Chapter 1
The candles are supposed to be for Mara.
Twelve white pillars arranged in a perfect circle on the stone floor of our family's ritual room, each one lit with the kind of careful ceremony that takes twenty minutes and a steady hand. I've watched my mother do it four times now, once for each of my older siblings when they came into their power. The candles burn gold when the magic takes hold. A warm, steady gold that means the Awakening worked and the bloodline holds true and another Fairmont heir has stepped into their inheritance.
Mara told me to stand in the center because she needs an anchor. Something to draw the ritual energy through. A focal point. She used the word anchor with the same tone she uses when she says useful and convenient and hold still.
Which is exactly the problem with this family. Everything is about what's useful to them.
"Don't move," my mother says from her position outside the circle. Her hands are already raised, the words of the old invocation moving silently on her lips. My father stands besideher, watching me with flat, assessing eyes. Not watching Mara, who is supposedly the point of all this. Watching me, because I'm the part that can go wrong.
Mara takes her place opposite me across the circle. She's beautiful tonight, dressed in white, her dark hair loose around her shoulders the way the ceremony requires. She looks like she belongs here. She always has. Every Fairmont child is born with a thread of power running through them, and every Awakening is the moment that thread is pulled taut and made into something real. Magic becomes theirs to hold and use and pass down.
No thread exists in me. Never has. I'm the null, the gap in the bloodline, the daughter my parents stopped bothering to explain to visitors after the third time a healer confirmed it. But standing in the center of the circle where the energy has to pass through something on its way to Mara makes me useful. My body is good at that, apparently. Good at being passed through.
I'm so tired of being useful.
My mother's invocation rises from silent to audible, and the ritual starts. It always feels like standing too close to a fire. A pressure behind the eyes, a warmth along the skin that doesn't come from anywhere visible. The energy moves through the room in the way water moves through a pipe, looking for where it needs to go. It finds me first, the way it always does, and I let it.
Then something changes.
The warmth stops moving. It stops passing through and starts settling in, sinking into the space behind my ribs like it's found somewhere it wants to stay. My breath catches. The energy isn't reaching Mara anymore. It's staying in me.
And for the first time in my life, something in this family is choosing me.
"Stop," my father says sharply. "Angelic, release it."
"I'm not doing anything." My voice comes out steadier than I expected. The thing inside my chest feels like swallowing a star, like heat and pressure and something pulling at the edges of my ribs from the inside. "I don't know how to stop it."
"Try harder," he snaps.
"Oh, excellent advice. Try harder. Why didn't I think of that?"
Mara's face has gone white. "What is she doing? Mother, what is she doing to my ceremony?"
"Angelic." My mother's voice drops to the register she uses when she wants to cut through to something essential. "You release that energy right now."
"I would if I could. But apparently nobody thought to teach the family null how ritual magic actually works."
The candles flare. All twelve of them, simultaneously, surging from a careful controlled flame to something that reaches the ceiling and throws wild shadows across the ritual room walls. The magic inside me lurches, expanding outward in a pulse I can't contain, and then it all happens at once: the candles extinguish, the circle cracks along three of its carved lines, and every piece of glassware on the shelves along the far wall shatters.
Silence.
Mara is shaking. The white of her ceremony dress has a scorch mark along the hem where the nearest candle flared too close. She stares at me across the ruined circle with pure fury. "You did that on purpose."
"Right. Because I've always dreamed of ruining your special day and finally getting some attention in this family. You caught me."
"You've always been jealous—"
"Jealous of what, exactly? Your personality? Because that would be a reach."
My father crosses into the ruined circle and takes my arm. His grip isn't gentle. "What did you absorb?"
"Apparently your daughter's entire magical inheritance. You're welcome."
"How much of it?"
The honest answer is all of it, and from the way the heat in my chest shifts, he already knows. "Enough to make this interesting."
