Chapter One
“You don't have to be here,” I murmured to my cousin, Bress.
“Yes, I do,” he insisted. “She's my mother.”
“Moire mentally tortured you and nearly drove you insane,” I shook my head. “No one would think badly of you if you wanted to go back to Twilight, and ignore this whole thing.”
“I'm just now starting to feel whole again, Seren. Like I'm my own person,” Bress' stormy eyes swirled like fog. “I need to do this. I need to be here to confront my mother and prove to myself that I'm strong enough to survive her. Maybe prove it to her as well.”
“Alright,” I sighed.
I don't even know why I'd brought it up again, Bress was already there. I knew he wouldn't go back now. I suppose it was just one of those last minute instincts, a sort of mental flinch, an attempt to slap my cousin's hand away from the Moire fire.
We were in San Francisco, at the Human Council House, in a meeting to discuss Moire. I was serving as both Ambassador and Princess of Twilight, a representative of my father, King Keir. As two of Moire's last remaining relatives, Bress and I had the right to be involved in the investigation. Since that also made us her biggest targets, it was also in our best interests to be there.
I was sitting between Bress and my boyfriend, King Raza Tnyn II of Unseelie, with my puka companion, Cat, laying across my feet, beneath the council table. Raza had been invited to attend because he was technically Moire's king, but he was actually there to be true to the vow he'd made me on Halloween. He had promised to kill Moire with me.
Sounds vicious, I know, but you need to understand what kind of woman Moire is. The ex-Marchioness is as wicked as they come. Even her son had been a product of evil. She had raped Bress' father while he was a prisoner in Unseelie. Fertility strikes fairy women only once every hundred years. Moire had decided she wanted to be a mother, but she didn't have a lover at the time. So she had taken what she wanted from a seelie prisoner.
That's what Bress had told me, but I suspected it was far more Machiavellian than that. By having a child with a seelie sidhe, Moire had ensured that her baby would be born a twilight fairy. Twilight fey were held in high esteem in Fairy, but again, I believe it went further than that. Moire knew that her half-brother, my father, was (at the time) without an heir. As Keir's nephew, and as a twilight fairy, Bress made a perfect candidate. So, not only would she be having her coveted child, she'd produce a twilight fairy in line for the Twilight throne.
That's how cunningly evil Moire Thorn is.
At the Battle for Unseelie, Moire had attacked my father. Bress had come between them and saved Keir. An act which shocked all of us. Previously, Bress was wound so tight around his mother's little finger, it was a miracle her finger didn't turn black and fall off. But Moire's attack on Bress' beloved uncle had somehow freed her son from her influence. Bress stood up to her and Moire fled. After the battle, Bress came to Twilight to live with us. Moire got away. We hadn't seen hide nor hair of her (both hide and hair were pure white and very hard to miss) until Halloween when she'd started stalking me.
So now I was back in HR (the Human Realm), over two months later, with my mentally fragile cousin, Bress, my trusty puka, Cat, and my fierce dragon-djinn boyfriend, Raza. Oh, and all of our assorted guard members. As royalty, Raza and I both had our own personal Guard, a collection of fairy knights whose only job was to protect us. Raza had his King's Guard and I had the Star's Guard. We both tried to leave them behind pretty often, but a fairy knight takes his (or her) duty seriously. They can be hard to shake. I told Raza he shouldn't have assigned himself guards if he didn't want to be followed around, but he insisted that it was tradition. Dragons like tradition. I think they actually invented it.
The combined mass of our guards couldn't fit in the meeting room with us, so they were all waiting upstairs. There were only two ways down to the subterranean levels of the San Francisco Council House. You either had to take the elevator or the stairs. Our guards had stationed themselves outside the entrances to both. One of the members of my Star's Guard, currently standing his post upstairs, was actually my ex-boyfriend, Tiernan Shadowcall, Lord of the Wild Hunt. Can you say awkward?
If Tiernan found it awkward, he didn't let on. I'd tried to free him of his guard vows, but he'd been furious at me for even offering. He insisted that he still loved me, and it was his honor to protect me. Even if I was behaving like a child with a potty mouth (his words). So Tiernan continued to follow me around with all of my other guard members. And I continued to feel weird about holding Raza's hand in front of him.
But Tiernan wasn't in the meeting room, so I could hold Raza's hand without any weirdness. Well, without Tiernan weirdness. It felt kind of strange to hold Raza's hand at the moment. He was in his human glamour, and without his talons curving over my skin, his hand just didn't feel right. But one glance settled the sensation. I'd seen Raza use this particular glamour often enough to be comfortable with it. It was like Raza version 2.0.
