Chapter 1

1

EVANGELINE

O ne. Two. Three. Four. Turn.

One. Two. Three. Four. Turn.

One. Two. Three. Four…

My footsteps were loud in the quiet of my cell. Over and over, I measured the space, walking through the impenetrable darkness. At first, I'd done it with my hands outstretched to keep myself from bumping into the damp stone walls, but there was no need for that now. Four paces by four paces, with a stone slab in one corner, and a bucket in another. I turned. One, two, three, four. The air was cold and smelled like mildew. I turned. One, two, three, four. Every now and then, a hatch in the door opened, and a paper cup of water was pushed through, along with a paper bowl of slop that made me grateful I didn't have enough light to see. I turned. One, two, three, four. I was sore and exhausted. How much time had passed? I'd slept four, maybe five times, but there was no way to track time here. My meals—if they could be called that—were irregular. My cell was pitch black most of the time, but every now and then the lights slammed on; blaring fluorescents that covered the entire ceiling. I knew enough about this sort of thing to know my captors were trying to disorient me. Unfortunately, it was working.

The lights blazed to life, and I winced, shielding my eyes with a hand. The heavy steel door creaked, then swung open on rusty hinges. A bulky man in a cheap suit stepped in. In the harsh light, his blue eyes were pale and cold. Beyond the threshold of the cell, I could see two bored-looking guards, even bigger and even more cheaply dressed. One of them stifled a yawn, and I caught a glimpse of his fangs.

"Ms. Summers," he said, as casually as if we had run into each other at the park. "How are you enjoying our hospitality?"

"Well, Damien, I gotta be honest, I'm not going to leave you a great Yelp review," I said tiredly.

Damien's eyes flicked over me, assessing. His gaze rested on my wrists, which were still rubbed raw from the anti-magic cuffs that had been put on me when I was first captured. Then his eyes landed on what had replaced the cuffs—a line of runes inked around my right biceps, the symbols crammed together so closely that from where he was standing they must have looked like a solid black band about the width of my thumb. I'd been unconscious when the tattoo had been marked into my skin, and I didn't know if I resented that or whether I was grateful for it. From the look of the tattoo, I was gonna go with grateful. Instead of the barely raised lines of modern tattoos, each line was a raised scar, like a chisel had been dug into my skin and the wounds packed with soot. It itched faintly, but whoever had done it must have thrown a layer of healing magic on top of their work. There was no point stopping my magic with a tattoo if an infection would warp the runes too far to work.

Every time he came into my cell, Damien checked me over the same way. At first, I'd thought it was… well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd thought I'd have to worry about something more than torture. There was no heat to the look, though, not even the casual lecherousness I got from old drunks when I wore a low-cut shirt to a bar. No, Damien looked at me the way someone might look at a kitchen knife to see if it needed sharpening. Given that I'd slipped Damien a truth serum and flirted with him until I could get him somewhere private at the masquerade where I first met him, I was pretty okay with the neutral, distant look. It was almost professional, although that wasn't super reassuring when I was sure I still had bruises from him choking me out.

"We'll need the room," Damien said over his shoulder to the guards. "Do not disturb me. Do I make myself clear?"

There were two mumbled ‘yes, sirs', and the door slammed shut, leaving us alone. Damien's face softened minutely.

And that was why I couldn't get a handle on him. The first time I met him, he'd confessed to being a double agent. The second time, he choked me out. I could never be sure which version of him would turn up in my cell on any given day.

"We don't have long," he said quietly, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a squished protein bar. He held it out to me, and I stared at it blankly. He shook it a little, and I grabbed it, tearing into it.

"Slowly," he admonished. "You'll make yourself sick."

I added that to my mental list of weird shit about Damien. Most vampires were only vaguely aware of how human digestion worked, and I didn't think the average vampire supremacist spent a lot of time around regular humans. Eyeing him warily, I ate slower. If I did make myself sick and wound up puking up chunks of the mint-chocolate granola bar, there would be questions I didn't want to answer.

