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The mortuary and the dead girl came back into focus.
The silly string wrapping the girl’s body blurred for a second. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I’d imagined it, then crouched and lookedcloser. The string blurred again, near her head, and as I followed the lumpy line of the cocoon towards her hands, it shimmered like hot air in a heatwave. There was another spell—
‘Ge
Trolls are deeply pacifist at heart; killing doesn’t come easy to them.
He’d only been back on active duty for a couple of weeks.
‘Are you all right, Ge
‘Yes, why?’
‘You’re crying,’ he rumbled softly.
Was I?I touched my face, frowning as I realised my cheeks were wet, and swiped the tears away. Damn. I hated when that happened; like some part of me was reacting independently to the rest of me. It was occurring more and more often.
Sympathy softened the grey-cloud colour of Hugh’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry, I should have know this would upset you, finding someone in the river after what happened on All Hallows’ Eve—’
‘I’m fine.’ I blinked and looked up at Hugh. This wasn’t the time or place to talk about then … about Grace. ‘Really, I’m fine,’ I said again, firmly. ‘Ignore it; I do.’
‘I can’t ignore it, Ge
‘We’ve been over this, Hugh.’ I patted his hand on my shoulder, taking comfort from the warm grittiness of his skin under my palm. ‘I have to find a way to crackthe curse, so there’s no way I can walk away from this, even if I wanted to.’ Which part of me did: the scared part, that after five months of fruitless searching for an answer—one that didn’t involve me getting pregnant—now wanted nothing more than to hide away and pretend I’d never heard of any fertility curse. ‘And you were right to call me. The girl’s body is taggedwith some sort of Glamour spell.’
His concerned expression changed to one of disappointment and his fingers twitched with determination before he carefully removed his hand from under mine. Hugh is impervious to magic—actually, trolls are impervious to a lot of things—but the whole ‘not affected by magic’ also means they can’t seeit or senseit either.
‘She didn’t tell you,’ I stated. Shewas Detective Inspector Helen Crane, Hugh’s boss—and my own personal nemesis. Shewas also a powerful bitch—sorry, witch—so she had to have seen both the spells.
‘No, but I suspected as much.’ His massive shoulders shifted in a frustrated shrug.
Mentally I winced; looked like the communicationproblem Hugh was having with DI Crane wasn’t getting any better, and it probably wasn’t helped by his decision to keep me informed about any deaths involving magic; something DI Crane had refused to do. She knew all about the curse, and she had a vested interest in crackingit, but she’d decided she’d rather cut her nose off than even try to work with me.
Hugh indicated the dead girl. ‘What can you tell me about the Glamour spell?’
‘Well … it’s smothered beneath the other spell, the one that binds her, and since she’s dead and the Glamour is still in operation, I’d say it’s probably some sort of Cosmetic or Disguise spell, and not an assumed projection which would’ve dissipated at the point of unconsciousness.’ I pursed my lips. ‘Quite what it’s hiding though, I won’t know until I remove it.’
The WPC made a noise like her broomstick had poked her, reminding me she was listening. ‘I can’t let Ms Taylor interfere with the evidence, Sarge,’ she said. ‘You told me you only wanted her to check things out.’
‘Ms Taylor being here is my responsibility, not yours, Constable Martin.’
‘I know the way things stand, Sarge, but—’
‘But I am still your superior officer, Constable,’ he rumbled warningly. ‘At least, I am right now,’ he added, a little ruefully.
‘And I want you to stay that way, Sarge,’ she said, throwing me a half-disapproving, half-entreating glare.
I gave her my best poker-face back. Hugh might look like he was only a few years older than my own twenty-five—especially since his recent ‘bury and bake’ session—but he was nearing seventy, and as he’d already pointed out to me on several occasions, he was certainly old enough to make his own career decisions without my advice.
‘I want to stay your boss too, Mary,’ Hugh told her calmly, as if having me here wasn’t going to get him hauled over his boss’s witch-fired coals. ‘But we have a duty to this poor girl and Ms Taylor can help us do that.’ He turned back to me. ‘Can you tell what the victim is under the spell?’
‘I can definitely tell you she’s not fae,’ I said, ‘otherwise the body would have fadedafter death.’
‘I know that, Ge
I waved a hand in frustration. ‘She’s been in the Thames, Hugh. Whatever the Glamour spell is, it’s bespoke, made-to-measure magic that’s survived being in fast-ru
It wasn’t a premonition—I don’t get those; just the knowledge that four weeks previously the badly decomposed body of a faeling had been pulled out of the river and an inexplicable administrative errorhad meant the body had ended up languishing in the standard human morgue as a Jane Doe over the weekend before someone had discovered she wasn’t fully human, by which time only fragments of some unidentifiable spell remained. Or so I’d been told. I’d never got to see for myself.
Not like now.
Still, if this girl was faeling, at least she didn’t appear to have been in the water long. Then I realised what was nagging at me. My own i
I looked up at Hugh. ‘I really need to remove the spell to tell what she is.’
‘Which Ms Taylor is not authorised to do.’ DI Helen Crane’s commanding voice cut in loudly before he could reply.
Chapter Two
My heart sank. The Witch-bitch herself had arrived. Just what we didn’t need.
I turned to see her striding through the entrance of the mortuary, tall and slender, with her blonde hair pulled back in a severe bun: the fortysomething icon for witches and the police force both. She was beautiful, even with her patrician features harsh with anger. And as usual she was blinged-up like a goblin queen, the spells stored about her jewellery-bedecked person flashing and sparking in my sightlike fireworks at a trolls’ New Moon party.