I should be calling for help. Demanding he put me down.
Instead, my fingers curl into his shirt and hold on.
Fear coils tight in my stomach, cold and sickening—and threaded through it, to my horror, is something else.
A rush.
A spark of excitement so sharp it makes my breath hitch.
As if some reckless part of me has been waiting for this moment my whole life.
What the hell is wrong with me?
The answer never comes, because in the next heartbeat—the world vanishes.
The sirens.
The burning house.
The smoke clawing at my lungs.
All gone.
When sensation returns, it isn’t smoke I breathe—it’s raw heat.
Wind rushing past my ears. Air that tastes like ash and stone and something wild, ancient, and alive.
I gasp, clutching at him harder, my boots scraping against unfamiliar ground as if gravity itself has shifted beneath my feet.
Terror and awe slam into me all at once, knocking the breath from my chest.
And with bone-deep certainty, I understand the truth—this stranger didn’t rescue me.
He didn’t pull me out of my mundane, predictable existence.
He stole me away. And the worst part?
Somewhere deep inside, a dangerous, inexcusable, broken part of me is already wondering what comes next.
And that’s the last thought I have before the darkness takes me.
Prologue 2: Thorne
Earlier, The Tidal Lands, Nightfall
The sea still reeks of blood and magic when we gather.
Not mortal blood—no.
This is older. Heavier.
The residue of SoulTakers burned back into the dark, of wards strained thin, of Nightfall holding by a thread because it always does.
We stand in the Tidal Lands, beneath a sky still bruised from the memory of our fallen Prime.
Kael is at the head of the chamber, storm-eyed and unbowed, the sea listening even now to the cadence of his breath. Phoebe’s presence within him hums quietly through the stones beneath our feet, new and bright and undeniable.
Alaric, too, is different now. Jules has changed him. Maybe even for the better.
