Sleep dragged me under like a tide I couldn’t fight.
When I opened my eyes, I was standing in a graveyard.
Fog smothered the ground, curling around headstones that jutted up like broken teeth. The air bit cold against my skin, a shiver running so deep I couldn’t breathe.
Shapes moved in the mist—hunters, dozens of them, their black cloaks just barely above the fog. None of them looked at me. They moved with a shared purpose, drawn toward the same place.
A statue.
It rose high above the gravestones, carved from black stone slick with damp. A woman’s figure, head tilted in regal defiance. But her arms were missing, snapped off at the shoulders.
My heart stuttered when its lips moved.
“She survived.”
The voice rolled through the graveyard, a booming female thunder that seemed to shak
