I followed Jack through the gardens. There was a long winding path that brought us through the middle of an overgrown garden. Flowers spilled out of their beds in wild disarray. There was something almost cheerful in their disorganized freedom.

In the distance I could see a great stone building. I'd call it a castle but that would imply something smaller than the building we were approaching. Its hulking mass cast a mammoth shadow across the gardens so that we were walking in darkness for hours before we reached the doorways.

I kept trying to crane my neck back to look at the building properly, but no matter how I turned my head, I couldn't seem to see the whole thing at once. The outside of the building looked at least as big as Brisbane... an entire city enclosed in monolithic walls. Jack kept turning to grin at me as we approached it and I thought he'd chosen the creepiest route to the – whatever it was.

"What is it?" I finally asked, starring at the mass of stone. If it weren't for the clearly delineated towers, I might have thought it was a mountain.

"That is The Great Court of the Fae," he said, in a way that you could hear the capital letters in his voice.

I feel like an idiot looking back on it. The sheer gravity of the building's façade, dripping with lines of moss, should have warned me. It looked like a battle scared and weary monster had collapsed against a landscape of beauty. Alarm bells should have gone off in my head; I should have at least wondered at the kind of society which would hold their "Great Court" in such a depraved and decrepit building.

But I didn't think that. Not then. Not until it was too late to run, screaming into the night.

Maybe I was just caught up in the magic of it all. I remember being so happy that all of this existed. That I wasn't the only strange and 'magical' creature in the universe, that maybe, just maybe, I wasn't as alone as I'd always thought.

I should have sensed the weight behind their magic. The eons of death and destruction which poisoned the land. It seems sickeningly ironic to me now; a necromancer who failed to notice death, but I'd been summoned there to raise the dead, it didn't seem like there was anything wrong about the feeling of death that permeated the atmosphere. What I can't stop cursing myself for not noticing, though, is the ghosts.

A city like Brisbane, which in the grand scheme of things, isn't that old, was literally crawling with ghosts. I shouldn't have been able to walk through a place as old as the otherworldly Court without being swamped by the dead, but I could. There wasn't a single ghost in the gardens, or the Great Court, or in the cemetery that night. I should have wondered where they were, but I didn't... until it was almost too late.

"What do you have to do with fairy politics?" Tyler asked, incredulous. He seemed to be struggling more with the idea of me being involved with politics than he did with the Fae's existence. I guess, after assimilating the idea that his roommate was a necromancer, nothing mythical fazed him. Or maybe he was just in the process of suspending disbelief. That seemed very Tyler somehow; suspend disbelief, suspend judgment, get the goddamned story.

"They actually prefer the Fae," I said, not wanting to voice any of my thoughts out loud. Why was it that, after everything, Tyler was the one whose reaction was unexpected? Why was he behaving so... unpredictably? "Most of them don't have wings and they're not particularly fond of being thought small."

"What do they look like then?"

"There are all different kinds, actually. They have this whole caste system depending on what species you are. But the higher orders, the royal court and everything, they look. Actually, they look a little too human. If you can imagine how we'd look if we were absolutely perfect..."

Jack led me up to a huge doorway, carved into the side of the stone building. It towered over me, big enough to accommodate someone three times my size. I looked Jack up and down. What if he was the runt around here? I'm not exactly tiny, but at five foot five, I didn't think I'd be able to handle anyone more than ten feet tall. At least, not if they were alive.

Jack pressed his palm against the door and leaned into it. He started whispering something I couldn't understand and caressing the door with his other hand. It looked a little too much like he was cracking on to it for comfort and I shifted my weight from foot to foot, just to do something to ease my tension. I couldn't exactly pretend that I wasn't with him.

The door opened with a gentle sigh. I could just imagine a woman lying back against a bed and making that sound. I wouldn't have been surprised if the door had giggled when it closed.

I raised an eyebrow at Jack as I passed through the doorway. He grinned at me, flashing a mouth full of luminous teeth. The guy could do toothpaste commercials here, but I didn't think his smile had anything to do with the wonders of modern chemistry. Ancient magic and the glamour, more likely. And I mean 'the glamour,' as in the ancient spell craft and magic that the Fae are renowned for using to seduce us mere mortals, not the kind of glamour that Channing Tatum oozes in every frame. Though, for all I know, Channing is part Fae. It would explain a bit.

