“It’s no use trying to change our minds,” Aline squeezed Smithers’ hand. “We’ve decided. We’re both two souls out of time. On this plane of existence there is nothing for us, but in the underworld there is hope. We will not truly die. Our souls will live on. It is our own second chance. Let us go to our next stage of life joyfully, knowing we saved our daughter.”

“I should go,” I said, with a look at Arthur. “I’m not even supposed to be here.”

Flynn kicked Arthur in the leg. He winced and stepped forward. His huge, meaty hand fell on my shoulder, and a pair of ice-blue eyes blazed into mine. “Blake, you’re a wanker. But this coven wouldn’t be the same without you.”

Does he really mean that?

I studied those eyes for any sign of a cruel ploy, but I found nothing but regret and sadness. He means it.

A lump rose in my throat. Weirdly, hearing those words from Arthur felt more genuine than anything Maeve had ever said to me about belonging here. I wrapped my arms around his enormous frame. He stiffened for a moment, then relaxed into the hug. Flynn winked at me over Arthur’s shoulder, and I reached down and pinched his bottom.

“Gor now, get off,” Arthur shoved me away. “We’re not Corbin and Rowan, got it?”

“We could be,” I winked at him. Flynn snorted with laughter.

“So this ritual, right? What do we need to make it happen?” Arthur shoved his hands in his pockets, pointedly ignoring my comment. Something like pride brimmed in my chest. I was finally, actually, part of this world. Now we just had to get Maeve and Corbin back, and everything would be perfect.

“We’ll need those two portraits Flynn made. And some candles and standard ritual supplies.” Clara consulted the page of the book. “And, of course, we shall need Corbin’s body.”

No, please—” Bree choked out. Andrew took her by the arm and led her from the room. I heard them murmuring in the hall.

“The body is with the coroner,” Flynn said. “Wallace said it would probably be available today, but it’s barely even six in the morning. They won’t—”

Arthur strode toward the door. “I’ll make them give it to us. Blake, you’re coming with me.”

“Why me?”

“Because I already pulled his body off that bloody stake and carried it out of the meadow. I’m not touching it again.” Arthur jangled his car keys. “Plus, you’ve got that whole ethereal beauty thing going for you that Officer Judge can’t resist. Let’s go.”

A few minutes later, Arthur parked the car in front of the police station and shoved me toward the entrance.

Of all the times to have made peace with Arthur. Three days ago he’d never have trusted me with Corbin’s body.

I pushed the door open and approached the front desk. “I’m Blake Beckett. I’ve come to pick up the remains of my friend, Corbin Harris. I know it’s early, but I was hoping—”

The officer behind the desk raised an eyebrow. “Corbin Harris? You’re in luck. I think the coroner finished with that case late yesterday. DS Judge will want to have a word with you before she signs the body over. Come through.”

I was led into a small room containing a round table, four plastic chairs and a strange machine with a number of buttons and levers. The fae in me reviled against sitting on the plastic surface. At least Briarwood had been filled with sumptuous natural fabrics and wooden furniture – Daigh was right, the humans who invented plastic deserved to die a horrible, grisly death.

Officer Judge – or DS Judge now – appeared at the doorway. “Blake Beckett? Did you look into a crystal ball and see we’d finished with Corbin’s body? I was going to call, you know.”

I remembered that Flynn had told her we were witches. I flicked my hair over my shoulder and settled her with my dark gaze. “Actually, the tarot cards told me.”

“Coffee?” DS Judge held two plastic cups under the machine and pressed a button. A sludgy brown liquid dribbled into the cups. She filled both to the brim and passed one to me. I took one sniff and pushed it across the table, as far from me as I could get. Why would humans bother inventing a machine that made dirt water? Now, a curry dispensing machine, that I could get behind.

“Does coffee interfere with your powers or something?” Judge raised her own cup to her lips and gulped back the foul liquid.

“No. It offends my fragile soul.” She snorted and downed the last of her cup before moving on to mine. “You’ve had a promotion, I see.”

“Yep, and the hours to match.” She rubbed her eye. “You might wonder why I’m here so early, but the truth is, I never left the station. I haven’t had any sleep since that night at Briarwood. I’m not even exaggerating. I’ve got a sleeping bag behind my desk and I tried to take a nap earlier this morning but Wallace was watching so I couldn’t. A whole bunch of reporters came in here shouting about some spectral horses that chased them across town then vanished into thin air. I told them to jog on. We’ve got real crimes to solve, can’t waste time with no spectral horses. Incidentally,” she trained me with a fierce glance, “there aren’t going to be any more spectral horses, are there?”

“I’d say you’re in the clear.”

