It’s the opposite of sensible, given how severely under-slept I am, but we talk all night.

I start from the beginning – four kids, all born on the same Valentine’s Day, one of them a changeling hidden in the crowd by a fairy king to save him from the Riders – and don’t stop.

‘There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense,’ Phil says.

‘Just one? You have a way better handle on this than me. I understand maybe twenty per cent.’

She ignores me. ‘Why did he let you take me back with you?’

‘The prince?’

Phil nods. ‘He didn’t have to let me go. He didn’t even have to let you go. He could have kept us both, and made us servants or whatever it is they do to humans in fairyland. But instead, he let you go, and let you choose one of us to take with you. Why?’

‘Honestly?’

‘No, lie to me. Of course, honestly.’

‘I don’t know for sure, but I have a pretty good idea,’ I say.

‘Which is?’

‘I think he thought it was funny.’

‘Funny?!’

‘I entertain him,’ I say. ‘He kind of likes me, I think. Not likes-me-likes-me, but he thinks I’m weirdly adorable. Harmless. Funny to watch. I’m the equivalent of cat videos on YouTube to him.’

She’s quiet for a few moments, and then, ‘Fuck that,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Fuck that.’

‘I need to apologise to you,’ Phil says later, as we lie on my floor, pillows under our heads, staring at the ceiling.

I’m already shaking my head. ‘No, you don’t, Phil.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she says. ‘I’m … I’m not feeling a lot right now, but one of the things that is getting through is guilt. So please. Shut up and let me say this.’

I obey.

‘Pearl, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘The things I said to you, and the way I treated you, and everything I did to you after that night at the creek – all of it was unforgiveable.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘Yes, it was.’ Her voice is firm, sure. ‘Perhaps some of it – the small things – perhaps those, I could have legitimately asked you for forgiveness for, and they could have been water under the bridge. But what I did to you that night at the concert – that’s not something you just get past.’

I blink. With everything that’s happened, I’d almost forgotten that night.

Not all of it, obviously. You don’t forget getting stabbed in the gut by your favourite teacher and then being brought back from the brink of death by your boyfriend. That stays with you.

But I’d forgotten what happened before that. I was ironless (I’d taken my ring off to make out with Finn, because I have my priorities firmly in order), and I needed some fast so I could de-possess Ms Rao. Phil was there, and I gestured to her to give me her iron ring.

She refused.

‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life,’ Phil says. ‘You needed my help, and I said no, and you got stabbed.’

‘Phil, I would have got stabbed anyway. Your iron ring wouldn’t have stopped that.’

‘It was monstrous,’ she says. ‘I was a monster.’

There’s no emotion in her face, just certainty.

‘You were going to die for me that night at the creek, with Jenny and Kel,’ she says. ‘You were going to let them eat you, to save me. But when you needed my help, I said no.’

I shake my head. ‘You don’t need to apologise for this, Phil, honestly, you –’

‘And despite all that – despite everything – you still chose me.’

I’m silent.

‘I knew before the words were out of your mouth that you were going to do it,’ she says. ‘I saw you look from me to Finn to your sister, and I knew you were going to pick me.’

‘Do you wish I hadn’t?’ I ask softly.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It’s not that I want to spend the rest of my life as a servant to some terrible fairy, but … if I was still there, I wouldn’t – I wouldn’t feel – not feel – whatever – like this.’

‘I couldn’t leave you there,’ I say. ‘Phil, I would never, ever leave you there.’

‘I know,’ she says.

‘It’s nearly 3 a.m.,’ I say. ‘We should get some sleep.’

‘Not yet,’ Phil says. ‘We’re going to solve this problem.’

‘Which one? We have, like, seventy.’

‘We’re going to work out how to break into fairyland.’

She grabs a pen and an old receipt off my desk and starts making a list. ‘The easiest option would be for Finn to break out, but considering he seems more interested in breaking up, I take it that’s not on the cards.’

I resist the urge to curl over the yawning empty pit in my stomach.

‘And you tried to see Hunter today, but you couldn’t?’

There’s no sign that she’s talking about the man who held her mother still while her throat was cut. There’s just the slight furrow she gets between her eyebrows when she’s trying to solve a really hard maths problem.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But I didn’t think it through. Even if I could get in, he’s in a coma. It’s not like he’s going to wake up just because I materialise next to his bed.’

She writes Hunter’s name down and then crosses it off. ‘Riders can’t be the only people who know how to cross between worlds. There must be someone else.’

‘I don’t think there is,’ I say. ‘When I was – when Finn was – was in my dreams before, he said the only person that could open the door was his brother.’

