Title Page

FAEFEVER

Dedication

This one’s for the Moning Maniacs—the best fans any writer ever had.

Epigraph

“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“Do not go gentle into that good night . . .
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

—Dylan Thomas

Maps

FAEFEVER

Part One

PART ONE
_________________________

Before Dawn

“I keep expecting to wake up and find it was all a bad dream.
Alina will be alive,
I won’t be afraid of the dark,
Monsters won’t be walking the streets of Dublin,
And I won’t have this terrible fear that tomorrow dawn just won’t come.”

—Mac’s journal

Prologue

Prologue

I’d die for him.

No, wait a minute . . . that’s not where this is supposed to begin.

I know that. But left to my own devices, I’d prefer to skim over the events of the next few weeks, and whisk you through those days with glossed-over details that cast me in a more flattering light.

Nobody looks good in their darkest hour. But it’s those hours that make us what we are. We stand strong, or we cower. We emerge victorious, tempered by our trials, or fractured by a permanent, damning fault line.

I never used to think about things like darkest hours and trials and fault lines.

I used to fill my days with sunning and shopping, bartending at The Brickyard (always more of a party than a job, and that was how I liked my life), and devising ways to con Mom and Dad into helping me buy a new car. At twenty-two, I was still living at home, safe in my sheltered world, lulled by the sleepy, slow-paddling fans of the Deep South into believing myself the center of it.

Then my sister, Alina, was brutally murdered while studying abroad in Dublin, and my world changed overnight. It was bad enough that I had to identify her mutilated body, and watch my once happy family shatter, but my world didn’t stop falling apart there. It didn’t stop until I’d learned that pretty much everything I’d been raised to believe about myself wasn’t true.

I discovered that my folks weren’t my real parents; my sister and I were adopted; and despite my lazy, occasionally overblown drawl, we weren’t southern at all, but descended from an ancient Celtic bloodline of sidhe-seers, people who can see the Fae—a terrifying race of otherworldly beings that have lived secretly among us for thousands of years, cloaked in illusions and lies.

Those were the easy lessons.