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CHAPTER 1
PERIPETEIA BOOKSHOP, HAVENPORT, DELORNIA
ASTORIA
Peripeteia Bookshop is silent, but my mind is an echoing, black pit of screaming pain.
My hands can’t stop their trembling while I behold the mutilated man lying in the center of my shop’s foyer. Like an igniter that refuses to catch, I spark over and over, light flashing across my skin as I attempt to summon my flames back. This shouldn’t be so hard. I am the Heir to Antonia. Power thrums through my veins. Yet it falters as I look at the body before me. Red drips down the walls of my precious shop in long rivulets, the wood floors unrecognizable beneath the congealing blood.
A cold sickness ripples down my spine that has nothing to do with my flames. This shouldn’t be happening. I’m in Peripetia. This is my safe haven. My stronghold. It’s impenetrable. I should be safe. Lucas should be safe.
I curl in on myself against this nightmare I can’t wake up from. My skin ripples, and I can’t catch my rasping breath. Bile surges and my eyes swell, for the reality is that I don’t need my flames to get a better look at the body to identify it; I know it’s Lucas. There is no one else it could be. The Weave has taken everything precious from me. First Viola and now… I choke on a sob and shake my head mindlessly side to side, my tangled hair a heavy curtain around me. Lucas. The sob echoes in the silence.
Lucas.
I fall to my side into the blood, not caring if my white silk robe is utterly ruined. I close my dull green eyes that miss their usual glow of magic. There’s no energy left within me. I, Astoria Rose Androclaria, Heir to the deceased Archweaver Antonia, am utterly alone in this cruel existence. Valen left me for the Order. Lucas is gone. I stop attempting to ignite my flames, and pitch darkness descends upon me.
The chill from the night air seeps into my flesh, numbing me slowly. The shop rings with silence until a familiar rustling echoes along the stacks. The grimoires are whispering, passing a message between themselves until their voices grow loud enough to penetrate the fugue state I’ve plummeted into.
My head lifts. Instinct guides me as I turn towards the stacks in the blackness. Blood-coated copper strands stick to my face and neck, my robe falling from my shoulder.
A shift in the air lifts my fog of despair, awakening my senses and bathing the darkness in the green light that comes back to life in my warming eyes. Shadows stretch high above, reminding me of the moving silhouette that startled me when I first left my loft.
Terror jolts through me. There is someone else inside my sanctuary tonight. A shadowy figure who stood at the base of my spiraling iron stairs. An intruder who slipped through my wards and waited to witness my despair. A being filled with cruelty, who slaughtered the living embodiment of half my heart. Someone who touched what is mine. Violated what is mine.
And that butcher is still here, hiding in the shadows.
A dark, twisted voice hisses from within my soul, a familiar oily film oozing along my insides.
Make them pay…
My heart thuds, a steady drum that pulses purpose through my veins. My eyelids peel back wide as magic sizzles hot and cold across my skin. I slowly roll my body up to my full height, my bare feet tracking blood.
My lips part, and smoke curls forth as I hiss in a warped, low tone to the grimoires lining the stacks, “Where is the intruder?”
The books still, their whispers dying. They shrink towards the pocket of reality where they hide during the daylight hours, but they don’t disappear—they’re blocked. The store refuses to switch to its legal, innocent bookshop form, and it keeps the grimoires trapped here with me.
My skin is sticky with drying blood. Blood of the man who held me together for four years. A man who can never hold me again.
I choke, tears falling into my mouth. That searing in my heart, along my soul, grows until it spreads, sending a sludge-like substance through my veins, which my heart pumps in painful convulsions.
The darkness shifts as I shake with an otherworldly screech, “Tell me. NOW!” and lash my arm out. My vision flashes, my head spinning with the surge of power that prickles down my limbs.
My power twists into a gold and black flame that cracks like a whip through the air. The lacquered wood along the shelves hisses as a burn scar scores it. Ash falls to the ground, delicately dancing in the whirl of power. My swollen veins pulsate with the same bright light and shadows as my whip. My stained white robe slips from my other shoulder and parts down my body to my elbows, red coating my bare chest like plated armor. The darkness of my magic gleams with an oily sheen.
“I will not ask again.”
A tremble of fear through my inventory does not move me. I have nothing left but this cold purpose that floods me. Like shedding chains that weighed me down, I stand before the grimoires, transformed. My fingers flex and curl in a wave, flames dancing along them, the crack of each knuckle loud in the silence.
A soft whisper brushes my ear. I turn my head sharply to the left. A barely visible silhouette stands just outside my halo of light, disappearing when I blink. My lips peel back in a snarl. The blood at my feet bubbles as my anger reaches a fever pitch, steam filling my nose, and a wave of nausea sways me as Lucas’ name echoes in the far recesses of my mind in a wail of despair.
All sense of self-preservation wipes from me, and I roar, throwing my arm out. The Flame of Creation bursts forth and thunders down rows of stacks to collide with the back wall, where the shadow last appeared. A painting of the harbor at sunset I’d hung there ignites, flames crackling loudly, and I whip my arm away, my fire sucking back within me so only the embers remain.
The intruder is not getting away. I will burn this whole place to the ground if it flushes this bastard out like a rabbit from its burrow.
I bolt after the shadow, my Creation Flame sizzling in one hand and Entropy Flame stinging my other with ice-cold black flames. The pain I inflict on this intruder will make what was done to Lucas appear a child’s game in comparison. I will drag them down to my basement and hang them from the stone ceiling. I will tear thin strips of flesh from their bones while making sure they never die. I will turn into a weaver’s nightmare to avenge my love.
But first I need to catch the intruder.