"Thanks," I muttered when I'd finished the protein bar. I handed back the plastic wrapper, and he folded it neatly and tucked it into his suit pocket.

"Don't thank me yet," Damien said. "The boss is planning on paying you a visit today. I'd hoped I would be able to find a way to get you out before then, but…" He shook his head grimly.

"But you don't want to blow your cover." Whenever Damien visited, he made an excuse about not wanting to blow his cover. I was starting to think that maybe he was part of the torture, that they were sending him in to give me a little bit of hope just so they could crush it again.

Damien blamed his part in my torture on not blowing his cover. I wasn't sure I believed him. At the very least, I didn't think he enjoyed it. In my time as a paranormal private investigator, I'd seen people who thrived on violence, who came alive whenever they got the opportunity to hurt someone. But when Damien hit me, his eyes went empty, like he'd gone somewhere else. Still, whether he enjoyed it or not, he did it. I was mottled with bruises and cuts. Most were from Damien, but Gabriel's father had paid me a few visits, too.

"She'll be suspicious if it looks like you haven't been hurt recently," Damien said.

I sneered at him. "What, you want me to give you permission? We both know you're going to do it either way."

Damien looked away. In the glare of the florescent lights, he looked tired and very old. "I am trying to help you, Evangeline."

"How kind of you," I said. It might have been stupid of me. Damien was the only ally I had here, but I was tired, sore, and filthy, and I didn't have the energy to be nice to the man who'd been torturing me. I slumped down onto the stone ledge and looked up at him. "Why did you send me the letter, Damien?"

Damien looked down at me tiredly and pulled out a knife from the same pocket where he'd carried the protein bar.

"Why did you want me to go after the ascendancy array?" I asked.

Damien flicked the knife open. The blade shone in the light.

"How did you know about me?"

He stepped closer.

"Did you know my parents?"

Damien took a deep, measured breath. Then he leaned down and went to work.

Afterward, I was left in the dark again. The protein bar sat heavily in my stomach. My filthy tank top was sticky with my blood. Damien had only made shallow cuts, but they were deep enough to bleed like crazy, and some of the blood was starting to dry into itchy flakes. I would've killed for a shower. Hell, I would've killed for a wet wipe.

I leaned back against the clammy stone wall and closed my eyes, although it was dark enough that it didn't make much of a difference. God, I missed Gabriel. I missed his intelligence, his loyalty, and his sometimes-clumsy earnestness. The way he touched me like I was something precious, and even the way he kept trying to protect me. I could have really used someone looking out for me right now. I tried to imagine him being here, patching up my wounds, holding me close. Would he give me a pep talk? Would he sit with me quietly and let me fall apart in his arms?

For a moment, I let myself bask in a fantasy of him showing up and making this all go away. I scrunched up my face, trying to keep the tears dampening my lashes from falling. I might be exhausted, in pain, and covered in my own blood, but I was not going to face the person behind all this with visible tear tracks on my face. Tucking my feet up onto the slab with my legs against my chest, I lowered my head to my knees and waited.

I wasn't sure how long I was left alone in the dark. Long enough that the blood stopped flowing from my cuts, but not long enough for my stomach to start rumbling again. At last, the door creaked open, and a backlit silhouette stepped into the room. The sudden light was blinding, and I raised a hand to shield my eyes. The door creaked shut again, and we were left in total darkness.

"Hello, Evangeline," the newcomer said. Her voice was soft and surprisingly sweet, with a lilting accent I couldn't quite place. It sounded like she was speaking from every part of the room at once, and the effect was dizzying. Every single part of my brain dedicated to keeping me alive sent out screaming warnings. The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and goosebumps prickled the skin on my arms. A faint musical chuckle echoed through the cell.

"I am very sorry it has taken me so long to visit you," the woman said. "I am very busy, you see."

"Don't worry about it." My voice came out quavery and weak, and I dug my nails into the meat of my palms to keep my hands from shaking.

