Hereditary Magic Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Hereditary Magic

  The Gatekeeper’s Curse Series: Book One

  Emma L. Adams

  Contents

  About Hereditary Magic (The Gatekeeper’s Curse #1)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Other books by Emma L. Adams

  About the Author

  This book was written, produced and edited in the UK, where some spelling, grammar and word usage will vary from US English.

  Copyright © 2018 Emma L. Adams

  All rights reserved.

  To be notified when Emma L. Adams’s next novel is released and get a free Changeling Chronicles prequel, Faerie Killer, sign up to her author newsletter.

  About Hereditary Magic (The Gatekeeper’s Curse #1)

  Ilsa Lynn has made it her life’s goal to avoid the curse that binds her family to serve the Summer Court of Faerie. With her magically talented twin sister given the role of Gatekeeper, Ilsa is content to hide under the radar amongst the regular humans.

  At least until a mysterious spell book falls into her possession, granting Ilsa with a sudden and inconvenient affinity with the dead, and dangerous magic that makes her into a target. With her family’s questionable past quite literally refusing to stay buried, the last thing Ilsa needs is an untrustworthy self-proclaimed faerie bodyguard, even if he does come with a deadly skillset of his own.

  Dealing with zombies and fae assassins would be difficult enough on its own, but now someone’s out to frame her for murder, too. While dodging enemies at every corner, Ilsa must get a handle on her new powers before the armies of Faerie invade Earth. She might just be in over her head…

  Chapter 1

  I’d been having a great day right up until the omen of death appeared.

  As I sat at my desk, chewing on the end of my pen over a particularly thorny essay question, the raven flew towards the house and landed on the windowsill of my room. I didn’t register the bird’s presence until the white stripe on its forehead caught my eye, marking him as Arden, the Lynn family’s messenger.

  Oh no.

  Tapping on the glass with his beak, Arden shuffled impatiently in a manner that warned me that if I didn’t open the window right away, he’d screech loudly enough to alert the other, all-too-human occupants of the shared house.

  “What is it?” I asked, pushing the window open. “You can’t be here. There are people in this house who don’t know about… our family.”

  With every word I spoke, another thread of the life I’d carefully cultivated over the last five years unravelled. It was nice knowing you, normality.

  “Ilsa Lynn,” the raven said. “Your presence is urgently requested at the house of Lynn at the behest of the Summer Court of Faerie.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “Hazel’s perfectly capable of solving her own problems.”

  My twin sister, Hazel Lynn, was Gatekeeper-in-training, chosen to succeed our mother as the single human peacekeeper between this realm and the Summer Court. As the non-magical sibling, I’d run as far as possible from the curse, but the breeze kicked up by the raven’s arrival carried an earthy scent that promised change—and not of the good kind. Magic.

  The house buckled, the floor tilting underneath my feet as a tremendous crash vibrated through the foundations. I grabbed the bedside table for balance, wishing I’d kept some iron handy. Yelling a warning to the other inhabitants, I stumbled from my room and ran for the stairs.

  The house split in two. Floorboards splintered, walls fractured, lines zigzagging across the plaster. I pelted down the stairs, raising my arms to protect myself. Plaster rained down in fragments, flakes falling like snow. I sucked in a breath and slammed my foot into the door, pushing it open. Nobody waited in the garden, human or otherwise, and the smell of magic was already fading. The way the house had split in the exact centre was so precise, it could only be the result of a spell, but its caster was long gone.

  Faerie magic, when aimed at me, bounced right off my defensive shield. So the conniving little shits had used their spell on the house instead. For beings that prided themselves on being well-mannered, you’d think the Sidhe would have the decency to ring the doorbell before unleashing the dramatics. I muttered a few choice curses under my breath, brushing plaster dust from my eyelashes, and glanced down to find a note lying on the doorstep. Words had been scrawled in an elaborate font: “You will find the heir, Lynn, or you will all suffer a terrible death.”

  The note disappeared in a swirl of leaves, leaving nothing behind but the smell of earthy Summer magic. A smell I’d grown up with, and had moved several hundred miles away to escape. You will all suffer a terrible death. The Sidhe hadn’t even signed the note. Bastards.

  If I’d had magic of my own, I’d have come up with an equally non-subtle way to tell them they’d got the wrong address. Ominous death threats and the word heir belonged firmly in my sister’s hands, not mine. My speciality was writing essays on obscure pieces of magical history for humans who’d barely come to grasp that the supernatural world existed alongside the one they thought they’d known. Twenty years had passed since the faeries exposed that hidden world for the humans to see, but they’d held my family in their grip for much longer.

  I stood completely still for a moment, watching the spot where the note had vanished, then turned to face the house. “Are you guys okay?” I called to the others.

  Several yelps in the affirmative followed, followed by a caw that sounded more like a cackle. Arden perched on the neighbour’s fence, a smug expression on his face. That damned raven had arrived too late with his warning on purpose.

