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  Her beauty was entrancing, but most of all, there was that aura about her, a glow that was normally faint and only visible to those of a certain nature. Selene Trystaine’s particular aura was on fire.

  Just like his.

  If it hadn’t already been made clear to him, the fact that he couldn’t read her mind would have cinched it for him that she was a fae. She had to be a Changeling. Technically, a Changeling was a fae who had been switched at birth with a mortal infant. It was ridiculously easy to do. The fae child would then grow up unaware of their magical lineage, and often times, they lived and died as mortals. Without realizing their natures and activating their powers, the would grow old, contract diseases, and waste away with the rest of humanity. Never the wiser. Sometimes, a Changeling was simply a fae left to be raised by mortals. Either way, they tended to grow up without knowing what they truly were.

  Selene Trystaine was an unaware Changeling. No fae who was aware of their lineage would willingly exist as she had obviously chosen to do.

  He could see that she was sweating; fine droplets of moisture had beaded on her forehead and across the apples of her cheeks. She was clearly uncomfortable physically; perhaps it was the humanity in the air, the smoke, the stenches, the unbearable chattering of countless languages. Fae were sensitive spirits; too much heat, too much cold, too many people, too few – these things spiked and speared at their psyches, leaving them to slowly bleed out.

  Perhaps it was her spirit’s unconscious yearning for something she couldn’t put her finger on, and its subsequent disappointment at not being able to find it. But whatever it was, Trystaine was unhappy, and yet she did nothing about it. As if she couldn’t – because she didn’t realize that she actually could.

  If she was a Changeling, then her sister was one as well. The two were no doubt truly related, spawned by the same seed, and at least one of their blood parents belong to the fae realms.

  Which realm was the question.

  As luck had it, Changelings were most often the products of forbidden unions. The Unseelie King, also sometimes known as the Unholy King and, by those in tighter circles, the Leanan King, ruled over the dark fae, and these creatures did not come about their reputations lightly. Some were worse than others. The worst were the Leanan.

  For the fae, the Leanan were to wickedness what the goblins were to brute force and trouble. Due to the inherent cruelty of these very special, very dangerous fae, their union with both mortals and the Seelie was expressly off-limits.

  The knight narrowed his gaze on the future Seelie queen. Could she be a dark one? A Leanan even? Could someone of their tainted blood truly be chosen for the Seelie throne?

  The knight momentarily closed his eyes and ran a hand through his hair. Whatever she is, she is the queen. He opened his eyes and scanned their surroundings, his sharp gaze zeroing in on the river where Damon Chroi’s water elementals waited unseen and unheard, keeping an equally watchful eye on the woman feeding birds at the water’s edge.

  A breeze brushed past him, heavier than normal air, and he recognized the aural signature of another elemental. Behind him, possibly somewhere down the path, was the unmistakable, solid, rain-scented presence of an earth elemental. He had a feeling he recognized which one it was: St. Michael. The oldest and most powerful of their kind.

  At the behest of the sidhe sovereigns, the Goblin King had sent everything he could disguise in natural surroundings to protect the women who might be queens. He’d sent his very best. Avery owed him one.

  I must return, the knight thought, and come back with reinforcements before –

  He straightened and went still where he stood beneath a nearby willow tree. There was a shift in the wind. The leaves slapped strangely against one another, long strings of upset branches. The sun slipped behind the edges of a massive incoming raincloud.

  It was too late. It hadn’t even been a full minute since he’d come out of the portal from the Seelie realm, and it was already too late.

  He’d wanted to find a way to get the queen to safety before their enemies attacked, but it was now clear to him that they’d been waiting for him. The kings had been right in assessing the danger. This was a trap.

  Worse yet, the queen was an unsuspecting pawn in the trap. She was no mere bait or decoy – she was the real deal.

  And worst of all, the knight could sense his king drawing nearer. He was impatient, and headed their way, bent on taking the same portal the knight had taken.

