Chapter 1 Mara

It's 3:12 in the morning and the final chapter of my bestselling series consists of one sentence.

Soren Ravelle had never been afraid of anything.

I've been staring at it for forty minutes. My coffee went cold an hour ago. Next door's dog has barked at the same plastic bag in the yard eleven times, and I've counted, because counting is easier than writing the scene where I kill the man four hundred thousand readers want to marry.

"It's beautiful," I tell the cursor. "It's art. They'll cry and then they'll buy the special edition."

The cursor blinks at me. It has no faith in me either.

I reach for my mug without looking, my elbow catches the edge, and the whole thing tips into the keyboard in one cold brown wave.

"No, no, no, no..."

The laptop makes a noise I've only ever got out of a microwave with a fork in it. A blue spark jumps off the letter S and bites my fingertip, the screen flares white, the lamp pops, and somewhere outside the dog finally gives up on the bag.

Then it's dark.

I wake up with my face in dirt.

Real dirt. Wet, cold, gritty dirt that's in my mouth and up one nostril, and when I lift my head a clump of it stays stuck to my cheek and slides down into my collar.

I spit. I spit again. There's a petal on my tongue.

Something is moving in my pyjama bottoms.

I stay face-down with my bum in the air, because my brain is too slow to do anything but take inventory. It's cold, damp, small and very busy. It's working its way across my left buttock with the confidence of something that pays rent there.

"Okay, okay," I whisper into the soil. "That's a dream thing. That's a dream frog."

I don't know why I'm saying frog. Then it croaks.

I'm on my feet so fast I take half the flower bed with me. I slap my own backside. It squirms higher. I hop, shriek, slap the other cheek, stomp in a circle, and it keeps climbing, a cold wet lump inching toward the small of my back like it's scaling a mountain for charity.

"Get out, get out, get OUT of there..."

I shove my hand down the back of my avocado-print pyjama bottoms, which is when an old man in a straw hat steps around a hedge with a pair of shears and stops dead.

We look at each other.

He's seventy if he's a day, brown as a walnut, with ears that stick out under the hat. My hand is wrist-deep in the back of my own pants.

"It's a frog," I explain.

"Course it is," he says.

My fingers close around it. I pull it out, fat and green and glistening, and hold it up between us like evidence. It blinks one gold eye at me, slowly. Then it shuts the other eye, opens it again, and I swear on my life it winks.

It kicks off my palm, lands on a rose, and hops into the hedge with its dignity completely intact.

Mine is lying somewhere in the flower bed.

The old man looks at the crater I've made in his roses. They're black, velvet black, with silver edges, and they smell faintly of honey and rain.

"Mind the moonroses," he says.

Every hair on my arms stands up.

I wrote that line. Book one, chapter four. Old Tobin, the gardener at Ravelle Castle, says "Mind the moonroses" to the heroine and then never speaks again for the rest of the series because I forgot he existed.

I turn around.

Behind me, rising out of the morning mist, is a castle of dark grey stone, all thin towers and ivy and too many windows. There's a crooked turret on the east side because I described it as crooked once and then had to keep it crooked forever. There's the balcony where Soren broods in book two. There's the broken weathervane shaped like a raven.

"Oh my God," I say. "Oh my God, it's Duskryn."

"Aye," says Tobin. "And that's my best bed you've flattened, you great lump."

I gape at him. "You don't say that. You only say 'mind the moonroses.'"

"I say plenty." He points his shears at me. "I say who are you, and what are you doing in his lordship's garden in your underthings, with a shirt that says..." He squints. "World's Okayest Aunt."

I look down. It does say that. My sister bought it as a joke and I've worn it three days in a row.

"I'm..." And then the size of it lands, and I start laughing, the high, unhinged kind. "Tobin, I know everything. I know where the passages under the castle go. I know the mushrooms in Whisperwood talk and you should never ask them about their mothers. I know the royal treasury's empty. I know your wife's name is Peg and she cheats at cards!"

His face goes purple. "She does not."

"She absolutely does, it's in a deleted scene..."

"GUARDS!"

Two of them come round the hedge at a jog, all black leather and silver buckles, and the bigger one has a moustache I definitely gave him at two in the morning after a glass of wine, because it's enormous. It's ambitious. It needs its own comb.

"Captain Stroud!" I'm so happy to see him I nearly hug him. "Don't eat the eel pie at the solstice feast."

He stops. "I love eel pie."

"I know. It kills you in book two."

He and the other guard look at each other. Then they each take one of my arms.

"Hang on, I'm helping..."

"Course you are," says Tobin.

A door bangs open at the top of the garden steps. A woman hurries out, red-haired and gorgeous, lacing her bodice with one hand and carrying her shoes in the other. She gives me a long look down her nose as she passes, the look women give you in a club bathroom when you're crying into the hand dryer.

Then he walks out after her.

He's barefoot. His black shirt is open to the middle of his chest, his dark hair is a mess of waves falling into his eyes, and there's a smear of the redhead's lipstick on his jaw. He's taller than I imagined. Broader. The cheekbones are exactly what I wrote, and I wrote them cruel, but I had no idea cruel could look like this at seven in the morning with sleep still on it.

Lord Soren Ravelle. Duke of Duskryn. More murders than I bothered counting, and my boyfriend in about nine thousand online comment sections.

He stops at the top of the steps and looks at me.

And keeps looking.

His eyes are grey, silver at the centre, the colour I described in book one as "the last light before a killing frost," which my editor circled and wrote "lol" next to.

Oh no.

I know this look. It's the look from book one, chapter nine, the one he gives the heroine across the ballroom right before he ruins her life and her underwear, in that order.

"Don't," I tell him.

One black eyebrow lifts. "Don't what?"

His voice. I didn't do his voice justice. It's low and unhurried and rough at the edges.

"Look at me like that. I know what you're thinking, and the answer's no. I'm not going to be another one of your..." I nod at the redhead vanishing through an archway. "Whatever she is."

He comes down two steps. "I'm looking at you," he says, "because you're standing in my roses in your nightclothes, you smell like the compost heap, and there's a slug in your eyebrow."

I touch my eyebrow. It's cold and soft and it moves.

I scream and fling it. It lands on Captain Stroud's moustache.

Stroud doesn't even flinch. He just closes his eyes, a man who has suffered a great deal in this job.

Soren comes all the way down. Up close he's even worse. He smells of woodsmoke and something dark and spiced, and he stops near enough that I have to tip my head back.

"Who are you?" he says.

"Mara Bell."

His face doesn't change at all. My name means less to him than the slug.

"I'm the... I wrote... it's complicated. I'm very important here, actually."

He studies me for a long, silent moment. Then he turns to Stroud as if I've stopped existing.

"Kill her."

"Wait, what? No! You don't kill people in the garden, you hate mess in the garden, it's in book one!"

He lifts one hand, lazy, careless, and the shadows under the hedges peel up off the grass. They pour out from beneath the rose bushes, from the arch, from under Tobin's hat, black and thick and fast, streaming toward me in long hungry ribbons.

I wrote those shadows. I wrote what they do to people.

And every single one of them goes for my throat.