  “Heir?” I said. “Isn’t that Hazel? Is she okay?” If she’d been a normal sibling, worry would have been my first reaction, but Hazel had been scaring the living hell out of her enemies ever since she’d come into her powers. And the Summer Gatekeeper had no shortage of adversaries.

  “More than you are,” said the raven, fluttering his wings. “You’re bleeding.”

  I touched my face. Red tinged my hand over its coating of plaster dust. “This is a mistake,” I said. “The Sidhe—how did they even know where I live?”

  “Why is that raven watching you?” Faisal, my housemate, peered out of the ruined hallway.

  “Because he knows I’m about to wring his neck,” I said heatedly. “I’m so sorry about the house. I’ll talk to the landlord… I’ve no idea if faerie damage is covered in our insurance payment, but there’s got to be a clause in there somewhere.”

 
He raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t be the first time the faeries destroyed something for fun, but I guess we can wave goodbye to our security deposits.”

  No kidding. I’d grown careless over the last couple of years and let my guard down. But even an iron barrier on the door wouldn’t keep the Sidhe out of a place they wanted to get into. Despite the raven’s dismissive comments, maybe Hazel really was in trouble. She’d never come to me for help dealing with the faeries before… probably because it’d be like asking a piskie for directions. I dealt with the faeries by staying the hell out of the way.

  I picked my way through the wrecked hallway to the stairs. The raven flew ahead of me into my room, still wearing that maddeningly smug expression as though the whole thing was hilarious.

  “If I stay at a hotel tonight, I’ll wake up with fire imps dancing on my face, won’t I?” I rescued the least damaged textbooks from the wreckage of my bookcase, shoved them into my bag and zipped it closed. My laptop joined them. No point in pretending I’d ever come back. When Faerie called, you damn well listened. Even—no, especially—if you belonged to a Gatekeeper’s family. It was more than a job; it was a life commitment to keeping the peace between the Summer faeries and the inhabitants of the mortal realm. I’d signed no such contract, but the curse existed in the very name. Lynn.

  I dragged my suitcase out from underneath the bed and tossed a pile of dust-covered clothes into it. “Great. Not like I needed anything to wear for work…” Oh, damn. I was supposed to be on the evening shift in an hour, but I wouldn’t put it past the faeries to follow me to the pub where I worked and turn the weekly student pub crawl into chaos and bloodshed. Pity, because if the house was anything to go by, I’d need a stiff drink or three to face whatever the Sidhe wanted with me.

  “You have terrible fashion sense anyway,” Arden proclaimed, perching on the bed post.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my clothes,” I said, glancing down at my hoody and jeans, which were also covered in plaster dust. Plain, unobtrusive human clothes couldn’t hide my identity, but they signalled to the faeries that I wasn’t one of their pretty mortal toys. “I’m lost on what I’m supposed to be dressing up for. If this is a hostage situation so they can probe my sister for a favour, they should probably have snatched me before I had the chance to grab this.” I picked up a jar of iron filings from the bedside table and pushed it up the sleeve of my hoody before checking on my phone. No calls, either from Hazel or Mum. I dashed off a vague message to my boss about a family emergency, resigning myself to being on my co-workers’ shit list for ditching them on the pub’s busiest night of the week. “If Mum wanted me to come and visit, she could have just called me.”

  “Can’t,” Arden said, flapping his wings in an agitated manner. “Mother is gone.”

  “Gone?” I echoed. “Oh, for god’s sake. Don’t tell me she went into Faerie without giving a time limit again.”

  In Faerie, days turned into weeks, and minutes stretched into days. Whenever Mum went on one of her ambassador missions to the Summer Court, it was lucky if she returned within the same month. The Summer Gatekeeper’s power could only pass to one person, so when it came to twins, it was a matter of the fates flipping a coin. My sister got heads, I got tails. That meant Hazel would be in charge of the Gatekeeper’s affairs while Mum was gone, and some bright spark had decided to deliver her latest life-threatening mission to the wrong Lynn sibling.

  I zipped the suitcase closed. “Arden, tell me the truth. Is Hazel in trouble?”

  Getting straight answers out of Arden was like arm-wrestling a man-sized carnivorous plant, while his advice was generally about as useful as flip-flops on a mountain hike. A shapeshifter faerie tied to our family by a curse as old as our own, he seemed to thrive off winding people up.

  “Everyone is in trouble,” the raven proclaimed, which made no sense whatsoever. I swatted at him with the page of essay notes I’d been writing before his unceremonious arrival, and he fluttered out of the way. “Hurry up.”

  “I don’t think so.” I stood, folding my arms. There was a horrible creaking noise from under my feet. I got the message. I threw the rucksack over my shoulder, grabbed my suitcase, and ran for my life.

