The Gatekeeper's Trials: The Complete Trilogy Read online

  The same curse that bound my family to serve the Sidhe gave me some degree of immunity to their charms, enough to tell me this dude was half-human. Sidhe magic caused human senses to short-circuit from sheer overwhelm and all descriptions to slide through my fingers like sand. Half-Sidhe didn’t have quite the same dazzling effect on the senses, and my annoyance at this rude arsehole who’d broken into my house won out over the primal terror inspired by the sight of an otherworldly visitor.

  I propped my free hand on my hip. “You could have come through the gate instead of sneaking in here and lurking around in the dark, you know. I was standing right there.”

  Not that it was really a surprise. The Sidhe, as a rule, did not pass up an opportunity to make a dramatic entrance. Besides, I was glad nobody had witnessed the DJ’s attempted escape into the grove. Nobody outside of my family was supposed to know the Inner Garden existed.

  “Did you hear me?” he said. “Tomorrow, you’ll be inducted as Gatekeeper.”

  I returned his scowl with a smile. “Heard you loud and clear. Might you elaborate on the time? I was hoping to enjoy the rest of this.”

  I lifted the wine glass and took a measured sip, gaining some measure of satisfaction out of winding up the dickhead who’d kept me waiting in limbo for months and then decided to wreck what was left of my evening.

  A muscle ticked in his jaw, as though he found me as irritating as I found him. To most fae, my very existence was an inconvenience.

  “Nine in the morning by your time,” he said. “If you’re late, you will find yourself transported directly into the Summer Court no matter where you happen to be, if you’re thinking of shirking your duty. If you’re asleep, or in the mortal realm, the same rule will apply.”

  “Really.” I lowered the glass. “What if I was in the middle of a threesome? Would the other people be transported into Faerie, too? Because that would get kind of awkward for all of us.”

  His eyes narrowed. “If you are with another person or persons when the hour strikes, you will all be transported to Faerie. Unlike you, no other humans will be protected against harm. If you would like to begin your Gatekeeper’s training with innocent deaths on your conscience, by all means, do as you like.”

  “No need for that,” I said. “I’m impressed you know what a conscience is. I assumed the Sidhe thought it was just another name for a weapon.”

  “Is it not just that?” he said. “Feeling pain for others is as damaging as any wound inflicted with a blade and may prove equally fatal.”

  “Remind me not to hire you to write my wedding speech.” I gave him an eye-roll. “Relax. I won’t be late, and I won’t bring any friends. Faerie’s not on anyone’s bucket list as a tourist destination.”

  Including mine, for that matter, but I hadn’t exactly had a choice. And now my short-lived freedom had come to an end.

  “See to it that you keep your word, human.”

  He turned on his heel and left, vanishing into thin air.

  “Great to meet you, too,” I said to the space where he’d vanished. Sidhe. For beings who prided themselves on impeccable manners, they seemed to take pleasure in making an exception for me. I didn’t blame Dad for leaving when I was a kid, because being around the Sidhe was a lot to handle when you were human.

  I glanced at my half-full glass, tempted to switch it for a bottle, but I needed to be in top shape for my induction. Besides, Mum was going to be thrilled to know one of them had slipped by the house’s defences.

  Putting down the glass, I turned off the lights and then crossed the kitchen to the back door. Judging by the steady thumping noise from the shed adjacent to the house, Mum was still up. I’d more or less forced her to build the place after her violent workout sessions kept waking me up in the middle of the night. The joys of living with a retired Gatekeeper with a shit-ton of pent-up rage.

  I pushed open the shed door and stepped in, careful to stay out of striking range. Gatekeeper powers or none, Mum could still kick the crap out of me with little effort. Her blond-tinted hair was twisted into a topknot to keep it out her face, her forehead slick with sweat. We shared the same figure—strong and curvy, not skinny or fragile—and expressive eyes. Mine had turned bright green when I’d got my magic, while hers had reverted to their original brown colour after her retirement. Her fists struck the punching bag again and again, as though she was imagining pounding a Sidhe’s pretty face to a pulp.

  “I thought you were in Edinburgh,” she said, without turning around.