Anyway, Jack led me into a kind of meeting chamber, like you see on those old docudramas about French royalty. I think it's called a 'drawing room' but I've got no idea why they'd call it that. They don't look anything like an art studio.

There were two men waiting for us. It was a relief to see that neither of them were over seven feet tall. One of them was lounging in an antique chair, his legs crossed, so I couldn't guess exactly how tall he was. The other was standing in the corner, glaring at the fireplace. His shoulders were hunched slightly but he still seemed about six foot four.

The man who was sitting looked more like how you'd imagine an elf might look, or a demigod. He had the lightest blue eyes I had ever seen, lighter than the sun bleached horizon of a Queensland summer sky. His hair was a bright and shining platinum blonde. It had a gentle wave to it and he wore it a little long, tied back at the nape of his neck. He was wearing these beige breeches and a white ruffled shirt. He fit perfectly with the French like setting of the room.

The other guy couldn't have looked more out of place. He was dark where the first guy was light. His hair was dark and defied all gravity, strands pointed in every direction as if he had just woken. It hung down across his forehead in that bad boy of rock, half emo, but too cool to care, way. He was wearing scuffed up black leather trousers and what looked like a silk shirt, with a royal blue jacket, that had huge silver buckles hanging off the front. I couldn't see his eyes at first because he didn't look up when I came in. He just kept staring into the fireplace. He didn't look like he was mesmerized by the flames, though. He looked like he was cursing them.

"Zephan," Jack nodded at the blonde guy, "this is the necromancer."

"Your majesty," Zephan smiled.

"With all due respect," Jack said, "you aren't the king yet."

"Of course," Zephan's smile didn't slip. "Welcome my Lady of Death," he said, holding his hand out to me. He didn't get up, so I had to walk over to him to take his hand. He turned my hand and raised it to his lips, but didn't kiss it. "It's a pleasure," he whispered.

"And this," Jack said, taking my hand from Zephan's, and leading me over to the brooding guy, "is Kieran."

"Hello," Kieran held his hand out. I took it, hesitantly.

"Hi," I said, grateful when he simply squeezed my hand in his and released it.

"I'm sorry," Kieran said to my feet, "but Joqchlann has not told us your name."

"Joqchlann?" I asked.

"Jack is fine," Joqchlann said.

"Right," I said, feeling my mouth stretch into a wide grin. The easy camaraderie which had sprung up between Jack and me was going to take a serious beating with a stick called Joqchlann. "I'm Laurel Tierney." I said to Kieran.

"It is very nice to meet you," Kieran said, "Laurel of Tierney."

"Just Laurel is fine."

"Laurel," Kieran whispered, looking me in the eye for the first time. His eyes were a deep, velvety brown, so dark they were almost black. The darkness of his eyes seemed to drain all of the light out of the room, all the color out of his face. His skin was a smooth, translucent white, that contrasted with the darkness of his hair. I took a step back from him. He looked more like a vampire than a faerie. More like a demon than a god.

He lowered his eyes. His face fell back into a brooding silence and I could tell that I had hurt him, somehow. I blushed, embarrassed that my reaction to seeing his eyes had been so transparent. I hadn't meant to insult him. I reached a hand out towards his shoulder.

"Shall we introduce you to the rest of the court?" Zephan asked, standing up. I dropped my hand like it had been stung. I don't think Kieran ever saw the beginning of that gesture.

"Sure," Jack said, turning towards the door. Kieran turned to trail after them.

"Actually," I said, "if you don't mind, I'd like a moment with Joqchlann." I stared expectantly at Zephan, ignoring Jack's shocked expression.

"Of course," Zephan smiled affably, "Kieran and I will wait outside."

As soon as Jack and I were alone, I said, "Would you mind explaining what the hell is going on?"

"I can't believe you just asked them to leave," Jack said, staring at me, incredulously.

"I want an explanation," I said, doing my best to stare Jack down, when I had to tilt my head back as far as it could go to look up at him "now."

"Actually, what I can't believe is that they actually left," he said. I kept staring at him. "You just threw the two potential kings, for our entire world, out of their private function room." I folded my arms and started tapping my foot impatiently. "Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Not really," I said. "We believe in democracy where I'm from."

"Right," Jack sneered, "because the democratic system is brilliant at weeding out the corrupt few."

