Chloe Mattos

Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets. But nothing comes for free, especially magic. When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it.

Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen's reservoirs for as long as she can remember. But a secret is like a knot. Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone. When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently reopens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares… but it turns out they're real.

Blaise wasn't supposed to be the villain. She was supposed to charm the prince, the male she'd loved for years. That was all the potion was supposed to do—give her another face, and only for a few hours. All so she could prove the prince loved her. Except Blaise got more than she bargained for, and instead of a beauty potion, she's now infected with a magical parasite who takes control of her body every full moon. A parasite who would rather take control permanently.

Ellie knows what she wants in life: Open a glassblowing shop in the art district; See her father retire; Marry for love (if she can find someone who can keep up, that is). Winning the fae prince's heart doesn't make the list. So, when Prince Evander throws a ball to find a human bride, Ellie respectfully declines. When she reads the morning paper and discovers the prince danced the night away with a mysterious stranger, only for the woman to flee at the stroke of midnight, Ellie can't help but laugh.

When the fae king of Naenden returns home to his palace only to find that his human queen has committed treason by conspiring to assassinate him, he has the queen executed and decrees that once every mooncycle, he’ll marry a human woman from the kingdom, only to execute her the following morning. Unless one woman offers herself as a sacrificial bride for the rest.