The moss at her feet flickered—luminescent tendrils crawling along the stones, spreading toward a bed of plants she didn’t recognize. They looked almost like ferns, but their fronds were thick and spongy, covered in a fine iridescent fuzz that caught the light.
Memory Moss.
She’d studied it in theory but never seen it in practice—plants that absorbed and stored images, sounds, moments. Living recording devices, preserving everything they witnessed with perfect fidelity.
This moss had been recording for six decades. Every sunrise. Every storm. Every creature that passed through. And one death that the official records said was natural.
As she watched, the tendrils began to glow brighter, patterns forming in the luminescence—shapes that resolved into shapes almost recognizable. A face. A woman’s face, middle-aged, with features too distorted by fear to read clearly. Her mouth was open in a scream that produced no sound, her hands raised in a defensive gesture.
The image flickered, fragmented.
A voice—barely audible, more suggestion than sound: “—can’t let him?—”
Another flicker. Darkness pressing in from the edges of the image, not natural darkness but a force that moved with purpose, hungry. The woman’s face distorting as the darknessapproached—something the moss couldn’t fully capture—existing more as absence than presence.
“—the Convergence?—”
The vision shattered. The moss went dark. The Warning Bells fell silent so abruptly that the quiet seemed to ring.
Lunaria stood in the suddenly still garden, her heart slamming against her ribs, her magic finally settling back into her body in a painful rush. The flowers she’d awakened still glowed faintly around her, but the frantic energy was gone. The garden had shown her what it wanted to show.
Now it waited to see what she would do.
That was Deia. That was Deia Tullio, the night she died.
Natural causes, the records said. Peaceful death in her sleep.
The records were lying.
Lunaria looked around at the garden she’d partially awakened—the moonflowers still glowing softly, the constellation orchids still pulsing with captured starlight, the Warning Bells swaying in anticipation of a threat she couldn’t see or name. In the distance, a bed of roses caught the light, their petals so dark, they appeared black even in the moonlight.
Void Roses. Blooming black.
Violence had happened here. Secrets buried for six decades, preserved in moss and memory, waiting for someone with the power to listen. Waiting for a celestial witch to come and wake the gardens that had witnessed a murder.
She should leave. Pack her bags, get in her truck, drive until Haven Shores was nothing but a fading memory.
The woman in the memory—Deia—had been screaming a warning. Trying to stop disaster. The Convergence.
A threat that might still be coming.
She didn’t leave the gardens until dawn began to pink the horizon, bleeding across the sky in shades of coral and gold that should have been beautiful.
THREE
HUX
Hux Holt’s alarm went off at 4:58 AM.
He was already awake.
He’d been awake since three, staring at the ceiling of his bedroom in the Holt family home, counting the cracks in the plaster that had been there since his childhood. The master suite was tastefully decorated, expensively furnished, and completely impersonal. He could have been sleeping in a high-end hotel room. Sometimes it felt like he was a guest in a life that had never quite belonged to him.
He silenced the alarm before it could sound, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and began the routine that had structured his mornings for the past eight years. The routine was everything. The routine kept the gnawing ache at bay.
Running clothes pulled from the third drawer, arranged by workout type. The coastal path, stretching five miles along the cliffs, chosen for its isolation rather than its views. A pace that would have killed a human but barely winded his lion.
The beast acknowledged the physical demand without truly engaging. It had been quiet for years, that animal part of him—conserving energy, waiting for a connection that wasn’t coming. Most shifters described their beasts as constant companions,sources of strength and instinct. His felt more like a tenant who’d stopped paying rent but refused to leave.
