Wrenn rubbed her forehead and looked out over the table at the golden evening light streaming through the doorway into her sunroom. She was pretty sure this vampire issue was about to merge with her other vampire issue. The personal one. And that the King would think she was blowing the whole thing out of proportion because of her past.
But her gut told her that what had likely been considered a “minor” dark fae problem in the eyes of the royals was about to blossom into an all-out war.
If only Oberon would believe she wasn’t chasing her own ghosts.
Wrenn swiped a transfer spell off her star and used it to pick up the list of known contacts for the dead sprite. She tapped her phone’s screen and the list transferred to her official Royal Guard app.
She tucked the vellum sheet into its protective sleeve and picked up her mug, carefully curling her aching hands around the blue water pattern along its outside. Ignoring her background pain was easier with her mind on the files, but the warmth moving from the mug into the death-like chill encompassing her fingers shifted her attention to her joints.
The chill danced on her skin and hardened her muscles when she slept. It stiffened her limbs and made moving difficult until she’d exercised enough to warm up.
But today—Samhain—was special. There was something about the Eight Festivals in a fae realm that shifted her basal metabolic rate. Beltane brought too much heat to her bones. Samhain caused the cold aches to ride her muscles into the evening.
Reviewing case files meant lighter work for the day, which she needed, since she couldn’t whip up a relief spell. Not until dawn tomorrow morning, when Samhain ended.
She was a witch living in Oberon’s Castle. Witches were forbidden to use magic during any of the Eight Festivals, and today was the most magical of all. The veil between realms was at its thinnest tonight, and witches weren’t good at magic, so they were to stay quiet and leave the spells to the good full-breed fae who were capable of controlling all those vivid interactions.
So Wrenn Goodfellow, the Fae King’s investigative paladin and witch of unknown heritage, closed her eyes and once more did her best to will away the pain, which she knew wouldn’t work. But at least it allowed her to pretend it sent away the army of nerve goblins chewing on her muscles.
For a split second, she had a vision of a parade of tiny literal goblins, all about the size of her fingertips, sitting along the arch of her thumb where she held her mug of tea. One wrinkled his wee puke-green nose and nodded toward her. Hey baby, how ya doin’? he screeched. The two on either side of him grabbed their crotches.
Wrenn pinched her eyes closed. Damned fae Samhain twisting her ability to see magic. She never had these problems when she spent the holiday in the mundane world.
She sipped her tea. The work called, anyway.
The next file was surveillance on a kelpie under suspicion of moving in and out of the mundane world more than he was legally allowed. His regular evil kelpie behavior wasn’t the problem. Someone was keeping an eye on him because he was basically jumping the turnstiles and misusing the fae realms’ public transportation system to move in and out of real-world cities.
Seemed also he’d dappered himself up all nice and clean and started a Nazi-lite group of women-haters. An extraordinarily wealthy group, and all that gold wasn’t coming from his group’s social media grifts, either.
And he’d figured out how to move between the fae realms and the real world with impunity.
This kelpie was likely trafficking for someone powerful.
Wrenn looked up at the ceiling of her small kitchen. She needed to remember that the kelpie might not be part of their vampire problem. His nexus of power could be any dark magical. Some nasty elf, or even a malicious nine-tailed kitsune looking to expand outside of Japan.
But there was a chance.
Likely suspects would be out tonight, popping in and out of Oberon’s Castle as they took advantage of Samhain’s thinning veils, partying and visible and accessible. So would every sprite and house fae on the list she’d lifted off the vellum sheet.
Some she could bring in. Most, not. On the streets, the power and word of a paladin only carried so much weight. But she was not to be out tonight. Not being a—
She glanced back at the threshold into her sunroom. Accidentally, and without thinking about the sunset, or the light, or possible triggered vivid thoughts. She’d let her mind wander with her work and now…
Now she paid the price.
Chapter 2
It’d been six years since she’d had a flashback. Six years of thinking that maybe, just maybe, the out-of-nowhere memory intrusions had finally stopped. That after over two hundred years of living with the fae she’d finally found some semblance of peace.
Wrenn had stupidly thought she could look at case files involving dark fae—no, vampires—and that all she’d have to deal with was a little extra pain because she wasn’t allowed to cast relief spells for the next twenty-four hours.
But it was Samhain, and her ability to see magic—no matter how unique and coveted by Oberon it might be—made her vulnerable.
The Samhain sunset hit the edge of her window and etched a line across the floor’s stones. On one side of the boundary, shadow. On the other, extending from the window’s arch into the kitchen, and to the side of her unadorned big toe, a harsh, icy-hot line of white light.
And an uncalled, unbidden memory sideswiped Wrenn’s mind:
Blue light streamed off a metal rod so tall it poked up through the roof of the tenement. Blinding, bottled electricity arced from that rod to the racks of bottles and tools along the walls.
The little hairs on her forearms stood on end. She stood on end, too, drawn up onto her toes by the buzz roiling from the laboratory and