‘The only person that can do it, but maybe not the only person that knows how,’ she says. ‘What about Helena? You said she was a changeling once upon a time, right? Maybe she knows some stuff.’

‘She was an Unseelie changeling, not a Seelie one,’ I say. ‘Wrong door. And even if she did know stuff, she wouldn’t tell me. She’s so shit-scared of fairies that she threw me under the bus to save herself, so there is literally zero chance she’d tell me something I wasn’t supposed to know.’

Phil crosses Helena off the list. ‘I’m guessing Tam’s off the table,’ she says.

‘He is so far off the table he’s not in the same room. If I even look at him the wrong way he’s going to murder me immediately.’

‘Same goes for Emily, I suppose.’

‘She is not an option,’ I say firmly. ‘If Tam’s not in the same room, she’s not in the same house. The same town. Plus, if she knew how to open the door, she would have conned Finn into going back to fairyland ages ago.’

‘What about Cardy?’

I blink. ‘Cardy?’

‘You don’t need someone that’s going to follow the rules and do what the fairies tell them,’ Phil says. ‘You need someone that’s going to break them.’

‘Are we talking about the same Cardy? Because he’s not exactly a rebel, Phil.’

‘But he’s possessed by an Unseelie fairy,’ she points out. ‘I bet it’s a rebel.’

I have to work to keep the horror off my face.

‘The way I see it – from what you told me, anyway – the Seelie won this round,’ Phil goes on. ‘They got everything they wanted: the Riders defeated, Finn back in fairyland. Don’t you think the Unseelie would be pretty keen on the opportunity to screw that up for them?’

‘The Unseelie tried to kill Finn,’ I say. ‘That was why they set the Riders loose in the first place.’

‘Not him specifically, though, right? A member of the Seelie royal family. Doesn’t matter which one. Surely they’d love the opportunity to take a pot shot at that dick of a prince.’

I press my fingers into my temples. ‘This is such a bad idea, Phil,’ I say. ‘Making a deal with the Unseelie – I can’t even overstate what a bad idea that is.’

‘Do you have any others?’

‘No, but … Cardy would kill me.’

‘He’d understand.’

‘No, he wouldn’t,’ I say. ‘You weren’t there when he found out he’d been possessed. The thought that something had been in his mind was so gross to him he threw up. There’s no chance in hell he’d go for this.’

‘Okay, so not Cardy, then,’ she says. ‘What about Ms Rao?’

‘We just went over this! Last time she was possessed by the Unseelie, she stabbed me!’

‘What other options are there, Pearl?’

‘I know, I know, I know,’ I say. ‘But making a deal with the Unseelie is such a bad idea. Even if we did use Cardy or Ms Rao to talk to them – even if they didn’t just laugh in our faces and then rip our throats out – even if they agreed to help – I don’t know what the price would be.’

I remember Tam’s face in the shed, the way his lip curled with rage when I tried to bargain with him. You say you have one thing to ask of me, and yet you ask two. If I acquiesce, it will be a third, and a fourth, and you dare to ask this of me when you have already taken everything!

Somehow I think the Unseelie might not be as generous as Tam when it comes to bargaining. What would they want?

I close my eyes. ‘Actually, I do know what they’d want,’ I say. ‘They’d want Finn. To change teams and go and live in Unseelie-land so they could parade him about. And he’d do it, because of course he would, and we’d be in exactly the same situation as we are now, except even worse.’

‘It can’t get worse than this,’ Phil says darkly.

It can always get worse, I nearly say.

‘But I see your point,’ she says. ‘Let’s make the Unseelie deal a last resort. Do you think it would help if I talked to Julian?’

‘No,’ I say immediately. ‘Definitely not.’

‘I know he hates you, but he’ll talk to me. The prince is the only one that can open the door, and he’s the prince’s servant, right? Maybe he has, like, residual memories or something.’

‘Listen to what you’re saying,’ I say. ‘He’s the prince’s servant. Asking him how to break into fairyland would basically be the same as saying “Excuse me, Mister Prince, would you mind telling me how to break into your magical fairytale kingdom and smuggle your brother out?”’

‘The prince already knows you’re planning to do that,’ Phil says. ‘You said so yourself. He thinks it’s funny.’

‘Which is why he’d make sure that Julian knows nothing,’ I reply. ‘He wants to watch me fail.’

‘So we shouldn’t even try?’

‘Julian’s dangerous, Phil.’

‘Not to me,’ she says. ‘We broke up, sure, but he won’t hurt me.’

‘The prince will,’ I say. ‘And the prince can take hold of Julian like that. The blink of an eye, and you’re not looking at Julian any more. You’re looking at the dude who suspended you by the neck from a tree.’

