The Shifting Price of Prey

Chapter Twenty

Genevieve. You should not be here.

Malik’s voice came again, the urgency in it tugging me out of the dream. For a moment I drifted, then horror slipped inside me as the dream pulled me under again, back to a wide, moon-bright plateau. The plateau stretched out to both sides of me, one edge hugging the steep mountain face, the other falling into the clouds roiling below. The ground was covered with an ankle-deep blanket of snow and wolves were howling all around me, their keening riding the wind that dragged anxious fingers through my hair and sent icy snowflakes to sting my face. I knelt in the snow, blood staining it in a ragged circle, like crimson petals scattered from a rose, as I denied my terror, my revulsion, and schooled my face. I was listening, as I had long ago, to the figure before me talking about . . . something . . . that filled me with desolation, even as it lifted my soul with fledgling hope. Only the words didn’t make any sense—

Genevieve.

Malik’s harsh whisper jerked me awake and the dream shredded like fog chased away by a resolute wind. Adrenalin sped my pulse, my left wrist banded with pain, and I jerked up, ripping off the sleep mask and searching my bedroom for him.

Dawn light streamed through the open window, washing over the sloping white-painted walls, the copper paint on my iron bedstead, and throwing shadows behind the rail holding my clothes. But as I peered at the dark corner, trying to see if he stood there, shaded from the sun, my inner radar kicked in and told me the room was empty.

Disappointment rolled over me. I rubbed my wrist, trying to soothe the stinging soreness there and wondering if I had really gatecrashed Malik’s dream, which was how it had felt, or was the nightmare down to the Morpheus Memory Aid backfiring? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time magic had gone haywire on me—

My bed was covered in rose petals. Those were definitely nothing to do with the Morpheus spell. The dark crimson petals were scattered over the white sheets like fresh blood on snow. Even with the obvious references to Malik’s and my time together in the hotel function room, and the dream I’d just woken from, and knowing I was alone, part of me hoped the velvety petals filling the room with a familiar dark spice scent were a clichéd romantic gesture on Malik’s part. Only, I didn’t need the unease in my gut to tell me they were nothing to do with romance.

I scooped up a petal praying it was an illusion that would dissipate with touch.

It didn’t.

My unease grew. Where had they come from? What were they to do with the dream? What did the dream have to do with Malik? How had I heard his voice if he wasn’t here? And more worryingly, if the petals were as real as they felt, how the hell had someone – Malik? – got them past the Wards?

I looked at the open window. In my sight, it disappeared behind a magical steel shutter. The magical steel shone deep purple and the combination of blood and power fuelling the Ward made it hum like a megawatt transformer. My flat was the safest place in England right now. Or at least it was meant to be. Nothing could, or should, get past the Ward, not even a five-hundred-plus-year-old vamp who normally had an open invitation over any threshold I was behind, thanks to my being stupid enough to give him my blood freely.

Agitated, I swung out of bed, grabbed my robe and hurried into the living room. The Wards covering the flat’s front door and the window were, like the one in the bedroom, intact, and a quick scan of the room told me everything appeared undisturbed. I pulled the sheet off the wardrobe leading into Sylvia’s Between.

The wardrobe, too, appeared undisturbed.

But appearances could be deceiving. Warily, I waved my hand over the wardrobe’s handles – intricately carved oak leaves that were recent replacements for the original brass ones – careful not to actually touch them. Robur, the ancient dryad now resident in the wardrobe’s wood (and the reason why the wardrobe was no longer in my bedroom), wasn’t the cheeriest of folk, and since I’d sprayed him with lemon polish not long after he’d moved in, he’d taken a distinct dislike to me. The wardrobe made an irritated creaking noise and the whorls in the wooden door shifted into an approximation of a face. Hooded brown eyes drilled me with a malevolent glare.

‘Everything okay in there?’ I asked.

‘Why, what have you done now?’

At Robur’s accusing tone, I clamped down on my defensive ‘nothing’, and instead said calmly, ‘I’m concerned someone may have bypassed the Wards.’

‘Impossible! I would know.’

Arrogant much? ‘Are you sure?’

The hooded eyes narrowed to disdainful cracks. ‘There are three pigeons sitting on the apex of the roof. The witch who lives the floor below is meditating, unfortunately not skyclad as she should be and she has neglected to light her elemental candles. The witch on the second floor is snoring, despite her extremely shrill alarm attempting to wake her three times. The goblin cleaner is polishing the woodwork on the stairs, correctly, I might add, using a lint-free cloth, unperfumed beeswax and working along the grain—’

‘Fine,’ I interrupted, before I ended up with another lecture, ‘you’re sure. I get it. But someone still left rose petals on my bed during the night.’

‘Your vampire paramour, I suspect.’

I huffed under my breath, ignoring the insult. ‘So he was here then?’

‘No.’

‘Then how can you suspect?’

His face rippled with distaste. ‘You were conversing with another in your dreams. I have heard that ability is one it is possible for vampires to effect.’

Astonishment flooded me. I’d been talking out loud in the dream? Why hadn’t Robur woken me? Though hard on that thought came the answer; this was the first time he’d done more than creaked at me since the polish incident. Eager to find out, I asked, ‘What did I talk about?’

‘Ghosts and blood.’

I frowned. ‘Can you be more specific?’

