Prologue
Choices & Regrets
My name’s Kate Kane and my world has turned to shit.
A little while ago—a year? Two years? Fuck, has it been three? I knew exactly two good people. One was a weird living statue who hung out in my flat and made me coffee even though she couldn’t drink it herself. The other was the mystical queen of London. They’re both dead now. Or in places between life and death where the difference doesn’t mean a damn and they still can’t talk or move or laugh or tell me to stop being so goddamned self-indulgent so, yeah. Dead or near as makes no odds.
This is normally the bit where I’d explain that I’m a half-faery PI with a string of exes, most of them either dangerous or annoying, a history of ruining people I care about, a psychotic mother who does guest spots in my head, and a lovable band of quirky hangers-on who I haven’t quite managed to get killed yet.
But just when my life had looked like it was getting on track, this cockney fuckstain called Arty King showed up and made a pretty good go of burning down everything that mattered to me, then this smug vampire fuckstain called Sebastian Douglas destroyed the rest. I wound up chained to a wall with my blood slowly draining out so that fuckstain number two could make his bid for immortality—well, immortality plus on account of he was already a vampire—and the only person who didn’t show up to rescue me was my actual goddamned girlfriend.
Fucking Julian Saint-Ger-fucking-main left me to die because apparently when you’re an eight-hundred-year-old-vampire you accept the brutal murder of your lovers as one of those things that happen, and you don’t stick your neck out for anybody because if you do, you won’t live to be eight hundred and one.
Most days I try to hate her for it. Some days I succeed.
Oh, I also shanked a granny. And while of all the people who got pointlessly slaughtered in the war for the soul of the city she was probably the one who most deserved it, I still have nightmares. I mean, I don’t want to come across like I’ve got this strict moral code or anything, but I really thought butchering some guy’s nan was on my “I would definitely never do that” list.
So, yeah. That’s who I am.
My name’s Kate Kane. I’m fucking poison.
1
Breakfast & Bad News
I awoke to the sound of cockerels. Actual motherfucking cockerels. I stirred, swearing under my breath. Rolling over, I found a naked werewolf stretched out beside me. I’d been fucking Tara Vane-Tempest on and off ever since I split with Julian back when everything went to shit. I say I’d been fucking her, but it was probably more accurate to say she’d been fucking me. Tara was not the kind of woman who consented to being the fuckee in the relationship. It was probably an alpha thing.
“Good morning, Kate Kane.” She was too damned awake too damned early. “Sleep well?”
She knew I hadn’t, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because she was well aware that I’d not slept properly since I’d let my best friend get turned into a hunk of inanimate rock, and secondly because it’s hard to get a good night’s rest when a shapeshifting lingerie model is going full all-the-better-to-eat-you-with on your willingly helpless body.
“Pretty well,” I replied. “I had four hours where I was too unconscious to hate myself so I’m calling that a win.”
“Someday this relentless misery is going to become unattractive.”
“Yeah, well”—I shrugged—“as an empowered twenty-first century woman I’m not relentlessly miserable for other people, I’m relentlessly miserable for me.”
Tara got out of bed in a fluid, animal motion that made me wish she’d get back into it, the sheets sliding away from her body like water off a nymph in one of those old paintings where you could show all the tits you wanted as long as you pretended it was art. She wrapped herself in a peach silk dressing-gown and pulled on a discreet rope that I knew from prior experience was hooked up to a Downton-esque system of bells somewhere in the servants’ quarters. Somehow, despite my common-as-pigshit roots, I was regularly getting my brains banged out by a woman who never quite got the memo about the feudal system.
“It is way too early for breakfast,” I told her.
“I have duties to attend to.”
Ugh, spare me. “I know, I know. We walk the boundaries between the worlds because otherwise everything goes to hell everywhere, always, something like that?”
“Roughly. And it’s worse now than it was.” That was underselling it. Between the drink and the hating myself I was less tied into the country’s uncanny underworld than I used to be, but I’d still been able to tell that the epic wizard battle screwed things up big time, especially since there’d been no clear winner. Tara perched on the end of the bed. She always looked like she was posing for a catalogue shoot, even when she was talking about serious mystical something-or-other. “I know that the witch-queen was your friend, but she rather fucked us on that one.”
She didn’t get to talk about Nim. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“No, she came from a long line of interfering humans who should have left alone what they didn’t understand.” I was pretty sure that was her grandmother talking. “Although”—she gave me a look that was softer than her usual intense, predatory gaze—“I suppose she was better than many of them. Which isn’t saying much.”
There was a polite knock at the door and Tara opened it to receive a silver tray laden with the kind of things you ate for breakfast if you were super rich, super posh, and a werewolf. Which meant a French press full of immaculately brewed fresh-ground coffee, a reasonable selection of continental pastries, and steak so rare a good vet could probably still have saved it.
She laid the tray on the bed between us, mostly out of politeness. It had been months since I’d eaten anything solid before noon and didn’t fancy starting now. Still, I poured myself a coffee and spent about ten seconds pretending that this was going to be the day I actually got up at a reasonable time and did something productive. Huddling back against the headboard with my drink, I watched Tara eat breakfast. I’d mostly given up trying to learn new things lately on account of how everything was going to be awful forever anyway so why bother, but I was learning quite a lot about Tara Vane-Tempest. Being a shapeshifting guardian of reality caught eternally between two worlds meant that she was guaranteed to be a mess of contradictions. In public she was this flawless icon of the British aristocracy, all poise and composure and using the right fork. Behind closed doors she was something completely different.
Ignoring the pastries entirely, she picked up one of the succulent, flawlessly seasoned steaks with her bare hands and tore into it with her teeth. Blood dribbled down her lips and fingers, and if I hadn’t been feeling so—I think the medical term is “shitty”—I’d have jumped her there and then. Sex and food both really brought out Tara’s animal side and, while I was more into her whole droit de seigneur bit than I liked to admit , it was when the wolf joined the party that things got properly interesting. The metaphorical wolf. Don’t get me wrong, I know some people are into fur, but I prefer my women strictly bipedal.