The Hunter's Prey (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 5) (2 page)

“I’ll come with you,” I said, blushing despite all my years at the mention of the sex magic. It was nothing but a utilitarian act: the best way to keep both of us brimming with the magic we needed to sustain our epic spell-making. It was nothing more, and yet, it was good and intense and real, as it always had been between us. I grabbed my cloak and followed him outside.

“It’s been two days since we’ve eaten. Humbow,” he said. “The veggie ones. Do you want one or two?”

“Two. I’ll get cookies.” Though I didn’t feel hungry, the sugar, starch, and proteins would serve me well.

“Cookies,” he agreed.

My store was situated in the lower labyrinthine levels of Pike Place Market, and we walked through the cavernous and concrete hallways. For all the changes that new wealth brought to Seattle, all the daily ways money carved this port city into a different shape, Pike Place Market was still full of small stores and stands run by generations of families, fishermen, and cooks that sold the same trinkets and food that they had been serving for decades.

The air outside my store felt good on my skin as we climbed out of the lower levels and emerged into the part of the market that was full of open air craft stands. The day was sunny, and I sucked in the bright and salty air as we entered the press of late summer tourists. They crowded around an old man who carved a name onto a piece of rice, and another who bent forks and spoons into makeshift jewelry.

Merlin and I strode forward and people moved away from us like water. Not from any spell, but the two of us together… we were formidable and people instinctually sensed it, no matter how stinky. We walked by flower stalls full of late-summer blooming dahlias that looked like exploding fireworks, and then passed the fish-throwers whose job was as much to flirt with every tourist as it was to catch the flying salmon.

We crossed the street and Merlin headed to the humbow stall. I wandered away to the cookie shop, marveling at the simple lusciousness of sun on my skin and my mind’s ability to not be so thoroughly and tightly focused on spell-making. Of course we would be back to it later in the day, but I didn’t want to think about that or anything right now. The freedom of that thought was closely followed by what my mind always thought of when free. What it couldn’t stop perseverating on.

Lila, tall and blue, changed and standing near me without any expression on her face, and me staring at her, searching for her as everything went wrong and terrible in the blink of an eye. Lila, as she vowed in a flat and strange voice to serve the Queen of Hell. Lila, walking away from me and everything she had ever known without one look back as she stepped through the door to Hell. No matter how many times I searched the memory, I never found any sign that she was still the girl I loved inside of her new Marid self. I didn’t know if her transformation into a djinn had obliterated her former self.

That thought, along with the fact of her being enslaved, haunted me day in and out and the true fact of my inability to do anything about it made me want to scream.

I breathed in deeply. She’s still Lila. She still exists. And I will bring her home. Somehow. Some way.

2

The Hunt

“Ma'am? Excuse me, can I help you? There's sort of a line, so
…
.” The girl's voice interrupted my thoughts. She had a rhythm and lilt to her speech that reminded me of Lila.

I blinked hard. “Two chocolate chip cookies with walnuts,” I said.

She handed them to me in a small paper bag. They were both huge and still warm, and I overpaid by three dollars and wandered back to where Merlin was leaning against a lamp post and staring out at all the humanity: all the brief and modern lives that wandered by, buying and consuming things. Near us, people gathered and watched an expert busker singing Beatle’s songs. Beyond him stood a performer, making people laugh as he made sleights of hand that pretended at magic.

Merlin faced away from me, and I stopped a couple of steps away from him. It was rare that I got a chance to look at him. To study him and really see him. One did not gaze for long minutes at their friends, and yet I missed the sight of his rugged profile. He stood with his chin out and his face tilted upward to catch the sunlight and drink it in. I'd always loved watching him, loved the way his face shifted and spoke of every single one of his emotions, more expressive than any other person I'd ever met. Except when he chose to go blank. To telegraph nothing. Right now, a simple happiness filled his face, and I could have stared at him all day long. Then his gaze caught on something and his features hardened into a concentrated frown.

“Humbow?” he said. His hand reached out and held the greasy white bag toward me without him glancing at me. How long had he known that I stood there, watching him?

I took the bag and pulled out the soft puff of white dough filled with vegetables and a sticky sweet red sauce. Adequate fuel. I ate it in a couple of bites before reaching for the next one.

I noticed Merlin’s hand was still outstretched. I placed a cookie in it.

He began to chew on it, but still didn't look my way. He kept his gaze concentrated on something in front of him.

I scanned the crowds of people, noticing nothing out of the ordinary, and waited for him to fill me in on what so interested him.

“Strange and stranger,” Merlin muttered and pointed at a spot across the street laden with a hundred posters for bands, pop-up restaurants, theatrical performances, and the like.

I squinted and looked for anything of note. Nothing. My eyes slid away and looked toward Post Alley, full of noise and people. I glanced at Merlin. He was still staring at those posters. For some reason my heart was racing. I felt hot and didn’t want to stand here. I wanted to go on a stroll, or get back to my shop. To our spell-making. “Is there some event you are thinking of going to?” I asked mildly.

“Only one. It's called breaking into Hell, and I do wish it would happen sooner rather than later.”

“Indeed.”

“But there’s something over there. It’s a bit interesting. Let’s go closer,” he said.

I didn’t want to take one step toward it, and the fact of that was… interesting, as Merlin said. Was there something there that wished to be hidden? And if so, why the hell would it be hiding in the middle of Pike Place Market in late summer, when everyone was out and about?

