks like we’re in for a busy night.’

C
onan the Barbarian twirled his sword like a cheerleader’s baton, pointed it out at the cheering crowds forty feet below in Leicester Square,
then did a slow bump and grind as he shot me a salacious wink.

‘Bet you don’t do that in the film,’ I muttered, ignoring the whoops, whistles and calls for ‘more’.

I used the controls on the hydraulic lift basket I was standing in to nudge myself closer to the top of the film poster, then
focused
on the splatter of muddy-coloured oil paint that
was the ‘Harry Potter’ spell. How the hell the magical vandal had got it this high was a mystery – one the police were responsible for unravelling – all I had to unravel was
the spell.

Which was proving easier said than done.

‘Okay, let’s try this again,’ I murmured, crunching three liquorice torpedoes to boost my magic, and touching the cleaned mascara brush I held to the paint. Carefully, I teased
out a fat orange stripe from the muddy mess, then another of indigo, followed by pink, green, and five shades of yellow, until I had all the stripes separated out into a seemingly random colour
wheel. Mentally crossing my fingers, I checked the poster. Conan scowled, hefted his sword like he meant business and froze. I compared it to the A4 copy the cinema manager had given me, and blew
out a relieved sigh. They matched. Finally, I’d hit on the right combination. After two long hours.

The time was within the budget, but I’d hoped to nail it in less. Of course,
cracking
the ‘Harry Potter’ spell would’ve taken a couple of seconds, but
cracking
a spell also cracks whatever it’s attached to, and shredded posters and damaged buildings were a definite no.

I’d tried
absorbing
the spell, but all that had done was turn the poster white. Luckily I’d managed to spit the spell back out unchanged before the magic had mutated, though
I was still suffering the nasty side-effects: mouth dry with the bitter taste of juniper berries, and six, so far, desperate trips to the cinema’s facilities. Even that hadn’t killed my
constant urge to pee. The idea of setting a Privacy spell and making use of the spell-dumping bucket as a handy potty was my newest fantasy.
Absorbing
magic can sometimes bring out its
‘mischievous’ side.

Mischievous magic aside, now I’d managed to reverse-tweak the spell to get the poster back to normal, all I needed to do was suck it up and dump it in the potty – sorry, bucket
– with our new Spellcrackers spell remover, a.k.a. the common turkey baster: the kitchen implement with a hundred and one uses, according to Leandra when she’d suggested it. (Unnerved
by the slightly manic glint in her eye at the time, I’d refrained from asking what the other ninety-eight were.)

A sudden gust of warm wind hit and I grabbed the metal hopper’s handrail as it gave a stomach-dropping shudder. Heights don’t usually bother me, but something about being forty-odd
feet up, in a three-foot-wide metal basket, suspended on a seemingly fragile-looking arm cantilevered up and out from the back of a small lorry, brought on an unexpected attack of vertigo.

Dizzy, I slumped down and tried not to think about water, potties or how far away the ground was. I took a few deep breaths, willing the dizziness to pass, then switched my phone on (leaving it
on when dealing with unknown magic is a sure-fire way of
cracking
the Buffer spell) and texted the rest of the team with the ‘reverse tweak’. Now I’d figured out the
colour combo, removing the ‘Harry Potter’ spell from the other fifty-odd posters (who knew there were
so
many posters in Leicester Square?) would be as easy as, well, sucking
up gravy.

I checked my messages— and found one from Malik, his clipped, ice-cold tone almost willing me not to phone back.

I took a breath and brought his number up, the nerves in my stomach not made any better by my constant need to relieve myself. And the minefield of thoughts I’d sidestepped earlier, when
I’d decided Malik was the obvious choice for info, opened up in front of me. If I was honest, things weren’t just complicated and confusing between us, they were downright awkward. And
it was all my fault.

I should never have blackmailed him.

Oh, it had seemed a great idea at the time. He’d started ordering me around, right in the middle of the ToLA case, and as he’d had my freely offered blood, I had no choice but to do
as he said. His orders were all meant to protect me, and the one chance I had of recovering the stolen fae’s fertility. Later, when I’d discovered that, I’d forgiven him. But at
the time I’d felt betrayed, mad as hell, and had been determined to stop him from ever abusing his power over me again. Plus, I had a plan to rescue the victims with his help, and knew the
only way to get it was to force him.