Chapter 1

For as long as I could remember, people had called me crazy. To be fair, the psychologist at the Arizona Winslow Group Home for Troubled Girls called me far worse than that—psycho, schizoid, and my personal favorite, cunt. Yeah, he was a total douche, and that was putting it nicely. When I outright refused his advancements, he made sure anyone who ever looked at my file would only see a deranged girl with serious mental and behavioral issues. I was sixteen at the time and lucky to have been able to fight off the asshole when he tried to put his hands on me.

Not every girl had been that lucky.

That was five years ago. As soon as I turned eighteen, I signed myself out of that place and moved to Brooklyn with my best friend, Catalina Jorge—CJ for short. She was the only one who didn't believe I was delusional, who didn't mock my affliction. I'd thought—at least hoped—that once I left that hellish home, the dreams would subside some, especially since they were always followed by crippling headaches.

I thought perhaps my childhood trauma, followed by the years spent in the foster care system and then the Winslow Home, had been the triggers. Unfortunately, they only got worse after I left, and even though I knew the dreams were clues to solving my parents' murder, somedays I wondered if perhaps they were right.

Maybe I was crazy?

But, then again, I couldn't really accept that. How could I? After everything I went through, allowing what people had labeled me to cloud my reality would invalidate what I knew to be the truth. I saw what happened to my parents fourteen years ago. I knew their deaths hadn't been an accident, and I was convinced there was more to my dreams and visions.

Sometimes they came every night; other times, I could go weeks or even months without one. Regardless, every time I experienced a dream or vision, I was unable to find rest until I drew every detail of the images I saw—of the strange world and nightmarish creatures that had haunted me since the night I lost my parents in a gruesome car crash.

I was seven when it happened, and up until then, I'd grown up in the backseat of my parents' Jeep.

We lived like nomads, never staying long enough in any one place. Mom and Dad would get a temporary job at a local diner or sometimes a job working at the motels we were staying at. Then, without warning, they'd gather our things in a rush, and we'd be back on the road.

Felt like we were always on the run. They tried to downplay things for me, but I saw it in my mother's eyes—the fear, the constant worry something awful was going to happen, that someone was chasing us. Back then, I couldn't make sense of my parents' behavior.

But I was a kid and all that mattered was being on the road with them, enjoying the breeze through the car on warm days, holding Teddy in my arms, gorging on gummy bears like my teeth wouldn't rot from all the sugar.

I didn't care that we didn't have a house, or a dog, or that I wasn't in school and didn't have any friends. I never even questioned if we had other family.

It was me, Mommy, and Daddy. We were on an adventure, and nothing could ever pop our perfect little bubble.

Until something did, and the whole world spun wildly on its axis.

It had been sometime in September, shortly after my seventh birthday. We were driving down from Montana in the dead of night.

Back then, the evening sky was a looking glass into space, and billions of stars covered the heavens in a glittering blanket cradling a blue moon. It was magnificent. Sitting in the backseat as I gazed into the beauty of the expanse, I overheard Mom talking to Dad about needing to be ready and having to prepare.

That Sedona was the best place to show me.

"Sedona?" I asked, wondering what was so special about it. Both my parents jumped at my voice. They'd probably guessed I'd been sleeping in the backseat. "Show me what, Mommy? Are we going to a theme park for my birthday?"

Mom shifted on the passenger seat and faced me, lips curling into a warm smile. "Not this time, Avery. But Sedona is very magical. You're gonna love it, Bunny. I promise."

"Will there be a pool and slides?" I pressed her, eyes wide with hope.

"We're going camping, Peanut," Dad chimed in, briefly peeking at me through the rearview mirror. "You love camping, don't you?"

I slouched in my seat, averting his eyes in the mirror. "We always go camping."

"We'll make s'mores, catch fireflies…" Dad continued.

Looking out the car window, I stared up at the looming full moon. "I don't want to catch fireflies."

"You used to love catching fireflies." There was a whiff of disbelief in his voice.

"I was little then, Daddy."

From the corner of my eye, I saw my mom glance at me over her shoulder. "Avery. Bunny. You're still little."

"I'm bigger now." I peeled my eyes from the window and met her gaze. "Would you like to be trapped in a glass jar?"

For a second, her face was expressionless, eyes frozen in a deep stare, as if she didn't recognize me, then she smiled. "You're a very special child, Avery Marie Jaxson. Never forget that." But her smile faded quickly, overtaken by a shadow of worry. "We have a few more hours on the road," she said flatly, focusing back on the empty stretch of highway ahead. "Better get some sleep, Bunny."

