What do you say to your probably-not-cousin when they punch someone in the face a bunch of times and then bodily throw them out of your house defending your honour?

‘I, uh – thank you,’ I settle for.

And you know what Tam says in reply? Nothing. All he does is grunt vaguely, flex the hand he punched Julian with a few times, walk past me like I’m not there, and close the guest bedroom door behind him.

Are you allowed to call someone rude if they just might have saved your life? Or do they get some kind of pass?

Just so you know, I text Phil the next morning, your boyfriend tried to suffocate me last night. Literally. He broke into my house, called me a bitch a bunch of times, and nearly killed me.

No response.

Julian’s not in school for the next few days. ‘Hey Phil, where’s the boyf?’ I hear Tillie ask her in English on Thursday.

‘Broke his nose,’ she replies. ‘Playing football. He’ll be back next week.’

I’m so furious that if someone had been like, ‘Hey Pearl, I know you have zero martial arts training, but how do you feel about punching through this enormous slab of concrete?’ I probably would have been able to do it. Is she serious?

There are only two options here. One is that she believed Julian over me. The other is that she believed me – she believed that Julian snuck into my house and tried to kill me – and she just doesn’t care.

There’s a third option, I realise later that night, stopping to shake out my hands in about the second hour of my Hunter-endorsed ragetastic songwriting sesh. He might have got to her phone before she saw the message. Deleted it.

I have to talk to her. I have to convince her to get away from him. But how the hell am I supposed to do that? She’s not going to listen to me. And I’m never going to be able to get Finn on board the Let’s Brainwash Phil! train a second time.

He’s not talking to me. Or I’m not talking to him. I’m not sure which way around the not-talking is going. Every day, I get the same message: Hey Linford – we need to talk. But we don’t talk. We barely even look at each other.

It doesn’t stop me having intensely dirty dreams about him, but it does stop me telling him about the Julian/Tam/ face-punch incident.

And it also stops me telling him about Emily stalking me.

It takes me a while to notice her. For all their razzle- dazzle-look-at-me-I-am-so-beautiful powers, fairies are surprisingly good at blending into a crowd.

Sometimes I don’t even see her. It’s just a breath in my ear, a laugh like wedding bells, funeral bells, no words, just letting me know she’s there. Occasionally she speaks, and her voice brushes over my skin like the gentlest summer breeze. ‘You will serve us in the end, disappointment.’

Sometimes I do see her. Walking through Haylesford to Disey’s office one afternoon, I can see her in step with me out of the corner of my eye, mirroring me, matching me. The instant I stop to confront her, yell at her, do something, anything, she vanishes, but when I start walking again, there she is, shadowing my every move.

And then once she just straight up appears to me, in her full glory. It’s at lunch one day, and I’m sitting under a tree, watching Holly cross the oval and wondering if I should have yet another go at talking to her when suddenly she is walking towards me. I think something has finally gone right and I’m going to be able to work some stuff out, and she’s closer and closer and closer and then suddenly it’s like the sunlight hits her in just the right way and Holly melts away and there she is.

‘You are running out of time, disappointment,’ Emily says.

‘Don’t call me that,’ I reply, resisting the urge to shade my eyes from her dazzling beauty, to look away.

‘When summer meets its zenith, he will return to us. He will walk through the Summer Door and he will never leave.’

‘If you’re so sure, why do you even need me?’ I ask. ‘And why are you so desperate? You’re immortal. It’s not like a few decades here or there is going to make any demonstrable difference in the long run.’

She leans close. How can anyone be so beautiful while wearing a Haylesford High school uniform? Where did she get the uniform? Is it one of Holly’s, or do the fairies have, like, a dress-up bin somewhere for when they need to go undercover?

‘I think I’ll start with your sister,’ she tells me. ‘Paradise, is it? She would fight and fight and fight, and still I would break her.’

‘If you come anywhere near my sister, I’ll –’

‘And then your brother,’ she goes on, as if I hadn’t said a word. ‘He will think he is broken without her, but that is nothing to the ways in which I would break him.’

I want to open my mouth and spew hot lava on her perfect face.

‘The Seelie made a promise, and so I cannot kill you, disappointment,’ she tells me. ‘But the Valentine must return when the door opens on the summer solstice. The Crown Prince has decreed it. And so I will break every person you know until he agrees to leave with me. I will raze this town until all that is left is you and he, and if he still does not come, I will not stop.’

Oh God, wouldn’t the Killer Girl Pearl squad have a field day with that one? I can practically see the articles now. Whole town killed: Pearl Linford = most ambitious murderer ever?

