Hereditary Magic Read online

  “If you speak ill of the dead, they’ll come back and hex you,” Arden said.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m already cursed twice over. There’s not much the dead can do that the living haven’t already, trust me.”

  I reached the edge of the rise, looking out across the city. The air shimmered, the only faint sign of the Ley Line’s current location. Arden flew over the cliff’s edge and disappeared from sight. A moment later, I stepped after him, into empty air. The world flickered and reformed itself, and my feet touched down instantly on the path outside the Lynn house.

  The manor sat on a lane which looked like it belonged anywhere out in the countryside, except if you kept walking along the road, you’d never reach your destination. You’d just be eternally thrown round in circles. Ivy covered the walls of the house in thick curtains like an illustration from a storybook, while flowers bloomed at every corner. The house might as well have worn a neon sign, proclaiming “Realm of Faerie here. Single tickets only. No returns.”

  The heat from the gate burned my hand, the metal baking under the blazing sun. The Sidhe rarely set foot on the Lynns’ property—luckily—but Summer magic shone out of every inch of the tall manor house and wide, green gardens. I didn’t blame Dad for not sticking around. This place was an eye-watering sight for someone without magic. Let alone allergies.

  Surrounding the house, the forest was warm and inviting, sunshine pouring through perpetually green leaves. The flowers here never withered, even in winter, but at the other end of the fence, out of sight from this angle, the trees were shrouded in darkness, and frost coated every branch no matter the season.

  And at the very end of our garden was the gate—the only known route into the Seelie Court in the mortal realm. It opened only for the Gatekeeper, so there was no way to follow and ask what in hell the Sidhe wanted with me. Admittedly, even my magic-proof shield probably wouldn’t protect me from the monsters beyond the gate, eager for a new pet human to play with.

  Most humans taken into Faerie didn’t come back the same, if they came back at all.

  I unlocked the front door. Nobody waited in the thickly carpeted hallway. Portraits of the various Gatekeepers appeared to follow me with their eyes, as though judging me. Not unlike the real thing. From the state of the place, you’d hardly think Mum was absent. Not a speck of dust lay on the furniture in the living room, and not a single cushion lay out of place. Mum was dedicated to housekeeping spells as well as her job as Gatekeeper. As far as parenting went, though, she might have taken a few classes before my father ran away, leaving her to bring us up alone.

  It wasn’t his fault. Our house—or, more accurately, the gate in our garden—was designed to repel anyone who didn’t belong to the Lynn bloodline, and he lasted a year before moving away. Mum didn’t mind. His only purpose, in her eyes, was to provide her heir to the Lynn legacy. Meaning my sister. I was the extra. As for our estranged brother, the less said about him, the better.

  As I looked around the living room, searching for any signs of Hazel’s presence, a strange woman stepped out of the wall.

  I jumped backwards into the sofa. “What the fuck?”

  “Don’t panic,” the woman said. She was a little older than I was, mid-to-late twenties, and she’d spoken with an English accent. Her long, brown hair was tied back in a ponytail and she carried a gleaming sword strapped to her side.

  She was also, apparently, a ghost.

  “I’m not dead,” she added, like she’d read my thoughts. “I’m travelling through the spirit realm, but my body is still alive. It was the quickest way to reach you. I’m Ivy Lane, by the way.”

  “I—how did you get here?” Sure, some necromancers could detach themselves from their physical bodies and wander around as ghosts to freak people out, but even a necromancer shouldn’t have been able to find our house. Ivy’s muscular build and the sword at her side indicated she was either a mercenary killer or a bounty hunter—someone I really didn’t want to cross, ghost or otherwise. The blade was sheathed, but it appeared to glow faintly blue. A faerie talisman. Holy crap. “Nobody can come in here. Spirit, human, faerie, whatever. This is—”

  “A liminal space,” said Ivy. “It’s taken me nearly a week to get around the bindings, but eventually, your pet bird helped.”

  I gave Arden an accusing look to cover up my shock. “You took bribery? You should be ashamed.”

