Keys and Curses (Shadow Book 2) (27 page)

The forest gave way once more to grassy paddocks. The van went through a brand new steel mesh gate with a sign on it that Flower thought probably said
keep out
, but she was rusty at reading human script, so she wasn’t sure.

A series of hairpin bends forced the van to a crawl. They bounced over potholes and rocks that shook the vehicle like a pebble in a bucket. She was bruised all over from being thrown against the window by the time they splashed through a small lake and finally pulled up at a cluster of wooden buildings.

Flower was only too happy to stumble out of the van and stretch her cramped muscles. It was really a very nice spot. The air was much fresher out here and the sunshine warm and inviting. Grass and trees stretched for miles, which would surely suit the Bloomin Fairies nicely. A hubbub of noise swelled from the other side of the buildings.

“This way.” Clockwork passed her with the two terse words and set off for the noise.

The fairies congregated in a seething circle on an unplanted patch of garden, bare feet churning up the dirt and voices spiralling in indignation. In the centre, seated on her pile of blankets, the Lord of the Gourd looked right royally displeased. Mudface scowled in front of her, clutching her book to her chest.

Fitz pushed his way through the fairies. “Finally, you’re here.” He gave his beard an agitated tug. “It’s been like this all morning. Flower, couldn’t you talk some sense into Mudface? She listens to you.”

“What’s the problem?” Flower eyed Mudface’s scowl. She hardly needed to ask.

“Mudface wants to go back with us, but the Lord of the Gourd says she has to stay with the tribe. I tried to convince her it was too dangerous, but she won’t listen.”

“Well of course she won’t. She wants more out of her life than this.” Flower gestured around. “Why not let her come back with us? Surely it’s her choice?”

“As if a Bloomin Fairy would know what’s good for her,” Clockwork said.

Flower’s temper cranked up a notch. “You’d be surprised at the things Mudface knows!”

Fitz threw up his hands. “Don’t you two start arguing. Flower, you’re the diplomat, sort it out either way and on your head and hers be the consequences.” He stalked away.

Flower sighed and wondered just when it was she’d agreed to be a diplomat for the Invisible Army. She strode into the circle. “What’s going on here?”

The Lord of the Gourd gave her an evil look. “Giant freakin dead muse, you tell her! Tell her she can’t go!” She turned to Mudface and shook a shrivelled finger at her. “Bloomin Fairies don’t leave the tribe! Not for anything, and especially not to go running off with freakin dead muses!”

“Who says?” Mudface’s words were fierce.

The Lord of the Gourd lifted the shrivelled gourd from her blankets and held it aloft. “Gourd says!” she yelled, so loudly her eyes bugged out. “Gourd says you stay with us and get married to-” her finger travelled over the crowd for a minute, wavered, then settled on a fairy with a wiry red topknot. “Him!”

The redhead went pale. “Me?” he shrieked. “I’m not marrying the freak!”

“I’m not getting married!” Mudface yelled. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!” She punctuated the last words by jumping up and down. “I’m going to be an investigative journalist!”

“You don’t even know what a vestagate journalise is!” the Lord of the Gourd bawled.

“Yes I do but you don’t!”

“That’s right I don’t! You stay here and get married and have babies like a normal Bloomin Fairy!”

The pitch of their voices increased with every word until they screamed themselves into silence. Mudface and the Lord of the Gourd glared at each other, nose to nose. The redhead tried to sidle away and not be noticed.

“Madame Lord of the Gourd,” Flower said in her most respectful voice.

“What?” The Lord of the Gourd maintained her glare.

“Mudface is young and needs to spread her wings. May I humbly suggest you allow her to come with me for a little while, then return to her clan when she’s ready to settle down?”

“No way freakin dead muse. Bloomin Fairies don’t leave. Ever. Never. Have any of you others left?”

The watching crowd shook their heads vigorously.

“I’m going,” Mudface said. “You can’t stop me. And I probably won’t ever come back.” She straightened, looked about the fairies with frozen dignity and inclined her head. “You all think I’m a freak. You don’t want me around anyway since I was dead.” She marched out of the circle.

“Stop right there!” the Lord of the Gourd screeched.

Mudface pushed her way through the fairies, who tried to block her exit.

“Come back or I’ll–I’ll-”

“You’ll what?” Halfway through the crowd, Mudface turned to face the Lord of the Gourd.

“I’ll curse you!”

Mudface narrowed her eyes. “Be worth it to leave.” She turned her back.

Flower backed toward the edge of the crowd. She didn’t like the way this was going at all. One friend with a fairy curse was quite enough for a lifetime. “Mudface maybe you should think about this.”

But her words went unheard. The Lord of the Gourd raised her finger in the air, twirled it around three times and then pointed at Mudface with deadly intensity. The fairies around her threw themselves out of the way.

“I curse you pink and overgrown!” the Lord of the Gourd yelled.

Mudface went flying as though she’d been hit in the back with a physical force. She sprawled face first into the grass. Her book sailed out of her hands.

Their snub little faces mortified, the other fairies hurried away from her and busied themselves with digging up clods of grass with any tools that came to hand.

The Lord of the Gourd settled onto her blankets and gave Flower a grim stare. “You’d better look after my granddaughter.” Then she lay down and closed her eyes. Seconds later she began snoring.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Nikifor’s boot heels slipped from the top of blunt spikes and hit wood. He skidded down a sheer wall on his backside, hit his shoulder on a post and then free fell, arms flailing, into thin air for a dizzying ten seconds before landing with a thump on thick grass, the wind knocked out of him, in the middle of a fight. Mudface and Clockwork landed evenly beside him. Flower hit the ground near his head, rump first, and said an incredibly foul word. Fitz rolled on his side when he landed and bounced straight to his feet with the dexterity of a man well used to stepping through doorways between the worlds where unexpected ten foot drops lurked.

