changeling chronicles 03 - faerie realm (13 page)

The Lady of the Tree appeared, leaning out of the tree and smiling at me. “What do you have to say, Ivy Lane?”

I kept well away from the roots criss-crossing the clearing. “Did you kill a shifter?”

“Why would I harm a mortal?”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

Her smile turned into a dark scowl, marring her perfect features. “I should remind you, mortal, you are bound to me, not the other way around.”

“Are you targeting shifters?”
Are you the Elf Lady George saw?
Because if she hurt that kid, I’d rip her roots out. “Two shifters have died. Both saw their attacker use Summer magic. On your own account, Summer magic is dying. To use that amount of power—”

“—means tapping into the talisman,” she said, a melancholy expression crossing her face. “Someone is actively using magic that should belong to the faerie realm.”

It isn’t you?
The last time I’d seen her put on the
I’m so sad
act, she’d followed up by trying to cut me apart. I wouldn’t trust her, but outright accusations would plainly get me nowhere. Not least because if I pushed too far, she could make me do anything with that vow. The Lady might not be a Sidhe, but I’d learned the hard way that the oldest faeries had the biggest propensity for torturing humans. She’d never said she needed me in one piece to fulfil the vow.

“Chieftain Taive tells me the talisman is likely a weapon,” I said. “I’m having difficulty believing someone could just stride out of Faerie carrying it. Except in the invasion—or when the veil was acting up, I guess. Wouldn’t you be able to sense its magic?”

“I can,” she said, in a stage whisper. “Can’t you feel it, on half-blood territory? Their magic is fading.”

“No, I can’t feel it.” She was positively gloating. Creepy old hag. At least I knew the half-bloods wouldn’t be working with her, unlike Calder. “So who are the contenders? Surely not just anyone could steal it.”

“Only the very best faerie warriors can handle a talisman.”

Like the Invocation?
“A Sidhe lord? Might you have told me from the beginning?”

“One could easily guess, Ivy Lane. Nobody but a Sidhe lord would have the audacity to steal what isn’t theirs. Nobody until you, that is.”

I hardly heard her. My mind raced, driving me towards the inevitable conclusion. I knew of an exiled Summer lord who’d recently come to the mortal realm.

Velkas. His sword…
damn. Had
Velkas
taken it?

Calder’s words came back to me:
he hired me to summon some changelings. He gave me an ash blade, like his own oak one.

An oak blade.

No freaking way.

The Lady looked at me expectantly with those too-bright green eyes.

I scrambled for a reply. “Me? I wouldn’t be stupid enough to walk away carrying a faerie’s sword.”

No… I’d left the sword exactly where it had fallen, beside Velkas’s dead body.
Could
someone have stolen it?

“But you walked away carrying Avakis’s magic.” Her eyes were shrewd, calculating.

“It was an accident.” Speaking of walking away, I wanted out of here. I forced my legs to stay in place, hand ready to grab my sword. “I doubt anyone missed him. How long has the talisman been gone from Faerie? You never specified.”

Her lips curved into a smile, but she didn’t answer.

“If you’re trying to win an award for creepy smiles, you’re well on the way,” I said. “Did you steal the talisman?”

“No.”

“Did you ask someone to?”

“Such accusations, Ivy Lane. No, I did not.”

“What, you want to help Faerie out of the goodness of your heart?” Another possibility struck me. “Or do you want it for yourself? Is that what this is about?”
Bring me the talisman,
she’d said. Not,
bring me the talisman so I can return it to Faerie.

She leaned forward out of the tree. “That’s enough questions from you. If you have no new information for me, leave.”

She’s not innocent.
Killer or not, I doubted she wanted the talisman to hand it over to Summer again. No, it was far more likely she wanted it for herself, whatever it cost me to retrieve it.

And I had no way to break the vow.

“Will it make such a difference to Faerie if the talisman’s never found?” I asked. “The whole realm can’t be dying. Surely.”

“Would you gamble your life on that?”

A root crept underneath my feet, forcing me to take a step back. Magic rose to my hands, reflecting in her green eyes.

