Prologue

J ennifer Mayer was afraid.

She wasn't a particularly brave woman in any case, but right now? Terrified.

There was a woman on fucking fire .

She was still talking, ranting about fae—whatever the hell those are—and vampires and shifters and tribunals and treaties and enemies…

None of it makes sense.

Also, the woman was hovering in the air. The flames were not consuming her—it was almost as if she was made of flames, rather than on fire. Jennifer could see the shape of the woman in the flames—her hips, her bust, her thighs, her feet, her hands, even her hair waving in the wind of the heat. It was not heatless flame—Jennifer was ten feet away, huddled behind the wrecked hulk of an upside-down UPS delivery van, and she could feel the heat on her face.

One moment it was a normal day—tutor her students at the learning center, pop out for a quick lunch from a bodega—and then suddenly the world was…

Well, Jennifer didn't have words for it.

There was a pop as if her ears had popped, and then the street was filled with…men? Beings? Creatures? Aliens? They had a head, arms, and legs, and seemed humanoid, but wore weird glowing armor and wielded strange weapons, and there were dozens of them. They marched down the street without a word. Another pop and more beings appeared from thin air, and these were recognizably human…ish. Old. Scary. Pointed ears. Eyes glowing white…and then one of them did something and a wave of power went out. Jennifer had felt it. It felt like she'd fallen into a pool of hot water. Her mind had gone fuzzy and things had been…dark, sort of. But not. It was still light out but things were dark—it was hard to make sense of it. She couldn't remember how the UPS van got wrecked, or why there was a hole in the building behind her as if some god-sized thing had cored a hole through it, leaving sheared-off desks and walls and floors and pipes spitting water and cables arcing electricity and arms and legs and torsos…

She couldn't remember where she'd come from or where she was going. Her brain felt scrambled.

She watched as another creature leaped down to the street from a rooftop—a height of a least fifty feet, landing like a superhero from the Marvel movies, and then attacked the army of armor-wearing beings.

That was particularly terrifying for Jennifer's poor mortal brain. The average mortal mind is not programmed to see arms ripped off and used as bludgeons and torsos torn in half, but that's what this… thing …did. It ripped through the armored warrior things, tore them apart like so many paper dolls. Guns fired, and those strange staff-like weapons belched purple balls that cored through buildings.

Another creature leaped down from another rooftop and joined the first, the pair now waging war in tandem. Bodies flew—or body parts did, at least.

Jennifer just watched, her mind traumatized, even as the glamour slowly dissolved her memory.

One thing the glamour couldn't do was nullify that most insidious of human traits, a new one, as things go: the obsession with digitally recording events.

Jennifer Mayer couldn't remember her name. She couldn't remember what she did for a living, or her cat's name, or the face of her girlfriend—math tutor; Geppetto; lovely, delicate, sharp cheekbones, small button nose, thin, red lips, pointed chin, blue eyes.

But she could remember that when something crazy happens, she's going to livestream it.

Jennifer Mayer's instinctive action changes the course of history.

It causes a cascade of events that alters the face of humanity and society itself.

She livestreams the battle. She captures Maeve's fight with Calliope, and Alistair, Fin, and Stirling fighting the Elites, Enforcers, shifters, and vampires. She livestreams Maeve's speech to the gathered immortals, the attack, and Maeve's subsequent flight with an injured Caspian, as well as the confusion that results as the gathered immortals bicker, panic, and scatter.

Jennifer Mayer is a nobody. A tutor, a cat mom, a semi-closeted lesbian, a romantasy geek…and obsessed with social media. She has ten thousand followers, who mainly follow her because of her cat, Geppetto. She posts adorable videos of Geppetto doing the silliest things, and people love it.

So, when Jennifer Mayer goes live on IG and streams something out of an MCU film, it gets picked up.

Shared. Reposted. And reposted.

It goes viral.

News outlets pick it up. And not just minor, online-only gossip rags, but major news outlets: AP, ABC, NBC, HuffPost, Buzzfeed, all of them.