  “I explained the situation,” said Ivy. “I’m a distant descendant of the Lynn bloodline, apparently. But it’s to do with your mother’s mission in Faerie. The king of the Seelie Court is dying.”

  “And?” That was old news. From before I was born, even. As immortals, faeries didn’t actually die, but the Erlking certainly seemed to be dragging out the process as long as possible.

  “You might need to sit down for this part.”

  I’ve needed to sit down since you walked through the wall, to be honest. “You’re a strange ghost claiming to be alive who just walked through a magical boundary set up by the Sidhe as though it was nothing. Do your worst.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. When would I learn not to tempt fate?

  The hint of a smile touched her mouth. “You have a point. I was supposed to speak to the Gatekeeper, but I can’t cross into Faerie like this. And if you’re not the heir, you can get the message to her, right?”

  I nodded. “I’ll be having words with my sister, believe me. So what’s the issue with the Erlking? He’s been dying for over a decade. At least. He’ll die, and then come back like they always do.”

  Ivy shook her head. “No. I don’t know if you know how faerie immortality works, but it doesn’t. Not anymore. It’s a long story, and I don’t think I can stay here long enough to tell it. But believe me when I say—the Sidhe can die. That includes the Erlking. I’m told you’re peacekeepers between this realm and Faerie.”

  “Yeah, we are.” My voice sounded distant. Our entire lives had been built around the assumption that the Sidhe lived forever. That’s why the family curse was permanent. When one Gatekeeper died, the title passed onto the next, while the Sidhe endured. If the whole arrangement collapsed, I knew exactly what would happen. War. “Hazel is…” I trailed off. There were no adequate words in any human language to describe how utterly fucked we all were if what she’d said was true.

  “My time’s up,” Ivy said. Her body had turned more transparent, like ghosts did when they came close to passing on to the next world. “Really sorry about this.”

  And she disappeared.

  I stared after her. Hoping there’d been a mistake, and someone would come here and give me an explanation that made any sense whatsoever. The Sidhe were immortal. It was just… a fact. The idea of things being otherwise wasn’t comprehensible to me. Much less that the king of the Seelie Court, who’d lived for a thousand years at least, would soon disappear forever. Now magic was out in the open, who knew what would happen if Sidhe power struggles wound up here on earth?

  Dammit, Hazel. Where had she disappeared to?

  “So that’s what the note meant?” I said into the silence, glancing at Arden. “We—or rather, Hazel and Mum—are supposed to stop the Summer Court from tearing itself to pieces when the Erlking passes on?”

  “And find the heir,” Arden said casually.

  I gave a slightly manic laugh. “You what? The heir will be in Faerie, if they’re anywhere at all.”

  “Didn’t you read the note?”

  Find the heir. Not the heir to the Summer Court? Why would the Sidhe even consider giving a task like that to humans, even Gatekeepers?

  The door clicked open behind me. Hazel stood there—my not-so-identical twin sister. We’d shared the same brown eyes before Hazel’s had turned green from the Summer magic in the binding ceremony. And we had the same pale features, but my sister’s forehead was marked with a swirling faerie symbol designating her position as Gatekeeper-in-training. While my hair was dark brown, hers was sun-kissed and almost blond. When she
was Gatekeeper, she’d wear a circlet that looked like a crown. I wondered if she still stole the spare one from Mum when she wasn’t looking, so that clients would take her seriously.

  Her eyes widened. “Ilsa?”

  One look at her expression told me she hadn’t known I was coming. Arden had lied to me.

  “Hey,” I said. “You have a message from the Summer Court. Also, a ghost got into the house.”

  “A ghost?” She gaped at me. “What trouble have you got into, Ilsa?”

  “Him.” I jerked my head at Arden. “He implied you’d run away. And Mum was in Faerie.”

  “He’s right about the last part,” said Hazel. “I’m in charge of handling business on her behalf. So… what does he want me to do?”

  I took in a breath. “You might need to sit down.”