‘Whether or not he chooses to bring you with him is of no consequence,’ she says dismissively, and I blink, and she is gone.

In maths that afternoon, I’m half trying to think of ways to make literally every person in town wear iron and become an amazing anti-fairy ninja warrior, and half designing the magical castle in the clouds Finn and I will share when we inevitably have to move to fairyland, when a note lands on my desk, old-school paper-aeroplane style.

I look up. Cardy catches my eye. ‘Open it,’ he mouths.

The Riders are coming, ironheart, it reads, in beautiful flowing cursive that’s almost calligraphy and definitely not Cardy’s neat printed handwriting.

Great. Just great. More death threats. Just what I needed in my day.

Though . . . is that a death threat? All he’s saying is that these Riders are coming. I mean, sure, he did tell me that the Riders were coming to kill the Valentine, but on the scale of death threats, that’s pretty mild, compared to this whole ‘I will burn your town and salt the earth’ business the Seelie are throwing around. And the Unseelie don’t exactly strike me as moderate.

Under my desk, I try googling ‘ironheart’ on my phone, hoping that it’s got a few more specific results than ‘Riders’, but unsurprisingly, this Hail Mary turns up nothing. Nothing relevant, anyway. I somehow doubt that the Unseelie have given me a nickname that’s a reference to a brand of jeans or a martial arts movie from 1992 or a comic book character.

I’ll give them this, though: I’d much rather them call me ‘ironheart’ than ‘disappointment’.

I’m just about to put my phone back in my bag when it buzzes. It’s a text from Disey. Can u swing by the office after school, pick up my car, and then go get Tam after work? I have a thing.

I raise my eyebrows. This is the third ‘thing’ Disey’s had this week.

Sure, I send back. If Tam is trapped in a car with me, he has to talk to me, right? And maybe then I can make some progress on that ‘I’m almost positive you’re not my cousin but I have no idea what your actual deal is’ problem of mine.

Though . . . I’ve been wearing these iron rings for a while now and those memories of him, those memories of the mud kid, are still so clear in my mind. Is there any possibility that he really is my cousin?

No. Surely not. If a random stunt double of your fairy not-boyfriend turns up in your house, then you can’t not be suspicious, right? Even if they punch the actual boyfriend of your ex-best-friend right in the face and basically save your life.

Also, he’s apprenticing in a nursery, so he’s apparently good with plants. Neither Disey nor I have a particularly green thumb and Shad can kill pot plants just by looking at them, so I think it’s fair to say that if Tam really is our cousin, that proclivity of his does not come from the Linford side. Our mother was much too interested in herself to ever bother with things like flowers.

The nursery where he works is over in Derrigong, the next town over. Gravel crunches under the tyres of the car as I pull in to the carpark – a carpark which is fairly deserted, BTW, so I don’t think this is a place that’s really doing a roaring trade. I look around for Tam, but a) I’m not exactly a regular, so I don’t know my way around, and b) I can’t see him anywhere, so I ask at the cash register. Tam’s so monosyllabic and mysterious that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the dude had stared at me blankly and been all like, ‘Tam? There’s no one called Tam that works here,’ but he just gives me a bored look and says, ‘greenhouse.’

‘Thanks. Where’s that?’

He gives me directions. ‘Are you the girlfriend?’ he asks, smirking.

‘No,’ I reply emphatically.

The greenhouse is tucked away right down the back of the nursery, behind a whole bunch of birdbaths. The door’s closed but I try the handle and it’s not locked, so I go right in.

‘. . . acting of his own accord,’ I hear Tam say.

Wow. That sounded like it was the end of an actual sentence. Who knew he could put them together?

‘But can you be sure?’

Oh hell. Oh balls. Oh creative-string-of-swearwords. I know that voice.

It’s tropical and muggy in here, and it feels like the plants are closing in on me. I want to lash out wildly, to beat them back with the iron on my hands, but that might only make them angry.

I force myself to calm down, to regulate my breathing like Mr Hunter taught me when I first started taking singing and music lessons, and to listen.

‘She was wearing iron,’ Tam says. ‘He was unaffected.’

‘I don’t think he’s particularly stable,’ Holly interjects. ‘He’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that Pearl and Finn are murderers.’

‘This happens sometimes,’ Emily says. ‘The minds of mortals crumble under the weight of serving us.’

‘So Julian’s crazy and it’s your fault?’

