THE YEAR is 1877.
When Talia Rose steps into a fairy ring as a child, her mother, Tate Rose, an outcast witch, signs a deal with a dark fae to delay Talia's inevitable surrender until her eighteenth birthday. A deal that will allow Talia to be taken...
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THE FIRST DESERT FOLK Tate met when she resurrected on the Offering Altar was an ashen little fiend named Willa. Willa liked campfires. She (she—because Willa thought herself female, so that was her image) ate embers, ash, and charred twigs leftover from cowboys and wagon trains. Braver than most of the Folk, Willa ventured into the surrounding desert when the whim took her. Never too far from the gorge but just far enough to unhitch oxen and steal silver spurs. Wherever she went, her little hands left soot marks behind.
Tate wouldn't learn any of this until some time after their initial meeting.
The first thing she noticed when the orange world crashed in was intense pressure in her hips. A weight that pushed on her bones from the inside, coaxing more and more room. The second thing was Willa holding her hand. In the moments after dying, between waking up and still dreaming, Willa appeared as a taut, dark thread, and Tate held it tight in pinched fingers, allowing it to tug her out of stone-quiet bliss into painful consciousness.
Willa wasn't the fairy's given name, more a reference point on a page of mindless syllables made up of shrewd faces. Given names cradled the bearer's essence; it wasn't wise to share them freely. Not all strangers had wholesome intent, which is why, when asked about her name, Tate answered: "Tate." Because it wasn't the real thing at all, and in the fractured second it took to prevaricate, she'd successfully shed her mother's lifelong contribution to her existence.
It's also why, when Willa unwrapped the bruise-blue cord from around the baby's ankle and laid the wrinkled, new body on Tate's chest, and said: "What does she go by?" Tate refused even to think of the candidate. Talia wouldn't become Talia for at least seventy-two hours earthside. After the Deal. After Aida's binding. After the gorge's yawning mouth faded behind them and the Little House provided by the Folk had appeared, well-lit, in a hollow at dusk.
But now, Tate didn't care.
Tatiana Rose, the child is gone! Her mother's voice rang in her ears as her knees plowed into the sand. Tate's eyes flitted over the space where her daughter had been sitting minutes earlier. Cherries. Cheese. Pinecone. Roots. Blanket. Her mind listed the familiar before noticing the one thing that wasn't quite right.
Ants.
Ants?
Tate's breath caught in her chest. An army of reddish-brown insects clamored over one another, a line vibrating through her drawn circle—impossible—to maul the abandoned food scattered in the shade. They were tiny—specks on a fingernail. But the swarm made the ground shift and shimmer like rising heat.
"Talia," Tate called. Fear overtook sense, and she let the given name echo down the gorge. It was the only name she'd ever envisioned for the baby, contemplating it many pregnant hours on those sleepless nights when her aching joints couldn't find peace, and rolling over felt like shifting a stubborn horse. There was no safeguard for Talia to hide behind because nothing else suited her.