  “A fae was bewitching humans at a nightclub and I had to haul him over to the Court,” I said. “Also, the Sidhe’s messenger showed up in our kitchen. The Trials start tomorrow.”

  She dropped her hands. “They came inside the house?”

  “Didn’t even knock.” I walked to the punching bag next to hers and gave it a whack with my knuckles. “Guess this is it.”

  “I should have checked the date.” She picked up a discarded towel and wiped the sweat from her forehead—unmarked, though she’d once worn the same silver symbol as I did. “I assumed they’d wait until the solstice, but tomorrow’s May the first. Beltane.”

  “It is?” I hit the punching bag again, imagining it resembled the face of the half-Sidhe who’d ambushed me in the kitchen. “They couldn’t just show up on a regular Tuesday or whatever, huh.”

  The Lynn house sat in a liminal space between the two worlds, but time here matched Earth, not Faerie. Beltane was the first day of summer, though most mortals thought summer began on the solstice in June—a fitting day for the Seelie Court to formalise their claim on me.

  “Are you prepared?” Mum said. “You know what this means.”

  Did I ever. Once I was Gatekeeper, anonymity would be a thing of the past. No more sneaking around arresting fae criminals without causing a scene. “Sure. I know what to expect from them.”

  Her expression softened a little. “I know you do.”

  Mum had kept a deliberate emotional distance from myself and my siblings for most of my life. She could never guarantee that she wouldn’t die on the job, or that the Sidhe wouldn’t break their own rules and order us all to be slaughtered. For that reason, we’d never been close, but she and I had bonded over fighting classes and weaponry even before I’d developed my Gatekeeper powers at twelve. Ilsa preferred to bury her head in a book, while Morgan had wanted to spend as little time in the Lynn House as possible. Considering I’d grown up more or less alone with a mother who spent half her life in Faerie, you might be surprised I hadn’t turned out more dysfunctional than I had.

  “Guess I should text Ilsa. I just had to wreck her big day.”

  “I’ll tell her,” said Mum. “You get some sleep.”

  What she wanted to say was I’ll keep you safe. But just because the Sidhe were honour-bound not to harm the Gatekeeper didn’t mean the rest of the Faerie would do the same. Once I stepped foot in the Summer Court, it was on me to stay alive by any means necessary. Mum had told me the initiation tests for new Gatekeepers were different for each of us, just to keep us on our toes. It wasn’t in their interest to fail us, but if we couldn’t cut it in the Trials, we’d never survive out there in Faerie.

  My hands curled into fists. By taking on the Gatekeeper’s Trials, I’d ensure the faeries left the rest of my family alone, and I’d protect the humans in my life from being a part of their twisted games. As long as I lived, I would honour that promise.

  Whatever I had to do to keep it.

  2

  The Summer gate loomed before me, its sharpened points gleaming. An otherworldly humming noise rang in the air, while a dark void loomed beyond the thin thread of magic holding the gates together.

  The Seelie Queen stood beside the gate—tall, beautiful, flaxen-haired, and with a smile that could topple empires. But she wasn’t smiling now. Her eyes were fixed on the human figure chained in front of the gates. Mum struggled against her bonds, and behind her, dark shapes stirred, yearning to break out of th
e gates.

  I’d watched this scene a thousand times over the last few months, but I still flinched inside whenever the Seelie Queen pulled out the knife. With a cry, I slammed into her from the side, knocking off her aim before she could carve out my mother’s heart. The Seelie Queen’s mouth twisted into a snarl, transforming her beautiful features into grotesque rage. “You pathetic mortals.”

  The gate rattled in its frame, a nightmarish shape appearing etched against the darkness of the void, drawing closer by the second. Mum’s Gatekeeper powers weren’t enough to restrain it. The Seelie Queen had taken too much.

  Mum looked directly at me. “Hazel,” she said. “Are you ready to take on the position as Gatekeeper?”

  “Don’t you dare!” I screamed.

  “The only way to close the gate is to surrender its magic to the next Gatekeeper.” Her mouth pressed together, her face set in the stubborn manner I knew well. “It’s the only way to end this.”