  Chapter 2

  “So,” said Hazel. “According to this Ivy apparition, the source of immortality has gone. The Sidhe can die now.”

  “Yep,” I said, sinking into an armchair. The living room had hardly changed in five years, containing the same crooked furniture Mum refused to replace despite having the magical resources to do so, and several generations’ worth of trinkets crammed onto the shelves.

  “And the Erlking is dying,” Hazel said, sinking into the lopsided sofa. “And we have to find the heir?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “Well, shit.”

  “Pretty much.”

  She shook her head. “I swear, Mum didn’t tell me any of this. Why did this Ivy person tell you and not me?”

  “Because I was in the house. Apparently she got by the security.” I gave the raven a look. Arden had perched on top of the rickety bookcase, which contained an array of dust-covered childhood board games nobody had touched since the summer our brother had run away from home. “Arden told me you disappeared and pretty much dragged me here.”

  “Need both Lynn daughters here!” he said reproachfully. “Very dangerous job.”

  “I’ll give you dangerous,” I said. “So there was no reason to call me. In that case, I’m off back to Edinburgh in the morning. Or rather, to find a new house, since the faeries split my last one in two, and apologise to my boss and co-workers for vanishing off the face of the earth.”

  “Wow.” She raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you had a house. You didn’t touch your allowance at all, Mum said.”

  “Nope, because it belongs to Faerie. I took out a loan and got a job like a normal person, and I’m in a shared house. Or I was, before someone decided to break everything.” I glared at Arden. “Happy?”

  “Caw.”

  I flipped him off. “When did Mum go into Faerie?”

  “A month ago.”

  “There’s no way she doesn’t know about this,” I said. “I don’t know how Ivy Lane, whoever she is, found out before we did. She said we were related, distantly. Know anything about that?”

  “Nope. Maybe Mum sent her, but I doubt it.” She frowned, looking more Mum-like than I’d ever seen her. I should have known Arden was talking crap when he implied she’d run away. Hazel might not have been keen on her future as Gatekeeper when we’d been kids, but she’d inherited Mum’s no-nonsense attitude and commitment to getting shit done. She wasn’t a teenager anymore.

  “So she left nothing? Not even a note?” Wouldn’t be the first time, but this whole situation struck me as someone’s attempt at an elaborate prank.

  “Nope. I know she’s alive, at least.” She tapped the mark on her forehead. “Which is more than I can say for you. You look like you just crawled out of a coffin.”

  “Hey!” I protested. “I had a house fall on me today, you know.”

  “I thought you weren’t coming home at all.”

  I shrugged uncomfortably. Speaking to her on the phone, it’d been easy to tell her all my grand plans, but face to face, it was harder to put into words. Especially as I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Only that it in no way involved the Summer Court or the word ‘Gatekeeper’.

  “I was in the middle of my PhD application,” I said. “But half my books are now buried in rubble.”

  “What’re you doing a doctorate in?”

  “Folklore.”

  She howled with laughter, the exact reaction I’d expected. “Brilliant. Bet you know more than the staff do. That’s like the multilingual guy at our school who got A grades in three languages without ever showing up for class.”

  “Like you wouldn’t do the same,” I told her. “I spend all my time being a consultant on faeries for everyone I know. Might as well put it to use.”

  “If all faeries are allergic to iron, why did a piskie steal my phone?”

  “Because iron allergies in faeries are proportionate to magical ability. Most wild fae have little to no magic, so they aren’t affected by iron as much as powerful faeries are. Also, there’s a common theory that faeries born in this realm are more tolerant of iron than their kin in the faerie realm. The third argument is that piskies are bloody stupid.”

  “There are worse things to do with your time,” said Hazel. “Okay, apply your academic skills to this riddle. Why does the Seelie Court want us to find their missing heir?”

  “No bloody clue.” I got to my feet. “I’m fairly certain you’re the one the note was directed at and they got the wrong address, but it’s not like I can call the Sidhe and ask. It sounds like they’re preoccupied at the moment.”

