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I narrowed my eyes. ‘ Shebeing Angel, or The Mother?’
‘I do not know, child.’
Great. I was either here at the whim of Miss Looney Tunes, which could mean I was stuck here, or The Mother, which might be much worse. There was only one way to find out. I took a deep breath, arranged my face in what I hoped was a suitably deferential smile (just in case I was addressing The Mother), and strode over to Angel. ‘I really would like to go back now, please,’ I said, ‘if you could arrange it? Or if there’s something you think I should know, then please could you tell me?’
Angel gri
—and I flew through the air, crash-landed into the side of the dome and slid down into a crumpled heap. The proverbial stars blinded my vision in a rainbow of coloured lights, and as they cleared, I found her leaning over me.
‘They are all dying,’ she whispered, then danced away from me, the long tips of her golden wings dragging in the fluffy clouds.
‘Who’s dying?’ I croaked.
The wheeling crows cawed loudly, then dropped, their small black bodies plummeting down, morphing back into blood-splattered feathers as they fell. Right, the faelings.
‘He is killing them,’ she shouted.
‘He?’
She raised her arms up to the blue-painted heaven. The old man’s benign smiling face had changed. And now a sharp-featured caricature of a horned Satan laughed down at us instead.
Someone really needed to buy her a digital camera.
She crouched next to me and I froze as she fixed me with her pale gold gaze. ‘She prays for my help.’ Shadows shifted in her eyes and she touched her finger to my breastbone. ‘Her prayers disturb my thoughts. Put ashes in my mouth. Pierce my flesh. ’ Her voice took on a deeper timbre. ‘You will stop this. You will answer her pleas. You will break this curse. You will give them a new life.’
I really hoped that didn’t mean what I thought. ‘What new life?’
Angel blinked, and a wide happy smile bloomed on her face. ‘She says to send you back now.’
She flicked her finger against my chest—
And I tumbled into freefall …
Chapter Six
‘The sidhe’s not fadingagain, is she, satyr?’ A male voice: rough, remembered, hated—
Thin ropes snapped tighter around my ankles. Panic raced through my body; instinctively I jerked my legs against the bindings.
‘By all the gods, dryad!’ Another male voice: angry, worried, and reassuringly familiar. Fi
The ropes slithered away, taking my panic with them. I was back in the humans’ world. Fi
Then my body chimed in with a barrage of complaints, too mixed up for me to work out what part of me was suffering the most—my stomach, my head, or my back, where I was laying on something cold, hard and unyielding; concrete, maybe.
A gentle hand brushed my face. ‘C’mon, Gen, you need to wake up now,’ Fi
‘Don’t want to,’ I groaned in a whisper. Opening my eyes was too much effort. ‘Everything hurts.’
‘Yeah, well, absorbinga circle will do that,’ he said, exasperation threading through the worry.
Yeah, and getting thrown around by a goddess doesn’t help much either. Still, I was alive, if not yet kicking. And thinking of being alive— ‘The corvid faeling?’ I opened my eyes and stared up at Fi
I sighed. ‘She didn’t survive, did she?’
He shook his head.
Damn. I didn’t think she had, not after seeing all the crows die, but I had to ask.
‘Hugh told me the doc isn’t sure if her head injury was deliberate, or a result of her being in the river.’ Fi
‘ They are dying.’ Angel’s voice rang in my mind. ‘ He is killing them.’
I knew the poor corvid faeling wasn’t the first to die, and by the sounds of it she wasn’t going to be the last. Whatever was happening was ongoing, and it was down to the curse. Angel—or rather, The Mother—had been clear on that. They— She—had also been clear that Ihad to stop it.
And I was with Her one thousand per cent; the sooner faelings stopped dying the better. I just wished She’d given me more than a caricature of a photofit to go on.
I gritted my teeth and sat up. Vaguely, I registered I was outside, sitting on the concrete dock of Dead Man’s Hole, not far from the disused mortuary where the dead faeling had been found. There were still police and others milling about, so I couldn’t have been out for long …
My vision blurred, a wave of dizziness hit me and I dropped my head to my knees.
Fi
Part of me wanted to melt into that concern. It would be so easy. He was my friend, and more—or at least both of us wanted him to be more. Trouble was, ‘more’ to me meant going out on a few dates, getting to know each other a lotbetter, and having fun finding out if the attraction between us was as hot and magical as it seemed. But thanks to the curse, Fi
But yearning after him like a Glamour-trapped human wasn’t going to get me any answers. Or stop the killer. Or crackthe curse.
‘ You will stop this. You will give them a new life.’
IfI took Danu’s command to mean what I thought it meant, and ifI ignored all the problems that came with me having a child, then me getting pregnant should crackthe curse and stop any more faelings dying because of it. They were pretty big ‘ifs’, especially considering the life-altering consequences involved. But even if they turned out to be not so iffyin the end, the faeling from three weeks ago and the corvid faeling today would still be dead, and whoever killed them would still be free. The murderer might be motivated by the curse—which wasn’t in any way a justification—but that didn’t mean once the curse was gone, that he’d stop killing. Odds were he’d find another reason to justify his actions. And faelings could still end up as victims, even without a curse making them easy targets. So before I changed my mind and got all positive about the whole baby-making/curse-breaking business, I needed to find the murderer.
And that meant I needed to talk to the police and tell them about my tête-à-tête with The Mother.
And that meant talking to DI Helen Crane.
Yeah. Like that was going to work. The Witch-bitch wouldn’t give me the time of day, even with Hugh backing me up, so I was going to need help: someone she wouldn’t ignore. And that someone was sitting right next to me.
I rested my cheek on my knees so I could look at Fi