For Corrie and Sophie

faithful friends

Curses are never good—and never more so when you end up trapped in the middle of one—like the droch guidhe, the curse that started eighty years ago.

Clíona, a powerful sidhe queen—one of the noble fae—fell in love with a human, and she chose to bear him a son. Like all mortal children born of sidhe and human, her son was human and therefore ill-suited for life in the Fair Lands. So although she loved him with all her heart, she left him with his father when she was forced to return to her throne, charging those lesser fae who lived in the humans’ world to watch over him and keep him safe.

Only the lesser fae didn’t watch him closely enough.

The vampires found him.

And they lured him to his death.

Distraught at losing her son, Clíona cut off the lesser fae from the Fair Lands and laidthe droch guidheon them, that they should also know the grief in her heart.

Faelings—the mortal children of lesser fae and humans—were (and still are) the first victims of the curse: easy pickings for the vampires through no fault of their own. Unwilling to see more of their mortal children die before their time, and hoping to deny the curse its prey, London’s lesser fae first chose to stop having children with humans, but as time moved on, it became clear that not only were no faelings being born, but since the curse had been laid, no full-blood fae children had been born either.

The curse had blighted the lesser fae’s fertility.

And while they might be nearly immortal, while they might be able to heal themselves of most injuries, they are the offspring of the Shining Times, born of magic and nature conjoined, and to survive, they must continually renew their connection to keep it strong, and that means they must procreate. For if the fae don’t procreate, then the magic doesn’t either, and if the magic fades, then it won’t be long before the fae follow it.

London’s lesser fae are dying—literally—to break the curse.

But now they think they’ve found another way.

Me.

I stood at the entrance to Dead Man’s Hole, the now disused mortuary under Tower Bridge, shivering as the chill March wind sliced through my leather jacket. The wind tossed the distant voices of tourists visiting the bridge with the angry cries of the seagulls, and brought me the wilder scent of the river. Weak sunlight flickered into the mortuary’s large cave-like interior, making its Victorian glazed-brick walls and curved ceiling waver with watery reflections. Before me, my shadow stretched thin across the rough concrete floor, only to fade as it reached the large white sand and salt circle drawnin the room’s centre. Inside the darkness of the circle lay the dead girl I’d come to see.

More than fifty humans a year lose their lives in the River Thames.

I wiped my damp palms down my jeans and walked into the mortuary, nodding at the female police constable standing watch on one side. The astringent scent of sage coated with something sweet and thick caught the back of my throat. I swallowed back a choking cough, and kept walking until I reached the edge of the circle. Flecks of rust-coloured bone and the dried green of shredded yew patterned the sand and salt in intricate swirls like the ritual ashes scattered after a dwarf’s funeral pyre. The blood-spattered bone and yew meant the circle was consecrated to stop the dead from rising and hell-born visitors from appearing: standard police practice since the demon attack on London last Hallowe’en. And overkill in my opinion, considering it was now March, not October. But then, my opinion wasn’t one the police were usually interested in.

More than fifty humans a year lose their lives in the River Thames; around eighty per cent are suicides.

‘Stay outside the circle, Ms Taylor,’ the WPC said, her voice echoing the disapproval evident in her expression, her hand tightening around the extendable baton at her side. I quickly lifted my own hand in acknowledgement. She was a witch, and while I was no longer on the Witches’ Council’s hit list, witches still tend to get a little trigger-happy around me. The last thing I wanted was to give her an excuse to zap me with the Stun spell stored in the baton’s jade and silver tip.

Careful not to let my trainers scuff the sand circle I studied the dead girl staring sightlessly up at me from its centre. She was in her late teens, and Mediterranean ‘girl next door’ pretty: dark brown eyes, blue-black hair still wavy even while wet, and a dusting of freckles over her nose. More freckles dotted the dark skin of her shoulders, but where the spaghetti strap of her flowered sundress had slipped, the line of paler flesh it exposed suggested her colour was a result of sun or a sunbed, and not her natural skin tone.

More than fifty people a year lose their lives in the River Thames.

And none of them fae.

The dead girl didn’t look like any sort of fae. The suntan was the obvious giveaway; only human DNA produces melanin. As a sidhe fae, I could lie naked in the middle of the Sahara for a week and the dark-honey shade of my skin would never change, the blood-amber colour of my hair would never lighten, and even the sunburn would be nothing more than a rosy blush thanks to my fast-healing fae metabolism. But Hugh—Detective Sergeant Hugh Munro of the Metropolitan Police’s Magic and Murder squad—wouldn’t have called me in to look at the body if this was just an ordinary human death.

And the witches wouldn’t have put her in a consecrated circle.

So either she wasn’t all human, or—

Dread constricted my throat. I didn’t want this to be real. I didn’t want to think about what this girl’s death might herald. The droch guidhethat afflicted London’s fae had already mutated in the past by blighting their fertility, and now it looked like it might be mutating again. And if it was, was this girl’s death my fault? Had I somehow caused it by not doing what the fae wanted—by not having the child they wanted? A child they thoughtwould crackthe curse—despite there being no reason other than I was sidhe. Guilt at my continued refusal stabbed at me, but it was too life-altering a decision to say yes to without some sort of guarantee … and without knowing the magical consequences for the baby, the one innocent I should protect above all others …

I touched the gold pentacle where it burned reassuringly against my sternum, then shoved my fears away into the locked box in my mind.

Right now, none of that mattered.

What mattered was finding out if this girl’s death was a random death—a humandeath—or not.

I flipped the metaphysical switch inside me and looked, checking for magic. The circle glowed like a ring of blood-red neon shot with bright stars, the Stun spell in the WPC’s baton winked like an iridescent green firefly in my peripheral vision—

—and the girl’s body disappeared beneath a binding of dirty-white ropes. I frowned, narrowing my eyes to get a better look. There was nothing neat about the spell trussing her up in a lumpy cocoon; it looked as if someone had gone crazy and sprayed her with a dozen cans of magical silly string. So whoever had tagged the girl was an amateur—or wanted the police to think they were—or they’d been in a hurry …

Whatever the answer, the girl was still dead.

Detached sadness at the waste of life rippled over me. I hadn’t known the girl, she wasn’t a friend I’d loved and lost … I clutched the gold pentacle— Grace’ s gold pentacle—as the memory of Grace sacrificing herself for me at Hallowe’en rose like some malevolent leviathan, eager to consume me— The box in my mind snapped shut again and the sadness drained away, leaving me numb and empty.