  I didn’t slow down until I’d reached the end of the road. This was a supernatural-free area of the city, which I’d chosen on purpose when I’d first applied to study at university. Now I’d finished my four-year degree course, I’d spent the last year coming up with creative ways to procrastinate on my PhD application. Hoping that if I stayed away from Faerie long enough, the curse would lift and I’d be able to leave forever. Instead, said curse had left me with two choices: stay in a hotel overnight and put more humans at the mercy of the faeries tailing me, or go to the Lynn house and get hold of someone else to handle the Sidhe’s impossible request. The note hadn’t carried the Summer Court’s official seal, but nobody else would have reason to believe they could wrangle obedience out of me by demolishing my house.

  “So is Hazel there?” I asked Arden, who flew alongside me. “Or is she in Faerie, too?”

  “No.”

  “Which question were you answering?” I adjusted my rucksack. “Seriously, Arden. Just tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  “Caw. Mother and daughter are both gone.”

  “Shit.” When we were teenagers, Hazel had tried to run away from her Gatekeeper duties at least once a week. I thought she’d got past that habit long before I’d left home, and that she liked her job, or had at least resigned herself to the position. I tried calling her as I rolled my suitcase down the road, but received only the sound of a dial tone in response. Damn you, Arden. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be messing with me if Hazel’s life was in genuine danger, but with the faeries, you never really knew.

  Golden light gilded the hilltops overlooking the neighbourhood as the sun began its descent, and a shadow moved in the corner of my eye. Hey there, little faerie. Think I can’t see through your glamour? Faeries, Seelie and Unseelie alike, were given to pranking people, but they seemed to take my magical shield as a challenge. I slowed my speed, letting the four-foot-tall creature hurry along behind me, giving no signs that I’d heard its approach.

  “I feel like something’s watching me,” I said aloud. I looked to either side, deliberately letting my gaze skim over where the creature was actually hidden. “I guess not, then.”

  Arden flew overhead with a disapproving screech, which I ignored.

  When I reached the end of the road, the creature slipped out behind me. I could almost feel its brewing frustration. It wanted me to scream in terror, beg for mercy, flee from its magic. I grinned. The creature craved chaos, and I was driving it out of its tiny mind. It’d snap eventually.

  Sure enough—

  “Lynn,” murmured the faerie, fire crackling between its fingertips. The fire coalesced into a ball of whirling flames, and zipped at me with a whistling noise.

  If I was as dramatic as my sister, I’d have faked screaming and running in circles, but it didn’t really work when you had no power to back up the act. I made a big show of turning around in slow-motion instead. As the fireball came within a metre of me, it bounced off the shield and sailed right back at its owner. Nice try. The fire imp hissed and ran into the shadows, the fire dissipating harmlessly into smoke. I didn’t try to chase it down. It’d become a game with the local faeries to try to land a hit on me, but they never succeeded. Our family’s built-in magic-proof abilities were nothing if not thorough. It was the only magic I’d ever have, so I’d take all the entertainment I could get.

  “Was that necessary?” said Arden. “It’ll probably go and torch someone’s house instead.”

  “Nah, I left a trail of iron all the way down the road.” I revealed the small container of iron filings hidden in my sleeve. “I’ve rid the neighbourhood of fire imp infestations for a few weeks.”

  The raven made a disapproving tutting noise and continued to fly. I followed, wheeling my suitcase, then
paused when Arden angled towards a path leading up to the peak of Arthur’s Seat.

  “Couldn’t you have left a Path open on the ground somewhere?” I asked.

  “Caw. Paths move where the Ley Line is.”

  “Sure they do.” Not that I could actually see the invisible line that separated mortal and faerie realms. Most supernaturals tracked the Ley Line by its amplification of any magic in the general area. Sparks of green Summer magic shone on the hilltop where Seelie half-faeries had set up their territory on Salisbury Crag. But I was fairly sure Arden had deliberately picked this location for the Path to our house because he knew how much I loathed climbing hills.

  From the high vantage point, the damage the faeries had wrought on the city was evident. Just over twenty years ago, a group of outcast Sidhe—the most powerful of all faeries—had broken through the veil between mortal and faerie realms, wreaking destruction across the globe. Civilisation as the humans had known it had crumbled as the Sidhe’s magic, amplified by the Ley Line, had killed millions and dragged a huge number of Faerie’s inhabitants into the mortal realm. As a result, all supernaturals had been forcibly exposed, Gatekeepers included.

  With humans now rubbing shoulders with witches, necromancers, shifters and half-faeries, pulled into an uneasy truce under the regional Mage Lords, life went on. If you had no magic, you carried iron and salt, went nowhere unarmed, and kept your wits about you. The Lynn family’s magic had, much as I resented it, saved my life on more than one occasion. But that didn’t stop me from cursing their names as I wheeled my suitcase uphill.