If I fell asleep, those thoughts would twist themselves into rivers of blood as real as the mud in my sheets when I first met Lena. I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn’t find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.
And I knew just the one. It wasn’t under my bed; it was in one of the shoe boxes stacked against my walls. Those boxes held everything that was important to me, and I knew what was inside all of them.
At least I thought I did.
For a second, I couldn’t move. I scanned the brightly colored cardboard boxes, searching for the mental map that would lead me to the right one. But it wasn’t there. My hands started shaking. My right hand—the one I used to write with—and my left—the one I used now.
I didn’t know where it was.
Something was wrong with me, and it had nothing to do with Casters or Keepers or the Order of Things. I was changing, losing more and more of myself every day. And I had no idea why.
Lucille jumped off my bed when I started tearing through the boxes, tossing the lids, dumping everything from bottle caps and basketball cards to faded pictures of my mom all over my bedroom floor. I didn’t stop until I found it in a black Adidas box. I flipped the lid and it was there—my copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
It wasn’t a happy story, the kind you’d expect a person to reach for when they were trying to chase away whatever was haunting them. But I chose it for a reason. It was about sacrifice; whether it was self-sacrifice or sacrificing someone else to save your own skin—that was a matter of debate.
I figured I could decide tonight, as I turned the pages.
It was too late when I realized someone else must have been searching for answers within the covers of a book.
Lena!
She was turning pages, too—
When Sarafine turned nineteen, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. The baby was a surprise, and although Sarafine spent hours staring at her daughter’s delicate face, the child was a mixed blessing. Sarafine had never wanted to have a baby. She didn’t want a child to live the life of uncertainty that came with being a Duchannes. She didn’t want her child to have to fight the Darkness that Sarafine knew was lurking inside her. Until the child would get her real name at sixteen, Sarafine called her daughter Lena, because it meant “the bright one,” in the futile hope of staving off the curse. John had laughed. It sounded like something Mortals would do, hanging their hopes on a name.
Sarafine had to hang her hopes on something.
Lena wasn’t the only unexpected person to show up in her life.
Sarafine was walking alone when she saw Abraham Ravenwood standing on the same corner where she had first met him, almost a year before. He seemed to be waiting, as if he knew she was coming. As if he could somehow see the war being waged on the battlefield of her mind. A war she never knew if she was winning.
He waved, as though they were old friends. “You look troubled, Miss Duchannes. Is something bothering you? Is there anything I can do to help?”
With his white beard and cane, Abraham reminded Sarafine of her grandfather. She missed her family, even though they refused to see her. “I don’t think so.”
“Still fighting your nature? Have the voices grown stronger?”
They had, but how could he know? Incubuses didn’t go Dark. They were born into the Darkness.
He tried again. “Have you been starting fires by accident? It’s called the Wake of Fire.”
Sarafine froze. She had inadvertently started several fires. When her emotions intensified, it was as if they actually manifested into flames. Only two thoughts consumed her now: fire and Lena.
“I didn’t know it had a name,” she whispered.
“There are a number of things you don’t know. I would like to invite you to study with me. I can teach you everything you need to know.”
Sarafine looked away. He was Dark, a Demon. His black eyes told her everything she needed to know. She couldn’t trust Abraham Ravenwood.
“You have a child now, don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question. “Do you want her to walk the world beholden to a curse that dates back to before you were born? Or do you want her to be able to Claim herself?”
Sarafine didn’t tell John she was meeting Abraham Ravenwood in the Tunnels. He wouldn’t understand. For John, the world was black or white, Light or Dark. He didn’t know they could exist together, within the same person, as they did in her. She hated lying, but she was doing it for Lena.
Abraham showed her something no one in her family had ever spoken of—a prophecy related to the curse. A prophecy that would save Lena.
“I’m sure the Casters in your family never told you about this. He held the faded paper in his hand as he read the words that promised to change everything: “ ‘The First will be Black / But the Second may choose to turn back.’ ”
Sarafine felt her breath catch.