"No worse than genetics," I pointed out, "and at least we get to choose the lesser of two evils."

"Well, so do we," Jack glanced towards the doorway, "sort of." I sat down in Zephan's chair, just to see the horrified expression on Jack's face.

"Still waiting for that explanation," I said, crossing my legs.

"I don't think you should be sitting there."

"Well, the sooner you start talking, the sooner we can go meet whoever it is we're meeting."

"Right," Jack said, kneeling in front of me. Even though he was on his knees and I was sitting in a chair that was so high my feet didn't really reach the ground, he was still taller than me. "The two men you just met are cousins," Jack said, suddenly intense. "Their grandfather was the king of this realm. Your people used to call it Faerie Land, by the way."

"As in, if you stand in a ring of mushrooms, you'll get sucked down to Faerie Land?"

"Probably," he shrugged, "I'm not familiar with that one."

"Okay." I let the name of wherever I was go. "You were saying?"

"The king died, Little Death," Jack said, seriously, "without naming an heir."

"So...?"

"We need you to raise the king and make him choose."

"That's it?" I asked, standing up.

"More or less," Jack stood beside me.

"More or less?"

"Well," Jack took my arm and led me to the door, "he wouldn't pick one of them when he was alive."

Jack guided me out to a hall. It had a high arched ceilings, with exposed beams that curved into tapered points towards the centre of the roof. The beams looked like they were made of ivory, set on fire with luminous candle light. Only there weren't any candles in the room. All of the light seemed to come from the bones. I felt like I was walking through the preserved skeleton of some beached whale and the building had grown up around it. I had to keep reminding myself that I had my own special brand of magic, to keep from passing out at the shock of all that power.

Zephan greeted us at the doorway and spread his arm out over the court in a flourish. Lace blossomed from the cuffs of his sleeve and trailed behind his arm as he gestured around the hall. I couldn't see Kieran.

"This," he said, dramatically, "is the Great Court of Fae." The room gradually fell silent, waiting for his next words, I suppose. "And this," he said, and it wasn't until his next words that I realized he wasn't speaking to me anymore, "is our Lady of Death. The great Laurel Tierney."

The room burst into spontaneous applause and I felt my face flood with heat. I'd say that I've never been very good with crowds, but I've never had to face any before. My desire to go unnoticed had carried me through my entire education, without forcing me to the centre of attention. I've never been in a performance, never ran for student council, never tried out for a sports team. I'd made my obligatory oral presentations in English, desperately trying to be average; not good enough for anyone to sit up and pay attention, but not so terrible that anyone remembered having to sit through the excruciating agony of a stuttered report.

When you have something to hide, you make it your mission in life to blend in and be forgettable. Nothing in my practice at disappearing had prepared me for being suddenly thrust into the limelight by royalty, in a magical realm, where the shortest person in the room (after me) was just shy of six feet. My fairly average five feet, five inches of height suddenly seemed horribly insignificant in proportion.

"I can't see her," someone called out from across the hall.

"I can see her hair," someone else called back.

"She's sooo tiny," a woman said. She was standing fairly close, so was probably one of the only people in the room who could see all the way down to my feet. She kept looking me up and down, her eyes getting wider and wider. If I'd seen her walking down the street, I would have stared at her, but that thought was little consolation under the circumstances.

She was 6'1, incredibly slim, with cascades of blonde hair and smeared, crimson lips. She looked like she could out catwalk Tyra Banks on a bad day. "Are you sure she's a necromancer?" she actually wrinkled her nose at me. "I thought they were all tall and thin and creepy looking."

"Hey," I said, not entirely sure if her disbelief was meant to be an insult or not.

"What?" she asked, tilting her head, and looking surprised.

"Well," I shifted, uncomfortably, "I'm not exactly fat."

"Oh," she laughed, "of course you aren't."

"You have lovely petite curves," Zephan said, gently. So, why did I get the feeling they were mocking me?

"Still can't see her."

"Of course," Zephan smiled magnanimously at his crowd. He took my hand and tugged me over to a banquet table. He picked me up and dumped me, unceremoniously, on the table. I stood there, angrily staring down at him. He turned back to the court and presented me with another flourish of his hand. I'd like to pretend that I didn't hear the general consensus of the crowd. I was ridiculously short. I must still be growing. Are they trying to pass a child off as a necromancer. We need a demonstration.

