‘Iron poisoning,’ Disey says, shaking her head. ‘Damn it, Pearlie, how did you get iron poisoning?’

There are no answers I can think of which aren’t a lie, so I don’t say anything.

‘You scared us half to death,’ Shad says.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t you be sorry, Miss Pearlie,’ Helena says, reaching over and trying to fluff up the pillow on my hospital bed and nearly punching me in the face instead. ‘You just focus on getting better.’

There’s a screech as Disey pushes back her plastic hospital chair and starts pacing.

‘Dise, I’m all right,’ I say. ‘I’ll be fine. Didn’t they say they’d let me out tomorrow?’

‘Iron poisoning,’ she says. ‘You know what that can give you? Liver failure. It can put you into a coma. Another coma. Or you could die.’

‘It was mild iron poisoning,’ I say. ‘Emphasis on the mild.’

‘Coma,’ she says, half-laughing, half-shaking her head.

‘That’s just what I need. Another coma.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

‘Dise,’ Shad says in a warning tone.

‘You’re not working in that iron shop any more,’ Disey says.

‘I’m not quitting my job!’

‘Pearlie, you have iron poisoning!’

‘You can’t get iron poisoning from external overexposure to iron,’ Helena says. ‘It has to be ingested.’

‘Oh, what, and you’re the international expert on iron poisoning?’

‘Dise.’ Shad again.

‘I’m right,’ Helena insists. ‘I know this. Iron poisoning has never been associated with iron mining or anything like that. It’s always iron tablets.’

‘Have you been taking iron tablets, Pearlie?’ Shad asks.

Ugh. Ugggghhhhhhhh. Remind me to ask Finn the best ways to negotiate yes/no questions.

‘A few.’

‘A few?’ Disey says. ‘How many is a few?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Enough to poison yourself with!’

‘Dise,’ Shad says, ‘take a walk.’

‘I am not leaving, and you know that, Shadow Linford.’

‘I’m fine, Disey! What do I have to say to convince you that I’m fine?’

‘You have to not be in the hospital with iron poisoning!’ she says. ‘You have to not be sneaking down to the creek at night to fight cannibal teenage murderers. You have to not be playing piano so much that you break your fingers. You have to not have your half-naked photograph plastered all over the internet –’

‘Outside. Now,’ Shad says, and bundles Disey out the door.

I bury my head in my hands and groan.

‘It’s all right, Miss Pearlie,’ Helena says. ‘She’s just worried about you. She’ll calm down.’

‘Have you met Disey? No, she won’t. Not ever.’

‘Trust me – having Disey Linford angry at you is survivable. I should know.’

‘Helena.’

‘Yes?’

‘How did you know that about the iron poisoning? How you couldn’t get it from iron mining or whatever?’

She starts twisting her engagement ring round and round on her finger. ‘Maybe – I – well, maybe Matilda told me.’

‘And how do you know Matilda?’ I press. ‘Like, how did you meet?’

She stops fidgeting, looks me dead in the eye. ‘I met Matilda when I was eighteen and I was new and alone in this town,’ she says. ‘She helped me. That’s what she does. She helps people.’

The words ‘what are you trying to tell me?’ are on the tip of my tongue, but in my ears I can hear Cardy’s voice, not-Cardy’s voice, whispering we walk among you, so I bite them back.

‘She’ll help you too, Miss Pearlie,’ Helena says. ‘She’ll help you, if you let her.’

The nurse comes bustling in before I can ask any more questions.

It doesn’t stop me thinking about it, though. I know there’s something . . . not right about Helena. I’ve always known. Hell, I suspected that she was the one that killed and ate Marie for like three seconds. Sure, I was wrong, but that doesn’t make all the things that made me think she was an Unseelie killer go away.

She knows about iron. Like, a lot about iron. She’s mates – long-term mates – with the town’s iron queen. And I’m ninety-nine per cent sure she doesn’t lie.

The lying thing says fairy. But the iron thing says . . . what, exactly?

Could it say Rider? They’re fairy-killers, right?

I study Helena across the room as the nurse takes my blood pressure. Can I really see her belonging to a club whose number-one attributes are ‘blood and terror and fury’?

Shad comes back in a few minutes later. ‘Disey?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘I sent her out with her new girlfriend to calm down.’

I nod.

‘You did know she was seeing someone, right?’

‘The getting dressed up late at night? The coming home in yesterday’s clothes? I worked it out. This isn’t my first rodeo. Who is it?’

