Page 1 of Thistle Thorns

PROLOGUE

Dear Reader,

For those of you who have not read the extended ending of Book 5: Muddled Magic, which was released late July 2024, please read this Prologue as it will provide the necessary context (aka the “missing chapter”) for the beginning of Book 6: Thistle Thorns.

If you have already read the extended ending, please start Thistle Thorns at Chapter 1.

Thank you and enjoy!

Cheers,

Kat Healy

Shadows and embers engulfed me, a twisting wind lashing my hair against my cheeks and whipping in my dress as I was pulled through the portal after my brother.

In front of me yawned a churning brown abyss, like the earth was swallowing me whole. Maybe it was. At its center, so many hundreds of feet below, was a red, molten glow. It was almost the same shade as the demon Arcadis’s eyes, which had widened with ferocious incredulity at my stowaway presence. His grip tightened in my brother’s hair, yanking him away from me. Towards the portal’s terminal end.

Imprisonment, or worse, in the Unseelie Court.

Marten’s face was contorted in pain, his robes stained a color darker than black from where the hellhound claw protruded from his shoulder. It was hindering him somehow, both physically and magically, and he couldn’t resist when Arcadis wrapped his free arm around his chest, dragging him down. But he wasn’t senseless in his pain—his hand was clamped tightly around mine. His brown eyes were wide, desperate and pleading for me not to let go.

I wouldn’t.

But it would be easier for me to haul him away from Arcadis if I had the use of both hands.

Risking a glance behind me, I discovered both what was holding me back and what was impeding Arcadis’s descent.

Shari.

The quiet crafter had my hand in a death grip in both of hers, the overlong sleeves of her sweater billowing about her elbows and revealing pale, slender arms. Behind her wing-tip glasses, her brown eyes were so wide with fright they were ringed in white. But she held on to me in more ways than one.

A thin, glittering red thread I’d only seen once before, on that overlook in the Tussock woods where we’d put our hearts and souls into crafting the Hunting Spell, sprouted from the center of her chest. So much like her crochet yarn, it wound down her arms, over our joined hands, and buried itself into my iron cuff.

An anchor. A lifeline.

I could feel its strength and the will behind it. Though terrified, Shari would not let another person fall prey to a demon ever again.

Behind her, Grandmother fisted Shari’s sweater hem in her talon-like grip, her eyes blazing with the green light of her magic. Then it was Dad gripping Grandmother’s hand in a chain of family members that terminated in a halo of scratchy gray light.

The sky! That was the gray of the November storm I was seeing and the bare limbs of the naked trees cross-hatching the expanse.

Somehow Shari and the Circle of Nine were keeping the portal open.

But it was Arthur, legs planted wide in the center of that gray halo, teeth bared in a silent roar, the corded muscles in his arms straining, who fought to reel us all back to the mortal realm. Lewellyn and Uncle Badger were on either side of him, holding on to his thick thighs and rooting him to the ground with their body weight in case his strength failed.

“Marten,” I shouted, though the churning wind of the portal snatched my words away. We had to hurry.

One hand wasn’t going to free my brother from that horrid demon. Yet when I called on that great tree of magic within me, only a fraction of it surfaced. Not that it wasn’t eager to obey, but something was blocking it. An external force, given the pressure I sensed suddenly crushing in on me from all sides. Like deep water, the kind where no light penetrates.

Gritting my teeth, I fought against that pressure, and thin tendrils of my green magic leaked from my fingertips, wreathing around our joined hands in imitation of Shari’s red life essence thread. I already knew they wouldn’t hold like I wanted them to.

“Thistle thorns,” I shouted once again at my brother, “I need you to actively participate in your own rescue. Help me!”

From the way his face twisted, I knew he was trying, but the hellhound claw in his shoulder somehow wouldn’t let him summon his magic. Marten flexed his arm, though, attempting to pull himself towards me.

Arcadis struck. In one fluid movement, the demon traded Marten’s hair for the hellhound claw, his other hand tightening into a fist and cracking me across the jaw.

My chin snapped to the side as fireworks ignited across my vision, but my grip didn’t falter. Dad had taught us never to release a weapon no matter how badly we were beaten. In this case, it wasn’t a weapon I held, but something equally dear.

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