Chapter 1
Kyan
Lucas nine years old
Night used to be a thing I trusted; I thought I knew every bump, creak and every breath this place made.
It used to be only whispers from the shadow realm when the veil was at its weakest, the old bones of this manor groaning with the years it’s spent holding the past within its walls.
Night used to mean sleep and the soft weight of my mate curled against me, and Jonah snoring obnoxiously, yet even that I got used to. Nights were pretty much harmless, now they are anything but. Instead, I lie awake listening for my son’s dreams that can split the realms open and swallow him whole.
Now, night is a listening for every creak, every ripple in the air that tells me whether or not the shadows are calling for him and whether he is answering them.
Now, I lie awake counting breaths that aren’t all mine. Waiting for the moment the air changes. Waiting for the veil to ripple the way water does right before something rises through it.
Marabella sleeps on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, the other thrown across my chest like she’s staking a claim she refuses to surrender even in her dreams. Her hair fans across the pillow, dark and wild. She looks peaceful with Jonah nestled against her back. His arm drapes across her waist like he can somehow piece all the remnants of her we lost when she lost Kora.
The old clock on the wall ticks too loudly down the hall as we move into the witching hour. The house settles around us with its old ghosts, new bones and even newer magic. Beams creak like the place is trying to remember what it was before it became a home for a demi-goddess, an Octavian warlock, and a boy who keeps slipping through realms in his sleep.
A boy who is mine.
I’m staring at the dark ceiling when I feel it.
It’s not a sound. Not exactly. It’s a shift. Like the air in the room goes thin for half a second, like the walls lean away from us and the ceiling rises taller ever so slightly.
The hairs on my arms lift, and Kaif stirs within me, also sensing it.
Marabella doesn’t stir, so I slide her hand off my chest carefully. I ease myself out of bed, bare feet meeting cold floorboards. I don’t even bother to grab a shirt. The chill doesn’t touch me when that feeling is in the house because there is nothing colder than the doom it brings.
The corridor beyond our door is dim, lit only by the faint moonlight leaking in through the domed windows in the ceiling. The shadows in this house are never simple. They stretch and coil around the corners like they’re alive, like they’re listening for whatever darkness Lucas may set loose in the house. We may have breached the shadow realm, destroyed it, but when we did, the old ghosts of the past needed somewhere to go. Here they feel safe, here is where they call home.
Lucas’s room is at the far end of the hallway. I could close my eyes and walk there blind. I’ve made this trip too many times, and I know I will make it many more.
It started after the war with the Reaper wolves. After the day we nearly lost Marabella, the past reached out of Mnemosyne and wrapped itself around all of us until we were choking on memories that were never ours. Kaif has been worried since, like he knew whatever it was he saw was just the beginning of an end we are yet to see come to fruition.
After that, Lucas began waking with ash in his hair. Little black flecks under his nails like he’d been clawing at dirt; or sometimes soaking wet like he was dipped in a lake.
He started saying things in his sleep. A language I didn’t recognize until Kaif went pale and muttered a reply he refuses to tell me the meaning of.
That was when I learned a new kind of fear, something is calling for him. We thought we broke the curses that plagued our families, yet now it seems we’ve awakened a new one.
The door to Lucas’s room is cracked open. I don’t remember leaving it that way when I tucked him in. My stomach drops, wondering if he has been sleepwalking. I push it wider with my palm while holding my breath.
The room smells like my son. Like lavender soap and the sun from earlier today. Like wool from the duvet and childish sweat.
And something else.
The window is shut, the fire in his small hearth is dead. Yet a breath of winter ghosts through the room, curling across the floorboards toward his bed.
Lucas lies on his back, blanket kicked down to his waist. His arms are spread a little like he fell into sleep exhausted. His hair, black and chaotic like his mother’s, is damp at his temples. His mouth is parted as smoke from his breath mists into the air.