‘Then we need to get iron on Julian,’ Phil says. ‘So the prince can’t get hold of him.’

‘We’d need to find him first,’ I say. ‘And that might take some doing. God knows where he was and what he was doing before he turned up in the bush the other night.’

I blink.

Between the concert when I got stabbed by an Unseelie Ms Rao and the night Julian appeared in the bush right at the opportune time for me to attempt heart surgery on him, he was God-knows-where, while an Unseelie fairy was impersonating him.

‘Why was that fairy impersonating him?’ I ask. ‘Why was an Unseelie fairy impersonating the Seelie prince’s servant?’

‘Will knowing that help us open the door?’ Phil asks.

I shove the thought away. ‘No. Let’s go back to the beginning. Maybe there’s something we’ve missed.’

Phil looks at her list. ‘Option one was Hunter.’

‘In a coma, in hospital, where we can’t get to him. Next.’

‘Option two was Helena.’

‘Probably knows nothing and is too much of a wuss to tell us anyway.’

‘Three was Tam.’

‘No.’

‘Emily.’

‘Even more no.’

‘We could try using Cardy or Ms Rao to make a deal with the Unseelie.’

‘No way it wouldn’t go horribly wrong.’

‘Julian.’

‘No.’

‘Julian’s the only option that makes any sense.’

‘There is no planet on which I am letting you anywhere near the prince ever again, and Julian basically is the prince.’

‘You can’t tell me what to do, Pearl.’

‘Let’s go back to the beginning again,’ I say.

She makes a sound that I know means she’s frustrated with me. ‘Hunter.’

‘Coma. Hospital.’

‘Let’s say we managed to actually get in to see him,’ Phil says. ‘There’s no way you can, like … borrow Finn’s powers, is there?’

‘How would that even work?’

She shrugs. ‘He healed you with his mind from a whole other – dimension, plane, whatever you want to call it. What’s to say that he can’t sort of use you as a channel for his powers? Maybe if he’s in your head, and you put your hands on Hunter –’

‘He’s not going to be making any appearances in my head again any time soon,’ I say.

You can’t come here. You won’t come here. You’ll live your life, and you’ll stop looking for me.

Stop looking. He wants me to forget about him and stop looking.

He tried to make me.

‘Can you get into his head?’ Phil asks.

‘No,’ I say, sitting on my hands to make myself stop clenching and unclenching my fists. ‘That’s not how it works. It’s the most old-fashioned relationship ever. I have to, like, sit by the dream-phone, and wait for him to call.’

But he’s not going to call. Ever again.

He’s gone. Finn’s actually, really, truly gone.

I take a long, shaking breath.

I’m never going to see him again. Never going to hear him say Hey, Linford or God, Linford, can you just listen? or I love you, I love you, I love you. I’m never going to feel his hands on my skin again, never going to –

‘Wait,’ I say aloud.

‘What?’

‘Oh my God. Wait wait wait wait.’

I nearly trip myself up as I scramble to my bedside table.

It takes me a while to find it, buried in the bottom of the drawer (mostly because that drawer is full of the vast array of contraceptives Disey gave me when Finn and I started sleeping together), but it’s there.

Hunter’s not the only one that’s been in a magical coma before. I have. And Finn woke me up. Not because he intended to, but because he moulted on me. A single strand of his hair tethered me to life.

Then, a few months ago, when I was obsessed by the Seelie music and smashing my hands up trying to play it, I worked out the only way for me to get a moment’s peace in my own mind was to touch Finn. Obviously going around physically attached to him at all times wasn’t an option – especially considering we weren’t technically together at the time – so he made me a bracelet of his hair.

Until I mastered the music on my own, I never took that bracelet off. It went with me through every second of every day. That included through a whole lot of showers, so it’s almost unrecognisable now. Finn has shampoo-commercial hair (of course he does), but the bracelet looks like a matted bit of old leather.

But it’s still his. It’s still magic. And I can use it.

I can wake Hunter up.

‘You slept with Finn?’ Phil asks, even later.

I nod.

‘Wow.’

‘Wow is right.’

‘I take it it was good then.’

‘Understatement.’

‘Wow.’

‘Did you and Julian ever …?’

She shakes her head. ‘He wanted to, but … it never seemed like the right time, you know?’

‘It was like that with Dave. He was super keen to, but –’

‘I remember.’

I sigh. ‘Remember when that was the kind of thing we talked about? Not fairies and murder and tearing holes in the fabric of space and time?’

She looks over at me. ‘It’s never going to be like it was, is it?’

‘No,’ I say, with all the honesty of four in the morning. ‘Never.’