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“You're upside down.”

“What?” I roar.

“Why is there a bottle hanging off your horn?”

“Delete. It. Now.”

Owen starts laughing again.

Fuck my life.

For anyone unfamiliar with Arrhythmia's wish tree, the thing is older than half the buildings in town and roughly the size of a small apartment complex.

It stands across the road from my house, an ancient, sprawling live oak with branches thick as telephone poles. For decades, people have tied their secrets, prayers, promises, and wishes inside little glass bottles and hung them from the branches with ropes, ribbons, chains, twine, strings of beads, and—because this is Arrhythmia—at least three spells I don't understand.

At night, hundreds of tiny lights glow between them.

It's actually beautiful.

Until you're a Jersey Devil with a six-foot wingspan and a fucking tail.

Then it's a death trap.

One wing caught a strand of lights. My tail tangled in approximately fourteen ribbons. I tried to pull free.

That was my second mistake. My first was flying into the damn thing.

Three minutes later, I was hanging upside down twelve feet above Main Street with a bottle labeled I WISH EARL WOULD STOP STEALING MY NEWSPAPER dangling from my person.

It took six volunteer firefighters, two extension ladders, a bucket truck, and someone named Earl to cut me down.

Apparently, Earl does steal the newspaper.

But I didn't fucking ask.

Now I'm sitting in Owen's station drinking chamomile tea that Delilah brewed because, according to her, I look “overstimulated.”

I am not overstimulated.

I am fucking furious.

And confused.

And worried.

My promised won't speak to me.

My mate fucking hexed me out her front door.

And honestly, it’s kinda hot.

One second, I was standing there trying to explain that she's my promised, that the bite means something, that she means something—and the next, I'm airborne.

Not metaphorically.

The woman blasted me right out of her house. Which should piss me off.

It does piss me off.