Prologue
The music poundsthrough my body like a second heartbeat as I dance with my friends, celebrating my twentieth birthday at our favorite off-campus bar. The bass vibrates through the sticky floor and up into my bones. Blackwood Academy’s finest—aka the only people who put up with my sarcastic ass for the past year—have gone all out tonight. The air reeks of cheap beer and too much cologne, but I don’t care. Jess has even convinced the bartender to make those electric blue cocktails I love, the ones that taste like liquid candy and bad decisions.
“Best. Birthday. Ever!” I shout over the music, my throat already raw from screaming along to every song. My friends cheer, their faces flushed and gleaming with sweat under the strobing lights.
By midnight, though, something feels off. A strange tingling starts at the base of my spine, like ice water trickling down my vertebrae. It spreads through my limbs like electricity searching for ground, making my fingertips buzz against my drink.
“You okay, Ash?” Mia asks, her face swimming in my vision through the haze of smoke and flashing lights. “You look pale.”
I force a smile, tasting the metallic tang of fear on my tongue. “Just need some air. Too many blue things.”
The cool night air hits my face like a slap when I step outside, carrying the scent of rain-soaked concrete and car exhaust. But it doesn’t help. The tingling has become an ache, deep and insistent, like something is trying to claw its way out from inside my bones. I need to get home. Now.
“I’m calling an Uber,” Jess insists, her words slightly slurred as she fumbles with her phone.
“It’s only a ten-minute walk. I need to clear my head.” The lie tastes bitter on my lips.
I shouldn’t go alone. Every instinct I have screams this at me, but my legs are already moving.
Halfway through the park shortcut to my apartment, pain rips through my body without warning. I collapse onto the damp grass, the cold moisture seeping through my jeans as my fingers dig into the earth. Wave after wave of agony rolls through me, each one worse than the last, like my skeleton is trying to rearrange itself.
Something is wrong with the shadows beneath the trees. They move against the breeze, swirling toward me like smoke drawn to a flame. The air grows thick and heavy, pressing against my lungs. My skin burns as the shadows touch me, coiling around my arms and legs like living things. They feel cold and warm at the same time, impossible and terrifying.
“What the hell?” I gasp, watching in horror as my shadow peels away from the ground, rising like a dark mirror of myself before dissolving into tendrils that wrap around my body with the gentleness of a lover’s touch.
The pain concentrates between my shoulder blades, building until white spots dance across my vision. It feels like something is trying to tear its way out of my back with razor-sharp claws. I scream, the sound raw and animalistic, but it’sswallowed by the shadows gathering around me like a hungry tide.
“Don’t fight it, Ashley.”
The deep voice rumbles through the surrounding air, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. I look up through tears that blur my vision to see a man standing at the edge of the shadows. Except he isn’t just a man. Massive black feathered wings extend from his back, spanning at least fifteen feet and blocking out the moonlight. Each feather catches the dim light like polished obsidian, creating a mesmerizing pattern of depth and darkness that seems to shift and move even when the wings are still.
“Who—” I can’t finish as another spasm of pain cuts through me, stealing my breath.
He moves closer with predatory grace, his green eyes reflecting the dim light with an otherworldly glow. There’s something distinctly inhuman about his beauty—the sharp angles of his cheekbones, the way his pale skin seems to glow in the moonlight, the predatory stillness in the way he holds himself. His dark hair falls across his forehead in waves that look like they’ve never seen sunlight, and when he smiles, I catch a glimpse of elongated canines that mark him as something far more dangerous than human.
“My name is Bael. I’ve been waiting for this moment since you were born.”
“Waiting for what?” I manage through gritted teeth, tasting copper where I’ve bitten my tongue. “Me to die in a park on my birthday?”
The corner of his mouth twitches upward, revealing those sharp teeth again. “Your Ascension.”
Before I can ask what the hell that means, the pain peaks. I hear a sickening tearing sound and realize with horror it’s coming from me. The shadows surge, forming a cocoon around my bodyas something bursts from my back with a wet, ripping sound that makes my stomach turn.
Bael kneels beside me, his wings creating a canopy over us both. This close, I can feel the unnatural coolness radiating from his skin, can see the way his pupils dilate as he watches me with an intensity that should terrify me. “Breathe through it. Let the shadows help you.”
“What’s happening to me?” I sob, my voice breaking as the shadows respond to my distress, somehow cushioning the pain with their cool touch.
“You’re becoming what you were always meant to be,” he says, his hand finding mine. When our skin touches, something electric passes between us—a connection that feels both foreign and strangely right, like coming home to a place I’ve never been. His skin is marble-cold but somehow comforting, solid and real in a world that’s suddenly turned upside down. “An Ascendant.”
The moment our flesh connects, Bael goes completely still. His breathing stops—not that it seemed necessary for him to begin with—and his eyes widen with something that looks like shock, then wonder, then hunger. His grip on my hand tightens, and I feel his thumb trace over my knuckles with a reverence that makes my pulse skip.
“Impossible,” he breathes, his voice rougher now, edged with something that sounds almost desperate. “You’re...” He shakes his head, as if trying to clear it, but his eyes never leave my face. “The connection. I can feel everything you feel.”
Some primal part of me, buried deep beneath twenty years of thinking I was completely human, recognizes him. Not his face or his name, but something deeper—his essence, his soul, whatever the hell it is that makes him who he is. The fear that’s been clawing at my chest since this nightmare began suddenly quiets, replaced by an inexplicable sense of safety. Of belonging. Likeevery step I’ve ever taken has been leading me to this moment, to him.
The shadows part just enough for me to see what has emerged from my back. Wings. Massive, powerful wings that span nearly as wide as Bael’s. But where his feathers are uniformly black as midnight, mine are a deeper darkness with crimson tips that seem to glow with their own internal light. Each feather is perfect, from the downy ones close to my back to the long flight feathers at the tips. They rustle with each breath I take, the sound like silk whispering against silk.
“Holy shit,” I whisper, watching them flex involuntarily, feeling the new muscles in my back pull and stretch. The feathers are incredibly soft, softer than anything I’ve ever felt, and when I move them, they respond to my will as if they’ve always been part of me.
