Suzanne McLeod - The Bitter Seed of Magic

Panic bubbled inside me and I slammed a lid on it, hard. I’d been in worse situations; I could find a way out of this, I wasn’t dead yet—and to be honest, I was pretty sure me dead wasn’t part of Helen’s immediate game plan, so—

‘You have to pick your moment.’ Helen interrupted my thoughts. ‘It’s why it took us so long to get in without him knowing.’

‘Without who knowing?’ I asked cautiously.

‘Dr Craig, of course.’ She regarded me as if I was simple. ‘This is all his doing—although he had to force Ana—she’s his sister-in-law—to pull this patch of Between into being, he’s not powerful enough to cast this sort of magic.’

Ri- ight . Dr Craig was The Mother’s killer, so the ‘horned god’ in Her photofit was symbolic, as I’d thought. Someone really did need to buy Her a digital camera. I fervently hoped Hugh had already discovered that Dr Craig was the main perpetrator, and that he’d got him locked up in one of Old Scotland Yard’s cells, but part of me knew I couldn’t get that lucky. And my glee at Helen being a crooked cop wasn’t quite as satisfying now she’d got me in her shackles, only— Helen didn’t appear to be on the same baddie team as Dr Craig any more, not if she was hiding out in a circle. Plus she wanted something from me, something I needed to agree to if I was supposed to have all my faculties … and her daughter was missing. I took a mental leap and came up with—

‘So, Dr Craig’s holding Nicky hostage and I’m your ransom.’ I gave her a level look. ‘Have I got it about right?’

‘Spot on, Ms Taylor.’ She looked down her patrician nose at me. ‘But you can be quite clever, on occasion.’

‘So the real question is, since you’re not just handing me over now you’ve got me all trussed up’—I lifted my uninjured arm with its police issue silver shackle—‘what is it you want me to agree to before you do the swap?’

Her lip curled in disdain. ‘Craig’s interested in your childbearing capabilities.’

Of course he was. Everyone else and their dog was, so why not him? But— ‘What exactly does “interested in my childbearing capabilities” mean?’

‘Sit up and have a look.’

‘Why don’t you just do your magic-punch thing again? It’d be easier,’ I said flatly.

Her lips thinned, then she muttered and slapped her hand on my shoulder. I yelped, but the expected pain didn’t come; instead everything went warm and numb. ‘It’s not healed, so don’t try and use it,’ she said warningly. ‘And it won’t last long, either.’

Better than nothing. Using my good arm as a lever, I sat up.

In the centre of the large mediaeval-looking room there were around twenty metal hospital beds, all in the half-reclined position and set out in a large circle. The beds were all occupied by young girls. As I studied the faces of those I could see, I realised they all were all wearing the same Doppelgänger spells as the two dead faelings found in Dead Man’s Hole. Sitting alternatively round the circle were the pretty ‘girl next door’ with her brown hair and freckles (Sally Redman’s spell) and the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde: Miranda, the teenage witch from Morgan Le Fay College.

‘Oka- aay ,’ I muttered, ‘creepy or what?’ Then I realised something even creepier: they were all pregnant, and most of them looked like it wasn’t long to D-Day—or rather, B-Day? Not only that, half a dozen of the beds had small clear plastic cots next to them, complete with sleeping baby. And all the girls were silent and smiling, like this was the best place to be in the whole, wide world, like some sort of weird gathering of Stepford mums-to-be. Had to be some sort of Happy spell; twenty folk just wouldn’t sit that quietly. I looked , but there was no magic to see , not on the Stepfords, anyway.

But there was on the right side of the room. About halfway down was a modern pine grandfather clock dripping with spells. It clashed with the whole mediaeval look—suits of armour would’ve been more in keeping—but then, the clock had to be what was stopping the time—literally. Next to it was a door. I doubted it was the way out: it didn’t look large enough to get the hospital beds through, and they’d definitely been imported from the humans’ world—

‘You are now looking at the Merlin Foundation’s newest initiative to produce the next generation of wizards,’ Helen said, interrupting my escape-planning, ‘all done through a combination of IVF, magic and surrogate mothers. Craig has developed a method of creating test-tube babies that consistently produces powerful wizards, through sex and gene selection. A lot of wizards, especially those older ones whose chance at marrying a long-lineage witch disappeared when the Bride-Price was abolished, are happy to pay his fees.’

‘ Dr Frankenstein Does Designer Babies , in other words,’ I muttered in disgust as I tried to focus on the far end of the room … there was something hidden there, behind a massive, curtain-like Look-Away veil. It had to be the way out, or at the very least, worth investigating … once I got out of the Witch-bitch’s evil clutches. ‘What’s with the Doppelgänger spells?’ I asked, more to keep her talking than any real interest.

‘They indicate who the baby’s biological mother is,’ she said coldly.

I shot her an appalled look. ‘Surely the biological mothers haven’t agreed to that many babies?’

‘Apparently yes.’ She stared impassively at the Stepfords. ‘The witches are being very well paid for their eggs. He’s even paying the faelings for their surrogacy services; they’ve all signed contracts; they’re here by choice.’

I snorted. ‘So he’s killing them to save himself a bit of money? Nice to know he’s got absolutely no ethics at all.’

‘He’s not killing them per se, ’ she said, turning back to me, her blue eyes as cold as her voice. ‘The majority of them just don’t have enough fae blood. They die not long after giving birth—incubating baby wizards and then breastfeeding them sucks all the magic and life out of them.’

I stared at her, shocked. ‘But he’s a doctor; didn’t he work that out before he did his test-tube thing?’

‘He did trials on Ana. The daughter is hers and her husband’s, but the sons are all Craig’s, both biologically, and by way of being his experiments. Ana is strong enough to survive the surrogacy because of her sidhe blood, but he wasn’t successful with any of the other faelings, until he put together this set-up’—she indicated the large stone-walled room—‘here in Between . It keeps them alive just long enough.’

‘Fuck,’ I said in revulsion, ‘I don’t know which of you is worse, him for killing them off, or you for covering up their deaths. And all because you didn’t want anyone to know that you had a child with a vamp.’

‘Despite what you think of me, Ms Taylor, I don’t condone the death of innocents. I didn’t know the full extent of what was happening until recently, and Jack’s birth is only a small part of it.’ She cast a poignant look at the still sleeping Jack. ‘Did you know vampires are infertile?’

‘Well, Maxim isn’t, obviously,’ I said, ‘otherwise your boy wouldn’t be here.’ Not to mention me. ‘But what the hell’s that got to do with anything?’

She laughed. ‘You really don’t know, do you? I always wondered if you were actually that clueless, and now I see you are. But then, you wouldn’t have spent all this time looking for a way to crack the fertility curse if you’d known the truth …’ She trailed off, giving me a sly look.