Suzanne McLeod - The Shifting Price of Prey

Freya barked an obvious, ‘No!’

‘Yes!’ I told her.

She growled— and Mad Max snatched her up by her scruff, threw her in the fountain again then trotted calmly after her.

A round of applause from the crowd reminded me we had an audience. Damn. Next thing the paps will turn up, and I’ll be on the front pages again. At least the heritage wardens were keeping the rubberneckers out of the way.

I jogged over to Mary as she lifted her radio. ‘I need a HOPE ambulance. Code six three one – unidentified magical casualty. Trafalgar Square. How long?’ It crackled unintelligibly. ‘’K, I’ll hang on.’ She pointed at the twitching werewolf. ‘What did you do to him?’

‘All I did was tag him with Dessa’s spell,’ I said. ‘He was fine a minute ago. Better tell the medics he’s a werewolf.’

‘Unidentified is clearer. That way they won’t make mistakes. Why’s he holding the roses?’

‘Camouflage?’

‘I meant,’ she said pointedly, ‘why is he still clutching them? He’s unconscious. He should’ve dropped them, shouldn’t he?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe it’s something to do with the spell’s side-effects.’ I bent to check him out.

Mary grabbed me. ‘Leave him,’ she ordered. ‘Standard ops with un-ID’d spells. No touching the victim, and he needs to be in a circle. Here’ – she handed me a lump of green spell chalk from her pocket – ‘draw one. About eight feet across. At least he’s on stone, it’ll make it easier.’

I started drawing a circle, crabwalking around the still twitching werewolf.

‘Cripes,’ she muttered, which was Mary’s answer to swearing with a precocious nine-year-old daughter. ‘I should never have let Dessa give you that spell. It’s got aconite in it. If he really is a werewolf, it could kill him.’

Aconite? Oh, yeah, wolfsbane. I scowled. ‘He’s not a good guy, Mary.’

She shot Werewolf Guy a frown. ‘We don’t know that, Genny.’

I snorted. ‘He was throwing spells at my niece! And he helped kidnap three people. Good guys don’t do that.’

‘What spell?’

‘This!’ I stopped drawing and showed her the gold coin. It glinted in the sunlight.

She peered at it. ‘There’s no spell.’

‘Not now. Mad Max sort of ate it.’ I glanced at where he was sitting next to the fountain like he was auditioning for Guard Dog of the Year, and getting not a few admiring looks from the crowd. There was no sign of Freya, so hopefully she was tucked up safe at home, in Between .

‘Max looks fine,’ Mary said. ‘Maybe you were mistak—’

Werewolf Guy howled in pain, his twitches turning to jerks, and blood started leaking from his nostrils, mouth and ears. A horrified buzz came from the crowd, and I caught more of the inevitable camera flashes. Blood always brings out the ghouls. Werewolf Guy let out another howl, his spine arched, veins standing out like black cords in his neck. An answering screech came from above. The hawk, trained to scare the square’s pigeons. Werewolf Guy convulsed as if invisible hands were trying to tear him apart.

‘Finish the circle,’ Mary shouted. ‘Quick before he shifts.’

I dragged the green chalk over the flagstones, only a foot to go . . . Time seemed to slow . . . Werewolf Guy’s eyes snapped open. He flung his arm out. They flew from his hand, scattering in a shower of red petals. The petals landed on the grey slabs, like the pools of blood staining the snow in Malik’s memories. Werewolf Guy smiled at me with victory in his eyes. Above me the sound of wings buffeted the air. Gut clenching, I looked up. The hawk hovered, a dark shadow against the clear summer sky. It opened its beak wide, screeching again as it vomited a stream of green magic. The magic twisted and twirled, morphing into a verdant jade serpent, fang-filled jaws hinging wide, as it arrowed straight for me. I raised my hand, focused , and called the magic snake, aiming to snatch it from the air—

Something shoved me aside. The Irish wolfhound, wiry hair brushing my face as he leaped, snapped his jaws on the jade serpent. I stumbled, falling atop Werewolf Guy. For a moment he trapped me in his arms, holding me tight, then a flood of magic washed over me, spreading out over Trafalgar Square like the pressurised shockwave after an explosion. I glimpsed the hawk hovering; Mad Max shaking the serpent like a terrier with a rat—

Mad Max, the hawk and Werewolf Guy all vanished.

I sat on the stone edge of the left fountain, half-listening to the splash of water and the background rumble of traffic, as Mary, Dessa, and a dozen Peelers from the local police station finished taking statements. The Peelers had turned up a few minutes after it all went down, and along with the heritage wardens had managed to corral the majority of the bystanders into a makeshift witness waiting area, using the square’s café as their base. Even without the free tea/coffee/juice on offer, the majority were eager to hang around and recount everything exciting they’d seen.

And what they’d seen, according to Mary, came with the usual add-ons of imagination and conjecture. Some thought the hawk was an eagle, or a vulture, or even a remote control toy; Werewolf Guy’s hair colour was everything from blond, through red, to his actual black; and the ‘dogs’ varied from ‘a brace o’ wee terriers’ to a pack of rabid wolves— that particular witness was currently getting the third degree.

I was waiting to get my own third degree (as per Mary’s instructions) from Hugh. Waiting for Tavish to phone me back about the gold coin; I’d emailed him a set of pictures. And for Freya to shift from her doggy shape to human, which she was refusing to do. But most of all for Ana, Freya’s mum, to turn up.

I reached down to Freya, lying sphinx-like by my feet, ears pricked forwards as she watched the square with an unwavering doggy stare, and ran my fingers through her thick silky fur. It had dried in the sunshine, and I could just make out the darker tint on the ends, all that was left from when she’d magically dyed her hair green a couple of months ago. Attention seeking, Ana had told me with a long-suffering sigh. Freya’s dad had left during the ToLA case, after discovering what his brother, the deranged baby-making wizard behind all the abductions, had been up to. Supposedly, it had all come as a big shock to Freya’s dad.

Yep, and I was a goblin queen.

Freya grumbled low in her throat, flattening both ears in a sulky ‘leave me alone’ gesture. I stopped petting her. Where the hell was her mum? School was nearly finished for the day, Ana wasn’t here waiting for her daughter to arrive home, and all my calls kept getting her voicemail. My paranoid imagination was running riot, involving Ana in various awful scenarios with the Emperor, his werewolves, Bastien, or more likely, giving birth on the Underground.

I pushed my uneasy thoughts aside for another ten minutes until they hit critical, and dug Werewolf Guy’s gold coin in its clear plastic evidence bag out of my pocket (after a ‘discussion’, Mary had agreed I could hang on to it until Hugh said otherwise). I turned it over, examining it for any clues I might have missed the last twenty times I’d looked at it. It was a little larger than a pound coin, had a golden eagle on one side, a man’s head crowned with a laurel wreath on the other and Romulus Augustus writ Roman-style around the coin’s circumference. It didn’t take a genius to add coin and Werewolf Guy together, and come up with the Emperor, even without the face on the coin looking like the picture on the Emperor’s website.

Romulus Augustus was the last western Roman Emperor. His reign started on All Hallows’ Eve in 475 when he was around fifteen, and lasted for all of ten months, until he’d was deposed and shipped off to the Castel dell’Ovo on an island in the Gulf of Naples, from where he later ‘disappeared’ a.k.a. Accepted the Gift and became a vamp. Of course, Wikipedia didn’t mention the becoming a vamp bit. Or that the Emperor was Head Fang of Europe and Bastien’s master.