‘Miss?’

I carefully sucked up the spell’s last daub of paint then plunged my turkey baster into the bucket of salt water at my feet before turning to the owner of the soft, hesitant voice.

A Gatherer goblin, small at about two foot six, was waiting a deferential distance away, entertaining himself by hopping from one foot to the other to make the lights in his trainers flash red and green (much to the delight of a group of snap-happy Japanese tourists who’d previously been pointing their cameras my way). The goblin wore the standard issue navy boilersuit of a worker goblin, with the goblin queen’s logo embroidered in gold on its right chest pocket. On the left chest pocket was a large enamel badge, its design enhanced by tiny silver sequins. A similar badge was pinned to the front of the goblin’s peaked cap, which was doing a good job of flattening the tinsel-silver curls of the goblin’s massive Afro.

‘Hi,’ I said.

The goblin looked up and I noticed another badge under his chin; it said his name was Obadiah. Obadiah ran his knobbly finger down his long ski-slope nose in the respectful goblin greeting and gave me a tight-lipped smile. He closed the distance between us, careful to make his trainers flash (goblins always attack in the dark; showing the shiny is a flag of truce), the silver-lamé satchel slung across his body reflecting the bright lights in Leicester Square. He took something that glinted from the satchel and offered it to me.

‘For you, miss. From Mr al-Khan.’

‘Thank you, Obadiah.’ I returned his greeting and the tight-lipped smile, and took the glinting thing. It was a silver-coloured electronic hotel keycard. The logo on it was the same as the one on Obadiah’s badges (minus the silver sequins) and on the hotel occupying one corner of Leicester Square.

Obadiah tapped the plastic keycard with a silver-painted claw. ‘Penthouse. Miss take lift.’

I dropped the keycard into my pocket and glanced at the hotel’s seven floors thinking I was hardly likely to take the stairs. And more importantly why was Malik using a goblin to play messenger? But as my paranoia twitched, Obadiah held out his hand again and said, ‘For our blood, now lost.’

Dangling from his knobbly fingers was a long-stemmed rose, leaves stripped, thorns blood-red and sharp, petals a rich dark crimson.

The meaning of the flower bled into my mind. A rose for Rosa – the only vamp Malik had ever offered the Gift to. The only vamp to survive the curse of his blood and not turn into a mindless, shambling revenant maddened by bloodlust.

Though Rosa not turning into a revenant was pretty much irrelevant, as she’d been off-her-head nuts before becoming a vamp, and sadly the lifestyle change only added to her issues. Something I knew only too well, since I’d unwittingly borrowed Rosa’s body (until she died the true death during the demon attack last Hallowe’en) after buying what I thought was a Vamp Disguise spell. The ‘spell’ had blipped a couple of times, merging my consciousness with Rosa’s and leaving me with fragments of her memories. Those memories were enough to tell me that Malik had given Rosa the Gift out of guilt, but not why he felt guilty. They also told me he’d loved her, and she him . . . as much as she could love anyone, damaged as she was. The crimson rose was a secret tryst signal between them.

Rage and jealously ignited like wildfire that he would use oursecret sign with another. I snarled at the goblin, baring my teeth. He threw the rose at me, backing off quickly, stamping his feet hard as he disappeared into the crowd.

Then the emotions were gone, leaving me with nausea roiling in my gut. I pressed my lips together and slowly unclenched my fists, remorse at frightening the goblin warring with fear that Rosa’s memories, and the emotions they aroused, had . . . What? Influenced me? Possessed me?

Crap. No way did I need this. I had enough of my own bad memories without hers surfacing. And no way did I need Malik to help them resurface, whether intentionally or not.

I grabbed the rose, squeezing the stem until the thorns punctured my palm. The brief pain twisted magic low inside me, and the honey smell of my blood mixed with the dark spice scent of Malik’s as the spell the flower carried activated. The rose shed its petals into the ether leaving me holding a platinum ring set with a black crescent-shaped gemstone: Malik’s ring.

Except his ring was attached to my bracelet. Wasn’t it?

With a thought I revealed the bracelet hidden beneath the rose-shaped bruises encircling my left wrist – Malik’s mark; signifying that I was his blood-property and giving me protection from other vamps. The bracelet popped out of my body, its various spells glowing red and gold, with a clattering of charms: the plain gold cross to protect me from the demon (the one that had attacked last Hallowe’en); the cracked gold egg that had trapped the sorcerer’s soul I’d eaten during the attack and which had stopped the sorcerer from turning the tables and possessing me (The Mother goddess had later hooked the soul out of me and sent it on its way, thankfully); the inch-long obsidian scimitar to cut my connection to Rosa (a precaution in case she wasn’t quite as dead as Malik believed); and the tiny platinum ring that, apart from its current size, was a twin to the one I held.

So if Malik’s ring was still attached, whose ring was I holding now?

It came to me in a swirl of angry disbelief: Rosa’s.

He’d given me Rosa’s ring. Which, whoever’s emotions I was channelling, hers or mine, was all sorts of wrong.

I let the bracelet sink back into my skin, texted the rest of the Spellcrackers team that I was going into the hotel to sort a problem, and went to beard the infuriating vamp in his penthouse.

Chapter Seven

I expected the penthouse to be the ubiquitous luxury hotel suite. Instead it was a smallish function room, albeit still luxurious with varnished woods, brown-on-beige décor, and art large enough to be a talking point but bland enough not to offend.

The room had a post-party feel: the huge art-deco-style lights recessed into the sloping ceiling were dimmed to almost nothing, chairs were stacked along one wall, and the four tables in the room – all of them round and each large enough to hold at least a full coven of thirteen witches (though I doubted the hotel ever seated thirteen, even witches; some superstitions just won’t die) – were draped in white cloths, holding only a domed centrepiece of rose heads— the same dark crimson colour as the one Malik had sent with the ring.

Malik was at the far end, looking out of the windows that stretched from one side of the room to the other. I vaguely registered the lit-up pods of the London Eye, glowing deep blue against the night sky, as I strode towards him, Rosa’s ring clenched in my fist.

I slowed as I neared. His hair had grown. It had been buzz-cut last time I’d seen him, now it was pulled back and bound in a queue that cut a silky black line down his white shirt to his shoulder blades.

Briefly I wondered how he’d got it to grow that long in the last couple of months, then any curiosity was eclipsed by fury.

‘I am not Rosa!’ I yelled. ‘I don’t want her fucking ring or her magic flowers!’ I threw the ring at his head. It missed, chinking loudly off the window—

He snatched it out of the air. And turned.

Shock stripped away my anger. He was beautiful, his face all perfect lines and angles, his part-Asian heritage shaping his black eyes, but his forehead was marked. Branded. With delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, in the lower case: δ. The brand was delicate rather than disfiguring, and gave him an almost mystical air. I looked: it emanated with low-level power and some sort of Veiling spell. I forced my sightpast the Veil, and the brand turned from matt black to a pulsing painful red.