There is a sudden gasping sound, followed by a scrabbling and scratching. I peer through the leaves, and Holly is on the ground, clutching at her throat, clawing at the ground.

‘If you will dare speak so to me, then you deserve no voice,’ Emily says. ‘Besides, he is of no consequence. The Valentine must be our only priority. He will return to the Summerland when the Crown Prince opens the door on the summer solstice and take up his place beside his brother.’

‘Not if I have anything to say about it,’ I say.

It’s such a stupid thing to say. It’s a ridiculous, blonde-chick-in-a-horror-movie-who-will-inevitably-be-stabbed-to-death-in-a-murder-house thing to say. Who says this kind of thing to the super powerful fairy who’s threatened to kill their family?

But it’s out of my mouth before I can think about it, and I’m not going to lie: it gives me a weird kind of high.

Tam is in front of Emily before I can even force my way through the sticky plants to their little patch of clear space. ‘You should not be here,’ he says.

‘You know where you shouldn’t be, arsehole? My house. Because you are not my cousin.’

He just glares at me in response.

The mud kid. This is the mud kid. I can see him in my mind, smearing mud on my white dress.

This is the impostor dick who has been living in my house.

‘These memories,’ I say. ‘I want them out of my mind. You’re not my cousin, and I refuse to go around thinking you are.’

I can barely see Emily behind the wall of Tam’s body, but I know exactly what expression she has on her face. ‘What will you trade for them?’ she says.

‘Yeah, like I’m stupid enough to fall for that one,’ I say. ‘I read. I know not to make bargains with fairies.’

Behind me, still on the ground, I can hear Holly-Anne choking.

‘Let her go,’ I say.

‘You have just said you will make no bargains with me, disappointment.’

‘You really think you’re going to get Finn on side if you choke his ex to death?’

‘She questioned me,’ Emily says, ‘and she must be punished.’

She moves out from behind Tam, and suddenly I’m on the ground at her feet, grovelling in the dirt, because she is so bright, so glorious, starlight incarnate, and I can’t look at her. Then she kicks me, her foot in my ribs, and I go flying, hitting a plastic water barrel with a sickening crunch. ‘Those that cross me are always punished,’ she says.

‘The Seelie swore to protect me,’ I say, but it comes out as more of a wheeze than anything else.

Her only response is to laugh, a laugh which echoes off the glass walls of the greenhouse, and it’s like I’m trapped in a box where all I can hear is her laugh, over and over again. ‘Summon the Valentine,’ she tells Holly. ‘Bring him here. He must see what will happen if he continues to defy his brother’s wishes.’

I clutch my side as Holly, still choking, obediently pulls out her phone and starts texting. How do you know if you have broken ribs?

Tam does nothing, just stands there, arms folded. I guess his hero act was a one-time-only kind of deal.

I’m not sure how long it takes for Finn to arrive. I know it only takes about ten minutes to drive from Haylesford to Derrigong, but it feels like hours that I lie there on the ground, every breath agony, unable to look at the shining presence that is Emily but not really able to look away either.

Maybe it’s minutes, or hours, or days, but it’s long enough for me to make up my mind that I am not going down like this: small, weak, pathetic.

The whole building shakes as Finn storms in, slamming the door behind him. ‘What did you do?’ he demands.

I see him look from me to Holly to me again, clearly torn about which one of us he needs to swoop in and save damsel-in-distress style first. Pick her, I will him. Her.

‘Valentine,’ Emily says, a note of something in her voice that is golden, warm, like the sand on the beach on a hot day.

‘Don’t Valentine me,’ Finn says. ‘I told you, Emily. I told you so many times. I told you that this was between you and me and that you needed to leave – and who are you?’

‘This is my pet,’ Emily says, reaching up and stroking Tam’s hair as if he were a dog. ‘My darling boy. It will hurt me to leave him when we go, but –’

‘I’m not going anywhere with you,’ Finn says.

‘You promised, Valentine. You promised us a year and a day. And your brother the prince requires you to return home now.’

Slowly, doing my best not to make any noise, wincing at the pain in my side, I lever myself to my feet.

I see Finn’s eyes flicker to me, and I press my finger to my lips.

‘I know I promised you a year and a day, and I will keep that promise,’ he says. ‘But not now. I don’t care what my brother says. Not yet. We have forever to work this out, Emily.’

One step, quietly, quietly.

A second.

‘You are needed,’ she tells him. ‘Your brother needs you. And the Unseelie –’

I take one more step, shove Tam in the small of the back, sending him stumbling, and then I grab Emily by the neck and hold on.

