The Shifting Price of Prey (35 page)

I pressed send. Now he had to have ‘direct communication’ with me, or I’d shop him to the cops and witches.

The van braked to a stop and Taegrin’s bass rumble in my ear took on meaning. ‘. . . so we think we should reach the Thames head by the August New Moon.’ He turned to grin
proudly at me.

‘That’s great,’ I said, forcing my mouth into a smile as I mentally shoved Malik and his fury-inducing texts somewhere where the sun shone hot, and knocked back part two of the
Hot.D potion, almost gagging on the bitter aftertaste. Calm, clarity and a sense of purpose spread through me, smoothing out my emotions. Good thing too, as I had a job to do.

Taegrin pointed at the glovebox. ‘There’s consultant ID badges in there, Genny. Best if you wear one.’

I snagged a badge, followed him through the zoo, and to the tiger exhibit.

We entered the same shaded corridor as before with its U-shaped windows looking out on to the tiger enclosure. I skirted past a yellow ‘Warning: Wet Floor’ sign,
leaving footprints on the recently mopped floor and nearly gagging on the reek of chemical pine-scented cleaner. About halfway along the corridor, Hugh, Mary and a coven’s worth of WPCs were
gathered around a salt and sand circle with something green lying in its centre. As I neared I realised it was a folded piece of clothing; the blood-splattered kurta belonging to the kidnapped
woman’s bodyguard.

Hugh turned, his pink granite teeth gleaming as he smiled a concerned welcome, then I jerked to a halt as the pine smell was gone, replaced by another, more familiar scent.

Blood. Its metallic odour was flooded with adrenalin, its very freshness telling me it was recently spilled. Without conscious thought, I inhaled deeply. Underneath the coppery aroma slid
another. Meaty and rich with the smell of wet fur. I’d smelled it before, here, yesterday. Only now that recognition was deeper, more visceral than a day-old scent warranted, as if it was one
I’d known long ago—

Static flashed in my mind.

The zoo corridor disappeared.

I stood at the centre of a wide, moon-bright plateau. It stretched out to both sides of me, one edge hugging the steep mountain face, the other falling into the clouds boiling
below. The ground was covered by an ankle-deep blanket of snow, unmarked as far as I could see. For a moment all was still, silent, a breath out of time . . .

I was back in Malik’s dream/memory. The one I gatecrashed the first time I used the Morpheus Memory Aid.

A distant wolf howl split the air, icy snowflakes stung my cheeks and a chill wind whipped my hair over my eyes. I pushed it back, and the snow-covered plateau was no longer white and pristine.
Instead, pools of fresh blood stained the white expanse around me like a scattering of crimson rose petals.

The blood-scent intensified, laced now with arousal and the sweetness of ripe figs.

Rage curdled in my stomach.

Genny?

The voice was a distant rumble, like thunder in a far-off storm.
Hugh.

Static flashed again.

I looked down.

A man sprawled naked in the snow at my feet. Black curls matted his scalp. Green eyes, vivid against the dark olive of his skin, gazed up empty above a long aquiline nose and thin, sculptured
lips. Splinters of bone gleamed sharp and white in the red ruin of his throat. Thick black hair furred the hard muscles of his chest. Below his ribs, a long wound gaped wide, the flesh ripped open
by something sharp and clawed, the ragged end of his aorta dangling into the internal cavity; evidence that his heart had been ripped out. A tangle of intestines wriggled over the lower edge of the
wound, glistening slick and wet as they spilled from his abdomen on to the snow.

A distant analytical part of my mind catalogued the dead male’s injuries, and concluded they were recent. So recent, so immediate, in fact, that his body hadn’t caught up with the
reality of his demise. Since, from the thatch of black hair between his wide-spread legs, his sex still jutted, still erect, and still smeared with the girl’s blood.

A growl jerked my gaze to my right.