This last thread of the conversation increased in volume and frequency. A demonstration? What did they think I was? A dog?

"Jack?" I called out and he was suddenly standing beside my table.

"Yes?"

"I," I was starting to get black dots in my vision. "I'm not very good with crowds," I said. Then I was falling.

Something cold and damp was pressed against my forehead.

"Just shock, I think," someone whispered over me. I didn't recognize the voice.

"You think?" I heard.

"I haven't been able to get a proper reading," the first voice said. "She has some pretty intense shielding going on."

"But she's unconscious," Zephan said. He sounded angry. I opened my eyes. We were in another chamber, similar to the first meeting room, only slightly larger. I was stretched out on a chaise lounge. Someone had undone the first three buttons of my blouse.

"Was unconscious," I said, struggling to sit up. A lump of amethyst fell from my forehead, onto my lap. I picked it up, watching an incandescent light swirl out from the centre before settling down into a more natural clarity. The stone was still cold, but it didn't feel damp anymore. I wiped my palm over my forehead, pushing my hair out of my face. There was no moisture there, either. Strange. "Whose is this?" I asked, holding the stone out to the room at large.

Zephan sat in another chair, near the fire. Jack stood behind him. Another man knelt in front of Zephan. He looked old, and knurled, with grey skin that sagged in odd places. The old man came towards me, holding his hand out. I dropped the stone into his palm and watched him shudder at the contact.

"Interesting," he said, sliding the stone into a black silk bag. He looked into my eyes, very carefully, then bowed. "My Lady of Death," he whispered. "You had us worried."

"Did I?"

"Yes," Kieran said, from behind me. I jumped, not realizing that he'd been in the room the entire time. I felt a sudden urge to re-button my blouse. Ridiculous, because it wasn't even open that wide. I let myself do one of the buttons up before turning to Kieran.

"I apologize for any inconvenience I might have caused," I said, formally.

"It was no inconvenience," Zephan cut in smoothly. "Professor Vonnegut is on retainer." I gathered that the Professor was the old man.

"Might I have a moment alone with the Professor?" I asked Zephan. Jack opened his eyes widely at me and I could practically see his mind clicking over the thought 'not again.'

"Of course," Zephan stood, gesturing for the others to leave the room. "It is only natural that a patient be given the privacy to converse with her physician. I was about to suggest as much."

"Thank you," I smiled, watching Zephan usher Jack out of the room. Kieran glared at Zephan at the doorway and gestured for him to exit first. A smile haunted Zephan's lips before he left. Kieran turned and nodded at me before closing the door behind him.

"Very curious," the Professor murmured, once we were alone.

"What is?" I asked.

"I wonder," the Professor said, dragging a chair over to sit in front of me, "what you have done to wrap our Lord so firmly," he took my hand and held it up by my pinky, "around this little finger." I snatched my hand back from his grip.

"I haven't done anything," I said. "I was asked to come here, you know. It makes sense that he'd be polite."

"Perhaps," the Professor nodded. "But it was not Zephan who requested a member of the Deadly Aristocracy."

"I'm sorry?" I tilted my head to the side. The deadly aristocracy? My Lady of Death? Did they actually believe that I was some kind of royalty? 'Weird' didn't even begin to cover it.

"Kieran called for a necromancer."

"No," I shook my head, "the other thing. The title."

"The Deadly Aristocracy?" The Professor asked. I nodded. "Do you know nothing of your people's history?"

"I didn't even know that I had people."

"Well," the Professor's eyes became suddenly more animated, "I did my dissertation on the fall of the Deadly Aristocracy." He paused, waiting for an invitation to expand on the subject. I nodded at him. "The Great Court has long depended on a caste system for governance. The remains of that system are still in effect today."

"Really?"

"Oh yes. The Great Court that you just met are only the tip of the iceberg. The higher orders, like the elves and the necromancers have always been regarded with more esteem than the lower orders. The brownies, the goblins, the winged folk. The lower orders are believed to be naturally subservient species and, as you might know from your experiences in the other realm, have even been seen in subservient roles to mere humans." He pulled a face of disgust.

"So," I frowned, "you're saying I'm not human?"