I'd really been hoping for a theme park or maybe a cool resort. We seldom did anything but camp or stay at motels. Although, we did occasionally go to the movies, and that was always fun.

That night, though, a tinge of disappointment settled over my young heart. For the first time ever, I craved a normal life. And as I snuggled with Teddy, watching the stars blur as my dad sped us down the highway, I imagined what it would be like to have that life.

After spending so much time with them, I'd learned they only spoke about serious things when they thought I was asleep. So, pretending to be in dreamland, I eavesdropped on their conversation.

"It's time she learns the truth, Daniel," Mom whispered. "She needs to know how to protect herself in case something happens. In case they find us."

"They won't find us, Cassie."

"Each day I grow weaker," she said, her voice trembling. "I can't protect us forever. My…my energy is depleted."

She grew quiet and an eerie silence fell over us. "I can…sense them," she uttered after a long pause.

"Did you seeanything?" my dad asked.

"Last night. In the mirror." She paused, as if choosing the next words carefully. "She is drawing closer. If we don't get to the vortex by tomorrow?—"

"We will get there," Dad said, the engine roaring, tires rumbling as we sped faster down the highway. I slid my lids open a smidge, and through slit eyes, I stared out the window, the stars twinkling in a sea of darkness. But the moon… it was the biggest I'd ever seen it.

There was something almost mythical about it, like it was alive and watching. It sang within me. It was a soothing lullaby telling me that despite what my parents feared, I would be okay. A wave of tiredness took over me and my parents' voices faded away as strange dreams pulled me into a watery abyss.

That was the last trip we took together.

Most of my memories of the days that followed were snapshots of the landscape and fragments of things that didn't make sense. Like waking up in the car and thinking we were on another planet, everything looking like we'd landed on Mars.

The monstrous red rocks dwarfing us and making us feel small as ants. The white-hot sun beating on our brows. My short legs aching from the long hike to our campground.

Then, the menacing howls echoing in the night. My heart pounding fiercely as we ran through the brush in the cool night, the sounds of my dad's ragged breaths sawing in and out of his chest as he followed behind us, urging us to run quicker. My mother's screams as she fell and twisted her ankle. The sting on my flesh as a sharp branch pricked my arm.

Amongst the splintered memories of the night the wreck occurred, one image would always burn intact in my mind—out of breath, when we finally made it to the car, my mother told me not to look back.

But when did I ever listen?

As my father turned the engine and the Jeep growled to life, I looked out through the rearview window. My screams froze in my throat.

Made of black flames and eyes of fire,the beast I saw stalked toward us like a shadow of death. Everything its black flames touched turned to ash, the ground crackling as this monster scorched the earth.

From the ashes, a pack of howling hound-like creatures arose. Hides made of swirling smoke, they snarled as their blood-red eyes flooded with fury. They sprinted after us, and it was the last thing I saw before a high-pitched shrill blasted through my ears, shattering the car windows.

The next time I opened my eyes, I was lying on a hospital bed, clutching my mother's fluorite necklace. They said the trail we'd been traveling on had eroded from recent rainfall and crumbled beneath us, plummeting our car down a ravine.

My body was found yards from the crash site, unscathed. No one had any idea how I'd survived. My parents hadn't been so lucky. Their bodies were crushed under the Jeep before the car exploded.

A tragic accident.

Or so they said.

Shortly after, I found myself in the Arizona foster care system where each time I wound up in a new home, my foster parents would call social services asking for my removal. Some folks believed I was possessed and that my drawings were manifestations of some evil that existed within me. Others couldn't make sense of my drawing trances, when my eyes would apparently roll to the back of my head, yet I could still manage to draw intricate depictions of my dreams. To them, I was too much of an oddity, and fear won over their hearts. Eventually, that's how I ended up at the Winslow Home.

Now, fourteen years later, I was still having those visions and dreams—some were even more like nightmares. And for the third day in a row this week, I had been trying to deposit the bizarre images from my most recent dreams onto paper.

Biting my lower lip, I pressed down on my pencil so hard, the tip snapped, scattering teeny-sized lead pieces all over my drawing. Mentally whacking myself upside the head, I groaned as I stared at the unintended black smear marring my picture.

Just lovely.

I'd been so razor-focused, I hadn't realized how hard I'd been pressing. Not to mention that was my last Faber-Castell sketching pencil, and I'd sharpened it to a stump.

Damn it.

