WARNINGS
To give you an idea of what you’re about to read, I ask that my family put this down first. Turn off your kindle. If you don’t, gatherings might be awkward.
There, I said it.
Content warnings are as follows – mentions of suicidal ideation, graphic violence, graphic erotic scenes, dark romance, dark psychology.
These are not your friendly neighbourhood fae and I like my heroines twisted.
—Quinn Blackbird
SHADOW FAE
BOOK ONE
THE DARK
First came the darkness, billowing out of Britain.
Then the world went quiet. Radios turned silent, planes fell out of the sky. Our technologies died.
Famine erupted through the world like a bomb, bloodying battlefields between countries
It was the plague, however, that wiped out most of our numbers.
My name is Coralie and I fell victim to that very virus. I was one of the few who survived.
But nothing—absolutely nothing—could have prepared us for what came next; them charging into our globe in their hundreds of armies, spreading across the world like a new darkness and plague combined…
The dark fae have come to finish what they started. They have come to end us.
1
NOW
I have almost died too many times to count. Most of us who have survived this long can say the same. Lives lived with bunches of almosts and nearlys and not-quites.
The last time I met my almost death was only a couple of days ago—if the concept of ‘day and night’ even exists anymore.
Since before the dark fae came to this world, their pitch-black air billowed out of the Scottish Highlands and rolled over the world. From above, nothing can penetrate the thick blackness that engulfs us—not the moon, the stars, the sun. We are lost in the nothingness down here with only the occasional weak torches to give us dusty light.
That darkness brought with it the loss of all that we knew. Technology, abundant food sources, sight, safety—all gone. And the black air brought so much more; a plague. One so rampant yet silent and wholly aggressive that, even though I was one of the very few to survive the virus, I still feel its effects in my body today.
The chills cling to my bones, my fingers tremble and twitch, and there is a constant pallor of my weak skin that—if I’m cut—bleeds for too long before healing. All mere echoes of the pain I once suffered for weeks, trapped in quarantine with dying patients littered in iron beds all around me.
Memories of those gruelling, torturous quarantine days haunt me. They come in flashbacks so vibrant that a violent shudder rolls through my body.
On a stuffy, torn couch, I wrap my arms around myself and bring my legs up to tuck my knees to my chest. I’m all balled up, resting my heart-shaped chin on my creaky kneecaps (symptoms of too-long walks through the rough cobblestone streets and paths of France’s West).
I clench my hands at my legs to stifle the trembles taking root there. Cutting my dark-blue eyes (not the hue to stand out with blazing brilliance) around the crammed apartment kitchen, I see that sometime during my supressed memories, most of the small group has found sleep.
We reached the town of Tours—our torches illuminated the town signs on the main road a while back—no more than some hours ago, so I’m amazed that so many of us have caved to sleep already. It’s like the traumas of this cold, dark world don’t haunt them in the quiet moments, and as though out there, the dark fae don’t pillage and burn and destroy in a never-ending burden of loathing.
And loathe us, the dark fae do.
Why else would they have waged war on us? These creatures that we knew so little of, beasts that we thought to be old tales spun by ancient peoples, utter myths—they came to our world, darkness and plague and war, to end us, all without us even having the slightest suspicion that the dark fae existed.
Well, joke’s on us. And we are the punchline.
A bitter smile warps my face into something of a grimace. I bury my face into my knees, protecting my grim expression from those few of us still awake in the kitchen. Slightly, I shake my head at my own twisted sense of humour.
In a heartbeat, the smile is wiped right off my freckle-dusted face. The trembling in my hands surges with a sudden vengeance. I flex my fingers, peeling them apart from each other then give them a good shake.
This gesture draws in a few glances. The two lingering stares come from a married middle-aged couple tucked in the corner of the room, pressed against chipped white-painted cabinets. I can make them out only due to the blue gas-flames burning on the cooktop. We lit them when we barricaded ourselves in here for a rest.
Any chance not to use up our torches is an opportunity not to be missed. Torches aren’t all that difficult to find, it’s the batteries you’ve got to look out for. It all comes down to them, and back when quarantines were popping up and the darkness caused evacuations to spring up all over the world, batteries were one of the things looted by most, and left behind in the so few.
At the reminder of the black world and early days, I look at the window. It’s propped up above the sink, overlooking the street below, where medieval-faced houses line the cobblestone. A set of cheap metal-like blinds covers the window, but through the creaks and dents and gaps, I can make out the pitch-black air beyond the window.
The darkness came before the virus did, but it was in quarantine that I recall the true bone-deep terror of it.
My bed was tucked at an angle beside the panelled window. I spent my days staring out of it, picturing the grassy hills of Southern France that should have been there—and they were there, somewhere devoured by the dark air. But I didn’t see a damn thing other than the pure black nothing so thick and glossy that I remember thinking back then that it was as though the window was lacquered obsidian from the outside
I’d lived most of my life alone, but it was then that I felt it most. With so many dying around me, and all that I could face was the darkness on the other side of the window—an omen of what was to come to this world—I wondered then if it would be best to simply die along with everyone else in the flooded hospital room.
Alas, my luck meant that I survived it. I caught it, suffered for most of the wars that erupted between neighbouring countries (food shortages will drive just about anyone to violence) and the dark fae coming and the evacuations, then simply woke up one day without a fever. The next day, I could move. And on the third day, no one came to my bedside when I finally managed to call out for help.
It was on the fourth day that I was able to wander (or stagger) around the hospital and I realised that those who had survived—doctors, nurses, patients, whoever—had abandoned the place.
I’d tried the phone. Every phone I could find. Got no dial tone, it was just silence. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone; not my mother, nor my father, not even that one girl, Natalie, from boarding school who might be considered a friend if being generous. In truth, there are no friendships among the rich, only pacts.
And I was left without alliances, in a world I didn’t know, where things had happened that I knew nothing about.
It wasn’t for weeks that I came across others—a surviving group—and learned all that I’d missed. Needless to say, everyone I’ve ever known in the Before is presumed dead.