Fae games will change you . . . but their love will ruin you. At least, that's what my mother told me. My mother had three rules: 1. Never make a bargain with a fairy. 2. Never enter the Waywoods on a hunting day. 3. Never give the High Fae princes a reason to notice you. But even when I followed all the rules, the royal fae still took my family from me. So in one night I broke all three rules, and brought the kingdom to their knees.

My father called them messengers. He once told me they walked among us and that somewhere in this dark and godless city, there shined a faint sliver of hope. I had only to look for the signs. Well, I’ve spent my whole life investigating the inexplicable and all I've found are the unsettling vestiges of iniquity—the evidence of another world shrouded by the obscure. Purgatory to some, where depravity hides in shadows, and girls like me are little more than delicious bites of temptation. Others call it Nightshade.

Every hundred years, the island of Lightlark appears for only one hundred days to host a deadly game, where the rulers of six realms fight to break their curses and win unparalleled power. Each ruler has something to hide. Each curse is uniquely wicked. To break them—and save themselves and their realms—one ruler will die.

If a fairy godmother can get one sister into a marriage, getting another out of one should be easy… Lady Theodosia Balfour has certainly gotten the short end of the stick—her stepsister, the newly crowned Princess Beatrice, is telling everyone in polite society that Theo, her sister, and...

From the author of The Magician's Daughter comes The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, a mythic, magical tale full of secret scholarship, faerie curses, and the deadliest spells of all—the ones that friends cast on each other. All they needed to break the world was a door, and someone to open...