Blowing pencil shavings off my desk and pushing loose papers of half-finished drawings to the ground, I looked for my sharpener but found a stick of mint gum instead. I sighed in relief and added it to the balled-up lump inside my mouth as I flung the wrapper over my shoulder.

There was a good chance the floor was littered with a mountain of little aluminum papers. My jaw sure felt like I'd chewed through three packs of gum, maybe four.

Better than chewing my nails down to the cuticle.

I'd been bent over my sketchpad for hours, so desperate to finish the drawing, I hadn't paused for a bathroom break. Now the joints in my fingers and wrist throbbed with a vengeance, but if I didn't find my sharpener soon, the headache accompanying each dream would pulverize my mind, fracturing the images, which would result in an incomplete rendering.

Each drawing was a puzzle piece, and the answers to my parents' deaths lay buried inside. I was sure of it.

Brief mental note to self: Stop for more drawing supplies at the crafts store on my way home from work.

Work?

Geez. I hadn't even bothered to check the time.

No use checking now. I was too close to the finish line.

As I continued to sweep the remains of my pencil arsenal off my desk, a metallic glint on the floor caught my attention. Lying beside the trashcan at the side of my desk was my sharpener.

As I leaned down to pick it up, the sudden crack of shattered glass followed by an explosion of ear-piercing bird caws hauled me right back up.

A gaping hole the size of a saucer smack in the middle of the window by my bed stared back at me. My jaw dropped and the ping-pong sized ball of gum fell out of my mouth,

What in heaven's name…

The white curtain usually dulling the morning light billowed in the winter air as hundreds of crows gathered right outside my apartment, all of them perched on electrical wires and yapping so loud, my thoughts were a web of confusion. Putting a palm up, I shielded my eyes from the bright sun.

Had someone thrown a rock through my window? But how? I lived several stories up. I shivered as the frigid February air swirled through the room. This was the last thing I needed. I shared a one-bedroom apartment with CJ, but she had the bedroom while the living area functioned as both my bedroom and the common space. It was a tiny, rundown apartment and I knew my cheap-ass landlord was going to take the broken window out of our deposit. If he even bothered to fix it.

I grumbled. Fantastic.

But also, what was with the screeching birds?

I squinted and peered over to the clock on my nightstand.

Seven-twenty-three a.m.

I'd been drawing for close to three hours. Had it really been that long since the nightmare woke me? This lack of sleep was going to kill me one day. Palming my face, I groaned as I realized I only had two hours before needing to be at work.

How was I supposed to function later? And how in the universe was I supposed to finish my drawing with all this noise? I could barely hear myself think, let alone search my memory for details of the dream.

As far as bad mornings went, this one took the prize.

Un-wrinkling my muscles, I stretched and stood from my chair when the sound of a solitary caw caught my attention. My brows pinched. Near the broken window, an injured crow sat on the floor surrounded by shards of glass, its right wing hanging loosely to the side as it stared up at me.

My chest caved. "You poor thing," I whispered, hoping my voice wouldn't scare it. "You're the one responsible for all this chaos?" As annoyed as I was about the intrusion this morning, I hated to see an injured animal.

How it crashed through the glass and still survived was beyond me. As I walked toward it, it flapped its good wing, cawing frantically.

Outside, his comrades cawed even louder, the sound stabbing at my head like an icepick. I shut my eyes, trying to mentally block the grating bird calls. But it was useless. My headache was already on full throttle, and this wasn't helping.

Temples throbbing, I released a few deep breaths before looking down at my little invader. A chord in my heart pulled. It was so stressed its chest rose and fell in rapid succession, beak wide open as it breathed.

"Relax, buddy," I cooed, trying to soothe it. I considered picking it up to examine its wing, but after seeing how frightened it was, doing it with bare hands was out of the question. It would try to peck at me, and that beak didn't look too friendly. The last thing I needed were more agitated caws from the crows outside.

"Look, I'm not going to hurt you, but I'm going to need to take a look at that wing," I said softly as I walked past it toward the bathroom, careful not to step on any broken pieces of glass. "And I'd appreciate it if you told your friends to stop making such a ruckus."

A high-pitched caw erupted from its chest, and the chorus booming from the street ceased. I looked at the injured crow and frowned, my skin prickling with goosebumps. "Did you just…"

Cocking its head, it blinked. Which made me blink in turn, an uneasy feeling curdling in my gut as I noted the eerie awareness hidden behind its dark, beady gaze. Pivoting away, I ruffled off the willies lodged between my shoulder blades and puffed out a heavy breath. "Get it together, Avery. It's all in your head. There's no way it would have understood."

