Chapter 1
Serena Fontaine woke up with a start and
nearly fell off the couch. The TV was on, and the afghan was
twisted around her legs. Sitting upright, she untangled her legs
and tossed the afghan over the back of the couch. She picked up the
remote and turned off the TV and stood, unable to stop the
trembling in her limbs.
She didn’t normally fall asleep on the couch
in the early evening, but the previous night she’d received a
message from her mom and it had kept her up late last night.
Tiredness had seeped into her bones while she ate dinner and
watched a reality TV show. As she rubbed her neck, she remembered
the dream she’d just had about her sister.
It was times like this when she wished she
hadn’t been exiled from her people. She could have called her mom
and asked for her to cast a telling spell on the dream so Serena
would know if it was a true foretelling or if it was just her
brain’s way of freaking her out. Her mother’s fairy talent was
dreams, one of the lesser known but more powerful forms of fae
magic. Serena took after her father, whose power was the ability to
control plant life. She had forayed that talent into a successful
florist shop in the Belle Terra Supernatural Hotel, where she lived
and worked.
Shoving the unsettling dream aside, she
walked into the bathroom of her suite and turned on the shower. She
had been living and working at the hotel for a year, ever since
she’d been exiled from her people. The owner of the hotel, master
vampire Caleb Night, had been really gracious and allowed her to
open the flower shop in an empty storefront in the lobby of the
hotel. At one time, it had been a gift shop, but that shop had
moved to the other side of the lobby closer to the restaurant, and
the storefront had sat empty. It suited Serena just fine. She had a
workshop in the back where she could coax the flowers to
perfection, and she’d even hired a cashier, Jocelyn, so she could
work instead of dividing her time between the back and the front.
She liked Jocelyn, a human who enjoyed pretty flowers, and was glad
the young woman had been looking for a job.
Serena’s wings, hidden by magic within her
back, tingled, and she had the urge to throw open the balcony door
off her bedroom and go for a long flight. Master Caleb, however,
had asked her to stop flying off her balcony. The local police had
been called to the hotel a number of times when Serena had hopped
off the balcony. Humans seemed to think she was committing suicide
or being killed. She understood their misunderstanding – fairies
didn’t normally live where other supernatural creatures lived. They
usually lived in communes deep within wooded areas where they could
live and work in peace. To continue to live in her family’s
commune, where her father sat on the council of elders, she would
have had to agree to marry the fae male the clan’s king had chosen
for her. One look at the male – a thin, pale man with a shock of
red hair and wings the color of burnt toast – and she’d said no
thanks. Her king had given her an ultimatum, but she wasn’t about
to play house with a guy she wasn’t attracted to just because her
king thought it was a good idea.
Being exiled sucked. Contact was cut off from
her family. She wasn’t able to see her sister, Alanah, or her mom,
who she loved dearly. Her mom sent notes to her every now and then
through woodland creatures who responded to her sister’s ability to
communicate with them. The day before, Serena had been turning a
bouquet of roses an enchanting turquoise color with her powers when
a mouse had hopped onto the counter and nearly scared her to death.
If she hadn’t seen the tiny scroll tied to its neck, she would have
shooed it away with a broom.
Written on the scroll in her mom’s beautiful
scripted handwriting were two sentences that made the center of
Serena’s body run cold:
King Orpheus is pressing Alanah to marry
Cenrik or he will remove your father from the
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