‘Thanks,’ I said, grateful, but wanting more.
‘Here, take this.’ Dessa dug in her uniform shirt pocket as she overtook a beat-up white van, and held up a clear plastic packet with a pink plaster in it. A nicotine patch.
I blinked. ‘I want to knock them out, not stop them smoking.’
‘Sh—ugar! Wrong one!’ She fished again, held up another plastic packet. This one contained a blue patch and the label read: ‘Power Nap Patch ~ Restore your Get Up and Go.’
Was she mad? ‘Um, seriously, Dessa.’ I met her brown eyes in the rearview mirror. ‘If there’re bad guys threatening my niece, I want them out, not hyped up on caffeine.’
‘Trust me. This’ll knock anyone out in three seconds flat.’ She flipped it in the air. I caught it. ‘It’s got chamomile, valerian, and synthetic morphine. The caffeine only kicks in after forty mins; it’s slow release.’
The baggie had the slippery feel of spell plastic – it would vanish as the spell was activated – and a peelable ‘sticky’ to attach it to my palm until I was ready to tagsomeone. Neat. I almost dropped it as Dessa added, ‘Oh, and it’s got a touch of aconite.’
‘Aconite’s poisonous!’ Mary exclaimed.
‘So’s that patch if you eat it,’ Dessa warned. ‘But slap it on a “collar” and it drops them straight into happy snooze land.’ As she wove through the busy traffic, she explained how she’d confiscated the Power Nap Patches from a hoodoo witch with a stall in the black part of Covent Garden market. The witch had been doing a brisk trade as she’d neglected to stamp the patches with the traditional poison mark: the black skull and crossbones in a circle. Apparently there were no ill effects so long as the patches weren’t eaten or used more than once a week; something else the hoodoo witch hadn’t told her customers. And they were cheap, or at least cheaper than Stuns, to make.
‘You and I are going to have a serious chat, constable,’ Mary said firmly, once Dessa finished.
Dessa’s mouth turned down. ‘Yes, sarge.’
‘Sounds like it might be a useful spell,’ I said neutrally as I peeled the covering off the sticky and stuck the baggie to my palm. ‘Maybe it could be licensed . . .’ I looked up – we were driving through Piccadilly Circus – and met Dessa’s gaze in the rearview. I winked. She half-smiled back. I’d try to make sure Mary didn’t give her too much grief for the spell.
A minute later we turned into Haymarket. Straight on, then left into Pall Mall, and we’re there.I rolled my shoulders, releasing the tension there. C’mon, c’mon, not far now.Only the traffic in front of us slowed. ‘There’s some hold-up ahead.’ Dessa craned her neck as the car slid to a halt behind a black cab. ‘Looks like a breakdown.’ She moved to give the siren a burst.
I touched her arm. ‘No. We’re too close; the wrong people might hear it.’
‘Your call. But we won’t get past all this without it.’
Crap. Dessa, with her flashing lights and siren, had got us this far in what had to be the longest fifteen minutes of my life. But Trafalgar Square was still half a mile away. I ran at least ten times that every morning; when I wasn’t hauled out to a crime scene. ‘I’ll run,’ I said, opening the car door. ‘You two catch up as soon as.’ I jumped out into the middle of the road, slammed the door, and started sprinting up the queue of stalled traffic; so much easier than trying to dodge the pedestrian jungle. Under the background noise of cars, buses and people, I heard Mary shouting something, then another door slammed and her pounding feet echoed mine.
What felt like an aeon later, but was probably no more than two or three minutes, I slammed to a halt at the top of the stairs leading down from the north terrace of Trafalgar Square. I caught my breath, scanning the square. It wasn’t as crowded as I’d expected. But as always there were folk lounging on the rims of the fountains, some dangling their feet in the water. There was a queue for ice creams at the café. A crowd of tourists were taking photos of the pixies playing on the huge bonze lions . . . Automatically, I clocked their numbers: eight pixies, seven up from yesterday, and the lions were sparkling with pixie dust— a problem for another day . . . And another, smaller tourist group watched over by one of the square’s heritage wardens, were snapping pictures of the hawk used to keep the pigeons from the square; the bird was perched on the black and gold railing caging Nelson’s Column, and was eyeing the crowd with an imperious tilt to its head.
I curled my fingers around the Power Nap patch, sweat licking fear down my spine. The sparse crowd should’ve made it easy to find Freya and Mad Max, but there was no sign of them. I upped the focus on my inner radar . . . three witches; two somewhere near the column, and another further away, behind and to my right – Mary. And a weird ping towards the far corner of the square . . . I frowned trying to work out . . . but it was gone before I could ID it. And I still couldn’t sensehair or hide of Freya or Mad Max.
I phoned Freya, but again it went straight to voicemail. I snapped the phone shut, wanting to scream or hurl it at someone, anyone— Instead, I took a steadying breath and continued scanning the square. Damn. There was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing, no one for me to find, or fight, or extract info from. Time to go knock – figuratively, anyway – on Freya’s door.
I jogged down the steps angling towards the left fountain.
‘ Ciao, bella,’ a male’s voice called from my right. ‘ Io sono qui.’
I almost dismissed the loud and mostly unintelligible voice – no one with nefarious deeds on their agenda was going to draw attention by calling out ‘Hello, beautiful’ and whatever the rest was – but some instinct made me turn. The male was about ten feet away. Adrenalin hit, hyping my senses. In one long second I took him in. Black curly hair, cut short to his head; vivid green eyes, hard and watchful despite the wide grin on his olive-skinned face; tight jeans, open-necked shirt displaying thick black chest hair; his arms outstretched, a bunch of red roses, tied with ribbon, gripped in one hand – the picture of the stereotypical Latin lover enthusiastically greeting his girlfriend – and looking enough like the dead male in Malik’s snow-plateau memory to be a relative. Latin lover had to be the male werewolf I’d glimpsed at the mosque.
And in the hand not carrying the roses, glinting gold in my sight, Werewolf Guy was holding some sort of ready-to-go spell.
High-pitched barks, followed by low ominous growls, came from my left.
My pulse sped as out the corner of my eye I saw two dogs jump out of the fountain: a smallish fluff of silver and grey fur – Freya in her Norwegian elkhound shape – closely followed by Mad Max’s giant white-haired Irish wolfhound.
Of course, now they turn up.
Werewolf Guy changed course towards the dogs, drawing back his arm to throw the glinting gold spell.
Not at my niece, you don’t!
‘Hey,’ I yelled, willing time to stop and freeze around him. Almost predictably, my cool new vamp power didn’t put in an appearance. Brute force it is, then.I charged, catching heads turning in the crowd, along with Werewolf Guy’s startled expression. At the last moment before I barrelled into him, I ducked and shoved my shoulder into his stomach. He doubled over with a grunt, air whooshing out his mouth. I clamped my arms round his thighs, heaved and flung him over my back; for all I’m small for a sidhe, I’m way stronger than most humans. I whirled to find Werewolf Guy jumping lightly to his feet as he came out of a roll, still holding the roses— and the spell. Crap. He’d recovered acrobatic quick. Not that I truly thought it would be that easy.
Cameras flashed, and a few tourists clapped, obviously thinking we were some sort of street show.