Death Kissed Northern Creatures Book Six Kris Austen Radcliffe Contents The Worlds of Get Free Books Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Epilogue God Forsaken Get Free Books The Worlds of About the Author The Worlds of Kris Austen Radcliffe Smart Urban Fantasy: Northern Creatures Monster Born Vampire Cursed Elf Raised Wolf Hunted Fae Touched Death Kissed God Forsaken Magic Scorned (coming soon) Genre-bending Science Fiction about love, family, and dragons: World on Fire Series one Fate Fire Shifter Dragon Games of Fate Flux of Skin Fifth of Blood Bonds Broken & Silent All But Human Men and Beasts The Burning World Dragon’s Fate and Other Stories Series Two Witch of the Midnight Blade Witch of the Midnight Blade Part One Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Two Witch of the Midnight Blade Part Three Witch of the Midnight Blade: The Complete Series Series Three World on Fire Call of the Dragonslayer (coming soon) Hot Contemporary Romance: The Quidell Brothers Thomas’s Muse Daniel’s Fire Robert’s Soul Thomas’s Need Quidell Brothers Box Set Includes: Thomas’s Muse Daniel’s Fire Roberts’s Soul Copyright 2020 Kris Austen Radcliffe All rights reserved. Published by Six Talon Sign Fantasy & Futuristic Romance Edited by Annetta Ribken Copyedited by Juli Lilly “Northern Creatures” artwork created by Christina Rausch Cover to be designed by Covers by Christian Plus a special thanks to my Proofing Crew. Copyright notice: All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, programs, services, or locales is entirely coincidental. Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. For requests, please e-mail: [email protected]. First electronic edition, July 2020 Version: 4.15.2021 ISBN: 978-1-939730-75-6 Get Free Books Subscribe to Kris Austen Radcliffe’s Newsletter You will be notified when Kris Austen Radcliffe’s next novel is released, as well as gain access to an occasional free bit of author-produced goodness. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time. Sign up for Kris Austen Radcliffe’s Newsletter Chapter 1 Oberon’s Castle, the Fae Realms… Malfeasance is a sticky syrup that took effort to create—one had to boil down one’s narcissistic tendencies just right to get that perfect gooey consistency for smothering the life out of the world. And there was always someone—mundane or magical—who lived for the perverse satisfaction of brewing up the worst of the universe. They didn’t care who suffered. What caught Wrenn Goodfellow off guard was the number of knives-out sous chefs ready to do the villain’s chopping and slicing. Wrenn peered at the magic dancing along the edge of the bayberry-scented, semi-translucent vellum she held. Such sheets were milled from the scales shed by butterfly-winged pixies, the self-righteous kind who supposedly never lied, and were hard to come by. They were renowned for their clarity of “truth and magic.” In Oberon’s Castle, “truth” keyed itself to its holder and more often than not, “magic” was the lock imprisoning what was real. Such slipperiness made whipping up a vast kettle of malice all that much easier. Wrenn rotated the vellum slightly to better catch the last golden shine of the sunset flowing across the threshold between her sunroom and kitchen. She adjusted the angle slightly to keep the sheet perpendicular to her line of sight, and watched the eddies and vortices of aurora-like blues, purples, and greens as they swirled and flowed over the data spells attached to the sheet. That shine was why she spent a significant portion of her monthly Royal Guard salary on her small but comfortable apartment. Why she’d fought to get a west-facing place in one of the calmer premium realms. Her aquariums did well here—her fish plinked and gurgled in the sunroom—as did her rainforest’s worth of potted plants. Those huge windows on the other side of the arched threshold, those sheets of glass made by fae artisans, acted as a megaphone. And there, along the edge of the vellum, a little bit of truth surfaced out of the dancing magic: A tiny ballerina manifested on the corner. She danced to one side, then back, like a looped video. Wrenn had no idea what the ballerina itself meant. Did the dead sprite identified on the clarity-laden vellum moonlight as a dancer in the mundane world? Did she dance here, for one of the Royal Courts? Or had dancing been her dream? Charmed artifacts like pixie vellum tended to be well cared for and used again and again. Wrenn had managed to get this one before the report was transferred into Oberon’s new digital archive and the paper sent to be used for a more important case. She rotated it again to get a good look at the overwritten magic under the report, just in case something leaked through and corrupted the information. The clarity of that dancing ballerina said it wasn’t a corruption. Whoever made this report cared enough to take the extra steps necessary to restrain older magic from seeping up into the details of this particular murder. Some officer had decided he needed to write up his report on the special lie-detector paper. Not, she suspected, because at the time he thought the eyewitness account all that important, but because he thought the witness was lying. Every cop knew that sprites were “like that” when they thought they could get something from a lie, like ruining the reputation of a good and charitable fae lord. Because when was every cop wrong? Then the sprite washed up dead on the banks of the Titan River three realms distant from the good and