Flower’s swearing faded into the background noise when Nikifor realised Ishtar Ishtar and a Moon Trooper were staring down at him, frozen in mid-fight.

Around them a fierce battle between Ishtar’s band of Bloody Fairies and at least twenty Moon Troopers went on under a blazing sun.

“Vampires out in the sunlight!” Nikifor boomed. “We’re all doomed to die horribly!”

“Vamps!” Ishtar roared. “Where??”

The Moon Trooper aimed a vicious low blow at her while she was distracted. Nikifor reacted instinctively by swinging one leg in a wide arc to dent the Moon Trooper’s mask. The kick brought him to his feet in a movement so acrobatic he wished he’d managed it in front of the pink-haired girl.

The Moon Trooper clutched his mask. Black smoke curled from his long, high-collared shirt.

Ishtar grabbed a handful of fairy dust from a pouch at her belt, leaped on the Moon Trooper, knocked him to the ground and ripped off his mask. “You are a vamp!” she yelled, then shoved the dust into his face.

Nikifor took a cautious step away while the Moon Trooper blackened and turned to sparkling dust.

Ishtar stood up, dusted herself off and kicked the remains. “You know what happens to vamps who come out in the daylight?” she screeched at the continuing battle. “They sparkle! And then they die!”

“Er-” Nikifor decided now was not the time to ask her anything, and looked around instead for his companions. His brain, already knocked about by the fall, only just had time to take in the high wooden walls they’d fallen from when a sharp blow to the back of the head knocked him to the ground again.

Ishtar leaned over him and glared. “That’s for interfering in my war. Just as I was starting to have fun, too!”

Nikifor closed his eyes and passed out.

“What do you mean, interfered? We didn’t know you were going to be here! And come to think of it, what kind of a damn fool place was that to cut a door into Shadow, Fitz Falls? It’s amazing we weren’t all killed!”

“Amazing for some, pity about others,” Clockwork muttered nearby.

“I’m afraid it’s an educated guess where we’re going to come through at the best of times.” Fitz’s tones were calm and unruffled. “There, is he coming around?”

Nikifor had no idea how long he’d been out. His head was on Flower’s lap and Ishtar was leaning over him. Still. Or again? She grinned. She had a nasty bruise near her nose and a new scar running down one cheek since they’d seen her last. “Hello Curse Boy.”

Nikifor groaned and rubbed his thumping head. “Ishtar.”

“I see you got your memory back.”

“Don’t try to move too much,” Flower cautioned. “She’s probably done serious damage.”

Nikifor moved anyway, because it was frankly dangerous resting his head in Flower’s lap when she was obviously in one of her moods again. He sat up, held his head in his hands until it stopped spinning and then looked around.

Ishtar’s band sharpened their spears, tended wounds and talked excitedly about dead vampires. More Bloody Fairies than he could count bustled around a campsite consisting of rough wooden huts and a fire pit with a huge cooking pot over it. Children ran and dived and fought under their feet.

Fitz appeared quite at ease in the village, unlike Flower, who was red with fury, and Clockwork, who looked like he expected to be mugged at any moment. Mudface sat close to Flower, dejection and fright written in her downturned mouth and wrinkled forehead. There was a faint, indefinable tinge of pink about her.

“What happened?” Nikifor asked, since nobody seemed inclined to volunteer the information. “Where are the Moon Troopers?”

“All dead.” Ishtar mimed blowing dust from the palm of her hand. “No thanks to you lot falling out of the sky at an inconvenient moment. I don’t like distractions.”

“But why were they out in daylight?”

“Oh, that.” Ishtar grinned. “We came on a whole nest of `em sleeping in the forest over there. So we carried them out into the sunlight, real careful, then woke `em up for a fight.”

Clockwork sniggered.

Ishtar scowled at him. “Think that’s funny, Freakin Fairy?”

Clockwork matched her scowl. “Hilarious.”

Ishtar’s frown deepened. She studied him more closely. “Don’t I know you?”

“Ishtar Ishtar!” snapped an older woman who was passing by at that moment. “Of course you don’t! I won’t have my only surviving daughter knowing Freakin Fairies!”

“Mum!” Ishtar wailed. “I can hardly help it, I just met him!”

Nikifor caught a passing resigned expression on Clockwork’s face and wondered just how he felt about concealing Hippy’s existence from her own family.

“My name is Clockwork Silver,” he said.

Both Ishtar and her mother’s attention snapped straight back to him. Willow Ishtar. The name popped, unbidden, into Nikifor’s mind, as did an image of Hippy marching from this very camp, banished, her family stony-faced behind her.

“Clockwork!” Willow elbowed her daughter aside. “I knew it! I recognised him as soon as I saw him! Come on son, what are you doing sitting with this riff raff?”

“You did not, Mum.” Ishtar grinned at Clockwork and jerked her head at the fire. “Come on, you can tell us what you’ve been up to since-”

There was a brief, awkward silence.

Clockwork got up and joined them. “I’d be happy to.”

“Someone get a drink for the Freakin Fairy who fought the evil muse king by my daughter’s side!” Willow bawled.

Fairies flocked around them. Soon the three were lost to sight.