  The Seelie Queen lunged at Mum, only to crash into the Erlking’s staff. He caught her by the throat, magic coiling from his fingertips and wrapping around her. While his elegant face was as stunning as his wife’s, cold shadows twisted around his fingertips as the magic radiating off his staff ate away at her defences.

  Beside the bitterly struggling couple, Mum dropped to her knees. When she looked up, the Gatekeeper’s symbol had vanished from her forehead, and the green light in her eyes had dimmed.

  “There must be a Gatekeeper,” intoned the Erlking. “If nobody steps up to take this power, the gate will be the enemy’s to take.”

  “I’ll take it!” I shouted. “I’m the next in line. I accept the position.”

  Green light flared across my vision, then a burning pain tore into my forehead, the sensation of the Gatekeeper’s mark carving its way deep into my skin…

  The trill of an alarm cut through the dream and I woke up, drenched in cold sweat. Fumbling for my alarm, I turned it off, shielding my eyes against the light piercing through the curtains. I flopped back on my pillows, my heart thudding against my ribcage, my breaths quick, urgent. Across from me, the Summer Gatekeeper’s circlet sat beside the mirror, edged in silver and green. Waiting for me.

  I might have no regrets about stepping up to take on the position as Gatekeeper, but I’d be lying if I didn’t dread seeing the Erlking’s face again all the same. While he wasn’t the person who’d tricked my ancestor into binding his entire family to Faerie, I suspected he was at least culpable in ensuring my family served the Sidhe forever. Compared to his wife, though, the guy was a saint.

  After a quick shower, I dressed in my faerie-made clothing, a plain shirt and trousers made of a soft, flexible material. On one wrist, I wore an iron band engraved with my family name, a present from Ilsa that would be my sole anchor to humanity once I stepped into the realm of the fae. My glamour snapped into place, turning into a knee-length coat embossed in green and gold and concealing the band from sight. I carried a single iron blade, while my other weapons were forged from bone and bark. That might sound odd by human standards, but trust me, being impaled by a sharpened branch is bloody painful.

  Finally, I could delay no longer. Picking up the circlet, I turned it over in my hands. I’d been stealing Mum’s spare one to play dress-up since I could walk, yet this felt more of a façade than any of those childhood games. In the mirror, I spotted Mum’s reflection over my shoulder. She took one step towards me, then two, closing the distance until she stood close enough to touch the circlet herself.

  I gave a nod, a small gesture that served as permission, and she lifted the circlet to my brow. At once, it melded to my scalp like a second skin. My reflection stood taller, her bearing more regal. Like a Sidhe, or a human masquerading as one of them.

  I tore my gaze away and checked my phone. A message from Ilsa; good luck. And another from Morgan: don’t die.

  Encouraging.

  I left the phone in my bedroom—technology didn’t work in Faerie—and went downstairs to grab breakfast before the Sidhe came to call.

  The house hummed with a quiet background noise that followed me through the hall as I munched on an apple. Someone—probably Morgan—had stuck fake moustaches on all the portraits of our ancestors. I pulled a face at the oldest portrait, which showed a handsome dark-haired man, the likeness of Thomas Lynn himself. Nobody knew for definite what he’d looked like, since he’d vanished shortly after his two daughters had been hauled off into Faerie and nobody had seen him since. One day, my own portrait would join the line, but for now, a crayoned of me riding a unicorn in a field of wildflowers occupied the blank stretch of wall where the portraits ended. Ilsa had drawn it when we were kids, back when Faerie hadn’t seemed to truly exist outside of our imaginations. Personally, I thought the lack of unicorns was one of the biggest disappointments of the reality.

  When the clock struck five to nine, I tossed my apple core into the bin and let myself out of the house. Mum didn’t come to see me off, but saying goodbyes wasn’t our strong suit. I reached the gate at dead on nine, yet no Sidhe appeared to spirit me away. Looked like last night’s visitor’s warnings about punctuality were all talk.

  I pushed open the gates, revealing the path into the Summer Court. A wide track bathed in sunlight gleamed invitingly between tall oak trees older than anything on Earth. A group of tall lean figures stood waiting a short distance away. A welcoming committee. How nice.

  The Sidhe turned on me, and the clamour of a dozen swords withdrawing from their sheaths crackled in the air like fireworks.

