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 castspells (though, if you were me, learning was a complete waste of time). Malik had drawna 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 stirone 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.
‘It is the shiny black troll with the gold specks.’ Robur’s voice was, if anything, even louder. Payback for the lemon polish incident. ‘The one who is stepping out with your landlord, Mr Travers. I discern from the wood beetles who inhabit the dresser in Mr Travers’ kitchen that the troll has his police uniform on and appears to be on official business.’
The pounding hit a new, urgent note.
‘Please hurry before he scratches the wood.’ Robur’s piercing words hammered into my fragile morning-after skull.
I pulled on my robe and hurried, as directed, to the door. I yanked it open as the large troll who was stooped down outside banged again. Luckily for me, his huge black fist bounced off the Ward (invisible to him, as all magic is to trolls) and sent purple ripples up and down the open doorway.
Constable Taegrin of the London Metropolitan Police’s Magic and Murder Squad gave me an apologetic look. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Genny.’ A small black cloud of anxious dust puffed from his headridge and settled on his shiny bald pate and the shoulders of his stab vest. ‘But Detective Inspector Munro was worried; you’ve been ignoring your phone.’
I had a vague memory of stuffing my phone in the fridge when I’d grabbed the second bottle of vodka after waking from another fleeing-from-monsters nightmare. Crap.
‘He wants you back at the kidnap scene at London Zoo,’ Taegrin continued. ‘I was nearest, so he’s sent me to pick you up.’
Chapter Thirty-Four
Covent Garden to London Zoo is fifteen minutes by road. On a traffic-free day. But I’ve never known London to have a traffic-free day, so we were in for a long, slow drive which I wasn’t looking forward to. Especially after it clicked with my hangover-fuddled brain exactly how we were getting there. Parked beneath the leafy canopy of the large elm guarding my building’s main door was a Magic and Murder Squad police van. Built to accommodate trolls (obviously, since Taegrin was driving), they lack a certain human-sized comfort.
Once we were safely buckled up (with me riding shotgun so I didn’t look like a suspect, but thanks to the adult booster seat and my dangling legs, looking like a seven-year-old instead), it took Taegrin all of a minute to tell me what the score was. The Bangladeshi ambassador had agreed (presumably after his midnight meeting with the Prime Minster) to hand over his bodyguard’s bloodstained kurta, so it could be used to scry for leads in the hope it would pinpoint the kidnap victims’ location. Hugh wanted me at the scrying, though as scrying was on the list of things I couldn’t do, when I asked why, Taegrin didn’t know.
After that he was quick enough to realise I wasn’t up to sparkling conversation; the two-part Hot.D (short for Hair of the Dog) potion I’d rushed out and bought from the Witches’ Market was probably a big clue.
I knocked back the first part, my mouth going dry at the chalky taste, and slumped on my booster seat waiting for the spell to take effect. Hot.D spells are meant to postpone any hangover for twelve hours, but as the witch I’d bought it from said, ‘You ain’t human, dearie, so I ain’t guaranteeing nuthin’.’