“Not even Aaron would be so stupid. Watch yourself, Alexis. There are always shadowy dealings at these things, but I have a feeling you will be affected by this one. Guard your back at all times.”

I nodded slowly, although he hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.

“And one more thing,” he said, his voice low. “I realize that it is all hearts and roses with your Demigod right now. That’s to be expected. But if ever you find yourself in a lonely castle on a forgotten island, I am always here. My door is always open. You’ll have a place of your own and a team to lead. You will never be trapped like Valens’s wife was. You will always have someone who can free you.”

My heart melted just a little more. Daisy would never, in a million years, let me take him up on that, but the sentiment was nice.

I nodded, my eyes misting.

He spread his arms, as though going for a hug, then dropped them again before sticking out his hand.

I laughed. He’d hidden it well, but clearly there was some degree of social awkwardness there. It made me feel better about my own shortcomings.

“Remember,” he said as he walked me to the door to meet Kieran, waiting to escort me out, “watch your back, Alexis. I’ve effectively made it so that if I can’t have you, no one can, but that doesn’t mean accidents won’t happen. Your mother sacrificed a lot to keep you safe. Don’t let her sacrifice be in vain.”

18

Alexis

The next afternoon I stood in the kitchen in my finest dress, with my hair and makeup done just so and a sickening feeling in my gut. My father’s warning had infiltrated my dreams, one nightmare twisting and turning into another. Sometimes it was just me facing off against a terrible, faceless foe. In the worst dreams, I was fighting in front of my kids, backed up against a wall. In all the dream sequences, I was in over my head, outmatched if not outnumbered. They were so vivid that they almost felt like a series of premonitions, inescapable.

I leveled a finger at Daisy, standing across the island from me wearing her fighting attire and a bored expression. She and Mordecai had not been invited with me to afternoon tea with Zander’s wife, Juri. It was an exclusive invite (albeit a last-minute one), and Amber thought I should be doing backflips to celebrate. We’d already declined a handful of other invitations.

My kids couldn’t come, my friends couldn’t come, my protection had to wait outside, but the cats had been invited to join me. I hadn’t wanted to be the bloody cat lady in the first place, and now they were invited to exclusive, posh parties instead of my human companions. It felt like someone was playing a grand practical joke on me.

Worse, it felt like an awful time to leave the kids. Kieran was in meetings all day, so they’d have to go with the crew. To a Berserker fight.

Thane’s challenge, delivered by courier, had arrived this morning, handwritten on elegant golden card stock. Five Berserkers—two women and three men, including Thane—wanted to battle it out to see who was king of the mountain. Or queen. Apparently they’d be fighting in a cage designed to contain highly dangerous magical beasts, something used for the magical beast fair held in the fall. Everyone was especially excited to see Thane’s beast at play, given his rare ability to control it.

The thought made my body shake with the adrenaline.

“Just because you’re getting the crew, doesn’t mean you’ll be protected, okay?” I told Daisy in a stern voice. “You will stay to the background, and if Thane gets through the electric wire, you will run and hide, you get me? You do not mess with Thane’s caliber of danger.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know. Thane isn’t going to get out of the cage, though. None of them will. They have it rigged for Berserkers.”

Which didn’t exactly put my worries to rest, especially since another form of hate mail had been delivered sometime in the middle of the night. A splatter of red paint marred the stone pathway in the garden. A crude drawing of a Chester bow—the symbol of ignorant non-magical people everywhere—decorated the warm cement. It had been drawn in a different hand than the hate message a day before, but we’d gotten footage again, and the people scrawling the message had worn the same robes. According to Daisy, they’d also had on the same shoes.

“Stay with the crew. Do not, for any reason, go looking for your admirers.” I leaned in. “Answering their challenge is not worth it. You are a teenager with no blood oath. You are not safe to try to kill your haters, do you get me?”

“Yes, I get you. Ew! It’s not like Mordecai would let me slip away, anyway. He’s been on me like a turd on a toilet.”

I had to pause, my face crinkling at the wrongness of the image. I waved it away. “Whatever. Just stay safe. I should only be indisposed for a couple hours.”

“Why aren’t you giving this lecture to Mordecai?” she asked.

“Because Mordecai is sane. You are not.” I grabbed my clutch off the island, gave her one last stern look, and headed for the door.

I was met at the door by Bertha, a bear of a woman, dressed in a crisp suit with a magenta tie and her hair chopped close. She was one of Kieran’s second-string people, pulled off Kieran’s detail with a couple of others to bring me to Juri’s lodge. The council’s approval of the mark meant I was a great deal safer, but Kieran still worried about me. So did I, truth be told.