Katie’s next text had my jaw dropping in shock.
Finn’s just walked in the office!!!! Did you know he was coming back? Why didn’t you tell me?
The text was sent mid-afternoon. I stared at it, heart pounding, thoughts and questions bouncing like balls I couldn’t catch till I snagged the important one: if Finn was still here I had a chance to talk some sense into him about the Witch-bitch Helen.
I called him.
His phone went straight to voicemail.
I started to call Finn’s brother, then stopped as I remembered the herd were on my shit list. Instead I read the rest of Katie’s tests. They told me what I wanted to know: Finn had turned up looking for me, discovered I was holed-up all day with the police at the Harley Street crime scene, poked around the office for a couple of hours, then said he had to go back to the Fair Lands. He’d asked Katie to tell me he’d be back soon.
‘Soon!’ I spluttered at the phone. ‘When the hell is soon? Tomorrow? Next week? When?’ And why the hell couldn’t the aggravating satyr tell me that himself— Maybe he had. Frantic, I scrolled through the rest of my messages—
And found the one, sent late afternoon, from Malik:
My apologies, Genevieve. I am unable to meet you at midnight. I would be grateful if we could rearrange our meeting for sunset. Malik.
‘My’ answer to him, five minutes later, was as he’d told me:
Any meeting must be private at office or not at all.
Stunned, I stared at the text until the pieces snapped into place. Finn had been at Spellcrackers. My phones had been at Spellcrackers. Finn, if he was about, was always the one who fixed the phones . . .
Damn interfering satyr had sent ‘my’ answer to Malik. And if I needed any more confirmation, four other texts – all Spellcrackers’ business calls – had been answered too. But just because Spellcrackers didn’t deal with vamps, and even if he hated suckers, and Malik in particular, it didn’t give Finn the right.
‘Back less than a day and you’re already up to your old tricks,’ I ground out.
Furious, I texted him, not caring he wouldn’t get it until whenever the fuck ‘soon’ was!
You have no right to answer my texts. No right to make arbitrary, high-handed decisions on my behalf, about my work or my personal life. Oh, and yes, Malik *is* my personal life.
Fuming I jabbed send.
Stupid, irritating males – all of them – trying to run my life for me.
Half an hour later, I’d showered, eaten the BLT sandwich I’d found in the fridge (thanks to Sylvia’s magical delivery service), drunk my nightly blood-fruit Mary, and my rage had muted to a pensive simmer. I checked on Bertha again. She was still swimming back and forth, doing her vigilant-periscope patrol, no doubt hoping I was going to reappear so she could get a bite in.
I sighed, not sure what I could do about the vengeful eel. She was here to stay, for at least until Sylvia had her baby, so I had six more months of dodging and running across my own roof ahead. I lay back in bed, staring at the white, sloping attic walls of my bedroom, and twisted Ascalon’s emerald ring on my finger.
I’d called Malik.
My calls went straight to voicemail.
Damn. I needed to talk to him. No way was I going to wait for second-hand info from Tavish. But talking to Malik was impossible when the vamp wouldn’t return my calls. And, with dawn fast approaching, hunting him down to talk in person wasn’t an option. At least not until after sunset, sixteen or so hours away. Frustrated, I rubbed my wrist and the hidden bracelet there: the quickest, easiest way to talk to Malik would be in the Dreamscape, but to do that I needed his ring, which I still didn’t have—
An idea struck. Maybe I could use another Morpheus Memory Aid to gatecrash his dreams – like I had when he’d been dreaming about the sanguine lemurs – and then somehow twist the dream so I could talk to him?
Only it was a crap idea. Turning up in his dreams by accident was one thing . . . but jumping into them deliberately? An apology probably wasn’t going to cut it.
Except right now he owed me. He was the one who’d sent me back without talking things through. If we were going to have any sort of relationship, he knew he couldn’t do that. No way was I going to be the princess in the ivory tower. Not to mention I’d told him I’d help. Help did not mean sitting things out on the sidelines. Especially when he had a fight on his hands and I needed info about the fae’s fertility from the vamp he was up against. And especially not when Malik could use the power in my blood.
He was a kickarse vamp already, add in my own power and I doubted even Bastien or a millennia-and-a-half-old Emperor could stand in Malik’s way.
‘Easier to ask forgiveness,’ I muttered, and ordered another Morpheus Memory Aid spell.
In the time it took to walk from my bedroom to the fridge, the box was waiting for me next to Ricou’s smelly fish.
I took the spell back to bed, thumped my pillows into submission, and finally admitted what had been staring me in the face.
Malik could do magic.
And, okay, he’d got a power boost from my blood, but having the power didn’t mean you knew what to do with it. You had to learn how to use it before you could cast spells (though, if you were me, learning was a complete waste of time). Malik had drawn a Blood-Ward circle, which was basic enough that I could do it, and then he’d cast a Privacy spell, a simple enough magic, though not so simple that I could stir one myself. But hey, a vamp of Malik’s age could possibly manage it. But then he’d gone and pulled that complex Translocation spell out of thin air. Like it was nothing.
And the only way he could have done that was if he’d studied magic.
No one studies magic unless they have an ability to use it and, other than sorcerers who trade their souls for their magical powers, the only way you get magical ability is from one or both of your parents.
Like Mad Max. He’d inherited his magical abilities from his sidhe mother. And my own half-sister, Brigitta, had taught him to use them.
So, if Malik knew how to do complex magic (even if he needed a boost from my blood to actually do it), it followed that he’d been born with that ability.
So, it also followed that before Malik had become a vamp—
He hadn’t been fully human.
With that oddly disturbing thought, I snapped the sleep mask on and chugged back the sickly strawberry-sweet Morpheus Memory Aid potion in the hope I’d find him in my dreams.
My dreams were a bust. Full of huge amorphous grey beasts chasing me through Regent’s Park, and every time their sharp fangs snapped at my heels, I jerked awake, terror pounding my heart in my chest. Only to fall back asleep minutes later to be chased again. Classic nightmare with added werewolves. A frustrating side-effect of the damn Morpheus Memory Aid. In the end I did the only thing possible: I snagged a bottle of vodka out of the freezer compartment and took it to bed with me.
A banging noise woke me from a deep, dreamless (thankfully), alcohol-assisted sleep.
Hot summer sun streamed in through my bedroom window, reflecting squares of light and shade high up on the sloping walls. The angle told me it was still early morning.
The banging came again.
‘There is a troll knocking on the front door,’ Robur the dryad’s eerie voice boomed out of my bedside table drawer. I jerked upright and the empty vodka bottle thudded to the wooden floorboards, clinking against the other one already there. It takes a lot of alcohol to affect my fast sidhe metabolism.
‘Why does everyone have to make so much noise?’ I muttered, grabbing my head.