‘Wow,’ said Shane.

‘Yeah,’ said Cat, unable to tear her eyes away from the scene before her.

‘Come on,’ said Shane, poking her in the ribs and snapping her out of it. ‘Let’s find Jenny and Mikey and get out of here. There’s something about this place I don’t like. It almost feels …’

‘Like we could get lost here?’ Cat said.

Shane nodded.

They skirted the edge of the crowd, watching in fascination as fairies of all genders spun around them in colourful outfits, their hair long and unbridled, never once tripping or falling. It was as though they all moved as one. Now and then, one of the dancers would extend a hand, inviting them to join in. When they declined, the fairies would simply laugh and rejoin the dance as though they had never left.

‘How do they do that?’ Shane said. ‘I can’t even bend over to tie my shoes without tripping up.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ Cat replied.

She tried her best to ignore the revelry and concentrate on looking for Mikey and Jenny, but there was no sign of either of them.

No sign of the queen either, she thought, although she wondered how she would know the queen when she saw her. Every one of the dancing fairies looked so regal, she could be in the middle of the dance floor even now.

She was about to ask Shane what they would do if Mikey and Jenny were being kept somewhere else when her eyes fell upon the face of the strangest creature she had ever seen, and given the night she had had so far, that was truly saying something. He wasn’t beautiful like everyone else in the room and unlike them he could never be mistaken for human. There was something animalistic about his too-wide smile and his eyes that glowed hot and red. His hair appeared to shift and change under the flickering candlelight, seeming at one moment to be a tangle of twigs and leaves and the next to be a normal shade of brown. The effect was disorienting. She wanted to get closer to investigate, but the song changed, and the dance began to speed up. Cat was knocked backwards and when she looked again, the creature was gone.

‘Well, aren’t you pretty?’ said a voice that sounded like birdsong. Cat found herself facing a short, plump fairy who wore an elaborate dress patterned like the wings of a butterfly, which seemed to shimmer in the light. Her hair cascaded down her back in long crimson curls and was threaded with autumn berries. When she smiled, Cat noticed she had deep dimples in her cheeks. She was so dazzling, Cat forgot all about the strange creature in the crowd.

‘But why do you dress like that?’ asked the fairy woman, gesturing at Cat’s still-damp jeans and jacket. ‘It’s all wrong for a party! Don’t you want to wear a beautiful dress like mine?’ The fairy twirled and her skirt rippled outward in a panoply of different colours. ‘Why don’t we go and get you something nicer to wear? We have lots of dresses here. With your colouring, I think something made of spider silk and moonlight would suit.’