Suzanne McLeod - The Shifting Price of Prey

Standing in front of the next tent were two male centaurs, all arrogant expressions, handlebar moustaches and oiled, pumped-up muscles. The sign above them offered Heavenly Rides . Tent five’s door flap was down, its sign turned round with ‘Closed’ scrawled across it in purple ink.

Sitting outside the last, rainbow-decorated tent was a small, green-skinned, pointy-eared leprechaun in a green cloak with his nose in a book titled Silver-Tongued Devil . At his feet sat a hairless cat in a blue-knitted jumper, leg in the air as it studiously washed its junk, and surrounding both were stacked huge foot-high balls of multi-coloured string. Behind them stood a massive bull-headed figure, hand on cocked hip, wearing a Spandex one-piece in shiny pink that did nothing to hide the figure’s melon-like boobs, nor its thick salami-like erection flanked by what looked like a pair of overlarge apples. A rainbow-shaped sign hanging in the tent doorway challenged all-comers to Chase the Minotaur to the Pot of Gold ~ String £50!

‘Fifty quid for a ball of string,’ Dessa muttered, breaking the stunned silence. ‘Even for a pot of gold, that’s a bit rich, isn’t it?’

The bull-headed figure pointed an admonishing pink-lacquered finger at her. ‘I’ll have you know fifty smackers is peanuts, luv,’ he said in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. The Spandex was as tight as it looked. Or maybe he was a she. ‘Why, the King of the Dark Elves himself forked out a thousand times that for the honour of chasing me.’

‘He’s not worth it,’ the centaur on the left said, sneering through his moustache. ‘You fancy a ride, witch, then I’m the one to put your money on. Old Mini over there lives up to his name.’

‘Yes, indeed!’ The other centaur looked down his nose at the pink-Spandexed minotaur. ‘I can categorically say that with Mini, what you see is certainly not what you get. That’s nothing but a distasteful plastic extension.’

O -kay!

Mini the Minotaur stuck both hands on his pink-covered hips, thrust them out and shrilled, ‘I’ll have you know Major-Me is a truly fully-functioning part of me.’

The leprechaun gave us a tired look from under bushy green eyebrows. ‘Bespelled,’ he murmured.

‘O’Keefe!’ Mini cuffed him on his pointy ear and squeaked,

‘Shut up!’

‘What’s bespelled?’ Dessa asked.

O’Keefe jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at Mini. ‘His strap-on.’

I choked, swallowing back a laugh.

‘A bespelled strap-on?’ Taegrin growled. ‘More like an offensive weapon.’

Mary rounded on me, accusation in her eyes. ‘Nothing interesting!’

I widened my own eyes in mock innocence. ‘How was I to know you had a thing for ginormous strap-ons?’

Her scowl promised retribution. ‘Right,’ she said briskly, turning to address the stallholders and holding up her badge. ‘We’re looking for an Irish wolfhound. His name’s Max.’

The silence was deafening. And no Mad Max rushed up, wagging his doggy tail in greeting.

‘We know he’s here,’ she carried on, showing them the scrying crystal, which was now glowing a deep blue, indicating Mad Max should be near enough to see if not actually touch. ‘So who wants to tell me what they know?’

The two centaurs snorted and suddenly seemed to find their hooves extremely interesting. Mini produced an industrial-sized file from nowhere and proceeded to give his pink-painted nails an unneeded manicure. O’Keefe stared at us for a long moment, bushy green brows drawn down, then he hawked and spat a huge gob of mucus. Its trail left a rainbow-like arc shimmering in the air as it flew an impressive ten feet to his right and splattered in front of tent five. Multi-coloured phlegm illuminated something lying on the grass, which, now it’d been pointed so disgustingly out, was easy enough to see glittering in the hot sunlight.

Before Mary could stop me, I jogged over, checking the something for spells – none – as I did, and scooped it up. I turned, dangling my find from my finger. ‘And here we have an obvious clue.’

‘What is it?’ Taegrin rumbled.

‘Max’s doggy choke-chain collar,’ I said. ‘Complete with his diamond-encrusted dog-tags.’

Dessa frowned at Mary. ‘Think it’s a plant, or did he manage to drop it for us to find, Sarge?’

‘Hmm.’ Mary tapped her radio on. It crackled to life. ‘How close is that backup, Constable?’

‘Search group three is here now, ma’am,’ the constable’s tinny voice replied. ‘The others shouldn’t be long. And DI Munro’s on his way from Trafalgar Square. ETA: thirty minutes.’

As she finished speaking, three more WPCs and Constable Lamber, his mottled beige headridge dusty, appeared in the circle of tents. They all cast quick hairy eyeball at the exhibitions, nodded to Mary, and joined Dessa and Constable Taegrin, waiting for instructions. The centaurs and Mini eyed them with professional disinterest but, as they obviously weren’t customers, dismissed them. O’Keefe, the leprechaun, just hunched deeper over his book.

Mary strode over, looked at the dog-tag I held, then at the tent with its closed sign behind me. ‘It’s probably a trap.’

Whether it was or not didn’t matter; it wasn’t like we were walking into it on our own, not with half the Met’s Magic and Murder Squad about to put in an appearance. I shrugged. ‘We’ll find out for sure when we check it out.’

She looked at me, indecision warring in her brown eyes. ‘What’s supposed to be in the tent?’

I took a couple of steps back to the tent doorway and flipped the closed signed over. It showed a picture of a golden bow and arrow, and a crystal ball. Written along the outer edge of the bow in fancy gold script was: Divine Love with Cupid.

I waggled my brows. ‘So wanna go see a god about a dog?’

Mary rolled her eyes at me, then said, ‘Let’s do it.’

Despite Mary’s easy agreement, and my saying that whatever trap might be inside Cupid’s tent had probably been scrapped long ago thanks to the very obvious police presence, it still took a long, toe-tapping fifteen minutes for Mary to organise our backup to her satisfaction. She also took time to organise a search of all the other tents, inside and out, and to interrogate the leprechaun and the others for any extra intel on ‘Cupid’. But, much to Mary’s annoyance, all of them to a minotaur claimed they’d never set eyes on the ‘Divine Love god’.

Though they did reveal Mad Max had trotted past them, tail wagging happily, into Cupid’s tent about an hour or so before we’d turned up. No one had been with him. Or, at least, they hadn’t noticed anyone. Not that any of them had been paying attention. So for all they knew Max the doggy could’ve had a whole army with him hidden beneath a See-Me-Not veil. And no, none of them had looked up either; so no one had seen any eagle, or any other birds, other than the swan maidens. Stellar witnesses they were not.

Once Mary was sure they had no more beans to spill, she deemed us – us being Mary, me, Dessa and Taegrin – ready to beard the love god in his tent.

‘Right, no messing about this time, Genny,’ Mary told me as Dessa unzipped the tent’s entrance, Taegrin on standby to enter first. ‘Tell me what we can expect of Cupid.’

‘Far as I remember, he’s a cambion.’

Cambions are born of a witch and an incubus, or a wizard (a witch’s son with a human) and succubus. The actual pairing could vary. And since cambions have long been considered ‘another type of witch’ (something the witches themselves have always been careful not to dispute, lest it reflect badly on their own ‘human’ classification) cambions benefited greatly from the witches big ‘human rights’ thing in the eighties. Of course, the real difference between a cambion and a witch or wizard, apart from their parentage, is their appetite for sex magic and their gift for prophecy. Which sort of explained why this cambion called himself Cupid and was telling fortunes.