Running away sounds great in theory?escape your past, clean the slate. But then, surprise! There's no one around to help you when you accidentally become the Faerie Queen.

Five months after leaving Montreal, Jude's settled into a magic-free life on the west coast. Her grudgingly quiet existence is shattered when she suffers an unnatural seizure and a stranger shows up on her doorstep. The fact that he bows to her is bad enough, but the news he brings is worse: her aunt Miranda is dead.

Which makes Jude the Mab.

It doesn't matter that she's half-human, that up until recently she worked for the Consilium, or that she's still carrying a torch for one of the Faerie Court's few remaining human adversaries. The Court expects her to don the crown, adopt an appropriate heir and run a world that she can't even enter. On top of that, her ruthless father turns up demanding an audience and the manipulative Archduke is ready to call in the favour she owes him.

With her enemies multiplying by the minute, Jude's on track to be more than just the first half-human queen of Faerie?she might also have the shortest reign of any Mab in history.

It's a record she'd be happy to claim if it didn't mean dying.