Robur grunted. ‘No. The language is unknown to me; I only know because you repeated the words “sanguine lemures” over and over. I was irritated to the extent that I searched for a translation. It is Latin for “the blood of undead ghosts”, or some such nonsense.’

The blood of undead ghosts? No doubt Malik could explain what it meant, along with how I’d ended up in his dream or memory in the first place. After all it wasn’t like I’d had his blood during our Jellyfish spell-removing episode, except— the jellyfish had been feeding on him, and it had stung me. Okay, so I’d cracked its magic and killed it, but I’d definitely got some of its poison in me, possibly along with some of Malik’s blood. Was that why I was experiencing his dreams/memories with him? I filed all my questions away for our ‘date’ tonight— if I ended up going.

Which I would if Tavish didn’t sort the Emperor question first.

‘Right, thanks,’ I said to Robur. The jellyfish scenario could explain why I was gatecrashing Malik’s dream, but it didn’t explain the physical presence of the rose petals. ‘Are you sure no one’s breached the Wards?’

‘I have informed you already. No!’

‘Then how did the rose petals get in?’

‘That . . . I do not have an answer for,’ Robur said dismissively, his face smoothing back into the wardrobe’s wood.

I resisted the urge to kick the wardrobe. The sneaky dryad had eyes everywhere, supposedly, but those petals had still got in without him knowing. Concerned, I called Tavish and got his voicemail. I left a brief message about the Morpheus Memory Aid revealing Katie’s boyfriend as the peeping tom, the shadowy animal beneath the trees, which might or might not, have been a werewolf. Now I thought about it, it looked like the grey crawling-out-the-abyss cat on the Moon tarot card. I mentioned my weird blood and snow dream, the rose petals and Robur’s comments. I left another voicemail for Katie, and one for her mum too, saying we needed to chat about Marc, a.s.a.p., and for Katie to be sure she wore the werewolf repellent, even if its reek meant she was likely to repel half of London.

Better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.

I grabbed an orange juice from the fridge, exchanging the stink-eye with Ricou’s dead mackerel. That they were still there meant Ricou hadn’t been home and Sylvia had spent the night alone. I made a note to talk to the absent naiad, tell him he needed to pay his pregnant partner more attention.

My gaze snagged on the shelf below the fish where the two bags of blood sat, my last two donations ready to go to Freya, my niece. The Wards were keyed to my blood, so maybe that was how they’d been breached. By someone who had access to my donations. Someone like, say, oh, Freya’s granddad, Mad Max— the Autarch’s pet vamp.

Only Mad Max didn’t need access to my donated blood; he could’ve easily siphoned off a couple of pints while he’d had me unconscious and tied to the hotel bed. Then given my blood to the Autarch. The blood would be stolen, so its power over me reduced, but there might still be enough for a small breach. And the petals were exactly the sort of sick joke the psychotic bastard would play. What if Robur, despite his initially reassuring conviction in his own surveillance abilities, was wrong and the Autarch had breached the Wards, even though all the interior ones looked intact? Of course, I hadn’t checked the ones outside on the roof yet.

I grabbed a handful of dog biscuits from the jar on the kitchen counter, and stuffed them in my pocket as I made a beeline back to my bedroom window. The Steel Shutter Ward moulded like thick, suffocating plastic around me as I climbed over the low sill and breathed in the scents of honeysuckle, cherry blossom and watercress, undercut with the copper tang of the blood fuelling its magic. The Ward released me, snapping back in place over the window and sending me stumbling into the summer sunshine. A hot breeze ruffled my hair, and the early morning bustle from the Witches’ Market in Covent Garden five storeys below rode the air like a distant radio.

I tuned it out, scanning the roof.

In the humans’ reality the roof was ten feet deep and stretched in a large squared-off U around the three sides of the Edwardian terraces that hemmed in the garden and cemetery below. The red-brick entrance to St Paul’s Church closed off the last side of the garden square. The roof was a great place to sunbathe, and all around the U-shape deckchairs and flowerpots had sprung up as soon as the weather turned warm.

But the section outside my window was nearing thirty foot deep; a new addition thanks to my flatmates. And instead of a few potted plants, we had a peaceful forest glade. Moss and colourful lichens carpeted the roof’s surface, multi-stemmed silver birch saplings ringed the glade’s edge, and in the centre was a silver-watered pond. If I squinted I could just make out where the original roof edge bisected the pond; one of the reasons I never ventured in for a paddle. The other was the water’s occupant. Alongside the pond were four wooden sun loungers with green-and-white-striped cushions. It looked like some luxury holiday retreat instead of a roof garden in the heart of London. It also looked as peaceful and undisturbed as usual.

So far, so good.

Above the glade rose a geodesic dome of magic, the dome’s opaque glass-like panels obscuring the view over London’s rooftops. That dome was the Ward protecting, enclosing and enforcing the overlay of the forest glade on the humans’ world. I focused my attention on the pink-tinged panels, scanning carefully for any breaks or breaches.

Nothing.

Relief settled in me. Robur was right. No one, not the Autarch, and not even Malik, had bypassed the Wards. The rose petals had to be a vamp illusion, however real they seemed. I turned to go and double-check, but stopped as the shadow of a tall figure appeared outside the Warded dome. Someone was on the roof, and this early it was unlikely to be one of my neighbours, not least because they usually kept their distance.

Pulse hitching in wariness, I clenched my hand, ready to release Ascalon, and dropped my sight.

The magical dome winked out.

Finn stood outside the Ward.