Prologue

PROLOGUE

AZRAEL

W hen I died, there was no light to absolve me or darkness to claim me.

There was no warmth, no coldness, no pain, no relief.There was no brimstone to catch myself on or clouds to hold fast to.

There was only the Nothing.

Until.

It plunged into that ocean of Nothing and tore its gnarled fingers through my chest cavity, curling them around my rib cage and yanking me out .

Then I was loose, running free and feral, gnashing teeth, desperate for hot blood and heart spoils. For soul flesh.

I was a husk, a cavernous corpse reanimated and hungry for what it could no longer possess.

Whatever stole me from the Nothing put me in a cadre with three other undead things. None the same except for the wings arching out of our backs, feathers pitch black, bones jarring awkwardly, like they were broken and never reset.

Angels, It calls us.

You hunt the lost now , It said. It breathed that mission into my mouth, filling my empty lungs with purpose.

We track down souls who escaped before the Nothing could claim them, and we send them to their end.

I can't see myself in mirrors or any reflective surface. I am a mystery to myself. Or I was before the others.

"White eyes," Raphael tells me, "mark you as ours. Our sister."

I probably belonged somewhere once, before the Nothing, but I don't remember.

"You won't," Sariel promises once, in the beginning. "That shit, whatever shit you had, it doesn't own you anymore. We do."

My mouth tastes like ash.

"Mine tastes like dirt," Uriel whispers into my ear when he catches me scraping my tongue over the roof of my mouth, trying to scrub up the bitter tang of burnt bone.

Raphael tells me all he can taste is salt water. Sariel doesn't ever say.

There are scars on my arms, slashes across my wrists and down my forearms. They're engraved deep into my skin, like grooves in stone. They don't heal, but they don't bleed either.

"There's no blood to waste on our pain," Raphael says the first time a soul fights back, sticking a blunt kitchen knife through my neck.

Sariel pulls the knife out, swift but careful even if she doesn't need to be. I won't die. Can't. What's done is done. Fire has taken care of the rest, consumed my blood and given it back to the earth.

Pain is dull, not as exhilarating as I thought I remembered.

"It's the nerves," Uriel explains. "They're barely holding on."

I'm not holding on. There's nothing to hold on to.

Souls don't always fight when we come for them. Some kneel down at our feet and beg. Some don't even look at us, white eyes glazed and staring into the distance, at a world we aren't part of anymore, with longing or regret until our teeth sink in, and we tear them apart. Then they scream. The quiet ones scream the loudest in the end.

The others are marked too, with white eyes and scars.

Raphael's skin has a faint blue tinge, washed out and almost translucent. His shaggy black hair stands out against it like charcoal on marble.

Uriel has rope burns around his throat and bruises on his neck in shades of black and yellow that never fade.

Sariel's are the worst, five bullet holes in her chest and torso, the skin ripped open and blackened along the edges. Like mine, they don't bleed, and they don't heal.

They say I belong to them, that I am theirs, and in turn, they are mine. Brothers and sisters, fused together by death and the hunt. But I don't feel much of anything, good or bad, so it's hard to know if that's true for me.

Other than the hunger, which has dug its way inside me with razor-sharp claws, scratching a ravenous poison into my flesh, baiting my worst instincts.

The taste of fresh soul on my tongue has become an addiction that has seeped into my heart and marrow. When I swallow pieces of them down, their last vestiges of life burn my throat and sit like hot coals in my stomach. Their acidic warmth rushes through me like adrenaline, harsh and dangerous.

I don't remember what it felt like to be alive, to breathe and pump blood, not really, but eating the lost is as close as I'll probably ever get.