‘No idea. You know how she is. She’ll tell us when she’s ready.’

Then he sighs. ‘You know she loves you, right? She’s just loving you, very loudly and aggressively, right in your face.’

‘You don’t have to explain Disey to me. I know how she operates.’

‘She’s not even angry at you. She’s –’

‘Shad. Not my first rodeo.’

He deflates. ‘Sorry, kiddo. It’s just . . . are you doing all right? Really?’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘I know about the picture. The school called us.’

I turn my head away.

He sighs again. ‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but . . . we’re here, all right? We’re always here, me and Dise. I’m going to stay here with you tonight, and –’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Shad, please don’t.’

‘Pearlie –’

‘I just want to be by myself.’

He wavers for a moment, then breaks. ‘I’ll be working all night, so if you want me to come back, you just call, okay?’ he says, leaning over and kissing me on the forehead. ‘And I’ll be back tomorrow morning to pick you up and take you home.’

I nod.

‘Bye, Miss Pearlie!’ Helena says. ‘Feel better, all right! And lay off those iron tablets.’

Is that the ‘lay off those iron tablets’ of ‘hey, I don’t want you to get cirrhosis’ or ‘hey, I want your system less full of iron so it doesn’t burn my mouth when I eat your heart’?

Blood and terror and fury. None of that seems remotely like Helena.

But it’s not like the Riders would gallivant around with a giant ‘I am a fairy assassin and I am sooooooo mad all the time and also I like to eat hearts’ button pinned to their jackets (or, in Helena’s case, their quirky librarian cardigans).

My phone buzzes. It’s a text from Finn. ur in hospital?! I’m coming now.

Don’t, I send back. I’m okay. No need to worry.

I can heal u!

It’ll look weird if I’m suddenly 100% better. Suspicious. Pls don’t come.

He sends back just one word. Linford.

I can practically see him in my mind, sitting in his room, running his hand exasperatedly through his hair, strands falling down around his face. Something grips my stomach hard, like a cramp. I want to see him so badly it hurts.

Soon okay? I send. We’ll talk soon, I promise.

He doesn’t reply.

I don’t sleep deep enough that night to dream, but his face flits in and out of my mind as I doze fitfully. His face, his fingers, his voice, the way the sun always seems to catch his hair, no matter where he’s standing. The hospital buzzes quietly around me, nurses bustling to and fro, the sound of wheels in the corridor, the distant sound of beeping, lots of beeping, all in different rhythms, a discordant symphony of beeping, utterly unmusical.

I see him sitting in the music room, the guitar in his hands, picking out the notes of the song I could never catch, the song I still can’t catch, the notes vanishing from my mind the second the guitar strings stop vibrating. I hear the song and yet I don’t hear the song, I hear the beeping of the hospital and yet I also hear his voice – Hey Linford – words written, not spoken, but felt like they were spoken, I hear the distant chatter of nurses and the wheezing beside my bed but I feel his fingers on my skin, the way they felt the day he lifted me onto the piano, and –

Wheezing.

I jolt awake with a start, like they do in Grey’s Anatomy or whatever when they stab the person right in the heart with the giant adrenaline needle. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘At any moment, we can reach out and take anyone,’ Dave wheezes.

He looks grotesque. The oxygen mask is still strapped to his face, but I don’t think it’s connected to anything – the wires or tubes or whatever they are hang loose. So do the tubes for his IV, even though the needle is still stuck in his hand. A few drops of blood drip, drip, drip down his fingers.

The last time I saw Dave, it was like he’d shrunk to half his size. Now it’s like he’s shrunk another half again, a skinny, haggard zombie.

‘Anyone,’ he says, the word cracked, almost indistinguishable behind the mask.

He leans in, and I’m scrambling away from him before my brain even registers I’m doing it. ‘You can garland as many people as you like with iron, but there will always be more for me to take.’

Jesus Christ. Like Dave hasn’t been through enough. First he gets zombified by the Seelie so often he develops this hardcore form of pneumonia which is probably going to kill him, and now the Unseelie have to get in on the action as well?

‘There’s no escape from us,’ he says. ‘We can take anyone. We will kill anyone.’

‘So kill me,’ I say. ‘You’ve tried once. Stop pussyfooting around with all the threats and just do it.’

‘Oh no.’ I see the flash of teeth behind the oxygen mask, bared in a smile. ‘You will live. They will all die, and you will live to see them die.’

