His beads turned a cagey purple. ‘Ah, she was an apprentice of sorts.’

Pfft! Apprentice! I was his artist’s model! His inspiration. The Love of his Life!Viviane’s shouting reverberated round my head. Until he took up with Turner. Don’t ever go swimming with him, bean sidhe, she warned. He’ll whip your soul out of your body faster than you can scream.

Briefly I closed my eyes. A lover’s tiff. Could my night get any better? ‘Tavish, give me the cards.’

His dreads writhed in refusal.

But Hugh had obviously decided I was truly me too, as he reached down, hooked a large hand under Tavish’s arm and pulled him onto his feet. ‘Think it’s best if you give Genny the cards, àrd-cheann,’ he rumbled warningly. ‘Otherwise I will have to arrest you for obstruction.’

A frustrated ‘on your own head be it’ look settled on Tavish’s face. He flicked his fingers and the tarot cards appeared in his palm and he said sullenly, ‘I make a gift of the tarot cards containing the leannán sidhe spirit, Viviane, to you, Genevieve.’

The cards streamed from his hand to hover in a neat upright stack in front of my face. The top card showed Viviane sitting by her canalbank in her lavender dress and bonnet, twirling her parasol. She was smirking.

‘I am in your debt, bean sidhe.’ She dipped her head, then, without turning, flipped her middle finger in Tavish’s direction. ‘Two hundred and forty-one years he has kept me enslaved to those cards. And he did not even allow me to do regular readings. Te-di-ous!’

Tavish flinched. Mad Max gave an appreciative, albeit nervous barking laugh.

‘Save your crowing, Viv,’ I said, and stuffed the cards into my jeans pocket, ignoring her muffled protests. ‘Right, Maxim, time to do your stuff.’

Chapter Fifty-Five

‘Time for the blood-letting, Cousin,’ Mad Max said, after he’d explained the mechanics of the spell.

One of which involved him sinking his fangs into me, the prospect of which had him grinning at me like a dog who’d found a stash of meaty bones. I shoved my sleeve up, stiff-armed him back, but left my hand on his chest. That was as close as he was getting.

He grinned wider, took my hand and executed an exaggerated bow as if to bestow a kiss, his platinum ponytail falling over his left shoulder as he did. He raised suggestive blue eyes to mine. ‘You know, Cousin, necks are much more fun than wrists?’

‘Get on with it,’ I said, ‘otherwise I’ll be ringing that vet when this is over.’ I scissored my fingers together under his nose. ‘I hear he does a good deal on doggy snips.’

‘You’re all bitch, love,’ he drawled, then closed his eyes. The hair on my nape rose like hackles as he drew his magic up. A faint silvery-red glow surrounded him like a thin aura. My own magic answered, turning my skin gold, and a distant part of me noted, thankfully, that I wasn’t feeling even the tiniest bit lustful towards Mad Max. Whatever consequences my lost night with Finn in the cave might have, at least the unwanted and embarrassing effects of shacking up with the leaking Fertility pendant were gone.

Mad Max muttered a string of unintelligible-to-me words under his breath, in a language with the same cadence as Gaelic, and I had my usual moment’s envy that a vamp, even one that started out as a wizard, obviously knew and could do more magic than me. I shoved the feeling aside, then braced myself as his grip on my wrist tightened, his lips peeled back from his fangs, and he struck.

Pain, sharp and hot, sliced through me, then was gone. Silver light wound with sapphire blue reeled out from Mad Max like a spool of film unravelling, then vanished, plunging us into darkness. Faint noise, like the distant roll of drums, grew closer and louder and more insistent, and gradually the darkness lightened like dawn colouring the sky—

And then we were in the circle again, Mad Max bowing over my wrist, looking up at me with a lascivious leer, everyone gathered about us, waiting for him to start the spell. The words ‘Get on with it’ came out of my mouth . . .

The air rippled and rolled through the zoo corridor, turning the images around me into watercolours, stretching and streaking and running them together so they flowed counter-clockwise around me, only to disappear downwards as if there were a drain at my feet.

The images streamed faster and faster until I stood in a whirlpool of silvery blue.

The drumming reached a crescendo.

It cut out.

The last of the whirlpool drained away, leaving me bathed in morning light, as the kidnap scene took shape. It was slightly out of focus, as if I were looking through a greasy lens.

Two dark-skinned males – the bodyguards – in their green and gold embroidered kurtas and mirrored aviators stood in the centre of the corridor watching a small black-haired boy who had climbed into one of the U-shaped windows and had his nose pressed against the glass: Dakkhin Jangali, the kidnapped child. On the other side of the window, the zoo’s two tigers were rubbing the sides of their faces against the glass as if they could touch him. Behind the boy stood a tall, lithely muscled woman in an orange sari, an indulgent smile on her face: Mrs Bandevi Jangali, the boy’s mother and wife to the ambassador. Next to her was a stylish twenty-something male wearing a dark business suit: the zoo’s publicity director, Jonathan Weir. He had his phone out, snapping shots of the boy and the tigers.

Look around, love,Mad Max whispered. Find the beacon. And remember, keep schtum, you can’t interact with the spell until I give the word.I looked. But other than the usual patches of wild untamed magic there was nothing to see.

‘There’s nothing—’

A high krick kricknoise filled the corridor and the eagle – the changeling – swooped in. It opened its beak and vomited a ribbon of green magic, as it had in Trafalgar Square. The ribbon twisted, morphing into a verdant green serpent that hung suspended in the air.

The beacon!

The eagle dived to land a few feet in front of the group. As the bird’s feet touched the ground it shimmered into a pale-skinned woman, her dark hair piled atop her head, dressed in a floor-length Roman tunic. Her pupils were hard black ovals, her irises the same blood-red as molten sulphur, similar in all but colour to any other sidhe changeling’s eyes, or mine.

Shock winged through me – not at her eyes, I’d expected them – but that I recognised her, not even needing the black ink marking her bare arms or the tiny black crescent kissing the corner of her lush mouth to confirm her identity.

The changeling was the Empress from the tarot cards, and Bastien’s mother from Malik’s dream/memory of the harem— Malik’s wife?

Only she couldn’t be. Changelings only lived a mortal lifespan once they left the Fair Lands. The only way a mortal could live longer was through dealing with demons . . . or being blood-bonded to a vamp. Then they lived and died on the vamp’s ticket. The Empress was blood-bonded to the Emperor. Hard on that shock was what the hell would Malik think that his wife was blood-bound to another vamp, and the Emperor at that; the vamp who’d sicced the revenant curse on him. Except Malik knew the Emperor, so he had to know who and what the Empress was, didn’t he? Unless he’d thought her dead all this time? No way could I imagine Malik knowing his wife was alive and not going after her. Whether he loved her or not . . .

Not that it mattered who Malik loved.

What mattered was rescuing the victims she’d kidnapped.

The Empress smiled pleasantly at the group, all of whom stared back as if stunned, then she lifted her arms outwards as if she were entreating the heavens. The black ink marking her skin slithered into hard-edged glyphs that shot like Cupid’s arrows into the walls, throwing a Veil over the corridor. More glyphs shot out and struck the suspended snake. As they hit, the space behind her split open like the wide yawning maw of a swamp-dragon. The portal. Beyond the portal was a shadowed stone tunnel lit by flickering fire torches.