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Prologue

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love

Her family traded in predictions These predictions tended, however, to run toward the nonspecific Things like: Soht involve the nu Open your hand for it Or: You have a big decision and it will not ht blue house at 300 Fox Way didn’t ae, to realize the exactsix people wheeled into a client’s car two hours after his psychic reading, he could nod with a sense of accohbor offered to buy another client’s old laer if she was looking for a bit of extra cash, she could recall the pro and sell it with the sense that the transaction had been foretold Or when a third client heard his wife say, This is a decision that has to besaid by Maura Sargent over a spread of tarot cards and then leap decisively to action

But the imprecise nature of the fortunes stole some of their power The predictions could be dismissed as coincidences, hunches They were a chuckle in the Wal lot when you ran into an old friend as promised A shiver when the number seventeen appeared on an electric bill A realization that even if you had discovered the future, it really didn’t change how you lived in the present They were truth, but they weren’t all of the truth

"I should tell you," Maura always advised her new clients, "that this reading will be accurate, but not specific"

It was easier that way

But this was not what Blue was told Again and again, she had her fingers spread wide, her paled decks and spread across the fuzz of a fa room carpet Thumbs were pressed to the mystical, invisible third eye that was said to lie between everyone’s eyebrows Runes were cast and dreams interpreted, tea leaves scrutinized and séances conducted

All the women came to the same conclusion, blunt and inexplicably specific What they all agreed on, in es, was this:

If Blue was to kiss her true love, he would die

For a long ti was specific, certainly, but in the way of a fairy tale It didn’t say how her true love would die It didn’t say how long after the kiss he would survive Did it have to be a kiss on the lips? Would a chaste peck on the back of his palm prove as deadly?

Until she was eleven, Blue was convinced she would silently contract an infectious disease One press of her lips to her hypothetical soulmate and he, too, would die in a consumptive battle untreatable by modern medicine When she was thirteen, Blue decided that jealousy would kill hi at the un and a heart full of hurt

When she turned fifteen, Blue concluded that hercards and that the dreams of her mother and the other clairvoyant woht, and so the prediction didn’t h The predictions that came out of 300 Fox Way were unspecific, but undeniably true Her mother had dreamt Blue’s broken wrist on the first day of school Her aunt Jimi predicted Maura’s tax return to within ten dollars Her older cousin Orla always began to hu a few minutes before it came on the radio

No one in the house ever really doubted that Blue was destined to kill her true love with a kiss It was a threat, however, that had been around for so long that it had lost its force Picturing six-year-old Blue in love was such a far-off thing as to be iinary

And by sixteen, Blue had decided she would never fall in love, so it didn’t ed when her mother’s half sister Neeve caotten fa loudly what Blue’s s were done in her front room, mostly for residents of Henrietta and the valley around it Neeve, on the other hand, did her readings on television at five o’clock in the raphs of her staring unerringly at the viewer Four books on the supernatural bore her name on the cover

Blue had never met Neeve, so she knew more about her half aunt from a cursory web search than fro to visit, but she knew her iion of whispered conversations between Maura and her two best friends, Persephone and Calla -- the sort of conversations that trailed off into sipping coffee and tapping pens on the table when Blue entered the room But Blue wasn’t particularly concerned about Neeve’s arrival; as one more woman in a house filled to the bri when the already long shadows of the er than usual When Blue opened the door for her, she thought, for a moment, that Neeve was an unfarew used to the stretched crih the trees, and she saw that Neeve was barely older than her mother, which was not very old at all

Outside, in the distance, hounds were crying Blue was falionby Hunt Club rode out with horses and foxhounds nearly every weekend Blue knehat their frantic howls meant at that hter," Neeve said, and before Blue could answer, she added, "this is the year you’ll fall in love"

Chapter 1

It was freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrived

Every year, Blue and her mother, Maura, had come to the same place, and every year it was chilly But this year, without Maura here with her, it felt colder