‘Unless I kill Finn, right? That’s the deal? I can save everyone if I kill Finn?’

He’s definitely smiling now, that same grinning skull smile Cardy once wore. ‘Ironheart.’

‘David!’ a nurse exclaims from the door, aghast. ‘David, what on earth are you doing out of bed?’

I see the moment the Unseelie fairy lets him go. There’s a spark in his eyes, a nothing which is still something, but then there’s just nothing, nothing, nothing, and he slumps to the floor.

There’s so little left of him that the plastic of the oxygen mask on the linoleum makes a louder sound than his body does.

I go to visit Dave the next morning. Shad’s pretty eager to hustle me out of there – I can hear the echo of Disey behind his urgency – but I insist. ‘Just five minutes,’ Shad warns me, and then goes to pull the car around.

I wish I could say Dave was resting peacefully, but even though he’s lying still on the hospital bed, I know he’s not. There’s a muscle twitch in his jaw, and although his eyes are closed, I can see them jumping behind his eyelids. The fingers of his left hand are curling and uncurling over and over again, as if he’s trying to grasp something but he can’t quite manage it.

I look down at my iron ring. If I really was kind and compassionate and like, loving and stuff, I would give it to him. The Unseelie fairies might be able to reach out and take anyone, but I could give Dave my ring, stop them taking him.

I used to kiss this boy. Surely I should be able to make a sacrifice for him.

‘I’ll come back soon,’ I promise him. ‘With iron. I’ll keep you safe.’

His fingers keep curling and uncurling, grasping at nothing.

‘He had a rough night,’ a nurse says, suddenly appearing beside me. ‘Are you all right, love? He must have given you quite a scare.’

I nod, not entirely sure which thing I’m nodding at. ‘I know he used to sleepwalk a lot, but I didn’t think he did it any more.’

‘You know David?’

‘He’s my ex-boyfriend,’ I say. ‘I’ve been meaning to come and visit more, but . . .’ I shrug helplessly.

‘It’s tough seeing them like this,’ she replies sympathetically.

Her face clicks in my mind. ‘You’re Cardy’s mum, right? James, I mean?’

‘That’s my boy,’ she says. ‘And we’re all – his father, his sisters, his grandparents, his aunties and uncles – very grateful to you for saving his life, Pearl.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ I say. ‘Please don’t thank me. Finn, maybe, but –’

‘You were brave.’

I don’t know what to say to that. Dave keeps wheezing. The machines in his room keep beeping. The beeps are louder than his breath, much louder, and they fall into a horrible syncopated pattern. Beep. Wheeze. Beep. Wheeze.

‘I have to go,’ I say, ‘but thank Cardy – James – for me, would you? I know he brought me in after I fainted.’

‘Thank him yourself. You’ll be back at school in a day or two. You’ll see him soon.’

‘Please.’

She nods. ‘I’ll thank him for you.’

‘And can you –’ I hesitate. ‘Can you tell him that the things I said? In the cafe? Can you remind him they’re important?’

She looks at me a bit strangely, but she nods again. ‘I’ll tell him.’

It’s a wuss move, I know. I’m seventeen in the modern world. There are a thousand ways I could contact Cardy. But – maybe it’s the iron poisoning, maybe I’m just a coward – I don’t think I can handle any questions right now.

Not that even at one-hundred-per-cent full-functioning brain-and-body power I could really think up a way to spin ‘wear this necklace every second of every day otherwise an evil fairy might reach out and turn you into their own personal zombie slave’ that doesn’t sound ridiculous.

‘Give them to me,’ Disey says when I’m back home.

‘Give what to you?’

‘What do you think? The iron tablets.’

I fish a bottle out of my bedside table and then another one out of my schoolbag and hand them to her.

‘That’s all of them?’ she demands.

‘You sound like I’m addicted to hard drugs or something and you want me to hand over my stash,’ I say. ‘That’s it. I swear.’

She fixes me with a steely glare.

‘God, Disey, I’m not lying to you.’

She shakes her head and makes a noise that sounds like disgust.

‘I don’t lie to you,’ I say hotly. ‘Ever. And I’m not lying about this.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Then while you’re busy not lying to me, you can tell me this. Were you safe?’

‘What do you mean, was I safe? Obviously I miscalculated a bit with the iron pills, but –’

‘With Finn. Were you safe?’

What – oh God. She’s talking about the Piano Incident.

