The Hunter's Prey (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 5) (3 page)

3

An Empty Lot

We walked north out of the market without stopping back at Morgan's Ephemera. Neither of us ever traveled too lightly, even when we were just leaving my store. I had spells in each of my pockets and in all the jewelry and barrettes I wore. Merlin carried his small black satchel, that in truth contained most of his worldly possessions. We walked past Steinbrueck Park and the melee of hustlers therein. A normal human called out to us that whatever we wanted, he could get us.

Lila, I thought reflexively. Bring Lila back and make her still the girl I loved.

The golden pins pulled my fingers onward, and we followed them north through Belltown.

Merlin and I walked, matching each other’s long strides, and mostly kept silent. Regardless of our tangled history, we were and would always be comfortable enough with each other to share silence. The mark of a true friendship. I pointed out small things along the way: a nice splash of graffiti on a wall that had wild strands of rebellion magic in it, some bright and tangled weeds growing up between the concrete, and a cute dog the size of a lunch box. Merlin showed me the light of a stained glass window and stopped to gaze up at the enigmatic statue of Chief Sealth, the man who Seattle was named after. His likeness stood with one arm outstretched, though it was impossible to say whether it was in greeting or in warning.

We walked on, and moved toward Queen Anne. Our path took us past a huge oak tree with towering branches full of leaves that were just starting to tinge orange with the coming fall.

“Lovely,” I said.

“It’s good to be alive, still good,” Merlin said and gave me a sharp look.

I nodded. It was, and that surprised me. I hadn't thought I would live to see this autumn, and that fact, along with the new fact of my own mortality, filled me with a strange feeling I was not accustomed to. Melancholy, perhaps, mixed with the steadfast knowledge that it would all end. That I would be gone someday. Perhaps sooner, in rescuing Lila, or longer. Seventy years or so, at the maximum.

The gold pins tugged on my fingers west as well as north, growing more insistent as we grew nearer to whatever destination they were spelled to take us to. We soon found ourselves walking along the ugliness of Elliott Avenue, full of too many cars and concrete roads. We let the pins pull us more west, and crossed the bridge that led into Magnolia. Like many of this town's neighborhoods, there was little reason to come here unless one lived here, and I had only been here a handful of times. It had a separate, almost suburban feel to it with the sprawling houses on large lots that overlooked the shifting waters of Puget Sound.

Merlin and I stopped and got burritos at a taco truck run by two friendly Korean men. They put kimchi and sriracha in with my carne asada. Burritos reminded me of Lila. She had always been on the lookout for a good burrito in Seattle, and claimed that there must have been a curse on the city that made Mexican food suck, in her words. I smiled at the memory. Sorrow followed. Nothing bad should have ever touched that child. I would set it right. I would get her back.

I rubbed my eyes and wondered if we should return to my store. But truly, the thought of any more spell-making today made me want to cry.

Merlin and I took our food to a sun-warmed picnic bench and ate.

“Look at your hand,” Merlin said.

The one I wasn’t eating with, the one with pins, was extended out fully.

“The pins pull ever harder to our destination,” I told Merlin.

“Aye, close now, for if we walk much further, we’ll be swimming in the deep,” he said, blotting his face with a paper napkin. He nodded and got a vague look on his face that I knew meant he was searching the area for magic. For anything that might give us some clue as to what we neared.

I did the same.

There was nothing but slight magical tendrils floating through the air. They felt like the types of specific magic tethered to various sorts of unders, but they were exceptionally diluted and not strong enough that I could discern any true information from them.

We walked on, and my calves and the soles of my feet had a nice ache to them, so different than the cramped muscles of inaction I'd suffered most days since we'd fallen into our regimen of preparing to go to Hell.

A cool breeze blew down the street, full of sea brine and the musky scent of seaweed. We passed houses with four-door garages and entrances with mini-turrets. It was a peculiarity of this modern age, in this country that had never even had its own monarchy, that the wealthy wanted their own castles and built their domains accordingly. Never mind that actual castles were all built with different forms of slave labor. Everyone of power thought they deserved to be kings and princesses, damn the reality of history. That thought led me back to Lila, serving the Queen and King of Hell. All thoughts had a way of leading back to her.

We walked through the winding roads lined with houses, until we stood at the top of a long, downward block that ended at a cul de sac. Beyond it was Puget Sound. The four pins in my hand pulsed and shifted, urging me to hurry.

When we reached the bottom of the hill, we stood on the sidewalk and faced a wide empty lot that sat overlooking the water, full of blackberry vines lush with fruit and English ivy that crept everywhere.

“Perhaps this is some kind of joke? Some magical goose chase?” But as I said those words, I didn’t believe them. The vague traces of magic were thicker here, and set my teeth on edge. And nothing about the poster we’d found in Pike Place had seemed like a joke.

“An empty lot,” Merlin said thoughtfully. He squinted into the tangled vines and bushes. “It's large. Sitting on the water. Undeveloped.”

“Unlikely,” I agreed.

Merlin set his black satchel down on the sidewalk, opened it up, and peered within.

I never ceased to envy that infinity bag.

“Where is it? Come on now. Where are you?” he mumbled.

The problem was, of course, that it was too big on the inside and Merlin was many things but never tidy.

“I know it is in here somewhere,” he said, reaching in all the way up to his shoulder.

I fought the desire to glance over his shoulder and look at all that lay inside, but there was some honor amongst wizards and witches. A person's spelled objects were personal.

Still muttering, Merlin pulled out a knotted piece of driftwood that looked utterly ordinary at first glance. At second glance? Merlin murmured “
Even the very wise cannot see all ends
,” and the driftwood grew bright and orangey with a well-made dispersion spell.

