The Bitter Seed of Magic

Chapter Thirty-Six

Dead Man’s Hole, the old disused mortuary under Tower Bridge, was seeing way more use than anyone wanted. The place wasn’t much changed from my last visit. The river slapped against the dock outside, and cast watery reflections over the Victorian glazed-brick interior. Half a dozen uniforms—all witches—stood around the walls of the large cave-like room, and in between them were fat white candles that flickered and cast them into shadow. Spirals of thick smoke rose up to collect under the dome of the curved ceiling. My nostrils flared; underneath the heavy, waxy candle smell and the astringent scent of sage, I caught that same sweet, thick and slightly rotten smell from my previous visit. Then I realised it wasn’t just nudging my memory from before, but was also reminding me of the maple syrup on Sylvia’s breakfast pancakes. Strange, but then I’d never liked the stuff. And with a mounting sense of déjà vu, I followed Hugh to the large white sand and salt circle drawn in the centre of the cave-like room.

In the centre of the circle was the new victim. Unlike Sally Redman, the dead raven faeling, this girl was lying spreadeagled on her back, and naked. She also looked younger, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. I wanted to cover her up and give her back her dignity, but that wouldn’t help find who’d done this to her. It wouldn’t make them pay. I pressed my lips together and studied her. Inside the circle drawn by the police was another one, marked out in red chalk, and inside that was a red chalk pentagram. She’d been laid out with some precision on top of the pentagram, her head to one of the five points, her limbs spread out towards the other four. Around the inner pentagon formed by the crossing of the lines were more red chalkmarks, half-obscured by her body: a joined chain of five rings. My heart lurched with dismay as I made them out, and instinctively I touched Grace’s pentacle at my throat.

I looked up at Hugh and murmured, ‘The pentacle drawn underneath her matches mine.’

He nodded. ‘I recognised the design, Genny. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt it. Someone wants you involved—or implicated.’

I swiped away a couple of tears. Damn it, I really needed to find out why I kept crying and sort it—soon. ‘Is it possible someone’s using the girls to try and crack the curse? Or that they want you to think that I am?’

‘It appears sensible to think there’s some connection, Genny,’ he agreed, ‘but it’s not necessarily anything metaphysical.’

‘Why?’

‘The pentagram looks to be ritualistic,’ Hugh rumbled, ‘but Constable Martin assures me it isn’t. The points don’t face in any direction that could call power, and the design has enough confidence in its execution that she doesn’t think it’s sloppy work. We both feel that the pentagram is there to draw our attention to the curse and to you.’

‘Well, if someone’s trying to implicate me, then there’s always your boss,’ I muttered, looking around. ‘Speaking of DI Crane, shouldn’t she be here trying to remove me from her crime scene?’

‘Detective Inspector Crane is … no longer in charge of this case,’ he rumbled, his voice almost too low for me to hear.

‘Really?’ I gave him a surprised look. ‘What happened?’

‘She’s taking time off to deal with some personal problems.’

I wondered if the ‘time off’ was entirely her decision. But why Witch-bitch Helen Crane wasn’t here didn’t matter; not having her breathing down my neck was good news for me. But even without my own evil witch nemesis around, the other witchy occupants of the cave-like mortuary were still watching me closely enough to send wary chills down my spine. Not to mention that while we’d been talking, Constable Martin with her neat bun and just-kissed lips had walked round to stand on the opposite side of the circle. With her was another, older witch. She was giving me the once-over with sharp hazel eyes, and was too flamboyantly dressed in flowing fortune-teller chic (the fringes of small silver coins on her skirt and shawl were full-moon bright with spells) to be police. And since her presence had been shouting ‘power’ at my inner radar from the moment she’d come in, I was betting she was from the Witches’ Council.

Ignoring her, and the rest of the witchy crew, I turned to Hugh. ‘So, do you want me to check this victim to see if she’s tagged with any spells?’

‘Please, Genny.’

I looked. It was almost an anticlimax to see the same two spells as before: the dirty-white silly-string spell which cocooned the girl’s body, and underneath it, the faint out-of-focus waver of a Glamour spell.

‘Looks like the same spells that were on Sally the raven faeling,’ I said.

‘That’s what Constable Martin thought, but I wanted your opinion too.’ Hugh laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. ‘Do you think you can you remove the spells intact, Genny?’

I looked at the salt and sand circle. It was for containment, plain and simple, with no added extras.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘so long as I can do things my way, and I don’t have to worry about anyone mixing silver or anything else in the circle under the pretext of Health and Safety.’

‘That won’t be a problem,’ Hugh said reassuringly. ‘What do you need?’

‘The main spell seems to be some sort of preservative/stasis effort. The raven faeling’s injuries didn’t appear until after I removed it yesterday; it was only then she started to bleed. So the first thing’s a doctor.’ The poor girl needed someone better than me to resuscitate her if she turned out to be not as dead as she looked.

Hugh indicated the flamboyant hazel-eyed witch. ‘Witch Juliet Martin here is our official doctor on call. She has both the necessary medical and magical expertise.’

Witch Martin came around the circle and held out her hand to me. ‘Please, call me Juliet.’

I hesitated a moment—most folk with magical ability don’t do skin-to-skin contact, for fear of being inadvertently (or otherwise) tagged with a spell—then took her hand. Her shake was firm. ‘Genny Taylor,’ I said redundantly, since she obviously knew who I was. I looked enquiringly across the circle at Constable Martin.

‘My daughter, Mary,’ Juliet confirmed with a warm smile.

Nice to know we were keeping it all in the family.