“That magic of yours won’t save you, Ivy Lane.”

“Wanna gamble
your
life on that?” My heart thumped, and I knew challenging her was a bad move. But her explanation was ridden with holes.

“You can’t use magic to its full potential,” she said. “Not here.”

No. But I can in Faerie. In the Grey Vale.

The Lady looked at me with a hungry expression in her eyes.

“Does… the same apply to the talisman? Is that how it’s stayed hidden? It’s not as powerful here… right?”

Her smile remained in place.
Oh, hell.

Magic flared around me as though my thoughts had conjured it up. The roots continued to move around my feet, causing the ground to shift alarmingly. Crap. I wasn’t stupid enough to go one-to-one against her in full-on mad faerie mode with my own magic acting up. Worse, the look in her eyes told me quite clearly she didn’t give a flying fuck about the rest of the world. She wanted that talisman for herself. And for whatever reason, she needed me to find it.

Because I can pass into Faerie?

Shit on a stick. Only Sidhe lords could freely pass between Faerie and this realm. Only Sidhe lords… and me.

I grabbed my sword, intending to strike first, and the ground surged up in a waterfall of earth, rising higher. I ran, not at all keen on the idea of drowning in soil. My feet tripped over smaller roots. Earthy fragments pelted me in the back, and the wave crashed over me.

News flash: getting hit in the back with a wall of earth hurts like a bitch. I fell forward, scraping my knees on tree roots, and crawled a metre forward before the second wave hit me. Spitting out soil, I squeezed my eyes shut and splayed my hands. Blue light ignited, burning the backs of my eyelids. A cracking sound shot through the air, followed by a scream.

I opened my eyes to find the giant tree had split down the middle, and the inside… yeuch. Maggots crawled out, and the stench of rot was almost overwhelming. Decaying magic overlaid it all, and no traces of the Lady remained.

Alarm zinged through me—because of the vow, would I die if she did?—but a burst of high, horrible laughter echoed through the clearing.

“Really creepy,” I said, raising my sword. Screw it. Killing me now would spoil her fun. She
did
need me, and I had the distinct impression she was holding back. One of her roots could crush me like a giant stepping on an ant. No… she didn’t want me dead. She wanted to provoke me. I’d already destroyed her tree, but it looked like it’d been dying on the inside all along.

“When I come for you next, Ivy Lane, you won’t be able to resist my call,” said the Lady’s voice.

The ground moved again. I backed away, my sword useless against the shifting earth. Cursing under my breath, I kicked clumps of earth off my boots and stomped along the forest path. Within less than a minute, I reached the edge. What was going on? Was the forest rearranging itself due to the magic draining from Summer, or answering to
me
somehow, like the Grey Vale?

Or answering to my magic?

Jesus. If I’d been in trouble before, I was in the deep end now. Giving up was out of the question. Finding the talisman, potentially fatal. Handing the talisman over to Faerie before the Lady got hold of it, without breaking the vow in the process? All in all, the odds of me dying before Vance and I got a date were depressingly high.

As if on cue, my phone rang in my pocket.

“Hi, Vance.” I decided against adding,
can I come over and have sex with you before someone kills one or both of us?
Because he’d think I’d gone as barking mad as the Lady of the Tree. Pun intended.

“What happened this time?” asked Vance.

“How’d you guess?”

“I’m psychic,” he said dryly. “It’s you, Ivy. I leave you alone for ten minutes and you’ve made a hundred new enemies.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” I informed him, walking away from the forest. “I didn’t make any
new
enemies, anyway. The Lady of the Tree buried me in soil.”

“Of course she did,” he said. “Come here. I want to keep an eye on you.”

Funny how he could make even
that
sound seductive. The Mage Lord was back, apparently.

“I’m covered in mud. It’s not a pretty picture.”

“You’ve been covered in mud or blood most of the time I’ve known you.”

Touché. “Give me a chance to shower and I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Forty minutes and a quick shower later, I left the flat. I locked the door, turned around, and walked smack into Vance.

“Jesus!”

“Not quite.”

