The Shifting Price of Prey

‘Of course they are.’ He gave me a sly wink and tapped the sandwich box. ‘But these little beauties can tap into the magic, much as you yourself can, unlike even the most extraordinary of humans.’ He clasped his fat little hands and rested them on his shirt-straining pot belly. ‘It’s what makes them so desirable.’

Ugh.Dried garden fairy parts – smoked, snorted, imbibed or injected – are the equivalent of magical Viagra, and not just in the obvious, sexual way, but in the boosting-your-magical-abilities way. The resulting power spike is said to be a hundred times better than sugar (the standard way to amp up magic), a phenomenon discovered in 1835 by Jacob Sabine, a prominent Victorian naturalist and wizard. By the end of the nineteenth century, garden fairies had gone from being as common as dragonflies to near extinction, only to be saved by Sclalter’s Intervention, the Parliamentary Bill passed in 1902 which now protected them.

I’d fine-combed the legal stuff, hoping for something to nail the gnome with.

Unfortunately, the gnome was an accredited conservationist and therefore an authorised dealer. He was allowed to trade as a way to independently fund his fairy preservation work. Once licensed, the fairy would be worth around a grand. Given its rarity for this time of year, the gnome could probably charge three, maybe five times that. Add in that the Carnival Fantastique was in town, and ten times probably wasn’t beyond the realms of the gnome’s greedy calculations. Which was a hell of a monetary incentive to find a way to fast-track nature. The only thing stopping him coining it in was me.

Anyone would think he’d be more politic about things. But that’s gnomes for you.

‘It’s very early in the year for the fairies to be . . . active,’ I said, opting for euphemistic vagueness.

The gnome hit me with another denture-filled leer. ‘But you’ve examined the body haven’t you, Ms Taylor? So you can confirm that his death was part of normal mating and entirely unassisted.’

It was— if you ignored the fact that the male fairy’s near decapitation had been assisted by the female fairy’s neck-frill stiffening during fertilisation. Black widows have nothing on garden fairies.

‘I’ll agree it looks like it,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t stop it being much earlier.’

‘I think it’s a side-effect of global warming.’ The gnome’s eyes behind his glasses watered, as he gave me his version of an i

Global warming, my arse.‘I see.’

Of course, there was always the other, illegally assisted alternative. That somewhere, the gnome had a hothouse dialled up to tropical, and had used it to accelerate the fairy’s life cycle, then trapped him in an airtight box with a rubber frog and a handful of foxglove flowers a.k.a. fairy catnip. As soon as the excited, albeit confused, fairy lost consciousness, the gnome had slit the fairy’s throat and left him to dry out with a sachet of silicate crystals. That was the modern way: the Victorians used to use live frogs and rack the comatose fairies in small oak-lined smoking bins.

Trouble was, as the Victorians had discovered, garden fairies are almost impossible to breed in captivity. They need natural light. Which means glass. And they zip. Zipping into glass at the fairy equivalent of fifty miles an hour is like bugs hitting a car window. They splat.

The only time captive breeding had succeeded on any scale was when the Victorians had relocated Crystal Palace to Sydenham Park. An accident had placed it right on top of the local fairy hatching ground. So if the gnome did have a hothouse, it would have to be at least the size of a football field. Something that huge was hard to hide, even with magic. But my gut said the gnome was up to something. And I was determined to prove it. Only every time I’d moved out of his ‘office’ during my last inspection, he’d stuck to me like some of his nasty lichen, so now I was back, with my invisible-to-the-gnome co-worker in tow.

I unpacked my kit – measuring callipers, scalpels, pestle and mortar, ultra-violet light, magnifying glass and various potions and test spells I needed to complete the extensive tests prior to granting the licences – carefully lining up the items on the marble-top table under the gnome’s eager, creepy gaze.

Ugh.Last thing I wanted was him rubbernecking my every move for the next couple of hours.

‘This is going to take some time,’ I said firmly as I placed the last, most important item on the table: a packet containing the manmade crystals I’d superglue to each fairy’s head (the least valuable part), each crystal holding the actual Licence spell. The crystals were clear just now, but would glow viridian green once activated. ‘And I prefer to work undisturbed, Mr Lampy. I find there’s less chance of contamination or error that way.’ I paused, baring my teeth in a wide smile; he might not be a goblin, but he’d recognise the threat. ‘I’d hate to have to resample anything because I was distracted.’ In other words: leave me alone or I’ll chop large expensive chunks off your stock.

The gnome got the message. ‘Of course, Ms Taylor. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.’

I needed him like a vamp needed a suntan! He scuttled away and I settled down to work until my co-worker reappeared. Hopefully with something incriminating that would spell bad news for the nasty gnome.

Chapter Two

Thirty minutes later a familiar brush against my senses had me looking over my shoulder again to see a clear crystal appear on the room’s threshold. The crystal started to glow with the pink blush of dawn and the heady scent of peat and whisky shimmered through the room, sending desire shuddering through my body. I braced my hands on the desk, let the power ride me to the soft edge of pleasure, then bit back a frustrated cry as the spell set, leaving me wanting.

The cause wasn’t the spell: it was a simple Privacy one. Anyone could buy five of them from the Witches’ Market in Covent Garden for under a te

It didn’t matter what spells Tavish set; if I was near it was like getting blasted with magical pheromones. The longer we worked together, the more potent it got. I’d learned the hard way not to block it, as all that did was make my frustration worse. Not that he was doing it deliberately: in fact, when I’d brought it up, he’d looked dismayed then concluded it must be a side-effect (caused by my usual random reactions to magic) of the protective Chastity spell he’d taggedme with three months ago (he’d removed the Chastity spell soon after, once the threat was gone) and should fade in time.

Only the ‘side-effect’ wasn’t fading.

The second time I’d mentioned it he’d proposed we ‘swim in his lake’ and sort it out that way. But rather than his idea being one of his usual semi-serious suggestions we have sex, he’d been obviously reluctant.

Which confused the hell out of me.

Until it clicked that while Tavish had never missed an opportunity to sic me with his kelpie power and I’d often found myself gazing at him like a Charm-struck human, he’d always had an ulterior motive for hitting on me; the infertility curse afflicting London’s lesser fae. The fae had expected me to have a curse-breaking baby and, Tavish, as àrd-chea