The Shifting Price of Prey

Chapter Two

Thirty minutes later a familiar brush against my senses had me looking over my shoulder again to see a clear crystal appear on the room’s threshold. The crystal started to glow with the pink blush of dawn and the heady scent of peat and whisky shimmered through the room, sending desire shuddering through my body. I braced my hands on the desk, let the power ride me to the soft edge of pleasure, then bit back a frustrated cry as the spell set, leaving me wanting.

The cause wasn’t the spell: it was a simple Privacy one. Anyone could buy five of them from the Witches’ Market in Covent Garden for under a tenner. No, my reaction was down to the person who’d activated it. Tavish, the kelpie, defacto àrd-cheann – Top Dog, or in Tavish’s case, Top Water Horse – of London’s fae, and my co-worker/employee . . . when the inclination took him.

It didn’t matter what spells Tavish set; if I was near it was like getting blasted with magical pheromones. The longer we worked together, the more potent it got. I’d learned the hard way not to block it, as all that did was make my frustration worse. Not that he was doing it deliberately: in fact, when I’d brought it up, he’d looked dismayed then concluded it must be a side-effect (caused by my usual random reactions to magic) of the protective Chastity spell he’d tagged me with three months ago (he’d removed the Chastity spell soon after, once the threat was gone) and should fade in time.

Only the ‘side-effect’ wasn’t fading.

The second time I’d mentioned it he’d proposed we ‘swim in his lake’ and sort it out that way. But rather than his idea being one of his usual semi-serious suggestions we have sex, he’d been obviously reluctant.

Which confused the hell out of me.

Until it clicked that while Tavish had never missed an opportunity to sic me with his kelpie power and I’d often found myself gazing at him like a Charm-struck human, he’d always had an ulterior motive for hitting on me; the infertility curse afflicting London’s lesser fae. The fae had expected me to have a curse-breaking baby and, Tavish, as àrd-cheann, had been number one prospective daddy. But Tavish had only volunteered as ‘daddy’ to protect me from the rest of them. Something I was grateful for despite my annoyance at being kept in the dark about his whole take on the curse situation.

Of course, I didn’t need his protection any more, not since the true reason for the fae’s infertility had become common knowledge during the Tower of London Abductions case three months ago (codenamed ToLA by the police); their lack of fertility wasn’t due to a curse, but rather their fertility had been stolen. And, thanks in part to Tavish’s Machiavellian plotting, I’d recovered it.

Which was when Tavish had stopped hitting on me.

His reluctance hurt. Though, with the curse hanging around like an impatient Grim Reaper bent on eradicating London’s fae, I could understand why he’d faked fancying me. And it wasn’t as if I wanted us to be an item: Tavish is hot, and there’s a definite chemistry between us, at least on my side, but all my heart truly felt for him was friendship.

Of course, there was another reason why Tavish’s ardour might have cooled . . . stabbing him in the gut with a five-foot bull’s horn, and leaving him to the Morrígan’s tender ministrations probably hadn’t endeared me to him.

But whatever the reason I was no longer on his ‘SILF’ list, I didn’t want to complicate things for either of us by ‘swimming in his lake’, so I’d kept my confusion to myself and pretended the inconvenient and frustrating ‘side-effect’ had faded, in the hope that it actually would.

I blinked as Tavish suddenly appeared on the other side of the desk, shedding the Invisibility spell he’d been wearing, then did a double take. When he’d gone invisible and piggybacked after me into the gnome’s house, he’d been sporting his usual Sam-Spade-pinstriped-suit-and-Fedora work outfit. Now he was poured into a black unitard, pewter-coloured cobwebs decorating the super-tight Lyrca covering every part of him, including his head, hands and feet. He should’ve looked ridiculous in the costume; instead it left nothing to my libido’s imagination and he looked . . . disturbingly jumpable— Down, girl! Briefly I closed my eyes. How the hell had he even got himself into it, not to mention—

‘Tavish, why are you dressed up as a bad-ass Spider-Man?’

He stripped his hood off and the lacy gills either side of his neck snapped open like black fans. He shook out his green-black dreads; they writhed around his shoulders as if objecting to being contained, beads flashing from cobweb pewter to a clear sun-drenched turquoise.

‘Och, doll,’ he said, giving me his shark’s grin, serrated teeth white against the green-black of his skin. ‘The fancy dress shop dinna have a Cat-Man costume, so what else should I be wearing to be all sneaky and stealthy?’

Having him ‘work’ with/for me was like employing a two-year-old sometimes; still, most of my clients loved his ‘eccentricities’. I shot him an exasperated look. ‘You were invisible. It didn’t matter what you wore.’

‘Maybe. But where’s the fun in that? And look.’ Tavish lifted his hand and shot a stream of magic at the high ceiling. It expanded into thin filaments, attached, and then with a leap he was above me, crouched upside down on the ceiling, giving me an excellent view of his, oh-so-gorgeous arse.

Crap! Either I was as bad as the dirty-minded gnome, or Tavish’s magical pheromones were hitting a new high. I was going to have to find a way of getting rid of the damn side-effect, and soon. I dragged my attention back to the dead fairy then decided that staring at his appendage probably wasn’t the ideal way to cool down my libido.

I fished a bottle of water out of my backpack, took a long drink. Spidey impersonation aside, at least now Tavish had finished his search I’d find out if he’d dug up any incriminating evidence on Mr Lecherous Lampy.

‘Any luck?’ I asked, sitting down.

