City of Fae

“You’re all right for a ghost.”


I snorted, and glanced at his cuffs. If Reign wanted my help, he was going to have to let Andrews go. “Wait here.”

Andrews jangled the cuffs. “Not got a lot of choice …”

Warren and Reign filled my tiny kitchen, the two of them far too striking to be anything but fae. Talking in hurried bursts, they were clearly arguing when I emerged from the hallway, still barefooted, sporting the same bloody pink top and leggings borrowed from Andrews’s sister. “Okay, listen up. Rule number one, we do not cuff my friends to towel bars.” Reign opened his mouth to argue. “Shh. Rule number two, I can’t promise I won’t turn on either of you, but I can promise I’ll do everything I can to stop it from happening. If I screw that up, you can drain the draíocht from my veins and kill me.” Warren was the next to try and interrupt me. My glare cut him off. “Rule three, I am not a thing or an it. I’m Alina. If anyone has a problem with that, they’ll find a dagger between their ribs. Understood?” Neither said a word. Warren brushed a thumb across his lips. He glanced at Reign, who looked at me with an expression somewhere between surprise and amusement.

“So, are we going to stop the queen or stand around bickering?”

Reign’s smile slid sideways. He dug into his pocket and tossed me the keys to the cuffs. Warren snarled and turned away. Fine. Let the ancient fae throw a hissy fit. I didn’t care. I cared about stopping the queen, because inside I knew exactly what she wanted. The City of London and its people. And she would kill anyone or anything that got in her way.





***





It sounded like a bad joke. A rock star fae, a detective, and a keeper, took up residence in my living room. Reign sprawled across the couch, Warren loomed by the window, Andrews leaned against the kitchen countertop, sleeves rolled up and arms crossed, his detective-grade stare on. I knelt by the coffee table. Nobody had touched their coffee.

“By now, she’ll suspect Alina failed to kill Warren,” Reign said, speaking to nobody in particular. All eyes flicked to Warren. “Unless we provide a body.” The collective gazes settled on Andrews.

He snorted. “What? You think I can commandeer a body from a morgue?”

“It’s what they do in the movies when they need to fake a death.” I shrugged and cringed as Andrews frowned at my ignorance.

“I think we’ve already established this is real. Even if I could miraculously get my hands on a body, from what you’ve told me about the queen, she’s not going to be fooled by a random corpse.”

Reign leaned forward. He rubbed his hands together, fingers entwining. “Alina, you said you can hear her …”

“It comes and goes. If I listen hard, I can hear her, but I’d rather not.”

“She was adamant Warren had to die before the end of the week. Any idea why?”

I bowed my head. “No, only that Saturday is important.” Miles had mentioned Saturday too.

“I know why.” Warren practically growled. “If she can get rid of me, she can escape Under. If I die, the ties the Keepers wove to bind her years ago, will unravel. Once she’s out though, she needs to feed. Right now, she’s a fraction of her former self. She’s weak. Cut off from Faerie, she’s not gorged herself in centuries. The first thing she’ll do is search for a crowd, somewhere people gather, so she can harvest draíocht.”

“Okay, so … a park? A cinema?”

“Bigger.” Warren smiled a twisted, bitter smile. “You think you’ve seen the queen in her true form. You haven’t. Think bigger. Think much, much bigger.”

Reign nodded, confirming something in his mind. “I’ll cancel the concert.”

The concert. His concert, at the O2 Arena. Twenty thousand fans all crammed into the space inside London’s millennium dome. “Is that Saturday?”

“Yeah. I’ve missed all the rehearsals.” He shrugged. “Being perfect isn’t something you can practice.”

“Cancel it. You weren’t going to go ahead anyway, surely?”

“Yeah, I was.” He stretched his legs beneath the coffee table and threaded his fingers through his hair, sucking in a deep breath. “It would have been my last. I planned on going out in a blaze of glory.” He saw me gaping at him. “What? Fine, go ahead and judge me, you seem to enjoy it. The music is the only thing I have in my life that’s mine, the only thing I have control over. I’d have thought you, of all people, would understand that, American Girl.”

“After everything that’s happened, you were still going to go ahead?”

“Until the FA picked me up. Now I’m out … thanks to Warren. They can crash my gig if they want. The resulting show would be worth the ticket price ten times over.”

“You have to cancel.”