To a ten-foot circle cleared of snow. Ash marked out the circle. Glyphs glowed with magic around its circumference. Inside the circle was the girl. She was on her hands and knees, head thrown
back, long dark curls streaming over her shoulders, her prepubescent body naked except for a wide leather collar around her neck. A thick chain stretched from the collar to a spike driven into the
rocky ground at the circle’s heart.

Genevieve!

Malik’s voice calling my name was drowned out as the growl came again.

From the girl.

She lowered her head and glared at me with eerie yellow-green eyes.

Shock sliced through me as I recognised her, despite her being a few years younger than when I’d seen her last night.

She was the girl at the mosque. The one in the fur jacket.

The werewolf.

The girl snarled, lips drawing back over longer-than-human canines.

Genevieve!

My name was a sharply ordered imperative.

Static again.

Figures appeared in the distance, grey shadows loping over the snow, racing towards me. Hot flesh seared my palm. I squeezed my hand and warm wetness trickled from between my fingers to complete
the pattern in the snow as the muscle I held pulsed one last time.

‘Dead.’ The girl’s whisper was a taunt on the wind. ‘My mate dead. You’ve killed him. Taken his heart.’

You must leave, Genevieve. Now!

‘They are coming,’ she screamed.

Static.

‘Coming for you.’

My eyes snapped open and I found myself lying on the ground, staring up into a huge furry face. It looked down at me with unnerving yellow eyes, swiped a pink tongue out to
lick its muzzle and yawned wide enough to showcase a stomach-churning set of canines.
My, what big teeth you have, oh Furry One!
Panic knotted my throat— until I breathed in the
scent of pine cleaner, and my mind caught up with the fact I was back at the tiger exhibit at the zoo; and there was a reassuringly thick pane of glass separating me from the pointy-toothed tiger
eyeballing me like I was his next meal.

My pulse slowed and I realised I wasn’t lying on the ground but on a thin foam mattress covered by a silver-foil survival blanket. The only person about was Mary, chattering quietly away
on her radio. I shut her and the tiger with its pointy teeth out and tried to sort through what just happened.

The damn Morpheus Memory Aid spell, combined with Malik’s blood I’d drunk, had to be backfiring again, this time not even waiting for me to sleep; instead the spell was just throwing
me straight into a memory/flashback.

Malik’s memory/flashback.

And a disturbing one at that.

Not that I’d expected any of Malik’s memories of the Emperor and his werewolves to be good, not after Malik had gone hunting him and ended up sicced with the revenant curse by the
evil imperial vamp.

Who had to be a truly foul piece of imperial shit indeed if he chained up prepubescent girls and forced them to become werewolves. Because I was betting that was the ritual Malik’s memory
had shown me. Ugh. Definitely a disturbing memory to have. Not that the Fur Jacket Girl had seemed upset or traumatised by what was happening to her. No, she’d been raging about her mate
being killed. That I’d killed him. Shouting that
they were coming. For me.

My pulse sped up. It was the same as the Moon tarot card warning.

Only it wasn’t me who’d killed her werewolf mate in the memory, Malik was.

So was the memory a true one? Or had my subconscious added its own little twist at the end there as a reminder? Not that it mattered when I was pretty sure the Emperor’s werewolves were
coming for me, anyway. And at least the memory had confirmed one thing; the werewolves were definitely the kidnappers. The smell of werewolf blood on the bodyguard’s kurta had dropped me into
Malik’s memory/flashback.

So, did that mean all werewolf blood smelled the same? Nah, too unlikely. The blood probably belonged to a werewolf Malik knew. Since the male was dead it had to be Fur Jacket Girl. So who was
she to Malik? Someone he cared for? The rage he’d felt suggested that. Though his memory wasn’t something you’d want to see happen to anyone, whether you cared for them or not.
More importantly, his memory meant Fur Jacket Girl had been one of the werewolves here at the zoo.

Which was disturbing in an entirely different way.