‘Nae a glint, doll,’ he said, disappointing me. He dropped silently down, lifted the gnome’s heavy throne-style chair as if it weighed nothing, set it next to mine and slumped into it. His long, angled features took on a despondent air. ‘’Tis near like an untouched tomb upstairs, all inch-thick dust and empty, echoey rooms. Gnomes don’t care too much for air twixt them and their earth.’

The huge ginger tom growled, subjecting Tavish to the same evil-feline stare it had me. Either it didn’t like Tavish talking about its master, or maybe a giant Spider-Man looked like a tasty banquet. Tavish snorted, baring his teeth at it. The cat decided its paws needed cleaning.

I huffed. Figured Tavish would be more intimidating than me. ‘So if there’s nothing to be found, what’s next to investigate?’

His gills closed as if in defeat. ‘’Tis the nature of others to die.’ He plucked a slowly wriggling slug off the silver-foiled potato, held it up. ‘All of them live too short a life: slugs, garden fairies, humans, even the lesser fae.’ He dropped the slug into the tea then raised his eyes to mine; his were now a solid murky grey. ‘You’re nae but a youngster, doll, but you’ll discover it soon enough. They’re nae like us, the rest all fade too easily.’

His words seeped into my heart like acid trickling through half-healed cracks. My friend Grace had died. She’d sacrificed herself to save me. I missed her . . . and every day suffered the loss and pain and anger that she was gone too soon. Tavish’s eyes carried the same suffering. I’d never seen him like this.

It pushed my worries about the gnome away and I reached out, grasping his hand. ‘Who did you lose?’

He blew out a soft sigh. ‘Och, ’tis nothing, doll. ’Tis maudlin, I am, for nae other reason than the wee dead mannie here, taken afore his time.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s more than that.’

He looked down at our joined fingers then nodded as if he’d come to a decision. ‘We’re nae any closer to finding the way to release the fae’s fertility.’

Trepidation fluttered in my stomach. When I’d recovered the fae’s stolen fertility it was trapped inside a sapphire pendant. I’d given the pendant to my friend Sylvia, a dryad, for safekeeping, and now she and Ricou, her naiad partner, were expecting the first full-blood fae in eighty years. They were ecstatic.

The rest of the lesser fae not so much.

Oh, they were overjoyed for the coming baby (though some weren’t happy about its mix), but with the fae’s fertility still trapped in the pendant no one else could conceive without wearing the thing and, being a cautious lot, no one expected Sylvia to take the pendant off until after her baby was born. The practicalities of the situation were awkward. Much more terrifying was the threat the pendant could be lost or stolen again, condemning them all to die.

Tavish squeezed my hand, expression intense. ‘You’re the key to sorting it all, doll, you ken you always have been.’

Yeah, and didn’t I know it. It was my sidhe queen grandmother, Clíona, who’d laid the original curse – that they should also know the grief in her heart – on London’s fae eighty-odd years ago, in revenge for the fae not protecting her mortal son from the vampires. Later, in a fit of remorse, Clíona had secretly ‘borrowed’ the fae’s fertility (evidently her feelings of remorse only went so far) in an attempt to break the curse by having another child. My mother.

Long story short. My mother’s birth didn’t break the curse, and as a result of Clíona’s continuing ‘attempts’ to ‘put things right’ without dropping herself in the shit big-time, the pendant with the fae’s fertility was lost. It was found just long enough to enable my conception, and then stolen.

Now, thanks in part to my family connection with it, I’d recovered the pendant.

It should have been the happy ending everyone wanted. Trouble was the pendant carried only half of the spell trapping the fertility and before the fertility could be released, the other half still had to be found. Until it was, Clíona’s original curse was just on hold, not broken. All the fae had to go on was a riddle from the Morrígan:

That which was taken, must be recovered.

That which is lost, must be found.

That which is sundered, must be joined.

Half-arsed as it was, the riddle wasn’t hard to work out: the fertility had been taken, and was now recovered. The rest of the trap was lost, we had to find it and join the two halves together then, hey presto, the fae’s fertility would be restored. Except no one knew what the other half of the trap was, never mind where it was. Just once it would be great if the goddess-in-the-know had handed over specifics like a picture, or maybe even a map with a big red X marking the spot. But the Morrígan obviously hadn’t been feeling that helpful. So Tavish and the rest of London’s fae had been searching, magically and mundanely, to find it. So far all they’d found was a big fat nothing.

Of course the sensible thing would be to ask Clíona what they were looking for. Only sense doesn’t come into it when all the parties involved have been refusing even to acknowledge each other for more than half a century. I’d have asked her myself if not for the fact I was ‘an abominable stain on her royal sidhe bloodline’ and she was determined to be rid of me. That she hadn’t succeeded in killing me off yet was due in no small part to Tavish. Something else I owed him for.

I frowned at him. ‘Thought you said you’d had some foretelling that if I helped search I could screw things up; that the fae’s fertility could end up trapped or lost permanently, and if that happened the curse would never be broken?’

‘Aye, I did.’

‘What’s changed then?’ I asked.

‘Nae a thing, doll.’

‘So why now?’

‘We’re running out of ideas.’ Frustration turned his beads black.

‘So you’re prepared to risk me helping, even though it could all go wrong?’

‘Aye, but only in a small way. One I dinna think will cause any harm.’

I took a swig of water as dread settled like iron chains over my shoulders. I didn’t want to get sucked back into it all again. But if I was honest, the fae’s fertility problems weren’t something I could or even should turn my back on. It was my family who’d started the whole ‘stolen fertility’ ball rolling, way back when. And I wasn’t the one hurting in all this. The fae were. And as Tavish said, I was the key. If he needed my help, however small—

‘Okay,’ I told him briskly. ‘What do you want me to do?’