He cocked it behind his head and threw it high into the empty lot.

It flew and then bounced off some invisible membrane not five feet in front of us. Where the bough hit the membrane, it shone silver. That spot of silver grew and spread across the membrane, showing it to be a dome that stretched over the lot and all the way down to the water.

Merlin began to take a step forward. I put a hand on his arm and reached into my pocket for a piece of rose quartz. I held it up so it was equidistant between our faces. “
Wyneb cudd,”
I murmured.

Fingers of magic uncurled from the pink crystal and reached for our faces. Where they touched, I felt my nose grow. My cheeks widened. I watched Merlin and saw his chin grow longer and his forehead flatten. The spell would wear off within the hour, but for now, we did not look like ourselves, which might be necessary. When the spent spell was finished, I dropped the quartz on the ground.

“Nicely done.” Merlin ran a finger across my cheek. “Shall we?”

We walked forward and through the silver dome Merlin’s magic had revealed. Everything changed on the other side of it.

4

Hissing Peacocks

The empty lot dropped away in a dizzying moment as the illusion disappeared and a new reality took its place. The golden pieces pressed to my fingertips dropped off as well. I glanced down and saw a pile of other gold pins littering the green grass we stood upon. We weren’t the first ones to have found this spot.

Gone were the convincing weeds and vines, and in its place was the kind of regimented English tea garden that I'd always detested. Hedges sat in the shape of precise squares. Rows of perfect roses and climbing wisteria covered gazebos, with nary a stray leaf or blossom anywhere. An orange tree sat sculpted to within an inch of its life to resemble a mourning dove. The garden was the opposite of a witch’s garden, which was full of useful herbs and hearty weeds that were just as valued as the reddest rose.

A bored peacock strutted by, dragging his overlong bruised purple plumage through the short and perfectly green grass. He stopped to hiss at us.

A pea gravel path led downhill to the open doors of a small and opulent palace lying at the very center of the gardens. It was made of a pure-white marble that dazzled in the mid-day sun, and was topped with three golden onion domes that sat on top of carved columns in the shapes of voluptuous women stretching upward. The palace bespoke of wealth, of course, but also someone with impeccable tastes. In my experience, the wealthy tended to have awful aesthetics, for who among their servants and sycophants would ever mention how glaringly tacky their portraits were? Whoever owned this palace, whoever called this hunt, intrigued me.

“You smell that?” Merlin asked.

I inhaled citrus scents and the lush scent of cut grass. And then, something darker, underneath. A lot of somethings. The same magical scents we’d smelled before. “They’re inside?” I whispered.

Merlin nodded. “I believe so. Lots of unders with darkness wrapped round their souls.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Then we should fit in quite nicely with trouble and all her friends. Let us keep in mind that we can always leave. That whatever is inside is not our primary concern.”

Merlin caught my eye and nodded. “Of course. Now shall we, Madame Tintagel?” He invoked an old name, an old place and castle, and with it came memories.

It had been a warm day, and we’d ridden two black horses to Tintagel, a fortified castle often under siege and surrounded by the muck and tragedy of war. But not on this spring day that held the scent of honeysuckle and sea salt on the wind. We unpacked our picnic in sight of that castle and the craggy rocks that led to a tumultuous ocean.

We were newly acquainted, Merlin and I, which was to say though we had battled each other for decades, we had just set aside our mission to destroy each other and had instead become lovers.

I studied him, not sure who he was now that he was not the wizard at the end of some muddy field muttering and throwing spells at me. Not sure what to say now that we weren’t in the ecstatic moments that we’d so easily and often fallen into in the last four days.

What did he think of me? I didn’t like how important the answer to that question was for me, and I would not stoop so low as to ask him. But what if this small and fragile thing so newly hatched between us was merely a thing of my imagination? What if he enjoyed our pairing, and nothing else?

“Apple?” Merlin asked, holding out a small and tart fruit.

“A chunk of bread and hard cheese, as well as the pickles you packed.”

He chuckled.

“Did I say something funny?” I asked, spreading the folds of my long dress around me on the tufts of the newly grown spring grass. I stared out at the waves that bashed against the shore far below us.

“Do you know you’ve always been like that? Ever since I first met you, when you were all of, what? Fourteen years old?”

“I’ve always eaten when I’m hungry?” I asked archly.

“Never mind what anyone offers you. Never mind what your father, or the rightful king, or even the lowly court wizard offers you. You have always wanted what you wanted, and you state it so plainly, as though it were your right.”

“What a rude and unladylike woman,” I said, hiding the sting of his words. My whole life, people—and mostly men—had been calling me unnatural and unruly. That Merlin thought so as well? It shouldn’t surprise me.

“No, lass. I have always admired that quality about you and wished I had that own trait myself. I’ve always been too sculpted by the reality that surrounds me.”

“Ah yes, Merlin the greatest wizard of all the isles. The mighty magician who kings and noblemen offer up carts full of gold to have you at their side. You? You are weak?”

“Not weak. Just, I go along a bit more. That’s all.”

“And I’ve always wished I could make friends as you do. Be it visiting queens or the lads in the stable, you put everyone at ease. I seem to be made of the stuff that repels them all.”

Merlin handed me a wood plate with a nice hunk of dark bread, thick slices of cheese and some pickles. “Perhaps all the world wishes to be your friend, but doesn’t quite know how to approach you, lest you smite and smote them?”

He took out another plate and filled it with apples and cheese.

“Someday, in some future land, there may be a place for a woman of power such as I,” I said.

“I hope you are right,” Merlin said. “But even in that future, the folk will still sit a bit in awe of you.”