The darkness tasted like bitter bark and earth, sharp berries, and cold water. I could not feel it as it came over me but I could smell it, taste it, hear it . . .

When Alfhild was a little girl, her grandmother called her a fairy princess and told her all of her favorite tales.

She-d never imagined they were real.

Anxious to avoid the swarming reporters and ghoulish souvenir hunters who won-t leave her alone when her brother Gulliver is tried and acquitted for multiple murders he almost certainly committed, a grown up Alfhild changes her name to Lorelei and flees Louisiana to the sanctuary she inherited from her grandmother, the ancestral home in England.

All is well until she wakes one morning to find a naked man in her rosebush.

And the games begin . . .

Lorelei-s inauspicious introduction to Cadfael, the seductively beautiful Unseelie prince, does not prepare her for becoming a pawn between the ancient queens of the faerie courts, Iseult and Mabd. Her big mouth and smartass attitude turn tension into war between the faerie clans: the Seelie, hiding behind golden lies and their resplendent beauty; and the Unseelie, long considered the fearsome things that go bump in the night.

Her brother works for the Seelie queen. The man she loves is in line to inherit the Unseelie throne. And both of them are determined to have Lorelei on their side.

The real world thinks she's been murdered, her house has been turned into a crime scene, and there are creatures on both sides of the war who call her a traitor. She doesn't want to know what they do to traitors. Too bad the excitement didn't end at a naked man in her rosebush. Things are a lot weirder now.