A globe of light popped into existence in the middle of the room, floating near the ceiling. After the pitch blackness, the glow stung my eyes. It was blue-white, like the type of LEDs that always gave me a headache. The light fell on the newcomer, draping her in stark shadows.

She was tall, easily six feet, and seemed to take up the entire room. Her long black hair and long black robe blended into each other, covering up every part of her except her hands and face. The effect was otherworldly and made her look a bit like one of those puppets that had always freaked me out. The sort with a carved face but human hands. The woman was strikingly beautiful. Her features had the placid delicacy of a mask, with sculpted cheekbones, and a high, patrician forehead, her complexion so white it was faintly translucent—the most human-looking part of her was the tracery of pale blue-green veins beneath her skin. She cocked her head to the side like a bird and stared at me, unblinking.

No human had eyes like hers. They were completely white. Not the cloudy white of blind eyes, but completely white, with no veins, and a pearlescent sheen. They were framed by the sort of thick, dark lashes you normally only saw in mascara ads. It shouldn't have been possible to tell where she was looking, but I was completely certain she was staring me dead in the eye.

"You really do look just like your parents," she said softly. One of her hands shot out, and I flinched back, but she cradled the side of my face, turning me toward the light. Her soft hands were freezing. "You are quite lucky. They were a very handsome couple." She dug her nails into my cheekbone for a moment, dangerously close to my eye, then pulled back.

The way she moved was terrifying, fluid and graceful, but with sudden jolts of speed that had her across the room faster than my eyes could track.

My tongue felt heavy and dead in my mouth, but I swallowed hard and forced myself to speak. "You must be the boss," I rasped.

The woman looked at me with her impassive doll's face, tapping a finger against her lips. Her hands were long and slender, with sharp nails that made them look even longer.

"I am in charge around here, yes," she said. Her voice was so musical and sweet that it seemed almost artificial, like one of those robot-voiced digital pop stars. "I am called Morgana. At least for now."

"I'd say it's a pleasure, but…" I aimed for a nonchalant shrug, though it probably looked closer to a dying spasm.

Morgana's lips curled up in a beautiful approximation of a smile.

"Yes, very funny. Very… quippy. Your father used humor the same way," she told me, with the air of somebody recording lab notes on a specimen they were about to dissect. She flicked a finger through the damp air as if she were conducting an orchestra. Cold, burning magic forced my hands down to my sides. My legs unfolded, and I stood entirely without my own permission. With the smooth, fluid steps of a trained dancer, I crossed the tiny room and pressed my back to the clammy wall, stretching my arms out on either side of me. The stone curled around my body, forming seamless cuffs around my wrists and ankles.

Morgana tapped a finger to her lips. Her mouth quirked into that non smile again, and the stone looped around my neck, thick enough that it forced my chin up and the back of my skull against the wall. I swallowed, my throat bobbing against the rough stone. I felt like a dead bug pinned to a taxidermist's work bench.

"I have questions for you, Evangeline," Morgana said. She practically glided as she walked toward me, her footsteps completely silent. "And sooner or later, you will answer them."

"Let me guess," I croaked. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way?"

She cocked her head to the side. "No. I intend to do this the fun way. But you get to decide if you'd like to tell me what you know before or after I torture you."

"Eat shit and die."

Suddenly, Morgana's face was an inch from mine. Her cold breath fanned against my cheek, and if I could have, I would have squirmed backward. She smelled like nothing at all, which was an odd thing to notice, but my mind had fallen back to the protective mode of cataloguing details instead of dealing with the whole picture.

"I thought you might say something like that," she murmured. "Although I'll admit, I did not anticipate that specific phrase." Morgana raised one of those long, pale hands to my face. There was a sickening wet crunch and her pointer finger contorted, splitting from the second knuckle to the tip, her nail falling away and skin hanging down like ribbons of torn white silk. From the gory, exposed flesh a blood-slick claw protruded slowly, curved and wickedly sharp. My stomach turned at the sight, but if it hurt—and it must have hurt—there was no sign of it on Morgana's face.

