Suzanne McLeod - The Cold Kiss of Death

For Josh, Harry and Lillie

with love

The child stood barefoot and ignored in the cold, sheeting rain; her long dark hair was tossed by the fractious wind and her ragged clothes hung off her undernourished body. She was no more than eight or nine years old. She waited, staring at me from dark angry eyes. My heart beat faster at the sight of her, fingers of fear scraping down my spine and setting my teeth on edge. All around her people hurried across the wide expanse of cobbles towards the warm lights of Covent Garden, heading for the shelter of the glass-covered market with its shops, cafés, street entertainers and busy market stalls. The late-October storm raging through London meant the witches were doing a roaring trade with their Body-Brolly spells, Dri-Feet Patches and Wind-Remedy Hairpins: twenty-first century commerce at its most expedient. And none of the late-afternoon punters stopped to help the child. No one even noticed her, other than me.

But then the girl was a ghost.

Not many humans have the ability to see ghosts.

I’m sidhe fae. Seeing ghosts isn’t a problem for me—at least not the seeing bit—but having a ghost decide to haunt me? Well, that had definitely become a dilemma ever since Cosette had appeared a couple of weeks ago. I told myself again it was stupid to be afraid of ghosts—not when they couldn’t physically hurt the living—and forced myself to ignore the irrational need to turn and run. Taking a deep breath, I continued jogging steadily towards her. As I neared, she held her hands out in supplication and opened her mouth wide, and the storm-winds shrieked and wailed as a surrogate for her silent scream.

I stopped in front of her and suppressed a shudder. ‘Cosette, we really need to find a way to communicate,’ I said, frustration almost edging out my fear. ‘I want to help, but I can’t if I don’t know what’s wrong.’

She grasped her shift and ripped it open. The three interlacing crescents carved, red raw and bleeding, into her thin chest didn’t look any better than the last dozen times I’d seen them. The wounds weren’t lethal—they weren’t even recent; Cosette had been dead for at least a hundred and fifty years, judging by her clothes—but my gut twisted with anger that someone would do that to a child. The triple crescents were something to do with the moon goddess, but what they meant to Cosette, her death, or why she was haunting me, I was having trouble finding out. I’d asked around, done the in-depth internet trawl, spent a fruitless day in the witches’ section at the British Library, hired a medium—and hadn’t that been a waste of time and money—and got nowhere, so even Cosette’s name was one I’d given her and not her true one. Next stop in my ghost-appeasing hunt might have to be a necromancer. And finding one of those wasn’t going to be easy. Necros aren’t the sort to advertise their services, not when commanding the dead—as opposed to just talking to them—is illegal ... but both Cosette and I needed the break.

‘I see it.’ I stared at the bloody symbol and shivered as my wet hair dripped cold down the back of my neck. ‘But I still don’t know what you want me to do about it.’

Dropping her hands to her sides, she stamped a foot in silent annoyance. Then, as usual, she moved to peer around me as if she’d seen someone, flickered, and disappeared like a light popping out.

Nerves twitched down my spine as I thought that this time there would be someone—or some thing —creeping up behind me. I turned to check. The façade of St Paul’s Church loomed blankly over me, a candle-like glow shining through its tall arched windows, the tall brass plaque on its false entranceway a dark rectangle against the sandstone. Goosebumps pricked my skin, the chill from my rain-soaked running shorts and vest adding fuel to my anxiety. Three Soulers—Protectors of the Soul—huddled together under the church’s high overhanging roof, the reproduction lantern above them throwing the red Crusader crosses on their long grey tabards into sharp relief. Briefly I wondered why the rain hadn’t driven them to decamp into the Underground, their usual MO when faced with bad weather; no point trying to Protect Souls from the vamps, witches and anything magical—which included me and the rest of London’s fae—when those souls weren’t around to be preached at.

I put them out of my mind and scanned the church for anything that might have spooked Cosette. The gates to either side of the building gaped wide, leading into the shadowed garden beyond. I peered at a darker patch nearest to me and stretched out my inner senses—

‘Well, if it isn’t the sidhe sucker-slut,’ a familiar voice sneered behind me. ‘Bet she’s waiting for her vampire pimp.’

I turned slowly, giving the woman a cool stare as I faced her. She stood smirking at me from under a huge black umbrella, her brown curly hair frizzing in the damp, the navy security uniform she was wearing bulging around her more than ample body, making her look like the Michelin Man. Ex-Police Constable Janet Sims. The ‘ex’ bit was her own fault—she’d had a crush on a colleague, a friend of mine, and her jealousy had led her to ignore procedure—and me, when I’d needed help—which was her choice, but of course, I was the one she blamed. Just my bad luck that after she’d been sacked, she’d got herself a job working for Covent Garden Security, and now she just happened to ‘bump into me’ on a daily basis.

‘Nah, she’s waiting for the paparazzi, aren’t you?’ Janet’s blonde-bitch sidekick lifted her hands to camera-frame me with her fingers. ‘Over here, Msssss Taylor,’ she yelled, then pulled a mocking ‘poor you’ face. ‘Only the paps have stopped coming round, Genevieve . You’re yesterday’s news now, and no one wants a sidhe sucker-slut round here, so why don’t you take your orange catty eyes and run off to Sucker Town where you belong.’

Mentally I sighed; getting my picture on the front page with London’s big-cheese vamp—now thankfully deceased—was causing me more problems than I could’ve imagined. Still, Janet and her sidekick were a small—if, thanks to that enormous brolly, annoyingly dry—problem, even if they now amused themselves by hunting for my metaphorical blood with almost more zeal than a vampire. So far I’d kept my patience, and practised turning a deaf ear, but ...

‘Well, I can’t stand here chatting all evening.’ I pushed my wet hair back from my face and added sweetly, ‘I’ve got a hot date with a satyr to get ready for.’ Sadly, the satyr was my boss and the hot date was work, but hey, you go with whatever you’ve got when faced with a pair of wannabe harpies. I smiled at them, enjoying the green-monster glow that leapt into their eyes, then turned and walked away, not listening as they muttered snidely behind me.

As I got to the corner, I glanced back and focused that part of me that can see the magic. Just as I’d suspected, an Eye-of-the-Storm spell cast a greasy slime over Janet’s huge black umbrella and dripped fat globules down around the two women. For a moment I hesitated. All I had to do was cup my hand and call the spell; the wind would strip the huge monster of a brolly from Janet’s grip and leave the pair of them screeching and scrambling like a pair of proverbial drowned rats in the storm. I curled my fingers into a tight fist and told myself not to crawl down to their level. Their jibes weren’t worth it, nothing more than sticks and stones and all that. Of course, the bit about words not hurting was fine until the words came with magic attached to them—but Janet and her sidekick weren’t witches, just witches’ daughters. Their fathers had been human, not sidhe, and the two women might live in a world of magic, they might even catch glimpses of it, but they’d never be able to use it. They’d had to buy the Eye-of-the-Storm spell, and any spell worth its salt wasn’t cheap, as I knew only too well.