It’s pouring with icy rain as we stumble back through the Summer Door. ‘Come on!’ I yell, letting the door slam closed behind us. ‘We have to hurry!’

‘Hurry where?’ Phil yells, the torrential rain all but drowning her voice out. ‘Pearl, what’s going on?’

I’m already soaked, and my phone falls from my slippery fingers. I scrabble for it, dropping it twice more before I finally get my hands on it. ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Pick up pick up pick up!’

‘What’s happening?’ Phil says. ‘Pearl –’

‘Tam!’ I exclaim.

‘Tam’s trying to kill Finn?’ Cardy says.

‘Tam, pick up the damn phone!’ I scream.

It stops ringing. There’s silence.

‘Tam?’ I say.

More silence.

I jab at the volume button, turning it all the way up. ‘Tam, it’s Pearl. Are you there?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘I don’t care about that now!’ I say. ‘Holly’s out of commission, and I need someone that can find lost things. I need you to find –’

‘He found me,’ Emily says, her breath warm against my ear.

A sickening crack, like lightning.

It’s two weeks ago. I’m standing in a clearing in the fairy forest, looking at my best friend in the world, suspended from a tree branch.

It’s right now. I’m standing in the middle of the bush near the soccer oval, looking at my best friend in the world, suspended from a tree branch.

This time, it’s through her heart.

She looks down, an expression of surprise on her face. Blood bubbles from between her lips.

‘Phil!’ I scream.

‘Pearl,’ she chokes, and her head lolls forward.

I don’t know where I find the speed or the strength but I tear her down from the tree and oh God I shouldn’t have done that you’re not supposed to pull the object out when someone’s been stabbed and there’s blood everywhere, everywhere, so much blood. Cardy’s with me, kneeling by my side, and his hands are wet with blood and rain as he tries to stop the bleeding and my hands are wet with blood as I pound at her heart, trying to find every skerrick of Finn’s power within me, to pour it into her, tears and rain and blood filling my mouth as I will her to heal heal heal just open your eyes, please, Phil, just open your eyes. ‘You can’t die!’ I yell. ‘You can’t die!’

‘Pearl,’ Cardy says, ‘she’s gone, I’m sorry, she’s gone!’

‘No!’ I scream at him.

I wrench the iron ring off my hand and throw it away and dig deeper, trying to find everything that’s Finn’s, everything that’s mine, digging down into the place where the music lives. I reach down further, and there are hands covering mine, and don’t touch me, Cardy, don’t touch me! but it’s not Cardy, it’s not –

Phil comes awake with a gasp, curling immediately to the side as she coughs up blood. Tam lets go of my hands and stands immediately, getting out of the splash zone, but I won’t let go, not for the world. She vomits blood and blood and sea-green foam and more blood all over my lap and she chokes and chokes, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. ‘Pearl,’ she splutters. ‘Pearl –’

‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s okay. You’re alive.’

‘Pearl,’ she says, her voice cracking, her eyes wide, ‘what did you do?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘Just … shhh, all right? Cardy’s got you.’

She reaches for me, but I turn away. I stand.

Covered in Phil’s blood, more blood than even this sheeting rain could ever possibly wash away, I face the Silver Lady.

But she’s not looking at me. ‘I am owed a debt, and it is my right to claim my debt in blood,’ Emily snarls at Tam, kneeling before her. ‘Yet you would defy me?’

He bows his head and says nothing.

‘You ungrateful animal,’ she says, and slaps him so hard he flies a good three metres before he falls to the ground in a heap.

‘Ungrateful?’ I exclaim. ‘He saved you!’

She bares her teeth at me. ‘This is none of your concern, disappointment.’

‘I’m not the disappointment now,’ I say. ‘I’m the Valentine.’

She sneers at me. ‘You’re the Valentine’s pet, and it is nearly midnight. Then the magic will fade from your veins and all that he is will no longer be yours.’

‘Everything he is will always be mine,’ I say. ‘You might be written on his bones, but he’s mine.’

‘Such devotion,’ she says, a mocking note in her voice. ‘Just what I would expect from a pet.’

‘I’m not having this argument with you now, Emily,’ I say. ‘I need to save Finn.’

‘I would worry first about yourself,’ she says, stalking towards me.

I raise my chin. ‘I know you can’t kill me. I know you promised Finn –’

‘Oh, I promised,’ she says. ‘And I am a fairy, and we are creatures of rules.’

