The Witch's Hunger (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 3) (3 page)

“True, oh mysterious and ancient one,” she said.

I glanced at the door again. The Grail called out to me, and I felt myself fidgeting. Sweating. “I must be off to get back to Merlin and help Cleopatra.”

“Okay, but if you ever want to, you know, hang out sometime. And like if there’s anything going on, you can always talk to me.”

I patted her hand, reached into her bag, and used my crystal ball to teleport back to Belize.

4

The Opposite of You

I appeared in our casita, to the fine sight of Merlin pulling his pants all the way on.

“Gods, woman. That is a terrifying trick,” he said.

“A one-use teleportation spell,” I said. He must not know about the crystal ball. I didn’t dare show him any of the threads that led back to the Grail. It was for me, and only me, and he was much too clever a man not to notice and follow any clues I gave him. The thought was a clenched fist in my belly. Usually my mornings were carefree. Usually I did not start thinking about the Grail and its holiest of water until later in the afternoon. And it wasn’t that much of a bother then, it only hit me hard in the last hours before I could slip away and drink the Grail water and….

Merlin stood before me, giving me a funny look.

“What was that?” I asked.

He sighed. “Cleopatra. I was wondering what she was on about.”

I filled him in on the details, not telling him the last part about how I had promised to meet her in London for tea. Merlin and I were on vacation, and I should have asked him before I made any promises.

When I finished speaking, Merlin moved efficiently around the room, grabbing up his few belongings and putting them into his black satchel.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He laughed, “Come now, lass. Pretend to all the world that you are not itching to go on this quest of mystery and imminent danger, that any time spent doing anything else will not drive you a bit mad, but don’t pretend with me. Never with me. Let’s be off and save Cleopatra’s love from whatever looming evil threatens her. You long for it more than all the coffee on this continent, don’t you?”

“Have I told you that I love you more than is reasonable?” I said and started packing my own bag quickly.

We traveled light: his bag was bigger on the inside, and I didn't mind wearing the same couple of outfits day in and day out.

I told Merlin the address we were going to.

He said, “It’s in Camden.”

I nodded. "Do you know this Lovelace?"

"I met her, decades ago. At one of those parties the Old One throws now and again. Do you remember his parties?”

I shook my head.

“Debaucherous and long. Not my cup, but I go to them to say hello to my fellow immortals. There’s few enough of us around that it’s nice to catch up with them every twenty years or so.”

“There are some things I haven’t missed in my hermitage,” I said. “Tell me about Ada.”

“Ada Lovelace. She's one of the few immortals I've met who has entirely embraced the modern age," Merlin said. “And Cleopatra’s not wrong. She’s lovely.” Merlin glanced at me and laughed. “Not like that. Gods, woman. It’s a good thing you haven’t spelled your glare to kill people.”

We left the casita and walked down the beach, stopping at the small corner store to buy fresh mangoes, buttery rolls, and Styrofoam cups of coffee.

"And how shall we travel today?" I asked when we were back on the beach and headed toward where the sandy shore ended in a mess of lush jungle. We'd been surprising each other with different modes of travel on this vacation. The best had been via the backs of two ancient leatherback turtles. The worst? A teleportation spell that had made me feel I was missing half my atoms for days. Of course I had a perfectly good teleportation crystal ball. That could take me anywhere. Back to the Grail, if needed.

Merlin’s hand tightened in mine and he gave me a strange look.

"Sorry? Did you say something?"

"I said, twice, that we could travel via my seven-league boots, though I'd have to hold you in my arms and you'd have to hang all over me like some kind of damsel in distress."

"Intriguing. Do they travel over water?"

"No. We would conjure some sort of underwater breathing spell and see the deep Atlantic on our journey."

"Or we could fly." I pulled out two gray albatross feathers from my bag. They were a bit worse for wear—I'd had them for seventy-five years.

"Our bags?" This spell was clearly new to him. That pleased me.

"Our bags will transform with our bodies. They become part albatross, too. We'd just need to be careful to transmogrify on both sides somewhere that no one can see us. The transition is a bit gruesome and painful."

"And we’d arrive by high tea?”

I nodded. The spelled feathers would let us fly faster than any actual bird.

"A day of albatrossing it is. I can't think of a better way to spend the day than flying across the Atlantic with you, love."

We hiked deep enough into the jungle that no wayward tourist would stumble upon us. We each took an albatross feather and stabbed them into our chests as I uttered a few Welsh words that activated the spell. It took a painful and awkward thirty minutes of us squawking and swearing before we fully changed into huge birds.

To have wings is a grand thing, and the day spread out for us, long and empty, as we flew over the endless swells of shifting water below us. My mind was a sea-bird's mind, sharp and restless, but empty of thought. We flew on and on until we came to the jagged rooftops of London.

I led Merlin out of the sky on our long-feathered wings. We circled through the wisps of cold clouds in the last light of day as we landed on a flat rooftop. Slowly we turned back into a witch and a wizard, shedding feathers and vomiting up hollow bird bones as our organs realigned. When I was human again, I felt the full weight of Grail hunger settle over me, sharp and sudden, aching and gnawing.

So be it. It was well worth my secret nights of ecstasy.

"Shall we?" Merlin asked. He offered me his arm and we picked up our bags and stepped over the mess of feathers and beaks on the ground.

"This Ada lives in a flat?" I asked. Most immortals were effortlessly rich, due to antiques, compound interest, and other conspiracies of the long-lived.

We opened the roof’s door and walked down to Lovelace’s apartment on the third door. We knocked once, and Cleopatra opened the door.

