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ALICE

“Get out.”

My aunt’s voice is cold and hard as she leans over me to flick the car door open. The engine of her powerful Porsche is still running.

“Here?” I look out over the empty moorland, already made into shades of grey by the gathering dusk. “But this is where the…”

“Yes, this is where the Faerie will take you. Get out.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighs, lifts the centre console, and pulls out a small silver handgun.

“Just get out, Alice. I don’t have time for this.” She points the thing at me like she knows how to handle it.

I scramble out of the low-slung car, wishing I’d not mentioned bathroom breaks.

“Why, Aunt Cathy?” I plead, aware of the crackle of magic in the air.

No one goes out after dark in the countryside anymore. Everyone knows what lurks in the nighttime, even if once we thought we ruled it.

Not after the plague broke out, the illness which took millions worldwide, including my parents. Leaving an eight-year-old me at the not-so-tender mercies of my aunt, a woman who never cared for anyone other than herself.

A woman who sent me to boarding school as soon as she could and once I hit eighteen insisted I work for her as an unpaid PA. University was a long forgotten dream, and my boarding school friends edged out of my life with an almost practiced ease.

“Why, Aunty Cathy,” she mimics nastily. “I don’t understand how we can possibly be related if you haven’t worked that out already,” she snarls. “But then my brother was always a pathetic worm, which is why he married your mother.”

The casual cruelty of her words washes over me. She’s said far worse in the past. If it wasn’t for the fact my twenty-fifth birthday is in a week’s time and my trust fund inherited from my parents finally becomes mine…

“Fuck’s sake.” I raise my eyes to the sky. “If you wanted money, you only needed to ask for it.”

“What? And be beholden to a little shit like you?” Aunt Cathy laughs. “Why would I ask achildfor money? I took what was mine.”

“You did what?” I hiss, taking a step back towards the car, my fists balled.

She cocks the gun. I don’t care.

“It was all my parents left me, after you sold the house.” I can hardly speak for anger. “And you took it.”

Aunt Cathy shrugs. “The world changed. I needed the money, and you were a child. Now you know how fucking hard the world is, you’ll appreciate being given to the Faerie.”

“Last time I checked, I was not part of the lottery,” I snap at her.

The lottery is how the human world pays the Faerie back for saving all our pathetic lives, or at least those who hadn’tsuccumbed to the plague. The United Kingdom came off worst. Our land was filled with Faerie portals, and we’d particularly pissed them off with our rejection of their worship centuries ago.

The price: Human souls to be handed over to their lands beyond the veil. The Yeavering. Souls chosen by lottery. Magicked away into who knows what.

No one ever returned. No one knows what is beyond the veil. It is a story to frighten children with as the world scrambles to avoid having to give themselves up as the price for saving the human race.

And I have the misfortune to be living in England, with an aunt who clearly values her stocks and shares more than she values life.

“You weren’t. I was, so I did a deal.” Aunt Cathy shrugs. “The Faerie might be able to take what they want, but they recognise good business when they see it.”

I’m sure they do. I only saw Faerie once when I was younger. Tall, beautiful in an almost forced way, the stench of magic clinging to their robes as they wafted through the crowd, humans parting in their wake, some of them bowing.

I didn’t like them much.

“Yes, I guess you did what you do best.” I glare at her, knowing my fate is sealed if I’ve been chosen in the lottery, whether my name was added without my knowledge or not, all because she wanted rid of me. “Belittle, backstab, and betray,” I add as the wind drops and my shouted words are loud into the sudden silence.