Yet…

Turning my head over my shoulder, I stared at his little form. Dark eyes twinkled like shiny marbles. Crows were smart, but this one kindled a different level of intelligence behind its gaze. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Now that the murder of crows had stopped calling for their fallen flock mate, an eerie silence fell over my room. I ambled toward the bathroom, leaving the creepy bird by the window.

Luckily for the crow, I knew a thing or two about wrapping broken wings. When I was a little girl, my father would take me for long hikes, teaching me everything he knew about nature along the way. Several times we stumbled upon injured animals, particularly birds, and he'd show me the proper way to care for them.

I smiled thinking about those days. My father was such a gentle soul. Although it had been several years since he'd been murdered, the sweet memories of our little adventures were always tainted by the pain of his death.

Burying the gloom back into the recesses of my mind, I focused on helping my new avian friend. Sadly, if the wing was broken, the crow's flying days were over. Birds who suffered those kinds of injuries rarely regained their ability to fly. The bones simply didn't heal right.

Poor fella. The loss of flight and not being able to join his friends would break its spirit. No more freedom.

A pang of understanding rang in my chest. I knew the feeling all too well.

Crestfallen, as I stepped barefoot into my outdated, black-and-white-checkered tile bathroom, the cold floors sent an icy shock through my feet and up my legs. The hole had made my room drop several degrees already. And as I was dressed in black boy shorts and matching camisole, my body wouldn't stop shivering.

As I reached for the medicine cabinet, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror hanging over the tiny porcelain sink. My eyes were bloodshot, and the dark circles and puffiness did little to hide the toll a few nights of poor sleep had taken on me.

Opening the medicine cabinet, I reached for the self-adhesive gauze I needed to wrap the crow's wing and a small bottle of saline for my eyes. I squirted a droplet into each eye, the cool liquid balm easing the burning pain. Blinking away the excess fluid, I gathered my curly auburn hair into a bun and washed my face.

As I met my amber-colored gaze in the mirror once again, water dripping from my eyelashes and trickling down my neck, my lips pressed into a hard line. This headache wasn't as bad as some others, but it was still crashing through my brain like a tidal wave.

Leaning toward the mirror, I took deep and steady breaths, hoping to dull the pain. Watching the drops of water roll down my face and drip off my chin, my breath caught when the droplets suddenly stopped rolling, as if each globule was suspended in time.

Shit. I was about to have a vision. When this happened, time in my world seemed to come to a full stop. My body shivered as an army of ants scurried up my back. I hadn't experienced a vision in a long time and the anticipation of what I might see sent my blood rushing through my veins like a river of white water. Visions were different from dreams in that they felt more real, and sometimes I couldn't even discern the difference between my world and the vision itself.

Hands shaking, I lifted a finger to my face and touched a droplet. It evaporated upon contact in a tiny plume of sizzling steam.

A trembling breath escaped through my lips as I stared at my fingertips, puzzled at the tingling and the pale blue light emitting from my hands—this was new. It pulsed in tune to the beat of my heart. In a panic, I pulled away from the sink, ready to dash out the door, but an invisible tether tugged at my core.

Something pulled me back toward the mirror, and it did not want to let go. Fearful of seeing my reflection, I shut my lids and fought the compulsion to open them.

Don't look. Don't look.

I needed to get out of that bathroom. Maybe I could shake myself out of this vision if I refused to look in the mirror. Yet a part of me fought with my own instincts. My need to know more, my desire for answers slowly urged me to peel my eyes open.

Settling my gaze on the reflective surface of the mirror, I held my breath as I waited for the vision to take form. The surface rippled like liquid until it morphed into clear glass. Now translucent, it was as if looking through a window into another world.

My spine tightened and the tingling in my veins subsided, ice now spreading throughout my body.

Beyond the window was the dank courtyard from my dreams.

For three nights in a row, I'd suffered the same nightmare, enduring a horrifying execution—burned alive at the stake until I was nothing more than ashes. I always awoke at the same moment, when my soul escaped my body. Same as today, right before jolting awake from the nightmare. It was what I'd been drawing.

Could I still be dreaming?

Had the crow crashing through my window been a part of all of this?

But as I peered even closer, something seemed different. I felt different—awake. This was definitely a vision.

Terrified and fascinated at the same time, I reached to touch the mirror, but an unknown force pulled me through until I reappeared on the other side, face down on a muddied ground, barefoot, and dressed in a white nightgown.