We stepped into the street. Though this stretch of Pike Street was ostensibly open to cars, any driver fool enough to turn down the street went no faster than two miles an hour and was surrounded by a sea of sight-seers. Merlin and I waded through the people and with each forward step, a dozen reasons came to me why I shouldn’t keep going: I should get another humbow, I had a bad feeling about that side of the street, the place reeked of urine, and so forth. I noticed my increasingly frantic thoughts and realized this must be some kind of deterrent spell.

“I have to go water my plants? That’s a good one,” Merlin said. “My last plant died seven years ago.”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“This muttering in my head of inanities trying to keep me away from that board. Aren’t they speaking to you, too?”

I nodded. “They are.”

He slipped his hand into mine and my fingers automatically wrapped around his. We pulled each other one reluctant step forward at a time.

With five more steps to go before we got close enough to touch the damned billboard, my mind abandoned the rationalizations and my adrenaline spiked. My pulse raced. Sweat drenched my shirt. Every one of my instincts yelled at me to run now, while I still could.

Merlin breathed hard as we took the last few steps together. He reached out to touch the center of the billboard, where a piece of paper announced the pop-up opening of a restaurant that would serve pig, pig and more pig. I fought the urge to throw protection spells at the wizard to keep his fingers away from this dread vileness. I made myself breathe and touch the paper as well.

As soon as the flesh of our fingers touched, the spell ended. Relief washed through me as the surety that something deadly was coming my way disappeared. Our touch also changed the billboard.

Where before there had been thick inches of rain-drenched paper with the latest events stapled on top, now a rich piece of linen paper lay stretched across the billboard.

It was held up with four gold pins which gave off dull and buttery emanations. It spoke of arrogant power: leaving gold out in the open like that for anyone to take. The poster itself spoke of something else.

The creamy paper was gilded on the edges and had flowers and brightly drawn birds painted around the text. It all appeared hand-drawn, in the style of the lost art of illuminated books that had been so popular in the middle ages. The writing on the paper was deft and flourished, written with a blacker than black India ink that shimmered like oil in the day's light. I leaned in closer to study it. The ink was woven through with thin strands of invisibility and repulsion, so that any who were not creatures of magic, or creatures adept at using magic, would not see it.

So much subterfuge on this paper left in the middle of so many. And what was its message?

Written across the top in thick letters it read:
The Hunt

Beneath it was one more word:
Nears
.

The Hunt Nears.

I frowned and took a step backward. The hunt. The word dragged me back in time to the hunts of my youth. All winter long my father, Uther Pendragon, kept a menagerie of exotic animals in cages and half starved. I remembered how one time I had crept down to the lower levels of Camelot and fed a piece of chicken to a lynx. The ravenous animal had snapped my outstretched fingers and pierced my thumb.

In early spring they were released by the dozens so that my father and the select coterie of royals he invited could hunt them down with the hounds. All of Uther Pendragon’s myriad bastards were required to ride with him into the woods and serve him, all of the day and long into the night, serving food and mead, and composing and singing songs for the aging men about the greatness of their day’s hunt. I remembered the hard stares of those royals who saw us as a different type of prey, young and for the taking. I had managed to evade them. Not all of my half-siblings were as lucky.

“The Hunt Nears,” Merlin said softly and ran a finger over the words.

“Curious,” I said. “Look. There's something more.” I ran my fingers across the paper to get a better sense of it. It felt
…
powerful. As though the person, the creature, the beast or whoever had made it was so powerful it leaked on anything they touched. But there, at the corners, was more of the power and magic. I plucked off one of the heavy gold pins and held it in my palm.

Immediately, another pin took its place on the upper corner of the paper.

I took the other three pins out, and held all four in my hand as I watched new gold appear on the paper. The pins shifted and moved on my open palm as they crawled up my fingers and settled on my finger pads. They stayed there, as though glued, and pulled my hand forward in a vaguely northern direction.

“A following?” Merlin asked.

I nodded as I felt the pins gently tug at me.

“Interesting and strange. There’s something else. I keep getting wisps on the wind. The thinnest strands of odd magic.”

I had felt none of it, and was glad for his acuity. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply in and out as I amplified each of my senses and let them unfurl around me. There, the briefest hint of a cat-like magic. And there, another one, this one verdant and sticky.

I opened my eyes. “Residuals,” I said. “Other creatures of magic have been here and found this message.”

Merlin nodded. “Curious, no?”

“Yes, but this is a distraction. We need to make more and better spells for Hell. The doors could open up at any moment. We need to return to our spell-making.”

Merlin nodded. “And yet we are two disheveled, exhausted, and spent magicians. A wise witch I once knew always walked the witch's road when she needed to rebuild her stores of power. Do you remember the days, all the days, Morgan, when we walked and went nowhere in particular, finding the odd magics of the world and ending up wherever our feet meant to take us?

So many days, each precise and pleasant. It had been my favorite thing, before Merlin and I had parted. To go nowhere, together. “Pretty talk, wizard. You never could say no to a mystery.”

“And you could, my black kettle?”

I stretched my neck from side to side and felt the cricks of being too long bent over our spell. The idea of leaving the sunlight and going back to that long and exhausting work… it wouldn’t do to start on something new when we were this tired. We’d just make more and worse mistakes. “I suppose we could spend an hour or two walking and see where it leads.” I held up my hand with the four pins stuck to my fingertips. “And we can always turn back whenever we want. If anything happens. We will know if the door to Hell opens wherever we go. Very well. Let us walk the witch’s road.”

“And find the truth of this strange hunt.”

“Yes, though I fear that anything called a hunt must end in bloodshed.”

“My dire witch,” Merlin said with approval. His right cheek always dimpled when he grinned. I'd always loved that. “Let your hand lead us on.”