The glamour cast by the fae mage is a particularly vicious one, known as a memory-phage. It doesn't alter memory—it eats it. It's meant to be short-term—the glamourist is meant to end the glamour once the event is over, so the victim of the memory-phage has a small hole in their memory. A blank spot, like after a particularly hard night of drinking.

The fae, however, is killed by Alistair Taylor.

Most glamours end when the individual casting them is killed or sufficiently distracted. A memory-phage, however, is much more insidious and must be shut down or it will simply…keep eating.

Most of the people on the street at the time had already fled, so they were out of range of the glamour. They wouldn't remember much—something weird happening, vaguely. But poor Jennifer Mayer…she hid. She didn't escape the perimeter of the memory-phage, and when the fae who cast it died, the glamour kept on working.

Kept on eating. And eating. And eating.

By the time mortal authorities came to clean up the scene twenty-four hours later, Jennifer Mayer was a vegetable. Her mind had been eaten away, picked clean by the mindless, voracious glamour. It would never stop eating. Every day, it would eat and eat—every moment. Every second. Every new memory her mind tried to record, it would devour.

Jennifer Mayer was an orphan. She had no family, no friends. Her girlfriend was closeted and wouldn't claim her, and it wasn't that serious anyway, just a bit of sex between consenting adults. Jennifer's purse had been caught in the path of a hastaxi orb and erased from existence. She had no fingerprints in any system and no dental records. She was a Jane Doe and was taken to a hospice for the mentally impaired.

Her livestream, though?

That lived on.

Because as we all know…the internet is forever.

So, as Maeve Sparrow sits in a shockingly luxurious private jet, clad in nothing but a men's T-shirt, bound for a Tribunal prison or lab, Jennifer Mayer's livestream is being spread around the world—the mortal world.

It's examined by digital experts and pronounced real, legit—no AI, no digital alteration. It's real .

Pundits panic on talking-head news shows. Influencers post long, ranting streams with their faces superimposed over the video, trying to make sense of the woman on fire, the strange-looking men and women, the crazy things that are said…

By the time she reaches European airspace, the world as Maeve once knew it, where vampires and fae and shapeshifters are the stuff of TV, movies, books, comics, and legends… it's gone.

There's panic in the streets. Raids on stores proliferate as the religious announce the coming apocalypse and atheists talk about nuclear war and everyone else just responds to the panic of everyone else. Gun sales go through the roof. People are shot over rolls of toilet paper. Governments tremble and struggle to deal with the panic. Stocks skyrocket and tumble willy-nilly.

A prominent actor and climate/social activist posts a video—the world may be ending, but social media is bigger business than ever. The video shows this actor, a handsome, famous, wealthy, successful, beloved figure, doing something with his hands, and then there's a flare of golden-white light, and his face is…different. He has pointed ears. He's a Fae, he says (with the word spelled out in a caption at the bottom, capitalized). He is eight hundred years old. He's been famous in every American era, and several European ones, with different faces and names.

A few hours later, another video joins that one. This one is a woman, a pop star. Her video shows her drinking blood from a gleeful, willing, handsome young man. It's quite scandalous—or would have been. She's a Vampire. Again, captioned, the word spelled out so there's no mistaking the truth.

A third video less than thirty minutes later. A huge, tattooed, muscular male, a well-known UFC fighter. In his video, he stands naked in front of the camera—privates hidden behind a wolf emoji. His eyes flare amber, brilliant and blinding, and a viewer can just barely make out a twisting of limbs, a cracking of bones and joints, and then the light fades and what remains is a wolf, black-furred, amber-eyed, roughly the size of a Great Dane.

As the jet carrying Maeve Sparrow lands in a Swiss airfield, social media is flooded with videos of people coming out as immortal.

Change has begun. It's like wildfire, though. Wildfire, spread by wind and eating trees and grass and everything in its wake.

Maeve knows none of this.

A mountain waits for her, calling her name.