She trailed the tip of the claw over my cheek ever-so-gently. It was so sharp, I didn't even realize she'd cut into me until I felt the blood seeping down my skin. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction of seeing me flinch, though. I would keep it together.

"I want to know how you became so much more powerful so quickly," Morgana said. "I've seen your work before, and you were… unremarkable. Competent, occasionally clever, but not strong. But now… now you practically reek of magic. Even with this," she added, touching my tattoo with her other hand, "I can feel your power trying to break free from its bonds."

"Fuck. You," I said, enunciating both words as clearly as I could.

Morgana's doll face was completely blank as she stabbed the claw into my eye. I screamed, blinding, white-hot pain lancing through me, filling up my entire skull. I must have blacked out for a moment, because suddenly I came to, sagging against the chunks of rough stone wrapped around me. The left side of my face was sticky with blood, and my eye… I couldn't see out of it at all.

Panic rose in my throat, clawing and urgent. God, my eye was gone. High, animalistic noises came out of me, and suddenly, I knew that the idea of staying stoic and together in the face of her attention had only ever been a childish fantasy.

The cold air flowed into the socket of my ruined eye, crushing my exposed nerve endings. I twisted uselessly against my restraints.

Morgana laughed a sweet, throaty chuckle that scared the shit out of me. "Yes, there you are. No need for bravado now," she murmured, brushing my hair out of my face with a gentle touch. Then white-hot agony arced out from where she'd touched me. It filled my eye socket and danced down my cheek, up my forehead. I thought I screamed. When the pain faded, I opened my eyes. Both of them, I realized with a jolt. She'd healed me, rebuilt my old eye out of the wet ruin she'd turned it into.

"I am going to give you another chance to tell me how you gained this power, child," Morgana said. "I would encourage you to take it for your own sake."

All I could do was let out frantic, whining pants of breath through my teeth. The witch watched me for a moment, head cocked to the side, then nodded.

"Very well. If you insist on being stubborn…" Slowly, with the relish of a performer in front of an attentive audience, she extended a talon again. I tried to squirm away—a useless instinct. She clamped her other hand around my bicep and shook me like I was a disobedient puppy. I closed my eyes not because I expected it to help, but because I couldn't bear to watch the brutally sharp point of the talon come toward my eye again.

Suddenly, just as the very tip of the claw touched the delicate skin of my eyelid, there was a creak and the groan of metal on metal. I felt the sharp point move away, and risked squinting my other eye open.

"Sorry to interrupt, ma'am," a harried-looking Damien said. "But the wards on the northern entrance were just tripped. I thought you should be told as soon as possible."

Morgana's smooth face twisted into a delicate moue of displeasure, as if she'd been told the tea she wanted wasn't available. Apparently, having her secret prison broken into only counted as a mild inconvenience. She clenched my arm brutally tight, nails digging in until I could feel hot droplets of blood trickling down, then she stepped back.

"You were right to bring this to me," she said calmly to Damien, not bothering to look at him. "The girl can wait a while longer. Come."

Damien stood aside to let her pass, his back ramrod straight, looking like a perfect little lieutenant. As Morgana swept past, she waved a hand dismissively over her shoulder, and the stone holding me in place cracked apart and smoothed back into the wall, freeing me. I collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, knees hitting the cold stone hard. Damien watched me impassively, but once Morgana wasn't at an angle to see his face anymore, he brushed his fingers over his own bicep, his eyes widening.

I was dazed enough that it was only his little signal that clued me in to why I suddenly felt different. On my right arm, Morgana's sharp nails had cut five small half-moon shapes, leaving livid little wounds that stood out starkly on my filthy skin.

One of them cut right across the tattoo. The chains holding my magic back were broken, the door to my cell open. Lying in my crumpled heap on the cell floor, I grinned and called on the magic bristling beneath my skin.