She’s close to me, so close to me now that I could reach out and slap her across her perfect face.

‘But it is still Misrule,’ she says, and her fingers close around my throat.

‘Silver Lady!’ Tam rasps. ‘Let her go!’

I fall to the ground, wheezing. My throat won’t open. She’s crushed my windpipe, crushed me, and I can’t speak or breathe and my knees make a horrible crunching sound when I fall and Silver Lady you will not lay a hand on her I forbid it I forbid you and someone’s making a noise like a dying animal and it’s me, me trying to breathe, and everything is black, the wall is black and the stones are slippery and the smell of the roses, the smell of the roses is …

But I am a girl filled up with sunshine. I am a girl with molten gold in her veins. I am a girl with bones of diamond, and I am not broken so easily.

Air fills my lungs. I gulp it down gratefully, like a person lost in a desert who’s just found an oasis.

I healed myself. She just crushed my windpipe with her bare hands and I healed myself.

‘You may only command me until Misrule is ended, darling boy,’ Emily is saying, a note as hard as steel in her voice. ‘And I promise you that your presumption will not go unpunished.’

‘I would expect no less.’

Tam levers himself to his feet, no worse for wear. I’m not the only one who is the Valentine right now.

I grope for my phone. 11:31 p.m.

‘I have served you loyally, Silver Lady,’ Tam says. ‘I have loved you.’

‘I have protected you, and treasured you,’ she says, ‘and this is how you repay me. You deny me what I am owed.’

‘I will not forgive myself,’ he says, ‘for what that is worth.’

‘Nothing. Your word is worth nothing to me, faithless pet.’

Tam has an infinite number of silences, and in the space of about three seconds, he goes through about seventy of them. Sadness. Anger. Confusion. Frustration. Resignation.

Then –

‘Pick up the iron ring,’ he says.

A change spreads across her face. ‘Darling boy – Tam –’

‘Pearl threw away her iron ring. Pick it up.’

‘Not all things are reversed on Misrule. Iron will still burn me.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘Pick it up. I command you.’

When Emily moves, she’s like a force of nature. She’s a cyclone, destroying everything in her path, violent, unstoppable, powerful.

But not this time. As she walks over to where my iron ring landed, her movements are rough, irregular. She lurches, as if someone had their hand in the small of her back and was pushing her along too fast for her to walk.

She looks human.

Her fingers stop, millimetres above the ring. ‘Tam,’ she says, her voice cracking, ‘please.’

‘Pick it up,’ he says, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Put it on.’

Emily does not have my talent for disobedience.

It doesn’t take long for the iron to take hold. There’s a sizzling sound, like a steak on a barbecue. She falls to her knees.

‘I will never forgive you,’ she croaks, and then slumps sideways.

I don’t waste any time. It’s 11.35 p.m., and I don’t have any of it to waste. ‘Cardy, hide Emily,’ I order.

‘I can’t leave Phil!’ he says. ‘She needs medical attention.’

‘I’m all right,’ Phil manages to say.

‘No, you’re not!’ Cardy says. ‘And what about Holly? We can’t just leave her either.’

‘I don’t care what you do, just hide Emily!’ I say. ‘The prince wants her, and he’s not winning. He’s not getting what he wants. Tam, I need your help. I need you to use your Emily powers and tell me where Finn is, and then I need you to do something else for me. Will you help me?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I will.’

On a normal day, it takes about ten minutes to drive from Haylesford to Derrigong. Eight, if there’s no traffic.

I make it in six. I’m pretty sure I saw two speed cameras and a red light camera flash as I went past, so I’m probably going to lose my licence, but I make it.

God, wouldn’t the prince kill himself laughing if I wrapped my car around a tree and died just as I’d figured it all out? That would be like me discovering the cure for cancer and then slipping on a banana peel into the pathway of a falling anvil.

My tyres crunch on the gravel, skidding as I pull into the nursery carpark. There’s a horrible acrid burning rubber smell, but I don’t have time to worry about it. I throw myself out of the car the second it’s stopped moving and sprint down the path to the greenhouse.

I can’t tell if the door’s locked or jammed or magically wedged closed but I wrench it open by sheer force – force I shouldn’t be capable of, like when frail old grannies find the superhuman strength to lift cars off trapped kittens.

Or when kittens find the power to bring people back from the dead.