  The knight should have known this would happen. It was his job to protect his sovereign; he’d been given a piece of his king’s soul specifically so that he would possess enough power to act on his behalf and take the necessary action to keep him safe. But the prospect of a queen, and especially a queen in danger, was too much for that sliver of soul to bear.

  The Seelie King would be here shortly. It was the worst possible timing.

  A sound sliced through the air, a millisecond before it would have been too late – a millisecond before a mortal would have been able to react. But the knight ducked as sharp magic speared over him, invisible and deadly, a blade of power that would have taken off his head had he waited a moment longer. He dropped to his stomach and rolled, using magic to continuously shield his presence from onlookers.

  But as he came once more to his feet, he realized the enormity of the situation.

  There was not a single enemy, but dozens. Or, rather, dozens of dozens. And… no. It wasn’t an enemy, per se – but a spell.

  A spell that erupted in more bright, horrible shards of deadly magic. They blossomed out like a death flower, like a bursting star. He couldn’t tell where their point of origin was; there wasn’t time to investigate it. Those shards were going to take out everything in their path, making mortals weak or sick, and killing anything from the fae realms out-right.

  He needed to do something. Think! He needed to draw the spell away from her.

  I must protect the queen.

  The woman still stood at the water’s edge, her thoughts turned inward. The animals around her must have sensed the fae in her. She probably didn’t even realize this wasn’t how animals normally behaved; they drew near, never shrank away. They made eye contact and even spoke. If she’d known what she was, she could have comprehended their actual words. As it was, she seemed to understand.

  She was perfect.

  And this was the most important thing a knight would ever do.

  On the up side, he had one single advantage. He was not the king. They were certain he was, whoever had cast this spell. No doubt his magical signature had drawn the attacker out of hiding. But they were wrong. The real king was so much more powerful than he was. The knight was literally a fraction of the man they wanted to destroy.

  If he could draw them away from the queen, they would still be on even footing when all was done and said.

  The knight formulated a plan with the speed and efficiency that had long been associated with the Lords and Ladies. He included the elementals in the plan, pulling whatever protective magic he could find from everything around them, everywhere it was available and readily given. And then he executed that plan, trying not to think about the fact that when it was over, he would be dead.

  *****

  Avery moved through the portal, walking its length as a mortal would cross a street or step through a doorway. Most people who traversed transportation spells merely stood in place – or were even tossed through the magical windows like so much unsuspecting flesh. But Avery was a fae. Dimensional portals were in his blood the way door handles, knobs and knockers were in a human’s.

  As the magic moved him from one realm to the next, he hurried it along, his stride long and sure, his pace determined. He’d gathered the knowledge he’d wanted the moment the knight had exited his own portal seconds ago. Selene Trystaine was the Seelie Queen.

  Avery knew what protocol demanded. He knew that sacrificing a sliver of his identity had made him weaker, and he knew that he should be
resting. It took a lot out of a fae sovereign to create a knight.

  He was fully aware.

  But he was much more aware of Selene…. He’d seen her through the knight’s eyes, standing tall and solitary, long bare legs exposed to the world, fine, shimmering hair brushing her cheeks in the softest breezes, unshed tears somewhere behind those unforgettable, ice blue eyes. He’d felt her aura through his knight’s perceptions, her depth and warmth and uncommon understanding of the world around her, her anger and indignation at the injustices in the mortal realm – her fire.

  That had seared right through him with an intensity that literally took his breath away. He’d placed his hand to his heart as if he could quell her flames with his touch – anything to keep her from burning him alive in the magnificent inferno that was her spirit.

  He’d been instantly hit with his own desire like a sledgehammer to his senses. Knocked defenseless. Just for a moment.

  And then he was mobile.

  There were ten thousand things wrong with the universe just then. There were always ten thousand things wrong with the universe. But in his own little world, in his own tiny existence, some of those things posed a direct threat to what little happiness he could glean from his immortal life.

