Page 1 of Blood & Ice

Chapter One

“Hurry up, Tally,” Maverick urged, his voice coming in heaving gasps that rattled the phone speaker.

He was running from something big and, from the sound of things, it was gaining on him. “The werewolf has an accomplice, and I think that accomplice has tentacles.”

“Stay away from schoolgirls and you should be fine,” I quipped, clipping some of the potions he’d made for me onto my duty belt. I still preferred my gun in a tight situation, but for most threats, a potion would be fine.

“You think you’re funny. Just wait until you have to share me with a tentacle monster named Greg. That’s not the threesome any man signs up for.”

I’d just bent to tie my shoelaces and pulled them tighter than I meant to. I always wore my snow boots out into the field with Maverick. Sooner or later, we’d find ourselves up to our calves in snow when I overdid it with my power. It was happening more and more these days as the mantle of ‘Winter Princess’ really settled onto my shoulders. My faerie mentor, Bea, belonged to a different court and could only theorize why it was happening. To her knowledge, no monarch had ever resisted their power, and the longer I went without fulfilling my role, the worse the outbursts were going to get. So that meant I had to remain level-headed and calm.

Which was really hard to do when your husband was implying that he wanted to have sex with someone else. Even if that someone else was a tentacle monster, he’d named ‘Greg’.

No, that wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but my stupid girly feelings were smarting, anyway. Maverick was only my husband on a technicality, and that had been by my choice. At the time,the thought of being wiped clean from existence had been more terrifying than commitment. Now the lack of certainty between the two of us was killing me. Our arrangement was casual by design, but my feelings for Maverick were anything but. Because our marriage was in name only, he could technically see other people and I wasn’t allowed to bitch about it. But oh boy would I.

“I don’t really give a damn what kinds of threesomes you’re into, Mav,” I responded, trying to rein in the unreasonable flush of temper rising up in me. And failed utterly. My words were so brittle, they would have shattered into a million pieces if dropped. “Just keep them busy. I’ll be there in ten minutes or less.”

Then I hung up before he could say anything further. Petty? Yes. Satisfying? Also yes. With the sort of monsters around here, I rarely got to have the last word on anything. Between Maverick’s freaky blood warlock powers and his street smarts, I knew he’d pull through. Not even a substance-abusing shifter would be able to keep that man down for long. I’d feel guilty about cutting him off later, but right now, it came with a sick sense of satisfaction.

A soft cough drifted from the boys’ open door, shaking me out of my spiteful thoughts (which were actually pretty ridiculous) and back to my guilty reality. Sean and Charlie had brought a bug home from school. The socially conditioned part of me flinched at the thought of leaving my kids alone to suffer without me. My logical half argued that Darla and Cain were just as capable of giving them medicine and checking their temperatures as I was. The ghost flapper certainly wasn’t capable of the kind of violence I was and wouldn’t fare half as well against a werewolf. We all had our roles to play and on nights like this one, kicking ass was mine.

“It’s a cold, Tally,” I muttered under my breath, tightening the laces on the right boot mechanically. “Just a cold. You can’tmagic away a virus. Chill out and focus on the job.”

Well, for all I knew, Icouldmagic away the virus. I’d barely scratched the surface of what I was capable of. The faeries seemed eternally young, and only part of that was genetics. Magic had to be involved if you were living centuries or millennia. If I’d let the change happen, Olwen, Princess of Winter would probably know how to purge sickness from a human body. But I’d stopped Olwen from coming fully into being, which meant I had the power but was missing the instruction manual most of the time.

I strained my ears, my heart settling into a less painful rhythm when there wasn’t another string of labored coughing. I resisted the urge to peek, just to be sure the boys were doing okay. If I went inside, I’d want to snuggle with them and there were monsters out there who needed an object lesson in pain.

“Besides,” I said to myself. “It’s not like it’s a big deal. Everyone else is coming down with it, too.”

Poppy, Finn, and Andre had come down with the exact same thing a week ago, and a few witches in my social circle were fighting it off. If I had to guess, the germ had started at Haven Hollow’s only school and spiraled outward from there. Still, the suspicion lingered. The last time I’d put everything down to an ordinary phenomenon, it had royally bitten me on the ass.