It’s still cold outside, but it’s hot in the greenhouse, the glass steamed up. Plants coil around my ankles and wrists as I force my way through. ‘Get off!’ I snap, slapping at them.

Then there he is, lying alone on a bed of roses.

Perfectly beautiful. Perfectly still. Lifeless as a marble statue.

‘Finn,’ I whisper.

I run my knuckles down the side of his face, careful not to get scratched by the wicked thorns. Despite the hot, humid air, his skin is cool and dry. There’s the faintest shadow of a beard on his face, scratchy beneath my fingers. It makes him look older – like a man, not a boy.

‘Has he been here this whole time?’ I ask.

‘No,’ the prince replies from behind me.

‘How long?’

‘Since he proved to me that he could not be obedient.’

‘He was always going to be disobedient,’ I say. ‘You knew that.’

I don’t have to turn around to know that he’s grinning.

‘My brother,’ he says, ‘is not difficult to predict.’

‘What would you have done if I’d picked him?’ I say. ‘When you offered me the choice?’

‘You are not difficult to predict either. He would have chosen you, but you would never have chosen him.’

This time I do turn around. ‘Liar,’ I say, looking him directly in the eye.

‘That is the second time you have called me that,’ he says, ‘but I am yet to be forsworn.’

Something clenches, deep in the pit of my stomach.

‘Maybe I am easy to predict,’ I say. ‘And Finn definitely is. But so are you.’

He raises an eyebrow, the corners of his mouth quirking upwards in the smarmiest of smarmy smiles.

‘Were you surprised, when I worked out when Misrule was?’ I ask.

‘Pleasantly so.’

‘Having the wrong date planted in Tam’s mind was a real dick move.’

His lips press together.

‘It’s all right, you can laugh,’ I say. ‘If I’d rocked up to the Summer Door and tried to bash it open on Valentine’s Day, I would have earned being laughed at.’

‘But you didn’t, kitten,’ he says. ‘So I will not.’

That’s the closest he’s ever come to showing me respect, and it’s still dressed up with a cutesy little nickname.

That’s the last time he’s going to underestimate me.

‘If I hadn’t worked out the real date,’ I ask, ‘if I hadn’t found my way here tonight – how would you have come to me to ask me the question for the third time? You murdered Dave. God knows what you did to Julian. Would you have come yourself?’

‘They are not my only servants,’ he says. ‘Or did you forget?’

Oyster. He would have used Oyster.

Ugh. Of course he would.

I would have cracked. To stop my sister from having her head blown up, I would have gone with him.

And I would never have seen Finn again.

‘You are such a dick,’ I say. ‘Honestly. You are the worst person I have ever met in my entire life.’

He smiles, his perfect teeth brilliantly white.

‘I know, I know, you’re not a person,’ I say. ‘You’re a fairy prince, the most powerful dude in the universe and whatever.’

‘Except for today,’ he says. ‘Today, I am just a person. And today, I can do things that people can and that fairy princes cannot.’

My mouth goes dry.

‘Like break promises,’ I say.

‘Yes.’ There are a thousand threats in that single word.

Stand firm, Linford. Hold your ground. Sure, he’s planning on killing you, but you have a plan too.

Which will only work if Tam gets here in time.

I swallow.

The prince reaches out and rubs his thumb across my chin like I’m a little kid with chocolate on my face. ‘There is still a choice for you,’ he says softly. ‘The moment you stepped into this place you doomed yourself to death, but there is still a way out. I could ask you the question a third time. You could say yes.’

‘I’m easy to predict, remember?’ I say. ‘You know what I would say.’

‘I know, kitten,’ he says, rubbing his thumb across my chin again. ‘I know.’

He could do it now. He could yank my head off like he did to Helena and it would all be over.

I pull away and take out my phone. ‘It’s five minutes to midnight,’ I say. ‘Five minutes till Misrule ends. But I assume it’s not going to take you all that time to kill me.’

‘You have earned a quick death,’ he says. ‘It will be painless. I promise. For all that is worth today.’

‘Then we have four minutes to entertain ourselves,’ I say. ‘Will you answer a question for me? It’s been nagging at me for a while now, and I don’t want to die with unfinished business.’

He inclines his head. ‘This, too, you have earned.’

‘Are you trying to kill Finn because you’re worried the Seelie fairies will like him more than you, or are you working with the Unseelie?’

