Seconds later, I rush through the lake house living room to the faerie door, pulling the key from one of my pockets. DAMN, MY HAND IS BURNING. Then I’m in another dark space, and then through a door into the foyer, and finally I’m back at Gaius’s mountain home. My mountain home, seeing as nowhere else is safe for me anymore. I fled the Guild after they discovered my Griffin Ability, and they’ve been watching the homes of my family and friends ever since.

I hurry upstairs to Gaius’s study—burning, burning, burning hand—and find him bent over a spider-like contraption that appears to be shooting sparkling dust from one spindly leg and ink splatters from another. “Mission number one complete,” I announce, marching across the room and managing to feel immensely pleased with myself despite the horrendous pain scorching across my hand. “Here’s the payment for the job.” I remove the wooden case and the gold flower from my pocket. “Plus a bit of gold, because little Elsie felt like making it on the spot for me. And—” I lower the translucent shield bubble onto a pile of books and allow it to pop, revealing the rosebud “—the all-important invitation.”

“You got it!” Gaius exclaims, standing so quickly his chair falls over behind him.

Despite my pain, a laugh escapes my lips. “I got it.”

“And gold? You said she made it? And—your hand. That looks terrible.”

“It’s fine, I’ll treat it in a moment. Open the invitation so we can see—”

“You haven’t opened it yet?” Gaius asks as he rummages through one of his drawers and pulls out an emergency kit.

“No, I had to get out of there without getting caught. I didn’t want to ruin the good reputation you and Chase have worked so hard to build among certain circles of fae.”

“Ah, yes, probably a good idea.” Gaius removes a small tub of burn healing gel and hands it to me. “Here you go. Fix your hand up while I open this thing.”

As Gaius clears a space on his desk for the rosebud, I scoop some gel from the tub and smear it across my hand. The relief is instant as the gel’s magic diminishes the burning to little more than a whisper of pain. With my attention fully on the invitation now, I lean over the desk and watch closely. Gaius touches a petal with one finger that shakes ever so slightly. The petals begin to unfurl. “This is it,” he breathes. “Our ticket inside the Seelie Palace.”

“Well, if we can find out how to actually get there,” I remind him.

“Details,” Gaius says with a wave of his hand. “We’ll figure that part out.” He squints at the gold letters that appear in the air above the flower. “Cordially invited … blah, blah, blah,” he reads. “Princess Audra’s birthday … masked ball … on the fourteenth day of … oh, goodness, that’s—”

“Nine days away,” I say, my heart sinking. “Nine whole days. How is Chase supposed to last that long?”

Gaius stares at the invitation, chewing on his bottom lip. “Well, this is our only option, unless you know how to get us in and out of the palace on a regular day without being caught.”

“My ability—”

“Might not be enough. This is the most well-guarded place in our world. There will be magical protection everywhere. The easiest way in is during an event like this. Security will still be high, of course, but not impossible for us to get past.”

I grip the edge of the desk. “Fine. But if … if there’s even a hint of something happening to Chase before this party, then we have to go immediately.”

“Of course. Which means we need to hurry up and find someone who knows how to get there.”

“Yes.” And that’s something that someone else on the team will have to figure out, because my one and only potential contact is someone who never seems to leave the Seelie Court. I hold my rapidly healing hand out. “May I have the ring back? We need to update Chase.” And I need to hear his voice. I’ve gone a whole day without hearing it, and it feels as though a piece of myself has been missing.

“Yes, of course.” Gaius removes a book from one of his shelves and opens it. From a carved space in the center of the pages, he removes the telepathy ring I’ve been using to communicate with Chase since he was imprisoned. A ring imbued with a Griffin Ability someone didn’t want. Fortunately, Chase was wearing the corresponding ring when he was captured. “I’m sorry I took it, but I didn’t want you distracted by anything today.”

“I understand, but I wish you’d trusted me to simply leave the ring in my bedroom. You didn’t need to hide it from me.”