  He’d waited too long for this. He had been a solitary king for thousands of years. And the one woman who could bring that lonesome reign to an end was standing beside the river Thames, alone and innocent, unshielded, unprotected – vulnerable. In that moment, it would not have mattered whether he’d given his knight a sliver of his soul or the better portion of it. Nothing in the multiverse could have kept him from racing to her side.

  Chapter Five

  As usual, the water fowl cleaned her out of bread in short minutes, so Selene bent low and said goodbye to Poppy. Then she rolled the empty bread bags up and placed them in her cross-body purse before she left the river’s edge to move down the trail that would take her further into Christ Church Meadows.

  A few moments later, she caught a familiar sound and stopped in her tracks. A stooped figure in a white button-down shirt and dirty khaki colored shorts stood bent over a bench up ahead on the trail. Selene chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment and took a deep breath. Then she smiled and dropped her head, surrendering to her fate.

  The path was reddish brown gravel, patted down by thousands of footsteps over the years. To her right meandered a lovely canal that ran off the Thames. Manicured grass, thick and green, ran along the edge of the canal, bordering it with beautiful contrasting colors. The trees overhead bowed over the canal in a row of arches, their long and heavy branches blocking the sun but for a few rays of light that flickered on the water’s surface.

  The walk was gorgeous. This was Selene’s salvation in Oxford. It was her respite from a city that drained her in countless ways, and from a life, in general, that recently felt like it was doing the same.

  There were few people here, even in the summer, and even on a weekend. For some reason, this walk seemed cut off from the rest of Oxford. It was almost unreal the way a simple turn around the corner would bring her face to face with a hefty chunk of the ten million tourists Oxford suffered each year, but here, behind these trees and along this canal, their colors and noises could neither be seen nor heard. It was almost as if it were sacred here.

  And maybe it was.

  Or maybe it was the guardians who kept it quiet. Every sacred place had to have them.

  Christ Church Meadows had a guardian, so to speak. His name was St.Michael, and today he wore his white button down shirt, khaki shorts, and black and red striped rugby socks with sneakers that had more holes in them than Swiss cheese. At the moment, he was muttering vehemently under his breath as he bent low over his proprietary bench and opened an old Sainsbury’s bag. From within, he extracted what looked like the crumbling remains of a sandwich, a half-eaten bag of Twiglets, and some nuts.

  Selene slowed her pace as she drew near. Before she spoke up, she listened for just a moment, as she always did, because she achieved some strange and sick satisfaction from the words that left his lips.

  “…Yak pubes superhighway, his head’s a massive vomit captain!”

  “Hi St. Michael,” Selene said softly, drawing his attention.

  “Ah, the lady!” said St. Michael, turning to face her.

  He always called her ‘the lady,’ and she had no idea why, but she definitely didn’t mind. Selene wasn’t the genteel type. She was a woman who possessed an opinion and a fully developed personality, and in truth, she never felt like a lady except when she was in the presence of this single homeless man.

  “Who’s a vomit captain?” she asked, trying not to smile too big.

  “No one you should trouble yourself about,” said St. Michael. “But trust me, he’s a real testacle biscuit. Poppy was lookin’ for you,” he added, changing the subject like flipping a switch.

  “She found me,” Selene said as she moved up beside him and peeked into his bag. Most homeless men reeked, and as sorry as she felt for them, she had to admit she sometimes had to keep a fair distance. She was sensitive to such things, which was, she assumed, why cigarette smoke bothered her so much.

  But St. Michael didn’t smell bad. It was the oddest thing in the world, really. He was filthy. Mud covered his knees from where he’d knelt in the wet grass to feed the squirrels, and his shirt was covered in stains from where he’d wiped his hands on it. His pure white hair wasn’t exactly matted with grease, per se, but it wasn’t shimmering with squeaky cleanliness either.

