The Becoming (The Fae’s Invitation: A Cali Steele Tell-All Memoir Trilogy #3)

Chapter One

The Solstice

The hotel appeared on the winter solstice, exactly three years after I had first stumbled through its doors, desperate and shy and hungry for something I couldn't name.

I was thirty-one now. Established. Known.

The woman who wrote about fae lovers with an authenticity that had become my trademark, my mystery, my marketing hook.

I had been with seven women in those three years. Human women. Beautiful, skilled, temporary. I had learned their bodies, their rhythms, their languages of desire. I had become, by every external measure, the confident, sensual woman that Claire had seen potential in.

None of it was enough. None of them were her.

I was driving to a cabin in Vermont—a writer's retreat I didn't want, a solitude I had outgrown—when the road shifted beneath my tires, when the trees changed from pine to something silver and luminescent, when the sign appeared with its flickering language and its promise of somewhere else.

Claire stood in the parking lot, unchanged, unaging, her smile knowing and warm and final.

"You've been writing us," she said, not a question. "Telling our stories. Bringing others to the between-places with your words. Do you know what that means?"

"It means I'm your prophet," I said, stepping out of the car, leaving everything behind—my phone, my laptop, my carefully constructed human identity. "Your advertisement. Your lure."

"It means you're ready," Claire corrected, her hand finding mine, her touch cool and electric and home. "For the third lesson. The final transformation. The choice that cannot be unchosen."

The hotel was more alive than I had ever seen it. The stone pulsed with heartbeat rhythm. The curtains breathed. The staff—my staff, my court, my waiting worshippers—filled every corridor, every room, every shadow with their glowing eyes and their hunger for my presence.