She sighed with relief. “We’re still taking statements from all the people in that mob. As of now, we’ll be charging five people with various crimes. I imagine there will be many more. Arson, property damage, assault, manslaughter, inciting violence… you sure know how to make friends.”

I shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a likable guy.”

DS Judge’s eyes darted to the door, then fixed on mine. She drew her phone out of her pocket and placed it on the table in front of me. “Check it if you like. It’ll show you I’m not recording this conversation, Blake. There are no cameras in this room. No one is listening in. It’s just you and me.”

“I believe you.” Mostly because I had no idea what to do with her phone.

“So maybe you can tell me why the only record I can find about you is a death certificate from when you were only a few months old?”

“Why don’t you tell me why you think I have a death certificate.” I knew about death certificates from episodes of Elementary on the telly. It was actually kind of cool, being at the station and seeing the human justice machine clanking along in real life.

Judge tapped the edge of her phone against the table. “There were reports that one Aline Moore – that’s Maeve Moore’s mother, another person connected to Briarwood with a death certificate to her name – was sighted at the castle a day before this mob attacked. That’s not a coincidence. I think you’ve been meddling with some kind of magic you don’t understand.”

I flashed her my winning Blake Beckett smirk. “You’ve got everything exactly right, and also completely backward. I’m on an urgent errand, so I can’t sit here forever and chat over these delightful cups of watery grit. I do have a question, though. Does Corbin have a death certificate?”

“Not yet. You’ll need to register his death. The front desk can give you a pamphlet to tell you what to—”

I leaned back in the chair. “We might hold off on that for a wee while.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why? You think he might be coming back?”

“I couldn’t say,” I shrugged again. “Incidentally, what would you do if someone you thought was dead appeared to return to the world of the living?”

“I’d have to conduct a serious investigation. If it was found that some shenanigans had taken place to waste police time, there could be serious consequences for the people involved.” Tap, tap, tap, went her phone. “Jail time, even.”

“That’s fine. We can wash our hands of this and leave the next army of the dead for the law to deal with.”

Judge smiled. “I like you, Beckett. I’ll get the paperwork for you to fill out and you can have his body back immediately.”

“Did the autopsy reveal anything?” Corbin would be proud I’d remembered the word for human scientists dissecting bodies to figure out how they died. In the Unseelie Court, dissections were usually performed while a subject was still alive, and they served no legal purpose – the Princes just found disembowelment fun.

“I’m not really supposed to share details from an active investigation. Will it help you in your, er, magic?”

I nodded.

“Corbin Harris was killed when a knife entered his abdomen, and he bled internally. His body was then thrown on a fire and impaled on a stake. We have some DNA material, but it’s a mess. There’s human, and fox, and some other DNA we can’t identify that the pathologist believes is a corrupted sample. The fire destroyed much of our physical evidence. All we know is he had several pens and a candy wrapper in his pocket. Oh yes, and there was a metal object around his neck. It’s filled with some kind of weird organic sludge the pathologist couldn’t identify.” She pulled out a plastic bag from her pocket and tossed it on the table.

I picked up the bag, hating the way the plastic crinkled beneath my fingers. The object rolled across my palm. It was a tiny metal vial, encrusted with rust and stoppered with a tight wooden cork. A symbol was carved into the side – the same cross I’d seen on the pages of Clara’s book.

The cross of Saint Lazarus.

Even with my paperwork, I had to sweet-talk the women at the coroner’s office to get the body released. She said it wasn’t normal for the family to pick up the remains. Over and over again she asked me for the name of my funeral director. “A guy named Lazarus,” I finally said. “I can’t remember his number. But he’s going to do the ah… funeraling at our home, so he suggested we swing by and pick up the body. It just saves time.”

The flustered secretary finally gave in, and a few minutes later I returned to Arthur’s car with a large box under my arm. “That’s it?” he asked, peering at the box that held the last earthly remains of a larger-than-life human. We could both tell from the shape that Corbin wasn’t even whole anymore.

“That’s it.” I placed the box on the floor in the backseat, slammed the door, and slid into the passenger side, glad that ordeal was over. “Don’t break hard. The lid isn’t exactly sealed, and I don’t want bits of Corbin through my hair.”

We raced back to Briarwood. On a normal day, the driveway would be choked with tourist vehicle as people showed up to get their fix of turrets and wonky stairs. But Corbin put the tours on hold a couple of weeks ago to focus on the fae. It was just as well, because two guys carrying a body in a box through the grounds wasn’t going to get the castle top-rated on TripAdvisor.

Everyone was already gathered around the sidhe when we arrived with Corbin’s body. Arthur placed the box under a tree on the far side of the meadow, next to Maeve’s body. He kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them to her lips. I looked away, not wanting to intrude on his private moment.