  He should smell like the inside of a trash bin. But he didn’t.

  In fact, as strange as it was, Selene could sometimes swear he smelled like rain.

  And if that wasn’t enough to set St. Michael apart from the rest of humanity, his affinity for the animals of Christ Church was. He seemed to understand them even better than Selene did. It was a similarity the two shared and that the rest of the world found both appealing and bizarre: “How sweet that she loves animals, but she sort of looks like a fool out there by herself talking to them. I’d love to be as loved by the animal kingdom as she apparently is, but I wouldn’t want anyone seeing me do it.” This was more or less humanity’s take on animal kindness. It was to be applauded – but from a distance, and only in books and movies and when it didn’t threaten the consumption of bacon. Otherwise, it was rather mushy, weak, and embarrassing.

  And it was perhaps this isolation Selene felt from other people, this sensitivity that set her apart, which had in fact drawn her closer to St. Michael.

  Despite his other personality trait.

  “You see Bill too by any chance?” he asked. “That scrotum wanker of an alpha was at her again. Thinks he’s the duck world’s boink master or something. Never knows when to quit. Got his penis rammer up in every duck’s business. He’s a regular sack fungus. Some animals are far too human for my tastes.”

  Selene always tried to keep a straight face. Honestly, she did. But no one she’d ever met in her entire life had been as proliferous at swearing as St. Michael. The man was a creative genius.

  “I didn’t see him, actually,” Selene replied. Bill was the alpha duck in Poppy’s flock – or at least, Bill liked to think he was the alpha duck. He was really just a bully. But now that she came to think of it, Bill hadn’t been around when she’d fed the ducks this time.

  “Good,” said St. Michael. “This morning, I gave the big clown pecker the what-for and told him to take a day off. He’ll come back in a kinder mood.” St. Michael shook his head and walked over to the nearest tree to crouch down. He became quiet, but she heard him say, “…little Poppy,” before he went very still and waited for the squirrels.

  Selene remained where she was and watched. Within seconds, two squirrels at the top of the tree she had nicknamed “Yggdrasil” began making their way down the massive trunk. A few seconds after that, they were inches from St. Michael’s outstretched hands. One of them had taken a piece of leftover sandwic
h from him and was now contentedly munching on it as he held it between tiny gray fingers. The other sniffed carefully, but would soon join his companion in gastronomical bliss.

  Selene quietly moved away, leaving St. Michael to his task. As she stepped out onto the path, she looked over her shoulder to see the second squirrel jump up into St. Michael’s hand. St. Michael appeared to speak to him, and for the world, Selene could swear the squirrel spoke back.

  Selene smiled, but when she turned back to the path in front of her, it was to find a snow white cat sitting directly in the center of the trail. She stopped. The cat tilted its head slightly to one side and flicked its puffy white tail.

  The meadows seemed to have gone unnaturally quiet around them. Selene blinked and looked to her right. No one walked past the gates on the other side of the canal. She waited, watching for movement, but saw none. She looked to her left. But to the left was nothing but another, smaller canal. This one was covered in green leafy plants so tiny, they looked like algae on the water’s surface. Beyond the canal was a fence, and beyond the fence stretched a grassy field, the meadows of Christ Church Meadows. The school’s cattle often filled the meadow, along with deer and different types of birds.

  Right now, it was empty.

  Selene turned fully around, looking back down the path the way she’d come. The bench that St. Michael had used to set his bags upon was still there – but St. Michael himself was gone, as were his belongings and the squirrels he had been feeding.

  Selene’s gaze slid past the bench further down the path to the edge of the Thames. No ducks swam past, no geese, no swans. No gulls flew overhead. No joggers ran along the trail, no students rushed to class, no tourists stopped to take photographs.

  All was suddenly, and very eerily quiet.

  For Oxford, that was strange enough. But for Oxford in the summer and in the middle of the day, that was unheard-of.

  Something was wrong.