Please kill me.

‘I’m fine,’ I say, confident that my face is the colour of an overripe tomato. ‘You don’t need to worry.’

‘Pearlie, this isn’t a lecture. I’m not going to lecture you on sex. Ever. You can make your own decisions about your body. Plus, considering what I got up to when I was your age, it’d be super hypocritical of me to start laying down laws with you. But I need you to answer the question.’

‘Yes!’ I say. ‘Seriously, Dise, you don’t need to worry. We didn’t – nothing happened.’

Although if Julian hadn’t walked in . . .

‘Okay,’ Disey says. ‘But if it does, you make sure you’re safe, all right?’

I nod.

‘And if you need anything, you can come to me – no judgments, no questions asked unless you want me to ask them, all right?’

I nod again.

‘All right. Awkward but necessary conversation concluded.’

Thank God.

‘I’m going to work,’ she says. ‘But Shad’s here. And he’s watching you. No iron pills.’

This is a bit of an overstatement, considering it’s basically the middle of the night for Shad right now, but somehow I don’t think saying this will help.

Being stuck at home is giving me horrible flashbacks to what it was like when I was recovering from my coma, so I force myself to keep busy. I do a whole bunch of schoolwork, and then I spend a good few hours trying to google the Riders.

And yet again, this turns up nothing. Ugh. Fairies need to come up with more unique names for their horrifying murder monsters. Or at least more discoverable ones. Maybe they need to work with someone on their SEO.

Or maybe they already have, and that’s why I can’t find anything: it’s all hidden. You can find fairytales galore, but the real deal, the real stuff? That’s buried.

Maybe I need to get better with, like, hacking. I should ask Shad about the DeepNet or the DarkNet or whatever it’s called.

Wait. No. I worked out Kel was a kelpie from Wikipedia. By accident. There is no fairy conspiracy here.

Well, I mean, there is a fairy conspiracy, but uuuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhh why won’t my brain find something useful to be neurotic about?

I force myself to think about something new for a while, but it turns out ‘brainstorming what song to play for Cardy’s fundraiser next week’ is not the most effective distraction strategy in the world.

I have to work out what the deal with these Riders is. They must have an Achilles heel. Even the powers of fairies have limitations, and Tam said the Riders were human. There must be a weakness. If I want to have any chance of stopping the blood and terror and fury that’s about to rain down on our heads, I have to work out what it is.

When Tam gets home just after five, I’m waiting for him.

If I came home and someone was sitting on my bed ominously and threateningly, I would be pretty pissed off about it, but Tam barely spares me a second glance. ‘I’m dirty,’ is all he says, pulling his nursery uniform shirt off over his head.

I guess ‘ominous and threatening’ is a little hard to pull off when the dude you’re trying to ominously threaten is over six foot tall and ripped AF, and when you’re still a little shaky on your feet from accidentally poisoning yourself.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I say. ‘About – can you stop getting undressed, please?’

His fingers pause on his belt buckle. ‘Hurry up, then.’

‘What, have you got a hot date?’

He says nothing.

Ugh. He probably has to go and, like, wreathe Emily’s body in wildflowers or something. Tell tender stories to her of how empty his life is without her. Weep endless tears into a patch of soil, and then a sapling will grow from that soil, and it’ll turn into a mighty tree that commemorates his love for her.

‘This would all be solved if you just got a phone, you know,’ I say. ‘Just think: you could text your replies to me and we could have these conversations without you ever having to see my face. Plus, you could discover the pleasures of ignoring my messages. You’d like that.’

‘There’d be no point,’ he says, shaking out his dirty shirt and folding it neatly. ‘I can’t read.’

I have heard some pretty shocking things over the last few months. I mean, one of my friends died, I was asked to respond to allegations that I killed her on national TV, my best friend in the whole world told me I was an awful person and she never wanted to see me again, my childhood nemesis admitted he was into me, and, oh yeah, I discovered fairies were real.

They were all pretty shocking, but this? This kind of knocks me for six.

‘I’m sorry, what?’ I say. ‘You can’t read?’

‘It was not considered important for me to learn.’

That’s it. Finn and I are moving to fairyland. It’s on. It’s happening. Purely so I can reform the clearly lacking fairy education system.

‘What was considered important for you to learn?’

‘My duty was – has always been – to the Silver Lady. I learned what I needed to protect her.’