I narrowed my eyes at Juliet. Time to test just how accommodating she was going to be. ‘Can you cope if I put the spell in a plastic bucket?’

She gave me another warm smile. ‘Indeed I can, Ms Taylor.’ She sent one of the WPCs off to fetch one.

Now for the important part.

I took a deep breath, stepped into the circle and crouched near the girl’s head. Her blue eyes stared sightlessly up, for a moment reminding me of Malik, wrapped in the rug under my bed, and I briefly wondered what I was going to do about him and his orders, then I dismissed him. Time enough to deal with the beautiful vampire when he woke up for the night; right now I needed to concentrate on the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde in front of me, who looked much too young to die. Of course, that could just be her Glamour spell; underneath that she was probably something else entirely. But like Sally, the dead raven faeling, I couldn’t tell. However the Glamour spell had been stirred, it had some way of camouflaging her essence as well as her physical appearance.

The more I stared at her, the more she looked oddly familiar. I frowned, trying to place where I’d seen her—

‘She’s in the reality show filmed at Morgan Le Fay College,’ Juliet said as she joined me in the circle. She put down her doctor’s bag, then carefully tucked her flouncy skirt underneath her and crouched on the other side of the girl’s body. ‘Her name is Miranda Wheater. She’s in the sixth form.’

I clicked where I’d seen Miranda before: on the front of the glossy magazine Sylvia had shown me before the Librarian had taken back the fae’s curse-cracking books. The girl—or witch—had been in a jacuzzi, complete with a fancy cocktail and half a dozen older men, and the headline had shouted something about a curse, which was obviously why the fae had added the magazine to their collection.

I looked from Juliet to Hugh. ‘I take it someone’s checked on Miranda’s whereabouts?’

‘Miranda is thankfully alive and well and at the college,’ Juliet assured me. ‘This child is someone else. There has been a spate of this type of appearance-altering spell, where the wearer has chosen a figure in the public eye who hasn’t given their consent to any doppelgänger spells. The Witches’ Council has received a number of complaints about them. While it is not as important as finding out who is responsible for this poor girl’s death, finding which witch has been casting the spells might provide us with some valuable information in both cases.’

‘Which witch for which’ spell made me think of Ricou and his Johnny Depp Glamour. I filled Hugh in, and suggested Ricou might be able to help. The WPC returned with my plastic bucket, and Hugh sent her back out to fetch him.

‘How do you intend to do this, Genny?’ Juliet asked.

‘Can you see what looks like thick silly-string all over her?’ I asked, lifting a strand. She nodded, which was a small relief; not everyone saw the magic the same way. ‘Then it’s probably easier if you just watch.’

I touched the edge of the circle with my finger and activated it with my magic. It sprang easily up into a clear dome above us, luckily with no nasty surprises. The knot in my stomach eased slightly. I focused on the silly-string, then plunged my hands into the spell and called the magic.

Ten minutes later I wrestled the last of the silly-string off the girl and into the bucket. I wiped my hand over my forehead, then wished I hadn’t as the slimy residue of the magic stuck to me like the slug-slime the goblins use in their hair gel.

I gave an involuntary shudder, and anxiously checked the girl. Thankfully, even with the removal of the Preservative/ Stasis spell she hadn’t developed any obvious injuries, or started bleeding from head wounds, or suddenly taken a last gasp at life as the dead raven faeling had. The knot in my stomach eased some more in relief.

Remembering Ricou’s small spell tattoos on his inner arms, I slowly ran my fingers up the girl’s smooth, pale skin, stifling another shudder at the lifeless feel of it. Nothing on the left. I leaned over and started on the right, hitting pay-dirt—or rather, spell-dirt—just above her inner elbow. I focused, and let a tiny trickle of power drip into the spell sparking under my forefinger. The Glamour peeled away from her like a banana shedding its skin.

The beautiful blue-eyed, blonde fifteen-year-old was gone, and in her place was a green-eyed, green-haired, green-skinned female of around forty with deep bracketed lines running from her small nose to her pinched mouth. Huge drooping breasts and a roll of excess flesh around her waist and hips made her look as if she’d lost a lot of weight quickly. For a moment I thought she was a bean nighe, one of the dark fae, but then I realised she couldn’t be, because her body hadn’t faded after death. I brushed the dead faeling’s hair away from her ears to find they ended in a definite point. Not a bean nighe then.

‘Oh,’ Juliet gasped softly, as she placed her stethoscope over the female’s heart, ‘she’s a leprechaun faeling, isn’t she? I’ve never seen one before.’

I hadn’t either, but I had once seen a full-blood leprechaun: Juliet was right. I sat back on my heels as she checked the leprechaun faeling over, hoping that whatever had killed her had been quick and painless, and wondering who she was.

‘Her name’s Aoife,’ Ricou said, startling me.

I looked up to see him standing outside the circle. I hadn’t noticed him arrive, but the rest of the WPCs had, and they weren’t bothering to hide their stares. He was still in his Johnny Depp guise, but he’d taken his trilby off and was holding it against his chest, sadness etching his face.

‘Her father is a full-blood leprechaun,’ he continued, then turned to Hugh. ‘He came over from Ireland in the sixties and hitched up with a girl from Dagenham. They split when Aoife was still a kid. Her mum’s passed now, but her dad’s back over there. This will cut him up.’ He paused. ‘Aoife means beauty. She was beautiful too, when she was younger …’ He crushed his hat.

‘Is she anything to do with the Morrígan?’ I asked.

‘Her father’s from Rath Cruachán.’ Ricou frowned. ‘That’s in County Roscommon. Which is where the MacCúailnge, the Old Donn, hailed from, so she could be.’