  “No shit.” She looked at the raven again, her teeth running over her bottom lip. Beneath her flippant attitude, she was scared. And had reason to be. No family magic would protect any of us if the Sidhe went to war. It’d be a dick move to leave her to handle it alone, and besides, I had nowhere else to stay until I got the Sidhe off my backs. And while I’d spent so long running away, this wasn’t a problem you could turn your back on.

  “I’m going to check the reference books,” I said to her.

  “I knew you wanted to get into the library.”

  She wasn’t wrong. The library was a sprawling room painted in calming shades of blue, with towering bookcases tucked into every corner. I used to spend hours curled in the window seat, escaping into realms where the faeries hadn’t wiped out the world as everyone had known it. I’d found no shortage of bookshops in Edinburgh that reminded me of this place, but nothing quite matched the air of secrecy and hidden history that hung over these shelves as thickly as the smell of old books. The house had changed over the years as each Lynn made their own adjustments, but this room had remained the same, and was the only part of the house which felt like mine.

  Hazel stared up at the closest bookcase, like she hoped the right book would fall at her feet. No such luck. Even a magical house had its limits.

  “Any idea where to start?” she asked.

  “Look at the labels.” Grabbing the nearest book in the ‘Seelie Court’ section, I passed it to Hazel. “Come on, you’re the one who’s actually been to the Summer Court recently. Haven’t you heard the latest gossip?”

  “No. You think they’d tell a human? Mum’s the one they confide in, if at all.”

  “And there’s no point in asking the local half-faeries.” Any of them might claim to be the heir in order to get a shot at going into Faerie. Not to mention foolish humans. “But I’d have thought the heir would be Sidhe.”

  The two of us looked around the room as though expecting an heir to leap out from behind a bookcase. Which, let’s face it, was about as likely as us stumbling across the right information. What we needed was a list of descendants, but I was pretty sure we were the only family in this realm with faerie ancestry who actually had a copy of our family tree. Most faeries aren’t kind enough to leave so much as a farewell note when they leave their half-human offspring here on earth. Ours left us a curse. So, you know, it could have been better.

  Technically, Thomas Lynn had still been human when he’d returned from Faerie. Nobody knew the truth until he married his childhood sweetheart, had kids, and the Seelie Court turned
up on his doorstep. Apparently, during his time in the faerie realm, he’d unwittingly signed all his future descendants into servitude to the Courts. His two daughters became the first ambassadors—one for Summer, one for Winter. And their descendants were locked into the same curse. Forever.

  Nobody ever gave our ancestor the memo about not making a promise to a faerie.

  Thinking about it, maybe the Winter branch of the Lynn family could help us. But I’d almost rather ask the faeries for help than visit my distant aunt. And I doubted Summer wanted their enemies to know about the Seelie King’s plight, much less the missing heir. Summer and Winter had only reached a wary peace somewhat recently in human years, a peace that had almost shattered when outcasts from their own Courts had attacked the mortal realm. They still hadn’t offered an apology for the whole debacle. And if Summer had no king, Winter wouldn’t stay back and let them figure their shit out. They’d pounce on the opportunity to seize more power.

  Suddenly my PhD application didn’t seem so impossible after all.

  “We could read all night and not find anything,” said Hazel, pacing the row of bookshelves. “Who knocked your house down, anyway? Not the Sidhe.”

  “Nope.” I slid another book from the shelf, checked the title, and put it back. “You know they only come here in an emergency. They’ll probably show up a month late.”

  The Sidhe, rulers of Faerie, weren’t the most reliable of people. Sidhe, pronounced shee. They could speak any language, possessed power beyond mortal comprehension, and the ones I’d met had been self-centred, amoral, and completely incapable of understanding humans at all. They were also murderous and paranoid, and no doubt that paranoia had tripled if Ivy was right about the state of their immortality.

  There came a knock at the door.

  Hazel and I both looked at one another. The Lynn house wasn’t exactly accessible to anyone. Sure, Ivy had walked in, but she’d had to come here as a ghost.

  “Arden?” I looked at him. “Have you given anyone else our address?”