Or, if you prefer, grab a copy from your favourite online retailer in print or ebook!
CHAPTER ONE
SOMEONE TAPPED LIGHTLY on my bedroom door. Groggy with sleep, I felt about in the dark for my phone. The lock screen told me it was nearly 2am. My pulse kicked. It had to be about Gemma, my best friend. My sick best friend. “Come in,” I said hoarsely.
Mum crept in, house phone in hand.
“Is Gemma okay?” I asked before she spoke.
“I understand,” she said, and it took me a second to realise that she was talking to the phone. She hung up and sat on my bed.
I shifted my legs out of the way and waited, barely breathing. The darkness pressed in around us, heavy, full of secrets and fears.
“Is it really something only you can fix?” she asked me. In the shadows, I watched as she twisted the phone in her hands.
I wriggled over and lay my head against her hip, revealing in the comfort of her choc-chip-cookies-and-steel soulprint—the unique sensory aura that all people had, and that I could sense and some-times manipulate because I was a Road Master. “I don’t know if I can fix it,” I said truthfully. “But I know the doctors can’t. She’ll die no matter what they do.” My pulse stuttered again. Gemma wasn’t going to die. I wouldn’t let her. “I need to get her to Sanctuary, I think,” I said, referring to the home of the fairies that Gemma and I had the ability to travel to.
Unfortunately, Sanctuary wasn’t the only other world in existence. The Valley, known more properly as the Valley of Death, was Sanctuary’s opposite; where Sanctuary was based on life magic, the Valley ran on death.
And now it had its shadowy tendrils wrapped firmly around my best friend.
In the waiting night, I pressed my eyes shut, trying to remember exactly what the Valley’s connection to Gem had looked like. More or less like Scott? Less. Definitely less.
“And Gemma can’t just go there by herself?”
“Mum.” I shook my head. “She’s sick. Like, really sick. Keep her in the hospital overnight sick, remember?”
Mum shot me a sideways glance that I could read more from the slight shift of her head than any ability to see her eyes in this light. “No need to sass me, Emma Tanning. You have to understand how absurd this all is from the outside. If it wasn’t for Mrs Caro, or…”
I wondered if she was remembering her brief visit to Sanctuary a couple of weeks ago. I shifted awkwardly. “But you’ve seen it. You know it’s real.”
She sighed. “You’re sure it’s something… magical? That’s wrong with her?”
I sniffed. “Of course I’m sure. What did Mrs Caro say?”
“That the doctors can’t find anything.”
“Exactly. ‘Soul being drained by Valley of Death’ isn’t exactly in the medical textbooks, is it?”
Mum hugged me tight. I squirmed until I could breathe. “Be careful, Edge,” Mum told me, giving me one last squeeze.
“Always.”
The house creaked in the darkness around us, finally cooling after another hot, summery day.
“Liv?” The door protested briefly as Dad nudged it open.
Cool air from the lounge room aircon unit followed him in, chilling my arms.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured.
“It’s Gemma,” Mum said softly. “She’s getting worse. Maria says they need Emma. To… help.”
Help. I had to help her. I’d fixed Scott; surely I could save my best friend too.
“I’m going to drive Emma down now,” Mum said as I wriggled out from the covers and crossed the night-still bedroom to find clothes.
“Do you want me to come?” Dad asked.
“It’s fine,” Mum said. “You have meetings tomorrow. I can stay home if I need to.”
I couldn’t, though, I thought as I pulled on my jeans. No matter what happened tonight, there was no way I was missing school tomorrow. A certain teenage boy held answers to some very important questions, and I’d get those answers or die trying. He wouldn’t even know what hit him.
“I’m ready,” I said, interrupting Dad as I straightened out my shirt.
Mum stood, the bed pinging and creaking as she did. “Let me get dressed too.”
I waited in the front hallway. Tree shadows rippled through the narrow windows on either side of the door reaching across the floor tiles, rustling, straining. I stood where they ended and watched as my toes dipped in and out of darkness.
In and out, in and out. Dark and light, dark and light.
One step in either direction and I could be safe, or drown forever.
“Ready?” Mum said behind me, keys clinking too loudly in the night.
I stepped to the front door, into the shadows. “Ready.” I’m coming, Gemma, I told her. I’m coming.