LUCY
I'm nineteen today.
Unlike my last birthday—a bento cake, a hollow room, silence so complete I could hear myself breathe—my friends are taking me to a club tonight.
There was even a small lunch party at the café this afternoon, and a couple of the regulars brought gifts.
It turns out I'm a favorite here. Who could have believed it?
And honestly, I'm excited.
It's a strange thing to feel these days, especially with the nightmares that have been crawling through my sleep for the past two weeks—shapeless, breathless things that leave the taste of burnt ash on my tongue long after I wake.
But tonight I'm choosing to set all of that aside.
I inhale slowly and refocus on the dress laid out on my bed.
Emerald green. Silk. A slip dress that Amara picked out herself, which explains everything—the daring cut, the hem sitting just at mid-thigh, the way the color would pop against my blonde hair and pale skin.
I lift it carefully, a smile of pure fondness sliding across my face. Is it surprising, coming from that woman? Not even slightly.
I pull it on and stand before the full-length mirror, putting the finishing touches on my makeup. Harlen mentioned we might stay out all night, considering the college is on break.
A long, celebratory night. I try not to let my expression fall when I catch myself thinking that it's been nearly two years since I left home.
I wonder how they are faring—my people, my parents—under the rule of someone as cold and calculating as Doyle and Mina. The thought settles briefly on my chest like a stone before I push it aside. Not tonight.
Then I feel it.
A faint shift in the atmosphere, so subtle I almost miss it.
My brush hand stills. My spine straightens slowly, vertebra by vertebra, until I'm rigid from the base of my neck to my tailbone.
My entire nervous system prickles—and not in a good way. The air in the room grows heavier, denser, like something is drawing the warmth out of it and replacing it with something older and utterly wrong.
Fear moves up my spine in a slow, deliberate crawl.
I don't turn around. I can't bring myself to. Because I recognize this feeling— it's the same one that precedes the nightmares, the ones where I'm running through dark woods while creatures with glowing red eyes hunt me through the trees. The ones that leave ash on my tongue.
What if one of those creatures is here, in this room, right now?
My heart slams against my ribs. My feet feel cemented to the floor. I grip my brush like it might do something useful.
Then I feel a presence solidify behind me—not approaching from any door or window, but simply arriving, as though it had been assembled from shadow and still air.
The faint whirring sensation in the room ceases the moment it fully forms, as if the space itself has exhaled and gone quiet.
"Lucy Seraphina Drakonia of Virelan…"
The voice is soft. Almost gentle. That somehow makes it worse.
I shiver so hard my teeth nearly click together. There is my confirmation. I am not alone.
I focus on breathing—slowly, in through the nose, out through the mouth— because I am genuinely seconds away from collapsing to the floor in my fine emerald gown and I refuse to give whatever is behind me that satisfaction.
The hairs on my arms and legs are standing fully at attention. A female voice, smooth and measured, speaking my full name and lineage in a bedroom where I am registered simply as Lucy Drake.
"Please turn. I have a message for you."
A message. My mind supplies a dozen terrible images of what I might turn to face.
I don't turn. My racing heart won't allow it.
Then something presses against me—not a hand, not quite, but a force—and rotates my body gently but without negotiation until I'm facing the center of the room.
Any sound I try to make dissolves before it leaves my throat. The fear tastes bitter, metallic, real.
My eyes land on the intruder, and my mouth falls open.
"You…"
The woman smiles. She actually smiles at me.
"You…" I say again, stupidly, because apparently that's all I have.
She looks to be about sixty, though she carries that age the way old mountains do—not diminished by it, but defined.
Her white hair is full and wild. She's dressed like a gypsy: layers of colorful woven fabrics, beaded necklaces clinking softly against each other, embroidered shawls that seem to shift color whenever the light catches them differently.
I know this woman. I know that face.
She's the one I met at the boundary of Zaden on my very first day—the old woman selling hot buns from a cart who told me, almost as an afterthought, to try the café down the road if I needed a place to stay.
"I see you recognize me."
Surprise, surprise.
I watch, a little indignant, as she crosses my room without invitation and settles herself into the armchair in the corner like she owns it.
Well. Go right ahead. You clearly don't need my permission.
I roll my eyes, and some of the paralyzing fear begins to bleed out of me, replaced by something closer to irritation, which is at least a feeling I know how to work with.
"For my first appearance, I needed to intervene," she says, folding her hands in her lap. "To make your easing into the life you wished for a little smoother. Even though—" her brows pull together slightly— "human life is not for you."
I frown. "What do you mean? I'm enjoying my stay here."
She sighs, as if my enjoyment is a mild inconvenience she's chosen to tolerate. "Most times, what you wish and what the gods want are very different things."
Don't I know it. But I want this. I have built this. I am keeping it.
"You said you have a message," I press, because my phone has just begun ringing on the nightstand and the sound makes my nerves jump.
I try to hold two things at once: the surreal fact that I am speaking to what I can only describe as a phantom—a projection, a messenger wearing a borrowed face—and the practical matter of whatever she actually came here to say.
"Yes." She looks at me steadily. "Don't go to the club tonight. In fact, don't leave your house for a week or thereabouts. That should do the trick."
I stare at her. "What are you talking about?"
"Exactly what I said."
I feel my scowl deepen. I've read that beings like this tend toward the cryptic, but this is something else entirely.
"I can't stay indoors for a week. I have work—"
The look she gives me could curdle milk. Work, it says. You're talking to me about work.
"That doesn't matter in the scheme of things," she says, with the patience of someone who has lived long enough to find human urgency vaguely amusing. "You have to stay indoors if you want to remain hidden. Safe."
My phone starts ringing again. My friends.
I panic, watching as her form begins to turn translucent at the edges, the layers of her becoming less solid, more suggestion than presence.
"Who are you?" The words come out in a rush. "Why are you doing this? Why do I need to be kept safe? Why can't I stay in Zaden? Give me answers… please, just give me something—"
But she only smirks. Unhurried. Unbothered.
"Stick to my instructions and you will be fine." She tilts her head slightly, and something almost warm moves through her expression. "Maybe we can talk another time."
And then she is simply gone.
The oppressive weight lifts from the room all at once, like a held breath released, and I am alone again—standing in my emerald dress in front of my mirror, my brush still in my hand, my heart still hammering.
"What in the fiery furnace is—"
Three loud knocks land on my front door.
My friends are here.
I swallow. I look around the empty room. I look at my reflection—flushed cheeks, wide eyes, a girl dressed for a night she's no longer sure she should be having.
What shall I do?