  “Whoa.” I halted, inches away from the gleaming points of their blades. “I’m Hazel Lynn, the Summer Gatekeeper. I know I was supposed to wait to be called, but I thought you liked punctuality…” I trailed off. I’d expected to see disgust on their faces at the sight of me, or boredom, or simple annoyance. Not pure unadulterated rage. A half-dozen pairs of vivid green eyes shone with enough magic to render a regular human catatonic. I took a step back, my heartbeat accelerating.

  “Stay there,” ordered one of the Sidhe. Tall and dark-haired, he wore a long black coat edged in green and enough layers of glamour that he could have resembled a baboon underneath and I wouldn’t have been able to tell.

  His companion was a female Sidhe with olive skin and luscious curling dark hair. We’d met before, but Lady Aiten’s gaze held no signs of recognition, and from the expression on her face, you’d think I’d mortally insulted her entire family. What happened? Did DJ Thorntooth escape and get into Lord Niall’s stash of elf wine?

  For all the rumours that the Sidhe had little understanding of human emotions, I’d witnessed more temper tantrums from faeries than I had humans, and most humans didn’t have enough power in their fingertips to level a building. As Mum said: “It’s not that the Sidhe don’t have feelings. It’s that they’re convinced that their feelings are the only ones that matter.”

  In other words, hell hath no fury like a faerie slightly inconvenienced.

  “Can someone please tell me what’s going on here?” I kept my voice calm, as though there weren’t a dozen sharpened blades pointing at my exposed throat.

  Another Sidhe stepped forward. In daylight, the man who’d broken into my house yesterday looked even more eerily beautiful. Curtains of shoulder-length silver hair framed startling aquamarine eyes, which I’d never seen on any Sidhe from either Summer or Winter. His human parent must have been a serious looker. Pity they’d probably died for it.

  Faeries liked collecting pretty things. They didn’t necessarily let them stay that way. The few humans who survived Faerie returned as husks of their former selves, doomed to wither away to nothing.

  “The Erlking,” he said, “is dead.”

  The words took a moment to connect in my mind. The Sidhe didn’t lie, or joke, though I was pretty sure they were allergic to humour—or at least the type of humour that humans understood.

  “How?” I swallowed hard, my throat dry. It’s not possible.

 
; “Iron poisoning,” said Lady Aiten.

  Iron in Faerie? In the Erlking’s territory? Nobody was supposed to be able to get near him. His talisman ensured it, and I’d never forget the shadowy magic swirling around his staff, draining the essence from every living thing it came into contact with.

  “How did iron get into Faerie?” said one of the Sidhe. “Perhaps a human brought it with them?”

  “A human who’s accessed his territory before?” added Lady Aiten.

  I held up my hands. “Look, I appreciate that you’re under a lot of stress right now, but I just got here. I swear I didn’t lay a finger on the king. I didn’t know he was dead. I’m here for my Gatekeeper’s Trials—”

  “You killed him and stole his talisman,” said Lady Aiten. “Do you deny it?”

  “I didn’t kill him, and nobody can touch his talisman.” Not without turning to dust, anyway. While regular Summer magic originated from nature and existed in balance with it, the Erlking’s talisman contained a dark reversal of that power, a rare type of magic that drained the life force from anyone who got too close. As far as I knew, the one exception to the rule was the Seelie Queen, whose healing magic allowed her to touch the staff without crumbling to ashes. The one thing I cannot destroy, he’d called her. Not a happy marriage, that one.

  The dark-haired Sidhe’s spear brushed my throat. “I’d say we kill her as a deterrent to any others who may cross us.”

  “We cannot kill her yet,” said Lady Aiten. “Not until she hands over the crown.”

  “The… crown?” I leaned out of range of the spear’s sharp point. “You mean someone stole that, too?”

  Without the crown, the Sidhe couldn’t elect a new monarch. No wonder they’d lost their minds. Mortality was a sensitive issue here in Faerie at the best of times, given their longevity, but the Erlking had ruled over the Court for hundreds of years. There’d never been another monarch as long as the Gatekeepers had existed. Now he’d departed, sending them spiralling into an existential crisis which might drag everyone in all the realms into its orbit.