Chapter 1
The bell above the door chimed, and Eva Cross didn't look up.
She never looked up. Looking up meant eye contact, and eye contact sometimes led to conversation, and conversation sometimes led to a customer reaching for the same book she was reaching for, skin brushing skin, and then—
Then she'd be on the floor of Cross & Copper Booksellers, screaming about a car crash that hadn't happened yet, or a heart attack, or a knife in an alley three years from now. She'd learned, in the six years since the gift clawed its way into her life, that strangers did not appreciate being told how they'd die. Even when she was right. Especially when she was right.
Her gloves thin, black, buttery leather were the only thing standing between her and the world. She'd bought them in bulk, twelve pairs, because she went through them fast: worn thin at the fingertips from bracing against doorframes, from catching herself when she tripped, from every small unconscious way a body reached for the world before the mind could stop it.
Rule one: gloves, always. Rule two: no handshakes, no matter how rude it looked. Rule three: if skin ever did touch skin, get to the vision fast, get out of it faster, and never let the stranger see her face while she watched them die.
Six years of rules had built her a small, safe, silent life. A life that fit inside these four walls of secondhand paperbacks and chipped shelving, and she'd made her peace with small.
"We're closing in ten minutes," she called toward the shadow that had fallen across the poetry section.
The shadow didn't move.
Eva finally lifted her eyes, and her breath caught somewhere behind her ribs.
He was too big for the doorway. Too big for the shop, honestly seven-foot-something of black wool and barely restrained menace, dark hair pushed back like he'd stopped bothering to care what he looked like, and eyes the color of a winter lake right before it swallowed you. He wasn't browsing. He was hunting.
Something in Eva's chest recognized him before her mind did — an old, animal alarm that had nothing to do with her gift and everything to do with instinct. Every instinct she owned was currently screaming the same word: run.
She didn't.
"I'm looking for someone," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, and it moved through her like a hand closing around her throat. Not violent. The voice of a man who had never once been told no and meant to keep it that way.
"Lots of someones in a bookstore," Eva said, proud of how steady it came out. "Try the biography section."
The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. It did not reach his eyes. He moved further into the shop, and the space seemed to shrink around him, the shelves suddenly closer, the air thinner. "I'm looking for you, Ms. Cross."
Every hair on her arms lifted.
He knows my name.
She hadn't told a stranger her full name in years. She kept it off the shop's paperwork where she could, paid in cash, never used cards if she could help it a woman who could feel exactly how everyone around her would die learned quickly how to disappear. And yet this man said Ms. Cross like he'd known it his whole life, like it belonged to him.
"I don't know who told you that name," she said, backing toward the counter, "but you should leave."
"You've been careful." He tilted his head, studying her the way a man studies a lock he intends to pick. "Six years of careful. Gloves. No handshakes. You haven't touched another living soul since—" He paused, and something flickered across his face that looked almost like sympathy, though it was gone before she could be sure. "Since your mother."
The letter opener was in her hand before she'd decided to reach for it, cool metal biting into her palm through the glove. "Get out of my store."
"Eva." Just her first name this time, quieter. Closer. "I'm not here to hurt you."
"Funny. Everyone says that right before."
He moved.
She hadn't even seen him cross the shop. One second he was by the door; the next his hand had closed around her bare wrist, glove yanked half off in her scramble for the letter opener, and Eva braced herself the way she always braced herself. She squeezed her eyes shut. She waited for the vision to hit the gasping plunge into someone else's death, blood and fire and the last thing they'd ever see.
Nothing came.
No blood. No fire. No screaming.
Just silence.
Her mind, which had not been quiet once in six years, which screamed with strangers' deaths every time she forgot her gloves in the shower or brushed hands with a barista her mind was silent. Blank as new snow. She could hear her own heartbeat and nothing else, and for one suspended second she almost forgot to be afraid, because this, this was what other people felt like all the time. A touch that was just a touch. Skin that was just skin.
Then the fear came roaring back, worse than before, because six years had taught her that silence only ever meant one of two things: safety, or a death so far away her gift couldn't reach it yet.
She did not think, looking at him, that it was the first one.
Her eyes flew open. He was staring at her wrist like it had answered a question he'd been asking his entire life. His nostrils flared. Something moved behind his winter-lake eyes hunger, disbelief, a kind of desperate, furious relief that looked entirely too much like pain.
"That's not possible," he said, and for the first time his composure cracked, just a hairline fracture. "You're human."
"Let go of me." She yanked; he didn't budge, though his grip gentled by a fraction, like he'd only just realized how hard he was holding her.
"Do you feel that?" His thumb pressed once, deliberately, against the thin skin over her pulse. "Nothing. No vision. No death. Do you understand what that means?"
"It means you need to let go of my hand before I put this letter opener through yours."
Something that might have been a laugh, dark and startled, escaped him like the sound had been dragged out of a man who hadn't laughed in a very long time. "You have no idea what you are."
"I know exactly what I am." Her voice cracked despite herself. "I'm the freak who can't hug her own mother without watching her die of a stroke in eleven years. I'm the woman who's about to call the police the second you let go of my wrist."
"Your gift doesn't work on me." He said it like a confession, like it cost him something. "It has never worked on any of us. Do you understand how impossible that is? I am a king, Eva. Men have died trying to touch me with less intent than you just showed with that letter opener, and you feel nothing from my skin. No death. No future. Just—"
"Silence," she finished, before she could stop herself.
"Silence," he agreed, and for one unguarded moment the coldness in his winter-lake eyes burned into something else entirely hunger, wonder, a hope so old and so buried it looked like grief. "My name is Alistair Vance. I am the King of the Northern Lycan territory, and you are my—"
The front window exploded inward.
Glass sprayed across the poetry section in a glittering, silent wave, and Eva was moving before she understood why thrown sideways, Alistair's arm a steel bar across her chest, his body already angled between her and the shattered window like he'd done it a thousand times before, like protecting her was a language his body already spoke fluently even if his mouth had only just learned her name.
Three shapes poured through the broken frame, low and fast and wrong, joints bending at angles no human body should bend, eyes catching the shop lights in flat, hungry gold. The temperature in the shop dropped so fast Eva's breath fogged in front of her face.
"Vampire scouts," Alistair snarled, and the sound that came out of his chest afterward was not remotely human — something rougher, older, edged with a growl that seemed to come from the walls themselves. "They followed me. They found you."
"Found me?" Her voice came out thin. "I didn't even know I was lost."
"You are now." His grip on her wrist tightened, and beneath her fear, that impossible silence bloomed louder than any vision ever had a stillness so total it felt like standing in the eye of a storm. "Whatever happens next, do not let go of me. Do you understand? Do not let go."
Eva's fingers, half out of her ruined glove, curled instinctively tighter around his.
The nearest shape rose to its full height, unfolding wrong and slow like something learning how to wear a human shape for the first time, and smiled with far too many teeth.
"Alistair Vance," it crooned, gold eyes fixed past him, straight at Eva. "The North King's little psychic. Prince Damon sends his regards."
It lunged.
