Crap. Crapcrapcrap.
No way in hell was that supposed to happen . . . I rubbed at my eyes, crouched and desperately stretched out to Tavish under the desk. Who knew what harm the explosion of magic had caused him? I patted around but couldn’t feel him. Finally, as my vision returned I realised the only things under the desk were me, the ginger tom and some disgusting toadstools sprouting from the mouldy rug.
Tavish was gone.
A soft snorting noise made me turn. In the centre of the room, making the place seem small, stood a kelpie horse. The kelpie’s green-black coat was rough over hard, ropy muscles, its tangled mane glinted with dull gold beads, its black-lace gills fanned wide to either side of its arched, serpentine neck, and its eyes flickered with golden light.
Damn. Tavish’s wylde side had come out to play. Perfect.
Chapter Four
I crawled out and stood with my back against the desk, cautious. I trusted Tavish, but he wasn’t the one in control of the kelpie. It was as if taking his waterhorse shape stripped away his couple of millennia’s worth of civilisation and left him as he must have been when he first came into being in the Shining Times: something feral and predatory, birthed from magic. Good news was: we weren’t near the river so the kelpie wasn’t likely to Charm me to ride it into the depths. Bad news: Tavish wasn’t exactly easy to communicate with in this form.
‘Um, you okay?’ I asked.
The kelpie shuddered as if shedding water; its usual signal to changing shape. Its eyes flashed black, then back to the odd gold light. It shook again, pawed the scratched wooden floorboards with one camel-toed hoof and flicked its tail over its flanks as if dislodging irritating flies, then shot me a wild, white-rimmed look.
‘Guess that means no,’ I muttered, glancing round the room in case a helpful solution jumped out at me. The window was still buzzing with Knock-back Wards, the gnome’s cats were milling in a furry tide in front of the interior door, obviously wanting away from the kelpie but trapped by the spells on the threshold—
The kelpie half-reared up, ears flat against its skull, and wheeled towards the door. The cats scattered, scrambling onto shelves or under furniture. The kelpie dipped its head, snatched up the spell crystal from the threshold with a disgusted snort and thudded out and away.
I stared after it for a long moment, expecting Tavish to return in his human form or to hear the gnome’s surprised shout on discovering a kelpie horse rampaging round his house.
After a few minutes’ silence the ginger tom peered from beneath the fungi-covered sofa, its eyes wary, then it clawed its way out, stood with its tail up. It hissed at me as if to ask, ‘Scary horse-thing gone?’
I sent my senses out. The gnome was still fast asleep but there was no ping telling me Tavish/kelpie horse was anywhere near.
‘Yep, looks like the scary horse-thing has gone,’ I muttered, wondering how a waterhorse without opposable thumbs had bypassed the doors and Wards.
Frustration slumped my shoulders. Figured something would go wrong. No matter what I did with magic it always seemed to mess up, even with something as supposedly simple as a tarot reading. Still, maybe the rest of the cards would be more informative . . . I turned back to the desk.
The tarot cards were gone.
Three hours later, I called it quits. While I’d waited for the tarot cards to reappear or Tavish to contact me, I’d got on with the investigation. I’d finished all the tests on the dead fairies – all of them were apparently dead from natural causes – checked out the gnome’s creepy stock, and had a good snoop round the house. And found no clues in the ‘incriminating’ department.
I called Tavish. Same as the last however many times, his phone went straight to voicemail. Presumably, he was working off whatever was bugging him with a swim in the River Thames. I added another message to my earlier ones saying I was packing up, the tarot cards were still gone, and to call me.
I wasn’t sure what to take from the Emperor card. Tarot wasn’t my strong suit (bad pun aside), but as any self-analysis was a non-starter – this was about the fae’s fertility after all – I went with a literal interpretation.
The card had said: ‘He knows! He will tell you! For a price!’ And then, ‘He is the Emperor!’
The Emperor, whoever he was, would do a deal for the info. Simple. Of course, whatever he wanted in exchange wasn’t likely to be simple at all. But I was doing the cart-before-the-horse thing. First I had to find him. Which would be so much easier if I knew who he was. Only, thanks to the eagle (or whatever the cards were channelling) cutting the reading short, I had no name, other than he called or thought of himself as the Emperor. Of course, that could be down to the tarot card’s standard depiction, so could be something or nothing.
But I did have a couple of clues.
The first was that, instead of the usual sceptre, the Emperor held a silver dagger.What that signified was anyone’s guess.
The second clue was more enlightening. The golden eagle had been perched on a snake-entwined staff. I’d recognised it: it was the Rod of Asclepius.
Asclepius was the Greek god of healing. According to myth, the goddess Athena, his aunt, gave him a gift of Gorgon’s blood to help him in his work. Only he didn’t just use it to heal the sick, he started bringing them back after they’d died too, thereby giving them what turned out to be a new bloodsucking immortal life. Hence all new vamps ‘Accept the Gift’ when they leave their human mortality behind. Turned out creating a new species was a fatal life-choice for Asclepius, though, since Zeus, his überdivine granddad, wasn’t too impressed by his grandkid overstepping his healing remit. He struck Asclepius dead with a thunderbolt. Then Apollo, Asclepius’s dad, got equally pissed off and decided to dispose of his son’s creations, whenever they stepped into his light, by burning them to a crisp. Which is why vamps don’t do storms or suntans.
And why the Rod of Asclepius on the tarot card had to mean the Emperor was a vamp.
‘So I’m looking for a vamp with delusions of majesty,’ I muttered, which left the suspect pool wide open. Though since I couldn’t imagine how some unknown vamp would have the answer to releasing and restoring the fae’s trapped fertility, the ‘Emperor’ would more than likely have some connection to London’s fae, and/or to me. Which narrowed the suspects down considerably. In fact, to the one vamp who did the whole royal thing ad nauseum. The psychotic, sadistic, murdering sucker I was supposed to marry when I was fourteen. The Autarch.
Panic rose up to close my throat. I forced it back down and told myself I was jumping to conclusions. I’d never known the Autarch to be called ‘Emperor’; he was always called a prince. And just because I thought I knew all the vamps in London, didn’t mean I did. There was probably some other vamp I’d never heard of who was the Emperor. Yeah, you just keep telling yourself that, Gen. I stifled the scared voice in my head. I needed more info before I let the possibility that I might finally have to face my own personal blood-sucker nightmare, turn me back into that terrified teenager who’d run away. And the quickest way to get that info was to talk to the vamp in the know.
Malik al-Khan. London’s Oligarch and my ‘owner/protector’ . . . according to the vamps’ icky ‘property’ database, anyway. What our relationship actually was . . . was complicated and confusing, and needed working out. Not just between us, but in my own head. And in my heart—
I halted my thoughts before they strayed any further into that particular emotional minefield. This wasn’t the time or place. Still, I couldn’t quite stop the eager leap of anticipation at having a reason to contact Malik . . . I snagged my phone, and, getting his voicemail, left a brief message for him to call me. That done, I put my phone away. As I took a steadying breath, noticed the ginger tom was crouched on the edge of the desk, hackles raised, gaze fixed on the window.