And that was the trouble with being a faerie princess. It wasn’t paranoia if people really were trying to kill you. There’d been a number of attempts on my life already, and Janara’s people weren’t above coming at me through my children. The fact that others in the Hollow had the malady made me almost certain the germ was irritating but benign, but until I could confirm that for sure with the spell slingers I trusted, I wouldn’t take it for granted.

Only the charms scattered around their rooms by their babysitter Chloe made me feel better. Chloe was a changeling,which I used to believe was the name for the product between humans and faeries. Apparently, it could apply to the human children the fae stole, too. It wasn’t common in this day and age, but sometimes kids were still taken by the faeries. It had made Chloe cautious as an adult. She’d taken down any faerie traps that might directly affect me, but left enough up to make us both feel safe. She was visiting friends in Washington at the moment, so I had to consult my emergency list for a babysitter.

Darla, and more importantlyCain,had already agreed to watch the boys. So why did anxiety have my stomach stuck on the spin cycle? A sourceless fear had settled on the back of my neck like an itch I couldn’t scratch for days now. It wasn’t the job. I had that handled. So what was freaking me out so badly?

Oh, yeah, it was the big ‘L’ word. I’d nearly let it slip out the other day with Maverick, and it had weighed on my mind ever since. The word had been there on the tip of my tongue as though it had any right to be spoken. And it didn’t have a right. The last time I’d said that word to anyone in a romantic context and meant it, well, that had been a recipe for heartbreak. So, yeah, I wasn’t saying it until he did. And I was pretty sure Maverick never would.

“Very mature,” I mumbled. “At this rate, you’ll get to third base before you hit the century mark.”

And I would hit the century mark sooner than I wanted to think about. Now that I’d transitioned fully into my high Sidhe self, my lifespan was potentially limitless. I’d die if someone stuck a saber through my heart, but anything shy of a kill shot would heal. That meant I only had a handful of decades left with most of the people I cared about. Charlie and Sean had their whole lives ahead of them. Sixty or seventy more years, if everything went right. And then they’d be gone and... I’d still be here. Alone.

No, not alone. I’d still have Maverick. If he wasn’t too busybanging it out with someone else, of course. That had been the problem in my last marriage, too.

“Existential crisis later,” I chided myself, standing when the front door shook under someone’s fist. The blows were heavy, so I was guessing Cain had the reins tonight. I wasn’t sure what schedule he’d worked out with the ex-ghost turned medium. But when I turned the knob and let my door swing inward, it wasn’t a forty-something brunette with a stylish updo. The woman beyondwasa brunette, but that was where the similarities ended.

Darla was on the shorter side and utterly dwarfed by my new Sidhe height. This woman could probably have stood nose-to-nose with me if she put on a low heel. She’d made a token attempt to appear presentable by wearing an eggshell white blouse, slacks, and pumps. She’d even put her hair up, unlike the last time I’d seen her when she’d been letting it hang free around her face. Her features were austere, her eyes as cold and hard as agates.

I was tempted to slam the door in her face. The last time I’d been face-to-face with this woman, she’d been threatening my sister-in-law Astrid with expulsion. Where she summoned the audacity to show up in this Hollow after what she’d done, and more importantlyfailedto do at her school, I’d never know. I wanted to tell her where she could shove whatever favor she’d come to ask of me.

Instead, what I said was, “What can I do for you this evening, Headmistress Grimsbane?”

The headmistress didn’t dignify my question with a response. She surged forward, all elbows and knees, pushing her way past the threshold with what strength she possessed. I was sure I was stronger. Hell, I’d probably been physically stronger than Aurea Grimsbane even before my transformation into a faerie princess. She didn’t strike me as the type to stoop tophysical confrontation often, which meant she’d hesitate when it came time to throw punches.

Her flurry of limbs did accomplish one thing. She threw me off guard enough to open a gap she could use to worm her way into my house. I was tempted to send her spinning on a sheet of sparkling ice before planting her face-first in a snow drift. It would be oh-so-satisfying to give the headmistress some very literal frosted tips before sending her on her way. And I absolutely would make sure the door hit her on the ass on the way out.

For a moment that felt longer, sending her flying was the only thing I could think about. I knew, somewhere deep in my bones, that I could keep her aloft on a gust of winter wind, tossing her this way and that until she lost her supper or worse. I’d seen winter faeries use that trick before in battle, using the unseasonably cold wind to slam their opponents into the nearest solid object, breaking bones or, in the more gruesome cases, splitting their skulls like overripe fruit.

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