Prologue:

Holly Short jerked awake with a gasp, throwing the sheets off her legs as she jumped from her futon. She winced as her feet hit the frigid linoleum on the floor of her newest apartment. While she spent three years lost in limbo, her landlord had repossessed her old apartment and her belongings had very narrowly been saved from cremation. Shaking her head and cursing softly, Holly carefully made her way towards the kitchen.

Life had been fairly quiet for the elfin captain since she had returned from her latest 'save-the-world-in-a-day' adventure. The Fowl's were enjoying some quality family time on the east coast of Australia, Jay Jay had settled into his permanent home in Foaly's lab and Holly was up for promotion again – and this time she wasn't going to say no.

The thing that had woken her became immediately apparent as she stepped into the living room. She stalked over to the kitchen bench and slammed her hand down on the irritating ringing before she lifted the communicator to her ear and growled out an intimidating: "Hello?"

"Olla!"

Upon hearing the all too familiar uppity whinny, she collapsed into one of the gelchairs by the kitchen bench. "What do you want now?"

"Oh, how nice." Holly could see Foaly pouting and in her mind's eye. "The smartest centaur under the whole wide world rings you and the best you can do is snarl at me."

"Get on with it, Foaly."

"The nerve of some fairies! I just can't understand-"

"Cut it out you two," another voice interrupted Foaly's rant, yanking Holly awake. "This is an emergency; the council is already in session."

Foaly snorted and Holly knew she would have heard the clattering of his keyboard in the background if he hadn't been wearing v-gloves. "Nice of you to join us, Commander. One thought though, shouldn't you be in this all important emergency meeting?"

"How many security cams do you have in this place? Actually, I don't need an answer to that. It's two in the morning, Foaly, and I haven't slept in forty-eight hours. Get on with the briefing."

"Okay, your worship. I just hope the rest of the council members don't realise you're not actually listening to them." Holly fought the urge to smile; his voice had sounded a little deeper than usual, like he trying to stay as quiet as possible. He was definitely using one of Foaly's throat mics and she would bet her pension that he was covering the tiny movements of his whispers by leaning his elbow on the tabletop so it seemed like he was just resting his chin on his hand. She shook her head, some things never changed. "For those of us who only just got up, there has been a string of fairies reported missing over the past week. The cases appeared to be unrelated until we suddenly had eight people MIA and three dead bodies to deal with.

"The first fairy – a homeless sprite- was reported missing by a worker at a downtown soup kitchen at nine o'clock yesterday morning. His body turned up outside Police Plaza's service entrance at midnight with two other bodies which are yet to be identified. There were no witnesses, the databanks from the security cameras in the vicinity have been wiped clean. However, the worst thing – believe me, there is worse – is that none of these fairies were killed by any kind of injury or other physical trauma. The coroner's report was a little sketchy on details, they've never seen anything like this before, but it seems the victims were all drained of magic so quickly, and to such an extent, that they died of shock."

Holly forced the quiver out of her voice before she spoke. "Do we have a suspect?"

There was a resounding silence; even Trouble was reluctant to answer. She froze as her mind rapidly ran through the evidence again. A fairy's personal magic was sacred. This murderer was breaking every law in the Book and Holly knew from the ball of ice that was forming in her gut that it could only mean one thing: Opal Koboi.

A/N: So, I've only got about 3/4 of the next chapter written but I'm still on the fence as to what I'm going to do with it. If I do continue this it would be a pretty decent length and I'd probably try to update about once a week whenever possible.

I'd really appreciate your opinions: should I continue this story or should I just crawl back into the cave I've been hiding in for the past few months?