‘The subtext of that is “I am a trained ninja assassin who knows fifty ways to kill you with my pinkie”, right?’

He says nothing.

Subtext was probably the wrong word. I mean, 1) there wasn’t much ‘sub’ about this, it was basically text, and 2) the chances of him knowing what subtext is are minimal when he can’t read.

‘How do you work?’ I say. ‘At work, I mean? At the nursery? How do you function without knowing how to read?’

‘I know the names of plants,’ he says. ‘I know how to nurture them.’

‘But what about, like, the cash register and stuff?’

‘Holly-Anne taught me numbers,’ he replies. ‘And I watch what other people do. I copy. I mimic.’

‘God,’ I say. ‘Jesus freaking Christ, Tam. You need to learn how to read.’

‘Is this what you came to harangue me about?’

‘No, but – Tam, I know we haven’t got along particularly well, but I am going to teach you to read. I promise.’

‘If I have need of your services, I will call on them,’ he says coolly, folding his arms. ‘What do you want?’

Right. Mission. Planning. Those things.

They didn’t teach him to read.

Those fairy arseholes.

‘I want to pick your brain,’ I say. ‘You know about the Riders, right? Or did they not bother to teach you that either?’

‘I do not know all that there is to know.’

‘But you know some stuff, right? I know basically no stuff. And I need to know stuff.’

‘You know the most important thing,’ Tam says. ‘They cannot be resisted. They cannot be stood against. They are blood and terror and fury.’

‘Yes, I got that. Trust me, I got that. But I need to know more.’

He gives me that judgy look of his which says so clearly, without saying anything at all, ‘You are an enormous moron and I dislike you more than anyone I have ever met in my entire life’.

‘They want to eat my heart, Tam,’ I say. ‘Surely I deserve to know who it is that wants to literally eat me.’

He closes his eyes, shakes his head. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you.’

And what he tells me is this.

The Seelie and the Unseelie fairies have been at war with each other for, like, all of time. They fight and attack each other and invade each other’s lands and kidnap each other and kill each other’s pet humans and generally run around being huge dicks to each other, and this is their permanent state of being. It’s almost impossible to kill a fairy – and because iron is kryptonite for all of them, it’s even more almost impossible for them to kill each other.

So, being that they’re dicks with no respect for human life, they set up a way to kill each other. They created the Riders.

‘And the Riders are human,’ I say.

‘They were human, once,’ Tam answers. ‘They are not alive but they are not dead. There are six, although they lost one the last time they rode. They exist outside the system of signs and laws and lore that governs the Seelie and the Unseelie. They are another kind of magic, wild, uncontrollable. And it is a grave thing to raise them. To wake them from their slumber and bind them to your will requires a great sacrifice.’

‘What did the Unseelie sacrifice?’

‘I do not know,’ he replies. ‘Neither did the Silver Lady. If we knew that a sacrifice had been levied, that we might have known that the Riders were coming. All we knew was the dictum that the Crown Prince issued: to bring the Valentine home, or to share his exile.’

‘Do you have any idea what the sacrifice might have been?’

‘No, but it must have been mighty. The last time the Riders rode, the Unseelie sacrificed thirty of their own people so they could kill the Valentine.’

I blink. ‘Finn? They tried to kill Finn? Before?’

‘Yes,’ Tam says, standing and walking to the window.

If you asked me to make a list of the top ten people I thought could entrance me with a story, Tam would not be on it. He probably wouldn’t even be on the top hundred, either. But I’m entranced by this one.

Once upon a time, in a land where it was always summer, where everyone was ageless and timeless and beautiful, joyous news spread. Because fairies did not die unless they were killed, they were rarely born, and so this news was cause for months of celebration. The Seelie queen was pregnant.

But for there to be summer, there must be winter, and the news that made the Seelie fairies so happy brought misery and rage to those with whom they were in an unending war. The Unseelie fairies made a great sacrifice. They unleashed the Riders, and bound them to kill one of the Seelie royals.

There were limits, of course. Fairies are bound always by rules, even when unleashing something as wild and chaotic as the Riders. The Riders could only wake from their slumber on one of the fairy high holidays. They could only be released in one land – the land of the Seelie fairies, the land of the Unseelie fairies, or the land of humans – and could not pass between them. And before they could kill their quarry, they needed to find an ironheart to lead them: a child whose fury would empower them, embolden them.

It was these limits which proved to be the salvation of one of the summer royals, and the end of another.

