Death Kissed
Northern Creatures Book Six
Kris Austen Radcliffe
Contents
The Worlds of
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
God Forsaken
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The Worlds of
About the Author
The Worlds of Kris Austen Radcliffe
Smart Urban Fantasy:
Northern Creatures
Monster Born
Vampire Cursed
Elf Raised
Wolf Hunted
Fae Touched
Death Kissed
God Forsaken
Magic Scorned (coming soon)
Genre-bending Science Fiction about
love, family, and dragons:
World on Fire
Series one
Fate Fire Shifter Dragon
Games of Fate
Flux of Skin
Fifth of Blood
Bonds Broken & Silent
All But Human
Men and Beasts
The Burning World
Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories
Series Two
Witch of the Midnight Blade
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two
Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Three
Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series
Series Three
World on Fire
Call of the Dragonslayer (coming soon)
Hot Contemporary Romance:
The Quidell Brothers
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Robert’s Soul
Thomas’s Need
Quidell Brothers Box Set
Includes:
Thomas’s Muse
Daniel’s Fire
Roberts’s Soul
Copyright 2020 Kris Austen Radcliffe
All rights reserved.
Published by
Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance
Edited by Annetta Ribken
Copyedited by Juli Lilly
“Northern Creatures” artwork created by Christina Rausch
Cover to be designed by Covers by Christian
Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew.
Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, programs, services, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
For requests, please e-mail: [email protected].
First electronic edition, July 2020
Version: 4.15.2021
ISBN: 978-1-939730-75-6
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Chapter 1
Oberon’s Castle, the Fae Realms…
Malfeasance is a sticky syrup that took effort to create—one had to boil down one’s narcissistic tendencies just right to get that perfect gooey consistency for smothering the life out of the world. And there was always someone—mundane or magical—who lived for the perverse satisfaction of brewing up the worst of the universe. They didn’t care who suffered.
What caught Wrenn Goodfellow off guard was the number of knives-out sous chefs ready to do the villain’s chopping and slicing.
Wrenn peered at the magic dancing along the edge of the bayberry-scented, semi-translucent vellum she held. Such sheets were milled from the scales shed by butterfly-winged pixies, the self-righteous kind who supposedly never lied, and were hard to come by. They were renowned for their clarity of “truth and magic.”
In Oberon’s Castle, “truth” keyed itself to its holder and more often than not, “magic” was the lock imprisoning what was real.
Such slipperiness made whipping up a vast kettle of malice all that much easier.
Wrenn rotated the vellum slightly to better catch the last golden shine of the sunset flowing across the threshold between her sunroom and kitchen. She adjusted the angle slightly to keep the sheet perpendicular to her line of sight, and watched the eddies and vortices of aurora-like blues, purples, and greens as they swirled and flowed over the data spells attached to the sheet.
That shine was why she spent a significant portion of her monthly Royal Guard salary on her small but comfortable apartment. Why she’d fought to get a west-facing place in one of the calmer premium realms. Her aquariums did well here—her fish plinked and gurgled in the sunroom—as did her rainforest’s worth of potted plants.
Those huge windows on the other side of the arched threshold, those sheets of glass made by fae artisans, acted as a megaphone.
And there, along the edge of the vellum, a little bit of truth surfaced out of the dancing magic: A tiny ballerina manifested on the corner. She danced to one side, then back, like a looped video.
Wrenn had no idea what the ballerina itself meant. Did the dead sprite identified on the clarity-laden vellum moonlight as a dancer in the mundane world? Did she dance here, for one of the Royal Courts? Or had dancing been her dream?
Charmed artifacts like pixie vellum tended to be well cared for and used again and again. Wrenn had managed to get this one before the report was transferred into Oberon’s new digital archive and the paper sent to be used for a more important case.
She rotated it again to get a good look at the overwritten magic under the report, just in case something leaked through and corrupted the information.
The clarity of that dancing ballerina said it wasn’t a corruption. Whoever made this report cared enough to take the extra steps necessary to restrain older magic from seeping up into the details of this particular murder.
Some officer had decided he needed to write up his report on the special lie-detector paper. Not, she suspected, because at the time he thought the eyewitness account all that important, but because he thought the witness was lying.
Every cop knew that sprites were “like that” when they thought they could get something from a lie, like ruining the reputation of a good and charitable fae lord. Because when was every cop wrong?
Then the sprite washed up dead on the banks of the Titan River three realms distant from the good and