Malik had said he hadn’t seen any of the Emperor’s werewolves for more than five hundred years. So, as Fur Jacket Girl was still around, then she had to be a good half a millennia
old. Except werewolves only lived a human lifespan. So either Malik was lying – something I knew his honour wouldn’t allow him to do – or I was working on faulty info from the
witch archives. Or more likely, incomplete info, since I’d never got into the password protected files. No doubt if I had, they’d have told me some werewolves did live longer than human
lives.

And no doubt Malik could’ve told me that too. If I’d bothered to ask him.

Crap. I needed to speak to him. If he hadn’t known what was going on last night, I was betting he did now. Only the text-dumping vamp had cut me out of the loop. And yes, I was pretty sure
it was all down to his screwed-up protective instincts and his deal with Tavish, but damn, didn’t the idiot vamp know, that all cutting me off would do, was make me furious? And didn’t
he know that no way was I going to hole up in some metaphorical ivory tower, however much he wanted me to, not when people were missing and the fae’s fertility was still trapped? So what was
his point, really?

I clenched my teeth, swallowing a frustrated scream.

The silver blanket covering me rustled and Mary looked up from her phone. ‘Oh good, you’re awake.’ She crouched down next to me, hitching her black trousers at the knees as she
did, a relieved expression on her face.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I was thinking.’

‘Thinking?’ She grinned. ‘I thought it was called fainting. You did a good job of it too. Like a tree toppling.’ She demonstrated with her forearm. ‘Awesome
faceplant. Or it would’ve been if the DI hadn’t caught you. We tried to wake you, but you were way out of it.’

‘I don’t faint,’ I grumbled, as my eyes caught the remains of the sand and salt circle. ‘Any luck with scrying for the kidnappers?’

M
ary grimaced. ‘Nada. The blood on the kurta was too old.’

Damn. If the scrying was a bust then I needed to find Hugh and tell him the blood was werewolf. I started to get up—

Mary slapped a heavy hand on my chest and pushed me back down. ‘Stay there until the DI gets here,’ she ordered. ‘He’ll probably want the medic to look at you again.
I’ll let him know you’re conscious.’ She thumbed her radio and started giving more orders.

Medic? Again? Hugh was going overboard on looking after the definitely-did-not-faint sidhe. For which I was grateful, but . . . I did a quick mental inventory to make sure all my fingers and
toes, and everything in between, felt normal. Everything did so there was no point lying here, waiting for a – no doubt efficient, but human – medic to tell me I was okay as far as they
could tell. I mouthed at Mary to cancel the medic, and, brushing away her exasperated hand as she tried to keep me prone, I sat up.

It put my head on a level with the tiger’s. It was sitting on its haunches like a patient dog, less than a foot away from me. The sunlight streaming down highlighted the black stripes
marking its orangey coat, and silvered the white fur haloing its lower face and jaw like an old man’s beard. Its long whiskers were almost translucent in the glare. And its stripes
weren’t symmetrical as I’d always imagined, but fanned out from a point between its eyes as if someone had haphazardly painted them in. It was the first time I’d even been so
close to a wild animal, and it was beautiful and awe-inspiring.

Movement in the undergrowth caught my eye. Another tiger padded up. It lay down with lazy grace a few feet away, its long tail twitching slightly. The first tiger flicked its black-tipped ears
and half-closed its yellow eyes, but otherwise ignored its pal. Both stared at me as if I was the most captivating thing they’d seen this year. But unlike the predatory gaze I’d have
expected, the tigers looked more as if they were waiting for my next trick.

I frowned. Was that natural? I pinged them, the possibility of werewolves giving me the crazy idea that they might be weretigers. Got nothing but animal back. But then when I’d pinged the
werewolves all I’d got back was human, so maybe that’s how they felt to me. I tapped on the glass, mouthing hello. They just kept staring. I pulled a face, stuck my tongue out at them,
told them I knew what they were. Still nothing. I caught Mary giving me squinty eyes, so I bit the embarrassment bullet. ‘Do you think they’re weretigers?’