The new child was born on the same high holiday on which the Riders awoke to ride through the Summerland. But the child’s brother, the Crown Prince, caught wind at the very last moment of what the Unseelie fairies had done, because the Riders had taken one of his pets to be their ironheart, leaving the prince to run as he had never before from humans.

It was too late to stop the Riders from waking. The sacrifice had long since been made, and they had awoken. It was too late to stop them taking an ironheart, because the heart had been eaten. It was too late to stop them riding through the Summerland to find their quarry, because they were already riding. And the Seelie royal family could not flee together, because they were tied to the land they ruled, and if they all left at once, it would crumble like a dry leaf under the heel of a Unseelie fairy’s boot.

But it was not too late to save the new child.

The Seelie king took the baby from the queen before she could even lay eyes on it. He opened a door to the human world, where the Riders could not follow. And there, he used all of his magic to seek the perfect place to hide this precious child, and he found it: a small town, quiet, in a land near the ends of the earth, where, against all likely odds and statistical probability, four children were born on the same Valentine’s Day.

He swapped his fairy child for one of the human ones. And with that human child in his arms, he went back to the Summerland, so that the queen and the Crown Prince would not have to face the Riders alone.

‘They killed him, didn’t they?’ I breathe. ‘The king was the Seelie royal they killed.’

Tam nods. ‘Yes.’

I guess that explains why none of the Seelie knew who their Valentine changeling was. I always thought that seemed a bit careless.

‘And you were there!’ I suddenly realise. ‘You were – the child –’

‘Yes,’ he says again.

‘Do you . . . do you remember?’

‘No,’ he says, but his eyes flicker away from me, and I suspect he’s not quite telling me the whole truth.

But Tam’s repressed trauma memories are not exactly my number-one priority at the moment. ‘So this is why the Seelie are so desperate to get Finn home right now,’ I say. ‘They’ve heard the Riders are going to be unleashed in the human world this time, and they want to bring him home so they can’t get him.’

‘And they have risked the Silver Lady to do it,’ Tam says, a muscle in his jaw twitching.

Oh. Wow. Maybe this isn’t repressed trauma about being kidnapped as a tiny baby and then seeing your kidnapper horrifically murdered almost immediately. Though I should have guessed, really, because when are things not about Emily with Tam?

‘So you had no idea?’ I ask.

‘The Crown Prince told the Silver Lady to come here,’ he says. ‘He told her that he would open the door home for her on the summer solstice, but that she was not to step through it without the Valentine.’

The fingers of his right hand clench and unclench. ‘He doomed her,’ he says. ‘The prince doomed her.’

‘Will the Riders kill her?’

‘No, but if they kill the Valentine, she will be stuck here for eternity, on this side of the door,’ he says. ‘Cut off from her people. Cut off from everything she holds dear. Cut off from – from summer.’

‘She’ll still have you,’ I offer.

The look he shoots me is so angry I’m amazed I don’t actually spontaneously combust on the spot. ‘I am not enough,’ he growls.

I can see this conversation heading very quickly down a ‘if you don’t free my precious beloved darling Silver Lady right now so she can whisk Finn away to the Summerland, I’ll [insert various grievous bodily harms] to you’ path, so I change the subject. ‘Tell me more about the Riders,’ I say. ‘If I can work out how to defeat them, then maybe we can put a stop to this whole mess.’

‘They cannot be stopped. They cannot be resisted.’

‘They’re blood and terror and fury, trust me, I got it. But what’s their deal? You said they’re human, and if they’re human, they can be killed.’

‘They cannot be killed because they are not alive.’

‘You said they lost one of their number last time they rode, didn’t you? So obviously they can die.’

‘That Rider did not die in battle. She died because she reclaimed her heart before slumber reclaimed them.’

‘What, did she see the error of her ways? Did she fall in love?’

‘She reclaimed her heart. She found the place where it was hidden and took it back.’

‘The place where it was – you mean literally?’ I ask, aghast. ‘Her actual heart? The Riders don’t have hearts? How does that work?’

‘That is what is taken from them when they become Riders,’ Tam says. ‘Their hearts. And without their hearts there is nothing left for them but the ride: the blood and the fury and the desire to kill.’

‘And the desire to find their own hearts, right?’

‘It is a terrible thing, to be a Rider,’ Tam says. ‘It is existing, but it is not living. Without a heart, they feel nothing but the longing to feel again. This is not the first Rider who has sought out their heart. They are not alive, but it is the only way for them to die.’