In that moment, I do something I’m not sure any other human has ever done before.

I render the Crown Prince speechless.

‘I can’t quite make up my mind which one it is,’ I say. ‘Part of me thinks this whole thing has been a huge con – that there’s never been any Unseelie fairies in Haylesford at all, and that all of it’s just been you pretending there has so you could kill Finn. I wondered whether Jenny and Kel were actually Seelie, and part of some, like, super-secret assassin squad. And that was why you killed Kel – you were afraid he’d say too much and I’d work it out and blab to the wrong people. Like Emily, maybe.’

He’s silent.

‘But then part of me is pretty sure you’ve changed teams,’ I go on. ‘That Unseelie fairy who pretended to be Julian – that’s been nagging at me for a while now. Then there was the thing where Ms Rao got possessed and actually used ice magic – that wouldn’t happen if there were no Unseelie fairies at all around, right?’

Still nothing.

‘I could go back and forth on this for a long time, but – well, we’re running out of time.’

‘Yes,’ he says softly. ‘You are.’

‘You know what, though?’ I say. ‘It doesn’t actually matter to me what the answer is. Maybe you’re working with the Unseelie, or maybe you’re just power-hungry and jealous that your baby brother might be more popular than you are. All that matters to me is that you’re trying to kill Finn, and I can’t let you.’

I want to look at my phone to reassure myself that there’s still time, but if I look away, he’ll kill me.

God, Tam, please. Of all the times to let me down, don’t let it be this one.

‘You cannot stop me,’ he says.

‘I did before,’ I say. ‘You were behind the Riders getting unleashed on Finn, right?’

He inclines his head. Behind him, there’s the slightest movement in the greenery.

‘I thought so,’ I say, keeping my eyes fixed on his face. ‘And look who came out on top there.’

‘You didn’t, kitten,’ he says. ‘The Riders would have granted the Valentine a quick death. Brutal, bloody, but quick. But when I lock the doors – when he is cut off from the Summerland forever – it will be slow. Painful.’

The movement comes again.

This is it.

‘Liar,’ I say, for the third time.

It’s not loud. I thought it might be loud – that it might make a sound like you hear on television, when someone gets punched in the face and you hear that sound that’s almost like an explosion – but it’s not loud at all.

The prince sways, looking down at the point of the knife that’s suddenly protruding from his chest.

And then there is a noise, as Mr Hunter grunts. More of the blade appears as he drives the knife in deeper.

‘I did come out on top,’ I say. ‘The Riders are mine.’

Then I’m running, sprinting to the bed of roses. ‘Tam!’ I yell. ‘Tam, help me!’

He’s there beside me, helping me lift Finn down off the thorns.

‘What took you so long?’ I demand. ‘All you had to do was heal Hunter and drive him here!’

‘You didn’t tell me about the police guard!’ he says. ‘I nearly got arrested again! We’re lucky that –’

‘You’re supposed to be the ninja king of violence and – just help me, okay!’

I put my hands on Finn’s chest. Tam presses his hands over mine.

I reach down deep inside myself, grasping desperately for the golden thread of Finn’s power.

I reach down from the top of the black wall, past the roses, reaching for his hands.

My fingers brush his fingers.

The golden thread slips through my fingers.

‘No!’ I yell, grabbing for it.

‘Pearl,’ Tam says quietly.

‘Wake up!’ I say, my voice a sob. ‘Finn, wake up!’

There’s a gurgling, bubbling sound. The prince is laughing at me.

‘Please!’ I cry. ‘Please, Finn. Please.’

‘Pearl,’ Tam says again, and shows me my phone.

12:00 a.m.

Misrule is over. I have no power any more. I’m too late.

I’m too late.

Another sob escapes me. ‘Finn, wake up, please!’

There are arms under my shoulders, lifting me away. ‘Come away, Pearl,’ Matilda – Matilda? – says. ‘There is nothing for you to do here.’

‘Finn!’ I scream.

‘Pearl, look at me,’ Tam says, grabbing my face between both his hands. ‘Listen. He’s strong. He’s powerful. If anyone can wake up on their own –’

‘No!’

I slap his hands away, wrench free of Matilda’s grasp. ‘No, no, no. Finn, wake up! Please!’

I lean over him. I press my lips to his.

And there it is in front of me.

I catch the golden thread.

I catch his hand in mine.

I hold on tight.