He should look like nothing more than a boy of nine. He doesn’t. Right now he looks possessed. Like he is choking on the darkness that is creeping closer to him in the shadows.
Shadows pool around his bed. Not the normal darkness that the shadows of this manor offer. This is thicker, smeared like ink, pulsing faintly as if something beneath it is alive. A low hum vibrates in the air, so soft my ears barely register it.
Lucas’s chest rises, falls. Rises and falls.
The shadows rise with him, and I suck in a shaky breath.
“Lucas,” I say, barely above a whisper.
No answer, yet his eyelids flicker and the shadows around him surge. The floor beneath my feet… flexes like the manor itself is breathing. That is the only word I have for it.
It’s like the boards turn to skin for a heartbeat. The house itself is reacting to him, to whatever he is touching on the other side. The hum grows a little louder. The air sharpens and turns sickly sweet when the first ripple begins and forms a portal next to his bed on the wall.
Not fully open. Not yet. But he’s close to opening the gates to wherever he seems to go.
“Lucas,” I say again, firmer.
His brows draw together, like I’m pulling him away from wherever his dreams are taking him.
The shadow at the foot of the bed whips upward in a ribbon, twisting toward the ceiling. The temperature drops another degree. My lungs seize on instinct. I’ve felt this before, in the Underworld. In the chamber where the mnesmoyne revealed to us how it all started, as if it’s made of the very same magic that keeps the memories trapped in its depths.
I move closer to the bed. Each step feels like wading through invisible water. The energy thickens the nearer I get, and the shadows don’t like me invading. Waking him.
“Lucas,” I murmur, reaching down to touch his shoulder. The moment my fingers brush his skin, the shadows snap. They lash toward me, not with malice, not even awareness, like a reflex. Like a muscle memory contracting when startled.
A cold hand closes around my wrist, impossibly strong for a boy of his age who is yet to get his wolf. I freeze, and for a heartbeat, I am not in my son’s room.
I am in a stone hall lit by dead blue fire. I can smell iron and hear distant screams that aren’t screams at all but echoes of screams, trapped in ancient walls. Over my wrist is a grip like a shackle. My eyes jerk down, my wrist is empty, and suddenly I’m back in his room.
Lucas’s shoulder is warm under my palm, normal, child-soft. My pulse thunders so hard it’s a roar in my ears, and I pull my hand back slowly.
I’m not afraid of my son. I tell myself that once, twice, until the words stop sounding like lies. Yet something dark resides within him, or is trying to latch onto him? Calling him home to a place that a child has no right to be.
Lucas’s lips move. He doesn’t wake, but his voice slips out, low and broken.
“No,” he whispers.
A child’s voice, twisted by a weight that doesn’t belong in a child.
“No… stop… I didn’t…”
His chin trembles along with his lip, and the shadows pulse. I crouch beside the bed, careful to keep my hands to myself. “Lucas. Hey. It’s okay. You’re safe.”
His throat works like he’s swallowing back something lodged in his throat.
“Let me explain,” he says.
I go still.
“Explain what, buddy?”
His head tilts as if he’s listening to someone I can’t hear. His brow furrows deeper, sweat gathering there.
“Cel...”
The word cuts off. The shadows flare, and in that flare, I feel a presence brush the edge of the room. Not a spirit, it was nothing the way ghosts feel.
My mouth dries.
“Lucas,” I say urgently. “Wake up.”
His eyes fly open, and for a second, they aren’t his.
They are black. Not the normal dark red of Octavian bloodlines. This is obsidian, bottomless and vacant. He stares straight at me like he doesn’t recognize me at all. I don’t move, nor do I breathe. The shadows around the bed coil upward, gathering at his shoulders like a cloak.
Then he blinks. The obsidian fractures. The reddish hue returns. The shadows collapse like smoke with no fire. Lucas’s gaze clears, and he squints at me, confused and groggy.
“Dad?” His voice is small now, normal. A boy yanked out of a nightmare, and relief hits me so fast my hands shake.