She screams – not an ordinary scream, but one from a horror movie, high and shrill and agonising, like a dying bird or a velociraptor or something. Suddenly I’m not just squeezing my fingers into her neck as hard as I can, but it’s like my fingers are going through her neck, and –

Thud.

Something else crunches horribly as I cannon into something – a table of seedlings, it turns out, because the force at which Tam throws me at it knocks it over and I’m lying, half-dazed, in a puddle of water and dirt and plants. He’s marching towards me with a purposeful look in his eyes and Emily is screaming and Holly is choking and now Tam is reaching for me but then Finn plows into him, shoulder first, and they crash into the side of the greenhouse.

Something cracks. The wall? Another one of my ribs? I don’t know. The world swims and goes black.

‘– oh thank God.’

The words come out of him in a rush as the world crashes back into me with a rush. ‘Finn,’ I say. ‘Finn.’

‘It’s me, Linford, it’s okay – no, don’t touch me, you’re still wearing your rings.’

He’s holding me across his lap, my body cushioned against his legs, his arm under my head. I struggle up, making sure to keep my fingers clear of his skin.

Someone offers me a hand. Of all people, it’s Holly-Anne.

‘Are you all right?’ I say, accepting it.

I brace myself for the crunch of my ribs when she hauls me up, but there’s nothing. I feel fine – better than fine, full of energy, adrenaline, like I could run a quick marathon and then cool down with a sneaky triathlon.

I flex my fingers. They feel fine. Perfect, even.

Finn. Of course.

Finn. Again.

‘Yeah,’ Holly says. ‘When you – when she went down, it stopped. The thing she was doing to me.’

I follow her gaze over to where Tam sits, the unconscious body of Emily cradled against him.

This is not the Emily I saw in the bush, nor is it the Emily who threatened to drown Phil, nor is it the Emily that threatened me at school. This is not a terrifying magical fairy force of nature.

This Emily is burned almost beyond recognition, blackened and scorched and bleeding, only recognisable by her long red hair.

Because of me. I did that.

I don’t feel guilty. Should I feel guilty?

‘You will pay for this,’ Tam says to me. His tone is cool, calm, even, but I know he means it.

‘She deserved it,’ I say. ‘She threatened my family. She threatened my friends. And I’m not going to sit down and take that.’

‘Do you care about him?’ Tam says, gesturing to Finn with his head. ‘She was trying to save his life.’

‘Because the Unseelie are coming,’ Finn says, folding his arms. ‘I know. Pearl told me. But I can deal –’

‘They are coming to start a war,’ Tam says, his voice icy. ‘And they will gladly make this town the battleground. They will destroy everything and everyone and still they will seek to destroy more –’

‘Funny, that’s just what Emily said she would do,’ I interrupt.

‘– and they will do it all to kill you, Valentine,’ he goes on, like I haven’t even said anything. ‘Are you really so selfish that you would risk the lives of all so you can, what? Surf?’

Finn just shakes his head. ‘Screw you, man.’

‘You will heal the Silver Lady,’ Tam says. ‘And you will go with her to the Summerland on the solstice when the Crown Prince opens the Summer Door. Bring your disappointment with you or not – it does not matter – but you will come.’

‘Or what?’ Finn says. ‘Else?’

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Tam smile before, but I’ll tell you this much: I don’t like it. It’s a slow smile, a predator’s smile, like a shark or a crocodile. ‘There is nothing that would give me more pleasure than to watch them kill you,’ he says.

‘Who even are you?’ Finn demands.

Isn’t that the million dollar question?

Alike. They look so much alike. But iron has no effect on Tam, so he’s a) a human, and b) not a zombie slave, so –

Oh no.

I feel like I’ve just won the most epic game of Tetris ever and then been punched in the stomach. No. No. It’s too awful. That can’t be true. It’s too much.

‘He’s you,’ I say. ‘The reason he looks like you is that he is you.’

‘What?’ Finn says.

‘Finn, you’re a changeling.’ The world is spinning, tilting crazily, and maybe Finn didn’t manage to heal me all the way or maybe I’m about to pass out from shock. ‘Think about what that means. You weren’t just dumped into a house where they went, “oh look, a baby, we weren’t expecting that, how exciting”, you were –’

‘– swapped,’ he finishes.

There is horror in his eyes, and I know it mirrors the horror in my mind. The world is roaring in my ears.

We both turn to look at Tam. His face is hard, unreadable. ‘How’s my family?’ he says to Finn. His voice stabs, a knife. ‘I hear you know them.’