"Of all the..." Professor Vonnegut spluttered. "Of course you aren't human. You're one of the last surviving remnants of the most terrifyingly powerful orders of the Greater Fae. Human? You couldn't be less human if you were made of stone."

"But..." My high school level biology had not prepared me for any of this. "My mother is definitely human. And my father never had anything to do with the dead, even though his sister is like me. I don't think he even went to a funeral, besides his own."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well," I said, suddenly unsure of myself, "genetics."

The Professor shook his head. "This is metaphysics, not biology."

"That doesn't really explain much," I muttered.

"And does your science explain how you call the dead from their graves?"

"No," I said, slowly, stretching the syllable out, "but I don't think any scientists have made a study of the phenomenon."

"And why not?"

"Because we don't exactly go around flaunting our abilities."

"And why not?" the Professor repeated.

"Um," I thought about that for a moment. "Social conditioning?" The Professor raised a questioning brow. "Humanity doesn't exactly embrace the abnormal," I shrugged.

"Yet here you sit," he said in soothing tones, reminding me of Dumbledore just before he's about to wrap up the plot and dump an emotional bombshell on Harry. I braced myself. "Perfectly willing to accept the current situation."

"But not willing to accept that I'm not human," I said, "especially without a very good explanation."

"Physically, you might have been human," the Professor began, "had certain, non-physical elements not been in play."

"I'm sorry," I shook my head. "You're going to have to keep things specific if you expect me to follow you."

"Right..." the Professor got up and paced around the room. He paused, staring into the fireplace. "Okay," he said, "you see this fire?" I nodded. "You're like this. On the physical side, the biology, we're all just wood, right? When the conditions are right, the spark of draicht," he must have noticed my confusion at the word, because he explained, "Ah, like magic. So, when the conditions are right, the spark of 'magic' can ignite the wood and you get a member of the Fae. Correct breeding conditions, such as we have in this realm almost always result in a magical being. Humans on the other hand, are more like sand. Or," he frowned, "maybe more like extremely damp wood. It's harder for the draicht to penetrate, for the spark to ignite. Your father was probably like that. The spark was there, but there wasn't any ignition." He paused and searched my face critically. "Are you certain that your mother is completely human?"

I nodded, mutely.

"Hmm, well, something in her made it so that you were born like dry wood. With the spark of draicht from your father and the conditions from your mother, you became a necromancer."

"So, you're saying that I can raise the dead because of my mother's genes?" I asked, imagining my mother's reaction to that news. The Professor nodded. "Can I get that in writing?" I asked. The Professor nodded.

"Was that all that you needed?" he asked.

"No," I said, remembering that I'd wanted to ask him something before we went on this tangent. "I wanted to know what was interesting."

"Interesting?"

"When I gave you your crystal," I prompted, "you said 'interesting.' And you believe that I'm a necromancer and the court didn't, and I want to know why."

"The crystal was cold," he shrugged. "Not just cold. Dead. And nothing comes off you. No energies. Your aura is completely blank. I'd say absent but it's almost more than that. Like a vacuum. At first, I thought it was something to do with your shields. I cannot see into you like I can with others. But it's more than that, isn't it?" He shook his head. "There wasn't anything in my texts about this, but I think that, part of a necromancer's power comes from having death inside."

"I could have told you that."

"Really?" He looked surprised. "You can feel it?"

"Yes," I said, "that's part of it too." The Professor tilted his head in a question. "You can't raise the dead," I explained, "if you can't feel where death is."

"Death," the Professor mused, "as a tangible force. Not defined merely as the absence of life but by its own presence..."

There was a brief knock on the door and Jack stuck his head in. "Are you done talking?" he asked. "We kind of need you out here."

"I can't handle crowds," I said, feeling my breath quicken at the thought.

"Here," the Professor handed me a small vial, "drink this."

"What is it?" I asked, cautiously.

"Liquid courage," the Professor grinned.

"Alcohol?" I raised an eyebrow. The contents of the vial did bear a remarkable resemblance to scotch.

"Better," Jack assured me. I flicked the cap off the vial and raised it to my lips.

"If this is poison," I said, "I swear I will haunt you for the rest of your life and then for all of eternity, after that." I took a sip and felt heat flood through me. "I can do it too," I recapped the vial and stood up. I slipped the vial into the pocket of my jeans. "I'm a necromancer." And, believe it or not, it felt really good to say that out loud.