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And that voice…

He indeed knew it well.

It was a miracle of the sky deities he was still alive.

It took two hours for the numbing pollen to wear off. Mor winced as he curled up to sit from where his body had been frozen on the floor. He traced a hand over the blade wound in his side and then reached back to try and flick out the shard of glass still clinging to his flesh like a pesky leech.

Queensbane. How had it come to this?

He looked toward the window where the Shadow Fairy had disappeared. A storm had come and gone. Mor had watched rainwater sprinkle in through the broken glass and run down the walls. There were puddles in the storage room now.

What a mess.

What a faeborn-cursed mess.

He climbed to his feet and kicked a wood plank across the room. It sailed into the furthest shelf—the only shelf that hadn’t fallen—and with a loud, mean creak, the shelf tipped forward. Its contents smashed over the floor, a box of sheet music flinging into the air and sending a choir’s-worth of weightless pages fluttering to the ground seconds after everything else.

“Unbelievable,” Mor muttered now that everything was, in fact, destroyed.

He shoved his fist against his bleeding side to plug it up, and he strode from the storage room to get his coat. He needed to go find medicine and sink into the sort of scathingly hot bath that would burn away the memories of everything that had just happened in the last three hours.

Exactly eight months ago, Mor and two of his fellow assassins had followed their Prince across the gate into the human realm. Their human target had been harder to kill than expected, and Cress, being the flimsiest of all, had fallen for the human with barely a nudge in her direction. That was the turning point for a lot of things.

Exactly three months ago, Kate Kole had released her first book just in time for spring, titledHigh Court of the Coffee Beanafter the new High Court the assassins had decided to form in the human realm. Shayne had quickly called dibs on being High King.

And exactly two and a half months ago, Mor had been delivering coffee and muffins to a business by the harbour when he’d spotted a red-haired fairy standing in a nearby park, cloaked in a black jacket with a hood and a black mask. It was clear when Mor locked eyes with him that the fairy had been watching him rather closely.

When Mor blinked, the fairy was gone. It was like it had been a dream. Like his mind was playing tricks on him, dragging something from his childling years into the present. Punishing him for all the unresolved things he’d left behind with the memories he couldn’t forget.

Mor tried to imagine it was just in his head. But he got up in the night and packed his belongings while his brothers slept, just in case.

The next day, when Mor was at the grocery store picking up flour for Cress’s new baking show, he spotted the fairy again, lingering by the fruit baskets. The Shadow Fairy lifted a melon and glanced across the chilled area at Mor. It was then Mor knew for sure it was no dream. And that he had a terrible decision to make.

There were a lot of perhaps’ after that:

Perhaps Mor should have kept walking on by.

Perhaps Mor should have pretended he never saw.

Perhaps Mor should have gone back to Fae Café that day.

But he didn’t. Instead, he’d slipped into the air and mapped every street, searching for abandoned buildings in the city. And when he found one, he closed himself inside, and he never went back.

3

Violet Miller and the Creepies

The article in The Fairy Post hadn’t been joking when it mentioned acathedral.

From where she stood, Violet stared up at the spokes and the bell tower spearing the clouds. The morning was darker than most mornings, overlayed with grey haze and filled with thin, whistling wind, making the cathedral look even more terrifying. Clearly this building was abandoned; there wasn’t a single light on inside, and some of the windows were broken. Bits of glass littered the lawn out front. It reminded her of a haunted house in a movie, the exact sort of place every horror flick lover would know to avoid.

The great wooden doors were sealed shut. An elegant inscription was written across the door in what looked like fresh ink: TRESPASSERS BEWARE. MONSTERS LAY WITHIN. Violet chuckled as she stepped up the stairs and knocked a few times where the wood varnish was peeling off. If she got the job, at least her boss would have a sense of humour at the office. Though… this looked nothing like an office.

Perhaps The Fairy Post owner just happened to own this building. Maybe the main office was somewhere else. Violet leaned back a little and looked both ways down the street as the thought crossed her mind. There weren’t any other buildings close by. Most of the block was taken up by the cathedral yard and a small graveyard a stone’s throw away.

“Super creepy,” Violet mumbled to herself as she knocked again. She was an expert on creepy things, having gone to plenty of crime scenes for her articles. But this place was a whole different level of weird.

It seemed no one was home. That or she wasn’t knocking loud enough.