‘What happens when they find their hearts?’

‘Time catches up with them. This Rider had ridden for eight hundred years. When she reclaimed her heart, she crumbled to dust.’

I have a whole bunch of questions about how this is physically and anatomically possible, but as I suspect the answer is basically ‘magic’, I put them on the backburner. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘So the Riders are a man down. How do they recruit? I’m assuming they don’t just put an ad on Seek, like “Wanted: one Rider, no pay but you get to kill people, oh also, we’ll cut your heart out and you’ll be undead forever”.’

‘The Unseelie have woken the Riders, and so they must offer a replacement.’

‘So they have to – oh. Oh.’

‘What?’

We walk among you.

‘The replacement,’ I say. ‘They found their replacement.’

The sharktooth man. Kel. The night he came to my window. The night he came to my window, holding a dripping, bloody, gory heart in his hand.

I’d thought that night was some kind of sick invitation to die. I remember being drawn to the window, fantasising about what it would be like to feel those shark teeth in my skin, to become nothing but blood in the water.

But it wasn’t an invitation. It was a threat.

‘They showed me the heart,’ I say. ‘Before Miller’s Creek. They showed me the heart, because they thought I was the Valentine, and they thought I would know what it meant.’

‘Who?’ Tam says. ‘Who showed you the heart?’

‘Kel,’ I say. ‘I mean – the kelpie. The water horse.’

More pieces of the puzzle start fitting together in my mind. ‘Were Jenny and Kel even trying to kill me?’ I say.

‘Of course not. Jenny Greenteeth and a mere kelpie could not kill a Seelie royal. They were trying to force your hand.’

‘To do what?’

‘To take Seelie royalty back, bleeding, to the Unseelie Court would be a great triumph,’ Tam says. ‘They would not have killed you, but they would have made a spectacle of you. And then, perhaps, they would have sent the Riders to the Summerland instead, to ride against the Crown Prince and the queen.’

When I dove into the water that night at Miller’s Creek, I thought I was offering Jenny and Kel a death. But no. They wanted the rest of my life. They wanted me to live, imprisoned and ashamed and broken, forever.

That’s even worse.

‘Of course, because you are merely human Jenny Greenteeth would have just killed you,’ he adds.

‘It was a message,’ I say. ‘The heart – they showed me the heart because it was a message. Come with us or the Riders will get you. But I didn’t listen – I mean, I didn’t understand, but they thought I didn’t listen, so –’ I swallow, my throat suddenly dry, ‘so they took Phil.’

‘And now the Unseelie want you to be the ironheart,’ Tam says. ‘They would have killed you, and now they seek to make you a killer.’

‘The ironheart,’ I say, grasping at anything that isn’t guilt. ‘What’s the deal with the ironheart? If I – if they did it, if they took my heart – would I be a Rider too?’

‘No.’

‘Then what, Tam?’

‘The Riders have no hearts. They must be wakened to fury. And so they must seek one to lead them, one who can wake them to that fury. A child, whose heart is like iron: a heart that will burn those it touches.’

Black dots start swimming in front of my eyes.

‘So they eat the child’s heart,’ Tam says. ‘They consume the fury. And the child rides with them, as their leader, until they have hunted down their quarry.’

‘Why a new ironheart every time? Why not just use the same one again and again?’

‘The hearts of the Riders are preserved,’ he says. ‘They are hidden, but they remain intact, and so they may ride and ride and ride without them for centuries. But the heart of the child is eaten. And none can live without a heart, even a heart of iron. When the hunt is ended . . . ’

‘The child dies,’ I whisper.

I have questions. I have a lot of questions. About how this works, and why this works, and – and hearts – and blood – and eating – and so much, so many, so many questions.

But the conversation is abruptly terminated, because I have to run to the bathroom to vomit my guts up.

There’s blood in my vomit, which I know from the lecture they gave me at the hospital is a side effect of iron poisoning.

There’s too much iron in me. And rage and fury, and they are going to cut out my iron heart and eat it.

And then they’re going to make me into a murderer.

But if I don’t do it . . .

It is not a thing to be refused, but there are many hearts we could take.

Someone is getting their heart cut out and eaten. Someone is going to kill Finn. And if I don’t do it – if I somehow find a way out of being the ironheart – I might as well be the Killer Girl Pearl people think I am, because I’ll be signing someone’s death sentence.