I hit him in the arm. “Please tell me you weren’t standing out there for the last half-hour.”

“Five minutes. I did send you a message.”

I made to pull my phone out and check, but he transported both of us into the conservatory of the manor.

“Let me see the last two clients out and I’ll join you in a minute,” he said, sweeping from the room. As before, the main feature of the conservatory was the grand piano in the corner. Potted plants lay on the tiled floor, and glass windows overlooked the immaculate gardens.

“Ivy?” Wanda walked in from the open glass doors. “Didn’t know you were coming.”

“I didn’t get much warning.” I shook my head after the Mage Lord. “Nice to see you anyway. Are things busy around here?”

“No more so than usual,” said Wanda. “What did you do to Vance? He’s acting downright surly.”

Great. I didn’t want the whole world knowing our drama. “Nothing. He decided to beat up some shifters who kidnapped me last night.”

Her eyes widened. “You were kidnapped?”

On second thoughts, maybe I’d rather talk about our argument instead. “I stabbed them and escaped, but Vance flipped a lid and went after them without consulting me first.”

“That… doesn’t surprise me in the slightest,” said Wanda. “If someone he cares about gets hurt, the entire guild could stand in his way and he’d run them down.”

“I thought we’d established I can fight my own battles. Besides, running after shifters in beast form isn’t something a rational person would do.” I stopped before I said his anger issues were probably a shifter thing, remembering she might not know. Or maybe she did. Anyone who’d seen Vance fight would surely have seen his claws.

“Neither is making a bargain with a faerie,” Wanda said. “Which he said you’d done.”

Oops.

“The Lady of the Tree. I owed her a favour, and it got super-complicated.” No reason for everyone to be aware of the potential source of magical destruction hidden somewhere in town, at least until we knew if it was really here. “There’s no breaking a promise to a faerie. Trying to go against it would literally kill me. So I have to do everything I can to help her.”

Which made it all the worse if the Lady turned out to be behind the shifter murders. Maybe she really had been lying all along. But how, and to what extent? And why use the vow?

Wanda’s eyes were wide. “A promise can kill you?”

“Yeah, it’s faerie magic. Anyway. Enough about my impending doom.” I cracked a smile. “How’re the clients?”

“Terrible, as usual,” she said. “We’ve had endless complaints about the shifters, a dozen shifters complaining about the half-faeries, a necromancy attempt gone wrong, a botched spell that turned someone into a piglet…”

“Never a dull day,” I said. “How’d you end up working for Vance, anyway?” I’d never asked before, but I’d wondered a few times.

“My parents died in the invasion,” she said. “I’m half-mage, half-witch, and I didn’t develop my abilities until quite late on. The mages took me in anyway, so they’re like family. My grandmother survived, but she retired from the council a while ago.”

“Ah.” I hadn’t known. In my limited interactions with the mages, I’d found out most of them had an unhappy history around the invasion. Wanda was younger than me, around twenty-two, so she’d have been a toddler when the Sidhe came. Not old enough to really remember it.

“As for the assistant job,” said Wanda, “Vance gave it to me when I proved I was the only person in the manor who can find things when he displaces them. It drives the rest of the council crazy. Of course
he
knows where they are, but the number of times important papers have gone missing…”

Vance re-entered the room, preventing me from hearing the rest. Dammit. Now I had some ammunition to tease him about. I could picture those stuffy old council members tearing their hair out because Vance had moved things around. Ha.

“Wanda, you can leave,” he said. “Tell Quentin to clean the ectoplasm off the walls.”

Wanda didn’t bat an eyelid. “I will.”

“Ectoplasm?” I said.

“Someone decided to sell an untested ghost eradicator like the ones the necromancers use on dangerous spirits,” said Vance. “The person who bought it thought it was an ornament.”

“Someone exploded slime all over your office?” The mental image was too funny. I snorted.

“Didn’t you have glitter everywhere in your flat the other day?”

“All right, it’s not a contest.” I rolled my eyes. “What did you want to talk about?”

“The case,” said Vance. “I hazarded a guess you’d come up with a theory.”