Flynn, of course, had no such compunctions. He walked up behind Arthur and clamped two hands on his shoulders. “Boo!” he cried in Arthur’s ear.

Arthur leapt two feet in the air, spun around, and clobbered Flynn around the head. I sniggered. Aline and Smithers may have been the ones heading to the underworld, but Flynn was the one with the death wish.

“Boys,” Clara called from the sidhe. “We’re ready.”

I approached the mounds that formed the gateway to the fae realm, the place I’d spent my entire life plotting to escape. All this time, I had no idea that Daigh knew how to resurrect the dead. I knew then that he’d kept it secret so he could also keep his other evil deeds – such as the death of my parents – buried forever. Who knows how long he’d been planning this transition from fae to demon, this play toward dominion over life and death?

At the entrance to the mound, Clara had placed a pile of twigs and bracken. Beside it, she laid out the paintings, ready to be thrown on when the time was right. One wave of Arthur’s hand and the fire caught. It wasn’t a raging blaze, but it would do for our purposes.

“Are our sacrifices ready?”

Aline and Smithers stepped forward, joining hands as they faced Clara over the fire. Aline wore Maeve’s pendant, and Smithers had the ampulla I’d recovered from Judge around his neck. Aline’s jaw was set in a firm line, the same expression Maeve wore when she’d decided something and there was no changing her mind.

Sacrifice. It was the bond of a parent to a child – the love that defied dimensions and would bring down kings. Daigh may have raised me, but he’d cast me aside as soon as he no longer needed me. In all his plans and schemes, he’d never accounted for the fact that love could be his undoing.

And yet, my gaze fell on every face in the circle. On Rowan, who’d trusted me when no one else did. On Flynn, who’d been the first of the guys to show me what it meant to have a friend. On Arthur, who had been willing to admit he’d been wrong. My gaze flicked to the box and the body lying under the tree. I would leap into the flames for any one of them, and for the first time I didn’t doubt they would do the same for me.

This is what it is to have a family.

After casting the circle with salt and fire, Clara lifted her hands skyward, indicating that we should do the same. I stood between Arthur and Kelly, who’d insisted on being involved even though she wasn’t a witch. “I’ll do the belief magic,” she’d said. No attempt to explain that belief magic didn’t work like that would dissuade her. Jane was the only one sitting out the ritual. She remained under the tree with Connor, keeping a watch over the bodies.

“The clay steals the clay,” Clara intoned. “Death’s wings have swept away two souls who are before their time. We humbly submit for their return, and offer in exchange these worthy replacements. Let the clay steal the clay.”

“The clay steals the clay,” we chanted. “The clay steals the clay.”

At least our chant was in English. Apparently, Corbin usually made the coven chant in Latin or Orcish or whatever extinct language he was obsessed with that week. As I spoke the words, I focused on drawing up my spirit magic. There was precious little left after our efforts with the Slaugh, but a trickle still snaked through my veins. I hoped it would be enough. Thinking of Maeve and her bright smile, and Corbin and his sacrifice drew up a fresh burst from a source deep inside me. I forced the magic through my palms. It crackled in the air as it merged with the other witches’ power, creating a great cone that extended down over our circle.

The ground shook. I dug the heels of my boots into the earth to hold myself upright, and kept pushing. I remembered Maeve’s quick mind and how she stood defiant even when she was scared, how she got that authoritative tone in her voice when she lectured one of us about science, how I kissed her for the first time and it was like no kiss before that had ever existed.

Spirit magic churned inside me, pulsing against my palms as I fed it into the spell. The ground bucked and swayed, sending chunks of dirt cascading from the sides of the sidhe.

A dark crack opened in the earth in front of me, running from the top of the sidhe steps out toward Clara – a dark path none should ever follow. Black fog poured from the crack, which widened, the earth groaning as it was torn asunder.

Aline gripped Smithers’ hand. “Are you ready, my love?”

Smithers’ nodded.

Aline flashed him a bright smile with no hint of sadness. They broke from the circle, and together they leapt into the darkness, into their doom.

The void shuddered as the darkness embraced them. My stomach clenched as a flash of green caught the corner of my eye. A figure darted from the forest behind the sidhe, running toward us at full speed. It broke through the circle and paused on the edge of the void, white braids whipping around her face, arms outstretched, ready to jump.

“Liah!” I cried.

Her face spun toward me, her expression ice. She nodded, and dived for the void.

I surged forward and dived after her. As I toppled into the void, another body brushed against mine. Isadora’s eyes met mine, her mouth curled into an O of surprise. I tried to shout at her to get back before she fell in herself, but the darkness filled my mouth with gloom. My body exploded with pain as it collided with terror itself, and the underworld swallowed me completely.