Instead of his usual, true-black skin, Raza appeared to have a tawny complexion which matched the glamoured-topaz shade of his normally, metallic, golden eyes. His dragon wings were gone, as were the aforementioned talons, as well as his dragon-djinn features; the prominent brow and cheek crests. But his massive, muscular build was the same, and so was his rock star hair. Thick swaths of ebony strands hung around his regal face in angled points, two of which were naturally colored deep ruby. The crimson stripes were at his right temple and just below his right ear.
I had used a little glamour for my visit into HR as well, but it was minor. I masked the silver stars which spread out from the pupils in my eyes. Now they just appeared to be vibrantly green. Striking, but still human. Beyond my eyes, my only other fey feature was the purple, ombré stripe in my hair, and that could easily be explained as a dye job. I flicked the long length of it over my shoulder and focused my attention back on Councilman Murdock.
The Head of the San Francisco Council House was pointing to areas on a map, hung on the wall behind him, where Moire had been spotted. As I mentioned, it had been over two months since I'd first seen my Aunt at the SF Council House Halloween party, and we still didn't have a single clue as to what she was up to in the City by the Bay. At first, she was simply taunting us by popping up in random locations without any discernible reasons. But now Murdock had called us all here, saying that there was finally some evidence which needed to be evaluated... by fairies. So there we were, down in the council meeting room, surrounded by human council members, two representatives of the Coven, and Killian Blair.
Killian sat with the Coven representatives, even though he had once been considered a mutant by them. The Coven was composed of several tribes of witches, each tribe with a different power. These tribes were all descended from fairies, which was whom they'd inherited their magic from. A fact only recently revealed. The discovery had occurred when I'd taken a few witches into Fairy with me, and their fey blood had physically altered them to look more like their ancestors. Killian had gone through a similar transformation, but he didn't get features from only one fairy race. Because Killian was a child of two types of witches and, therefore,twotypes of fey races. So he received traits from both.
The witch tribes didn't intermarry. It was forbidden. I think they believed it would have a negative effect on their magic. After all, some of them had talents which manifested in physical ways. Like the Pack witches who turned into wolves, or the Bite witches, who were basically vampires. Killian's parents had been part of a group which had decided to thwart convention in the name of love. The founding members had left the Coven so they could marry outside of their tribe, and they ended up forming their own collective. They called themselves the Casters (a word playing on being witches and outcasts), and they lived in a private community called the Hallow. This was where they secretly raised their blended-race children. Children like Killian, who was a combination of Flame and Storm witches.
This mixture affected Killian in an even more unusual way than it had the other witches who had entered Fairy. Flame witches were descended from snake-djinn, a type of unseelie fairy. Storm witches were descendants of sylphs, a race of winged seelie. This particular combination had changed Killian into a twilight fairy. The first of a new race called the nathair-sith. Vivid, green, snake eyes had replaced Killian's deep emerald stare, and he now sported a useless, but beautiful, pair of dragonfly-esque wings upon his back. They were embedded in his skin, their cartilage veins raised just enough to be felt, as if they'd been put into stasis, halfway through emerging.
Killian's twilight status had launched him into a new life. He was now my partner in HR, a sort of ambassadorial intermediary. He worked out of the SF Council House, but he traveled a lot, all over the world, to meet with Coven tribes, the Casters, and the Councils. With his twilight ability of walking the In-Between, travel wasn't a big deal for him, a fact which the Councils made great use of. Killian had become an important part of the new truce between the witches, the fey, and the humans. And he'd also become my friend.
“There have been casualties in every location,” Murdock was saying as he hit the map. “But we didn't make the connection to Moire until now.”
Head Councilman Murdock held up what appeared to be a gleaming arrowhead. It sparkled as he turned it, catching the light like a faceted diamond. Bress and Raza made surprised sounds. I glanced at them, hoping for an explanation. But they were both fixated on the little piece of metal in Murdock's hand.
“This item was recovered from the latest crime scene,” Murdock leaned onto the table in front of him and put the arrowhead down. “And itwasa crime scene,” he tapped the arrowhead angrily. “One of our extinguishers reported that they witnessed Moire shooting an arrow into a crowd of people. Yet when they raced to the victim, all that was left was this arrowhead. The rest of the shaft had disappeared.”
I felt Raza tense beside me.
“What happened to the victim?” I asked.
“He's in critical condition at UCSF,” Murdock said grimly. “The doctors can't figure out what's wrong with him. Shortly after he arrived, he went into a coma.”
