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Rory is a changeling who escaped Faerie only to stumble into another nightmare, a silent war between species.
Caught between two worlds, he sticks to the shadows. When a Blood Storm drags him out of hiding, he knows he’s out of time. If the Faerie Queen finds him, she won’t let him go again. He’s exactly the lure she needs to drag home her runaway son. Aries—the last man that Rory wants to see, the faerie who bedded him then abandoned him, leaving him behind with a broken heart and a soon-to-be-broken body.
Aries is a Faerie prince. He’s used to getting what he wants—and what he wants is to never set foot in Faerie again.
When an injury sends him stumbling, nearly dead, into an alley, the last person he expects to save him is Rory, the changeling he loved and lost centuries ago. Aries wants a second chance, but, too soon, Rory is gone again—dragged back to Faerie by Aries’ own mother, the Queen.
Can Aries and Rory escape the web of political intrigue and old wounds or is their love destined to fail…again?
Reader advisory: This book contains scenes of non-consensual drug use, references to past kidnapping of a baby by a faerie, abduction, references to past abuse and trauma, violence, sexual assault of an MC, non-consensual voyeurism, non-consensual bondage, blood and gore, trauma, and PTSD. This list is not exhaustive.
General Release Date: 10th December 2024
Rory
I remember her as she was—the blood-red berries hanging heavy from her branches, her knots of May ripe for picking. Now, her boughs are heavy and limp, weighed down by shoots blighted with purple cankers. Once-green growth is black, scorched as if by fire.
The May-tree is dying.
Her roots are gnarled, spreading across the dry earth like outstretched arms, pleading for aid that will never come. My faerie guards ignore her, shoving me past with a heavy hand.
How many lovers has she sheltered in her shadow through the endless summer? How many nights has she stood solitary, a lonely guard against the creeping winter? I feel her sorrow. It scrapes along my skin like brambles.
“What ails her?” I ask, craning my head to keep her in sight. The guard behind me—Marik, he goes by, though I remember him as Anik—slaps the side of my head, breaking my gaze.
“Walk,” he orders, not deigning to give me an answer. Obstinate to the last, I set my jaw and freeze in place. His next shove sends me to my knees in the cracked dirt. “Your stubbornness will bring you only pain, changeling.” Marik spits the word out like a curse, but it falls empty on my ears.
I know what I am—and what I am not.
No longer am I a mere changeling, an auf good for nothing but the breaking of skin. I am more and less. A different sort of monster, thanks to the ill-fated ritual I’d concocted out of madness and daydreams. A gossamer hope that left me too broken to live but too stupid to die.
I flash my sharp teeth and something close to unease crosses his face, a fleeting expression that sticks in my mind for longer than it lasted. He cannot hear the May-tree’s screaming and cannot feel her sorrow, but I’ll be damned if I let him ignore me.
“I like pain,” I muse aloud, allowing myself to linger in old memories. I hadn’t when they’d held me down and broken my body with lashes from the willow tree and river rock and ash, but that was before.
Before the ritual that changed everything, that twisted my body into this new, wretched thing and carved slivers of sanity from my mind. Now, I crave pain. No heroin addict has ever lusted for a needle like I for a blade.
Again, the faerie bastard looks uneasy, but Marik grips me by my hair and uses it to shove me forward. The crabgrass snags at my palms, coarse and prickly. I grind my hands into the bite.
“Then crawl, else she sends the hounds.”
Ah, the hounds. Once, I’d raced them and lost. Even now, I can feel their hot breath on my neck like mountain fire. The scars have faded, but the memories are fresh, unlocked as they were by a single, careless brush of a faerie prince’s hand.
I start to move but slowly. I’m in no hurry to reach the Queen’s bower. I’m not scared of the pain that waits for me, but of the Queen’s cunning mind, sharper than any blade she could level on my skin.
It takes us hours. Then again, maybe it costs us days. Time means little in this world-outside-the-world. A flower could bloom for a thousand years but a tree sprout up in the length of a yawn. A single night’s sleep could send a harper home to a wife long dead and children grown to elders or send a bard back in the flicker of a candle.
The grass turns to cobbles, cold and sweaty with a sticky dew, and the cobbles to a smooth black path of solid pitch. It is hot against my skin, sucking in the heat from the dual sun, and the grass along its border is wrinkled and brown. We must be near the castle, but nothing is familiar. Before, the path was flowers and stone, not this mockery of pavement.
Marik plants one of his boots on my calf, freezing me in place. A voice above me—a guard, I realize as I crane my head up, just far enough to spot the supple leather of his knee-high boots—sounds amused as he says, “What have we here? A bitch returned to its master?” Anwynn, I realize, recognizing the voice, though I know not what name he’s using now.
I bare my teeth in an imitation of a growl then give a little yip. They want me scared and they want me broken. I am not foolish enough to think that I’ll survive what’s coming in one piece, but I won’t give them the satisfaction of cowering now.
Marik grinds his boot, the heavy leather treads biting into my skin, but I ignore the pain. I’ve felt pain, lived and breathed it, and once I’d died in it. My body, this farce of what had once been a man, may blossom bruises and bleed like wine but it will not break by it.
“She’s waiting for him.”
Marik kicks me into moving and I let him. Even if I stood up and ran, where would I go? There is nowhere in this blasted realm to hide where Queen Nuala couldn’t find me. The earth is her bones, the water her weeping cunt.
Unless I can make it to the Unsidhe, who have no cause to love her, I would be back in her clutches by first dawn.
But the Unseelie Court had separated itself from the Sidhe even back when I first touched these lands, still a babe in the Darrig’s arms. There are rumors of Unsidhe lands—of trees so tall their branches break through the sky, their roots growing mountains, and of spectral creatures whose voices drive the living to merriment so exquisite they forget to eat, wasting away.
There’s no guarantee I could reach them without a map, and even if I do, I have nothing to entreat them with. They have no cause to love me, either. They’d be just as likely to leave me wandering the thorny labyrinth that separates their Court from this one as to lend me aid.
So instead I crawl. The floor inside the gates turns to soft wood of deepest cherry, still living but sung into shape by tree nymphs and lovingly tended by the fenodyree brownies who care for the castle.
When we reach the stairs, I go to stand but a hiss from Marik sends me back to my knees again. “You had your chance to walk, worm.”
I don’t bother arguing. I lumber my way up the stone stairs and try not to let the seed of relief show on my face. It’s slow going, taking them on all fours, and every additional second is one I’m spared the Queen’s presence.
But all good things must eventually end. Soon, far too soon, we reach the Queen’s white wood door. Her crest is emblazoned in solid starlight at the center, a mockery in its beauty.
The Queen’s spies must alert her to our presence because her voice calls out before Marik can lift his fist to knock. “Enter.” Her voice is deceptively warm, but goosebumps lift on my arms. The door creeks open untouched, even the castle a slave to her bidding.
Marik kicks me but my body is frozen, my every muscle refusing to move. Eventually, he gives up and grips my hair, tangling my curls around his fist like a leash. The pain as he drags me inside is enough to stir me from my instinctive terror and by the time he drops me like a sack of potatoes at the side of Queen Nuala’s bed, I’ve gathered the shreds of my strength around me like a shield.
She breaks it quickly.
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