To me, this book symbolizes a beautiful flower

       that grew out of the rotting rib cage of a murder victim abandoned in a shallow grave. Thank you to everyone who made that weekend such a horrible experience and forced me to retreat into a fantasy world where a sewer full of monsters offered more hospitable company than yours.

      Nice people and objects that made this book

       possible were the Friday Night Mudslingers, my supportive family, Diet Coke, and Emmy Rossum’s Inside Out album.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Acknowledgments

      One

      In the Darkworld, the filth made it difficult to fly. Faery wings were far too gossamer and fragile to withstand the moisture that dripped from the murky blackness overhead or the clinging grime that coated everything, even sentient things, that dared cross over the Darkworld border.

      Ayla knelt in the mire, searching the mucky concrete ground for signs of her quarry. She’d had no problem tracking the Werewolf this far. The foolish creature did not even realize it was being followed, and her wings, not delicately made but leathery flaps of nearly Human skin, thick boned and heavy against her back, had given her the speed to keep up with him as he rampaged through the depths of the Darkworld. But they had made her too conspicuous. As she tracked the Wolf, something tracked her.

      She heard it, lurking behind her. Whatever followed had wings, feathered, if she guessed correctly from the rustling that echoed through the tunnel like tiny thunder. Perhaps it thought she wouldn’t hear it. Or couldn’t.

      The chill that raced up her spine had little to do with the gusts of cold air that blew through the tunnels. She knew the beast that followed her. She’d heard it spoken of in hushed tones in the Assassins’ Guild training rooms. It was a Death Angel.

      The stories were too numerous to sort fact from fiction. Some claimed an Angel had the powers of the Vanished Gods. Some dismissed them as no more powerful than a Faery or Elf. And some insisted that to look upon one was death to any creature, mortal or Fae. Once, not long after Ayla had begun her formal Guild training, an Assassin was lost. His body was recovered, impaled upon his own sword, wings ripped from his back. She’d seen him, though Garret, her mentor, had tried to shield her. The marks on the Faery’s ashen flesh indicated he had not been cut, but torn, as if by large, clawed hands. The killing blow had come as a mercy.

      Whatever the Death Angels were, they did not look kindly upon other immortal creatures.

      The blood pounded in her veins as she forced herself to focus on resuming the trail of her Wolf. Pursued or not, she had an assignment to carry out. Until the Death Angel struck, she would ignore his presence.

      Closing her eyes, Ayla called up the training she’d received. She reached out with her sightless senses. She could not smell the Wolf, not above the stench of the sewer. She could not hear it. The irritated buzz of her antennae, an involuntary reaction to the tension vibrating through her body, coupled with the rustling of the Death Angel’s wings in the shadows behind her, drowned out all other noise. She reached her hands out, feeling blindly across the pocked concrete of the tunnel wall. Deep gouges scored the surface, filled with fading rage. Her fingers brushed the residual energy and her mind lit up with a flare of red. The Wolf had passed this way.

      Rising to her feet slowly, she traced the walls with her hands. Here was a splash of blood, blossoming with a neon-bright flare of pain behind her closed eyelids. Innocent, simple blood. There would be a body.

      In a crouch, she moved through the tunnel, her arms low to the ground, trailing through the congealed filth there. Something dripped farther down the tunnel. It was audible, like a drop falling from a spigot to a full bucket. There was water ahead. Dirty water, no doubt contaminated by waste from the Human world above, and the Wolf’s victim would be there, as well; the despair and