She wore carefully done eye makeup that hid her despair. “Come in.”

An insect-like buzz of computers filled the air. Dozens of monitors, computers, and laptops sat across the room.

Before Merlin and I stepped inside, we both inhaled deeply. There was the faintest scent of someone's magic on the air, diluted by however many hours it had been since Ada Lovelace was attacked.

"Does it remind you of anything?" Merlin asked with his eyes closed.

"No. And there's not enough of it to make a finding and trace it back to its source. You?"

He looked thoughtful for a moment, and then smiled. "It reminds me of… you."

"Are you joking?" I knew my own scent. This was not mine.

"Just in that this scent is the opposite of yours. Sour notes where you are sweet. A vile stench where you are luscious. And it reminds me of some past foe, but…." He shook his head. “I can’t quite place it.”

I stared at him for a long moment. It was not like my brilliant lover to misplace any memory. Was he speaking the truth? What might he possibly want to hide from me?

We stepped into Ada Lovelace's humming apartment.

"You weren't wrong that she embraces modernity," I said. "I'm still not entirely comfortable with a typewriter, let alone this world of computers.”

“Aye lass, it's a strange and stranger world,” Merlin said.

“Oh, the two of you,” Cleopatra said. “What’s the point in being immortal if you don’t embrace the spirit of the day? How do you spend your days? Ada and I are both getting our doctorates in quantum physics. It’s fabulous and strange.”

Cleopatra nattered on about particles and waves and how they were one and the same as Merlin and I looked at the room and then walked into the next one, just as full of computers. And the next. Their sound and the chemical tang they gave the air set me on edge, but it was no clue to what had happened here, just my distaste for electronics.

Any time Lila had promised me she could find answers on computers, she would return with a jumble of misdirection and contradictions. Someday the secrets of my craft might live in the digital realm, but not yet. To me, the ways of magic seemed antithetical to the coding of zeros and ones, and in any case, so much of it was an art learned by the doing. Even a good magic tome could only take one so far.

We entered the back room and found the biggest monitor yet. It sat on a desk full of stained coffee mugs and half-eaten bags of crisps. All the other monitors were blank, but this one had an image of a kitten whose eyes seemed to follow one around the room.

Merlin reached forward and touched the kitten on the screen.

“Don’t,” Cleopatra barked.

Merlin jumped back as the kitten opened her mouth and asked for a password.

“This is her preferred computer? The intelligent one?” I asked Cleopatra.

She nodded.

“What’s the password?”

Cleopatra laughed and shook her head. “Ada would never share a password with anyone. Especially not a password that gave anyone access to Clive.”

“Clive?” Merlin asked.

“He’s her most advanced artificial intelligence. She’s been working on him for years.”

“How smart?” I asked.

“Too smart, and mouthy,” she replied.

“Then we must question him about the attack,” I said.

5

Password

A password is an ancient thing, first made by the Romans as a call and response when finding who was friend or foe within the fog of war and espionage. A password can be a riddle, a clever thing perhaps, and I stared at Ada Lovelace’s picture of a kitten, wondering if there was some subtle clue to what the answer might be. Or perhaps there was some clue within the room? Scotch-taped to the wall behind the computer were some pages torn from magazines. All pictures of women who resembled Cleopatra. Cleopatra? Perhaps.

I leaned forward and typed
Cleopatra
.

The kitten yawned, flames came out of her mouth, and the word
WRONG
flashed upon the screen.

Cleopatra said, “There’s no way we’ll ever crack it.” She didn’t, however, tell me to stop.

The kitten settled down and asked for a password again. I thought for a moment, and then typed
iamacomputernamedclive
.

More kitten flames and the word
WRONG
flashed again on the screen, bigger this time.

“Perhaps an unraveling spell?” Merlin said. “I confess, I am not sure these machines are persuaded by magic.”

We turned to Cleopatra. She shrugged and shook her head. “Try it.”

Merlin took a small topaz stone out of his black satchel and whispered, “
Some new road or secret gate
.”

The topaz pulsed with a blue light, and the warm and spicy scent of Merlin’s magic filled the air. He placed the stone on the computer’s keyboard. The keys clickety-clacked and the kitten’s eyes grew wider and brighter on the screen. The screen flashed once, and then went black.

“Did I break the damned thing?” Merlin muttered. “The spell was meant for magical passageways. I didn’t mean to break it. I—”

His voice fell off as blocky orange letters scrawled across the screen in rapid succession.

Three very wrong passwords. The great Ada Lovelace sometimes forgets a password once, but never twice, and three times? Your guesses weren’t even close. She uses twelve randomly generated letters and numbers which she changes every forty-eight hours as well as wearing a biometric ring which you do not have.

I have been instructed to speak if there has been no activity on this computer for a full twenty-four hours, followed by three password errors. I have been instructed to tell you that the great Ada Lovelace has been attacked and likely kidnapped. She suspected it might happen soon and instructed me to tell you certain information which may help find this someone or something who was after her. And if you are the one who took her I would like to tell you, quite sincerely: Fuck off.

The words stopped.

“Typical Clive,” Cleopatra said. “Ada thinks it’s not possible, but the machine’s smitten with her.”

The three of us stood facing the computer, not sure what to do next. “Please tell us what she knew,” I said, clearly enunciating each word.

The computer did nothing.

“Ada had Clive’s voice recognition software turned off, as well as some of his other scanning software. He had a way of watching her all the time and getting too interested in her business.” Cleopatra leaned forward and typed the same words I had uttered. Her fingers flew over the keyboard.