“It isn’t that I didn’t trust you, Calla. I just wanted to be certain you wouldn’t take it with you.”

I raise an eyebrow as Gaius places the ring, a simple silver band with a green stone, on my palm. “So you didn’t trust me.”

He ruffles his already mussed up hair. “Fine. I’m sorry. It was your first mission for us and … well, it was very important.”

“I’m fully aware of that, Gaius. I want to get Chase out of the Seelie Queen’s clutches just as much as you do.”

“Of course, I know, I’m sorry. I promise I’ll trust you next time. Oh, you probably want your amber back too.”

“You hid my amber as well?” I demand, curling my hand around the ring.

“It was a potential distraction.”

“It’s old and oversized and the only person I can contact is Ryn, so I definitely wasn’t planning on taking it with me. You know that.”

“Just taking precautions,” Gaius says, handing me the antique piece of amber with a guilty smile. “Which I understand now were unnecessary. Won’t happen again.”

I shake my head in frustration as I tap the amber’s surface. Gold writing fades into view. I tell myself I’ll look at it properly just now, after I’ve spoken to Chase, but I see the words ‘mom’ and ‘trial just finished’ and I can’t stop reading. A chill rushes across my skin. I feel faint, as if the blood has been drained all at once from my head. “The trial’s over,” I whisper, pulling my eyes from my brother’s message and looking up at Gaius. “They—they’re sending my mother to prison.”

Chase, are you there?

I call his name once more as I sneak into the Guild just before midnight. I’ve been trying to get hold of him since I left the mountain, but all I can hear are my own thoughts. I tell myself not to worry. He’s sleeping, that’s all. He’s fine. Well, he isn’t fine. He’s imprisoned in a dark, dirty cell with magic-blocking chains attached to his arms and legs. But he isn’t dead. He can’t be. The Seelie Queen wouldn’t keep him alive for a week only to suddenly finish him off with no fanfare. No, she’s keeping him alive for a reason, which means he’s just sleeping. You’re just sleeping, right? I whisper in my mind.

I swallow, trying to rid myself of the nausea in my stomach, and walk confidently across the Guild’s great foyer. Moving around under the illusion of invisibility has become second nature to me. Still, it’s a risk to come here so late at night when no one else is around and a surveillance device—which isn’t a living being and can’t be influenced by my projections—could so easily spot me. I casually pull my hood further over my head. I may look suspicious to anyone watching me on a recording orb right now, but no one would ever suspect me of being Calla Larkenwood, the runaway Gifted faerie who supposedly killed one of her classmates before making half the Guild sick with a disease-causing Griffin Ability.

I climb the stairs to Ryn’s office, but I walk straight past his closed door. I stop near the end of the corridor and lean against the wall. I lift my hand, as if examining my nails while waiting for someone or something. In reality, I’m scouring the corridor with my eyes for any sign of a surveillance bug. I flinch when the door beside me opens, but my projection is intact, and the guardian who walks out does nothing more than lock her office and leave with a bag slung over her shoulder.

I examine the corridor for another few minutes. When I see no movement and hear no buzzing, I push away from the wall and walk back to Ryn’s door. I open it, slip inside, and shut the door. “They’re sending her to prison?” I say as I drop into the empty chair beside Dad and across from Ryn. “That’s absurd. She was only a child when she broke her contract and fled the Guild. What happened to them fining her and leaving it at that?”

Dad, who looks sicker than I feel, shakes his head and covers his face with both hands.

I turn to Ryn instead. “She did receive a fine,” he says. “For manufacturing high-strength potions without a permit. For breaking her Seer contract, the Guild has taken into account the seriousness of the vision she chose not to tell them about. They also seem to want to make an example of her so that other Seers don’t make light of their contracts, which is why she ended up with six months in prison instead of a second fine.”

“Six months? Your message said two years.”

“The...