The next day is cold. Like, freakishly cold – turn your heaters on, get your jumpers down from the high shelf in the cupboard where you stuffed them when winter was over, do-you-think-it-could-snow-this-close-to-the-sea cold. Scrolling through Facebook on my phone, I see a post from someone’s mum that’s like, ‘COLDEST JANUARY DAY ON RECORD – and people think global warming is real, lol, wake up, sheeple,’ followed by, like, fifty people fighting with her in the comments.

I shouldn’t be scrolling through my phone. I should be sleeping. It’s January the fifth, which means that tonight at midnight, Misrule begins, and I either save Finn and my sister and Rhymer and the girl who isn’t Marie, or I get myself and my friends horribly murdered. Getting some rest seems like the least thing I can do to maximise my chances of doing the saving instead of the dying.

But I can’t even do that right. I wrap myself tight in my doona and close my eyes tight, but my mind is a whirlpool, going round and round and round – oh God, what if we get in but we can’t get out again, what if we end up trapped in fairyland forever? What if, what if, what if …

Waiting is worse than doing. I scroll through my phone, looking at all the photos I have of me and Finn together. There’s not that many – we weren’t together long enough for there to be many, not really – so I end up looking at the same ones, over and over again.

Him and me, sitting next to the pool at his place on the night he sent his parents and his brother away, the night he and I and Holly and Cardy drank our way through half a goon bag, the night he and I finally made it official. ‘Come on, give me your phone, we should take a selfie so the internet doesn’t think we’re joking,’ he said, and pulled me down beside him. It’s blurry and my eyes are half-closed because of the flash but you can’t really tell because I’m kissing his cheek, and he’s looking right at the camera and he looks so happy it makes me want to cry.

A picture I took when we were sitting on the floor, leaning back against my bed. We were supposed to be talking about serious things – like, literally life-and-death stuff, because we knew the Riders were coming, and we knew if we didn’t work out how to take them down then they were going to tear Finn apart – but everywhere his skin brushed against mine made me worry I was going to catch fire. We were holding hands, and eventually I was like, ‘sorry, I have to take a picture of this,’ and he was like, ‘of what?’ and I was like, ‘our hands, because you have no idea how much I love your arms,’ and he was like, ‘oh really?’ and I was like, ‘yes, hold still,’ and he listened long enough for me to actually take the picture, and then he put his mouth close to my ear and whispered, ‘I tried to think of some suggestive comment to make about my arms because I’d really like it if you would jump me right now, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound ridiculous,’ and I laughed and I laughed and then I did jump him, and it might have got a lot more serious than it did if Disey hadn’t come home, and after that I vowed to only discuss serious fairy business with him from a distance because I couldn’t concentrate when he was sitting there next to me.

One from the night before the Riders came, the one beautiful night before everything went completely to shit, the night we spent together. You can barely see his face in this one, because his hair came loose, a dark curtain spilling over his skin and mine. ‘You better not be putting this one on the internet, Linford,’ he said, his voice muffled against my shoulder.

‘That was exactly my plan,’ I said solemnly. ‘I want the world to know you finally succumbed to my attempts to seduce you.’

‘Newsflash, babe,’ he said, running his hand up my side and leaving goosebumps in its wake, ‘they already think you’ve seduced me. They saw that pic Julian posted.’

‘Maybe I want them to see that I wore you out.’

‘Oh, you didn’t wear me out.’

‘Would you like me to try?’

‘Linford, I would love you to try.’

So I shoved him onto his back and kissed my way down his body, and now there’s a lump in my throat, and how can I be crying again? How can I possibly be crying again?

‘Please hold on, Finn,’ I whisper, tracing my fingers across the dark sweep of his hair in the picture. ‘I’m coming for you. I promise. Just please hold on.’

I must manage to fall asleep at some point, because I’m woken at three in the afternoon by my phone ringing. ‘Hello?’ I answer blearily. ‘Holly?’

‘Misrule hasn’t even started yet and we’re already screwed,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘I just got a call from Finn’s mum,’ she says. ‘She’s in Queensland, and she’s frantic, and she wanted to call you, but she didn’t have your number, and –’

‘That’s not important. What happened?’

‘It’s Tam,’ she says. ‘He’s been arrested.’