Agent Jeremy snapped open his briefcase and pulled out a fat contract. "Have a look," he said, passing it across the table. "Let me know if there's anything else that you'd like us to change." Ángel began to read, heart breaking, eyes burning. He vowed that he would never return to this house, or speak to these people, ever again.

Chapter 2

“So is he dangerous?” Ángel asked Neil Jeremy.

They were in a helicopter, high over the mountains in northern Montana, speaking through noise-canceling headsets.

“No, don’t be silly,” said Jeremy.

Legends told that the fae were very dangerous: amoral, pitiless monsters, to be feared and placated and, above all, avoided. One absolutely did not voluntarily go live with them.

Ángel had heard the elf-lord’s music, of course. He’d released several albums: fae music transcribed for piano and orchestra. It was wild, incomprehensible music, full of strange harmonies and eerie, unearthly sounds. Ángel didn’t understand it, but it was enormously influential. In fact, most of what he knew about modern-day elves came from the lyrics and websites of elf-obsessed alt-metal musicians. Which seemed to justify Victor’s comments about Ángel’s squandered educational opportunities, but anyway.

Once, centuries before the birth of Christ, the beautiful and strange people of the Otherworld had moved freely across the magical veil. Then, for reasons that only the fae could know, that veil had become an impenetrable wall, and the fae had disappeared from the Earth, leaving behind only myths and tales: Tuatha de Danann. Daoine Sidhe. Tylwyth Teg. Fairies and djinni and demons; the peri, the yōkai, the Seelie and Unseelie Court. Monsters of all sorts.

The tales said that they lured people into bogs to drown, lured ships onto rocks to be destroyed. Stole people’s money and replaced it with autumn leaves, stole people’s babies and replaced them with monsters. Seduced people with their beauty, cursed them with their magic.

“Why did he come here?” he asked Jeremy.

“Stop worrying, Ángel. You won’t be in any danger.”

Jeremy had an annoying way of not really answering questions.

Sometime in the twentieth century—so Ángel had read—the veil had thinned enough for the fae of the Otherworld to begin studying humans. Watching them in magical ways, learning their languages, studying their culture.

Then, four years before Ángel was born, the fae had sent a gift through the veil. A previously ordinary beech tree in Springvale Park in Atlanta had begun to glow and emit an intoxicating scent. Crowds had gathered around, drawn as if by magic to the shining tree; then a rift had opened up, revealing a wooden chest full of objects that had been immediately taken into custody by the federal government.