By sunrise, every wolf in the Five Clans would be hunting her.
At 2:14 a.m., Nyra Voss was just trying to do her job.
“Man down at the old chapel on the ridge,” dispatch crackled. “Caller hung up. No name.”
“Copy.” Nyra was already climbing. The storm had killed the power across Saint Veil, her partner was stuck at a wreck on Route 28, and the ambulance couldn’t make the last stretch of mud. So it was her, a med bag, and a lantern.
The dead man was still standing when she found him.
That was the first thing she noticed.
The second was that he had no shadow.
He stood in the middle of the abandoned chapel, dressed in a black suit that looked expensive enough to feed a village for a year. His pale fingers were wrapped around a silver pocket watch. His head hung at an unnatural angle, and a thin line of blood ran from his mouth to his collar.
Outside, thunder rolled across the mountains.
Nyra tightened her grip on the lantern.
“Hello? Sir? I’m an EMT. I’m here to help.”
Her voice disappeared into the darkness.
She should have left. Any sensible person would have left. But the smell of blood had followed her inside.
Not ordinary blood.
This smelled like the strange metallic scent that haunted her nightmares.
It tasted like copper and lightning on the back of her tongue, the way the air did right before a storm broke. And her right palm, for no reason she could name, began to burn and itch.
The man lifted his head.
Nyra stopped breathing.
His eyes were completely black.
“You,” he whispered.
She took one step backward. “Do I know you?”
The man smiled, revealing teeth that were far too sharp to belong to a human.
“No,” he rasped. “But your kind destroyed my world.”
Before Nyra could move, he collapsed.
His body struck the stone floor with a sound that echoed through the chapel. The lantern slipped from her fingers and shattered. Darkness swallowed the room.
Then came a whisper.
Not from the dead man.
From somewhere beneath the floor.
Thirteen.
Nyra stumbled toward the door.
The whisper followed her.
Thirteen. Thirteen. Thirteen.
She reached for the handle.
Something cold closed around her wrist.
Nyra screamed and swung her free hand. Her palm struck the dead man’s chest.
For one terrible second, nothing happened.
Then the world went white.
A violent pulse tore through her arm. The dead man’s body arched off the floor, and a sound like cracking glass filled the chapel.
His black eyes widened.
“No,” he gasped.
The darkness beneath his skin began to retreat. His veins turned silver, then red. His fingers clawed at Nyra’s wrist.
“What are you?”
“I don’t know!”
The man’s grip suddenly loosened.
His body crumbled into ash.
Eleven months on the job. Nyra had held pressure on gunshot wounds, done CPR on a man twice her size, and called time of death on a girl younger than she was.
She had never watched a body turn to dust in her hands.
Nyra fell to her knees, gasping. Her palm burned. Beneath the skin, a symbol glowed like an ember, a circle split by thirteen jagged lines.
She had never seen it before.
That was what she told herself.
But somewhere deep in her memory, a woman’s voice whispered the same words it had whispered every night since Nyra was a child.
If anyone ever sees the mark, run.
A bell rang outside.
Once.
Twice.
Then every bell in Saint Veil began to sound.
Nyra staggered to the chapel doors.
Below the ridge, flashlights flickered on all over town. Beyond the old walls, the forest stirred. Shapes moved between the trees, large, fast, and watching.
Wolves.
But these were no ordinary wolves.
Their eyes burned amber in the darkness.
And they were running toward her.
A figure emerged from the chapel’s far aisle.
Tall. Impossibly still. Dressed in a long black coat that seemed to absorb the moonlight.
His eyes were red.
A vampire.
Nyra backed away, her hand closing around a broken piece of lantern glass.
The stranger glanced at the ashes on the floor.
Then at the mark on her palm.
He dropped to one knee.
“Your Highness,” he whispered.
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“No, my lady.” His voice trembled. “We have spent seven hundred years making certain you never existed. And now you’ve killed one of our oldest elders.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Then explain why an immortal is dead.”
Lightning split the sky.
Through the gap in the doors, Nyra saw him.
A man walking up the ridge through the rain, barefoot, shirtless, unhurried, while a dozen wolves the size of ponies parted around him like he owned them. Broad shoulders. A scar through one eyebrow. Water running down a body built for violence.
And eyes that glowed wolf-gold.
He stopped at the chapel steps and looked straight at her through the crack, as if the dark meant nothing to him.
“Crane,” he called, his voice low and rough as gravel. “Send her out.”
The kneeling vampire didn’t move. “Thorne. The prince wants her alive.”
“The Five Clans voted an hour ago.” The gold eyes never left Nyra’s face. “Unanimous. Whatever she is, she dies before sunrise.”
Nyra’s grip tightened on the glass until it cut her. She was the one who saved people. Nobody had ever voted on whether she got to live.
Then something strange happened.
His gaze dropped to her glowing palm, and the man flinched. Just a fraction. Like something inside him had gone suddenly, completely quiet.
Behind her, a voice rose from the darkness.
A woman’s voice.
One Nyra knew better than her own.
“She’s Hollowborn,” it said. “The last one. And she has finally awakened.”
Mara.
Her mother was supposed to be in Albany visiting her sister.
She was not supposed to be here.
She was not supposed to know that name.
A match struck.
For one brief instant, her mother’s face appeared in the light.
She looked terrified.
Not of the vampire.
Not of the wolves gathering outside.
Of Nyra.
“I’m sorry,” Mara whispered.
Then she blew out the match.
And the darkness answered.