My name’s Kate Kane and my world has turned to shit.
A little while ago—a year? Two years? Fuck, has it been three? I knew exactly two good people. One was a weird living statue who hung out in my flat and made me coffee even though she couldn’t drink it herself. The other was the mystical queen of London. They’re both dead now. Or in places between life and death where the difference doesn’t mean a damn and they still can’t talk or move or laugh or tell me to stop being so goddamned self-indulgent so, yeah. Dead or near as makes no odds.
This is normally the bit where I’d explain that I’m a half-faery PI with a string of exes, most of them either dangerous or annoying, a history of ruining people I care about, a psychotic mother who does guest spots in my head, and a lovable band of quirky hangers-on who I haven’t quite managed to get killed yet.
But just when my life had looked like it was getting on track, this cockney fuckstain called Arty King showed up and made a pretty good go of burning down everything that mattered to me, then this smug vampire fuckstain called Sebastian Douglas destroyed the rest. I wound up chained to a wall with my blood slowly draining out so that fuckstain number two could make his bid for immortality—well, immortality plus on account of he was already a vampire—and the only person who didn’t show up to rescue me was my actual goddamned girlfriend.
Fucking Julian Saint-Ger-fucking-main left me to die because apparently when you’re an eight-hundred-year-old-vampire you accept the brutal murder of your lovers as one of those things that happen, and you don’t stick your neck out for anybody because if you do, you won’t live to be eight hundred and one.
Most days I try to hate her for it. Some days I succeed.
Oh, I also shanked a granny. And while of all the people who got pointlessly slaughtered in the war for the soul of the city she was probably the one who most deserved it, I still have nightmares. I mean, I don’t want to come across like I’ve got this strict moral code or anything, but I really thought butchering some guy’s nan was on my “I would definitely never do that” list.
So, yeah. That’s who I am.
My name’s Kate Kane. I’m fucking poison.
1
Breakfast & Bad News
I awoke to the sound of cockerels. Actual motherfucking cockerels. I stirred, swearing under my breath. Rolling over, I found a naked werewolf stretched out beside me. I’d been fucking Tara Vane-Tempest on and off ever since I split with Julian back when everything went to shit. I say I’d been fucking her, but it was probably more accurate to say she’d been fucking me. Tara was not the kind of woman who consented to being the fuckee in the relationship. It was probably an alpha thing.
“Good morning, Kate Kane.” She was too damned awake too damned early. “Sleep well?”
She knew I hadn’t, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because she was well aware that I’d not slept properly since I’d let my best friend get turned into a hunk of inanimate rock, and secondly because it’s hard to get a good night’s rest when a shapeshifting lingerie model is going full all-the-better-to-eat-you-with on your willingly helpless body.
“Pretty well,” I replied. “I had four hours where I was too unconscious to hate myself so I’m calling that a win.”
“Someday this relentless misery is going to become unattractive.”
“Yeah, well”—I shrugged—“as an empowered twenty-first century woman I’m not relentlessly miserable for other people, I’m relentlessly miserable for me.”
Tara got out of bed in a fluid, animal motion that made me wish she’d get back into it, the sheets sliding away from her body like water off a nymph in one of those old paintings where you could show all the tits you wanted as long as you pretended it was art. She wrapped herself in a peach silk dressing-gown and pulled on a discreet rope that I knew from prior experience was hooked up to a Downton-esque system of bells somewhere in the servants’ quarters. Somehow, despite my common-as-pigshit roots, I was regularly getting my brains banged out by a woman who never quite got the memo about the feudal system.
“It is way too early for breakfast,” I told her.
“I have duties to attend to.”
Ugh, spare me. “I know, I know. We walk the boundaries between the worlds because