Prologue
There was a scream from the fifth floor of the rickety apartment building, audible even through the raging snowstorm. It echoed through the normally quiet, small city street. The reason for this sudden, unexpected disturbance was revealed in a dramatic explosion of gray and yellow. The flames and smoke burst through the windows, spraying glass and other debris through the air.
In lieu of an alarm, the scream resounded. From there, everything happened quickly. The first to escape the flaming building was a terror-stricken woman. She looked as though she had seen a phantom charge at her through the smoke that no doubt choked the air within the building.
The moment she arrived in the quickly crowding street, a boy with striking white hair that blended with the snow pushed past the rest to steady her as she stumbled over a curb.
“What happened?” Despite the chaos around them, the boy was calm. He looked old and young at once with his blazing golden eyes that spoke of things no one could comprehend. The woman stared at his strange appearance in a daze. Handsome, yet so oddly colored. Could such a human truly exist? Perhaps she was hallucinating from smoke inhalation.
Even stranger was the question that followed when the woman did not answer him. “Where is the kid?”
“The- wh-who?” Her voice was nothing more than a shudder, followed by a heaving cough as the smoke punished her for attempting to use her lungs for words.
“The-” he paused, pursed his lips, and let out a huff through his nose. His gaze flickered up to the building where flames were steadily lowering into other floors. “Nevermind. Things are escalating faster than I expected,” he mumbled, a flash of irritation warping his handsome features. “Third floor,” he added under his breath. “Right then. Drake.”
A taller teenager with dark and unruly hair stepped out from the crowd. His sharp blue eyes narrowed up at the flames. “On it,” he murmured, and then burst into a dead run through the doors of the flaming building before anyone could stop him.
“Three seconds Chris, Analea,” the white-haired boy spoke up over the woman’s cries of horror in watching someone run unprotected into a fire. And in three seconds, nothing seemed to happen. The people named Chris and Analea never appeared. In ten, the fire was gone. In fifteen, the strange boy with white hair was gone as well. No one found the teenager who ran into the fire. The only proof something ever happened was the damage left over from the sweeping flames and a frantic woman’s plea to the police to apprehend her neighbor. According to her, he was a boy who had started the fire seemingly with his bare hands.
A boy who had disappeared just as quickly as the other teens.
