Page 3 of The Filigree Key

“When you return,” she told them, “I don’t know if the shield around Redbud will still be standing. If it is, come to the northern border. I have an access port growing there.”

It was a clever piece of magic, too: a ring of toadstools, the traditional transports of the Fair Folk. It was a half-ring, actually, but that’s where the Stag Man’s magic would work against him. The shield he had erected had a reflective quality to it when struck, and when the half-ring was done growing, a strike would create a full ring of toadstools, even for a moment. But a moment was all Ame needed to open the portal and allow the Coalition shifters to infiltrate the town.

“We’ll find it,” Tod assured her, and she didn’t doubt the tracker could.

“Don’t lose your nerve,” she told them, then jumped back into the crawlspace.

Her paws were silent on the packed earth, the only sounds coming from the witches as they replaced the floorboards and rug. Ame wiggled through the gap in the lattice, waited a beat in the myrtle to make sure the lattice closed behind her, then darted for the picket fence when the coast was clear.

One heartbeat passed, then two, and Ame was slinking through the weeds and brush until she was at the end of the driveway by the country road that led towards town. Across the street was a split-rail fence that had once corralled horses. She climbed up the nearest post, sucked in a deep breath, and released the most abrasive yowl her little body could muster.

Every spy in the sky, pasture, and forest arrowed in on her, and the chase began.

Ame led them east, in the opposite direction Meadow would be coming from.

“Imaginari felis,” she whispered, and a copy of her caliby cat self darted away to the left. Now her enemies had two cats to chase, one illusion and one real, and Ame prayed the ruse would work. And that she wasn’t captured, either. She was a far cry from the cat of her youth, but she had enough spunk and spite left to endure one last adventure. Yet mallaithe and sluagh and fiáin and faelight beasts would be the least of her worries if she was caught and brought to the Stag Man.

If I survive this, she thought, I’m going to let Shari turn me into the fattest house cat ever.

CHAPTER ONE

PRESENT DAY

The moonless night was ablaze with light.

The white archway to Elfame shone like a star against the backdrop of the abandoned clover field. Though made of starlight and magic, the portal appeared crafted from glass, or the purest ice, and lit from within. Its glow twinkled in the frost that clung to every blade of grass until the ground resembled crushed quartz instead of dormant turf.

And it sang to me.

Not five minutes ago, I’d been ordered to mount my horse and join the procession returning to the castle. Three minutes ago, I’d risked discovery by stumbling against the wagon and pledging to free the grizzly bear—my Arthur—from his prison. Then the portal’s song had called, either attracted to my wrath or wishing to soothe it away.

Now I found myself rebundled in the white fox-fur coat and rooted within an arm’s length of the gateway to the immortal lands. I gazed, entranced, upon the opalescent doorway, one hand on the horse’s reins and the other stuck in my foraging bag. Curled protectively around the scruff of a tabby cat.

“What is that music?” Sawyer dared to whisper.

While my gaze was riveted on the portal, I could imagine his amber eyes widening in wonder. “You can hear it too?”

The portal’s melody was impossibly soft, just enough to tease my senses and distract me from the rawness of my returned memories. Four specific ones still persisted despite the lulling song. They twisted about in my mind like a vortex of sluagh blackbirds, squawking madly and cutting me with their feathers.

The snarling hellhound guarding the grimoire cupboard.

A demon with crimson eyes spiriting my brother away to a prison in the Unseelie Court for my mistakes.

My brave cat losing himself to the power of a moonstone collar.

Arthur screaming as the Stag Man ripped the unclaimed mate bond from his soul.

Amidst this turmoil, the tune of the portal persevered, like bathwater gradually increasing in temperature until it melted away all the worries of the day. It was flute-like, reminding me of the pixies’ language, and somehow mixed with the voice of a murmuring stream. The rational part of me knew this had to be the aura of the immortal lands, but it was alive and calling to me.

Touching the portal had not only freed my memories, but the ones infused within its bindings. And as its song mellowed the ache in my heart, my rage for Arthur and my friends and what my family and I had brought to Redbud, it made room within me to accept them.

Women.

The most beautiful women I’d ever seen, dozens of them. They ranged in size and height and skin color, but they all had one thing in common.

They were witches.

Powerful women . . . and all seduced by the Stag Man to summon his portal home.