Chapter 1 · The Rain and the Thirteenth Body (1)

New York City. 3:13 a.m. A storm that had been trying to drown the city since midnight finally succeeded.

The fluorescent light in the morgue had given up on one of its tubes. The one that remained lit the stainless-steel autopsy table like a stage, which was appropriate, because Liora Voss believed the dead deserved an audience.

"Mr. Thirteen," she said, scalpel hovering over the victim's clavicle, "you have three pieces of unchewed pizza in your stomach, a wedding ring, and a note that reads An angel is coming to pick you up. Do you know how hard you'd have to try to eat like that on your last night alive?"

From the corner, Marcus yawned so hard his jaw cracked. "Liora. Your habit of talking to corpses is creepier than the corpses."

"The dead don't lie to me." She made her first incision. "The living do."

Her hands were fast, precise, cold. Thirteen victims of the killer the tabloids called the Night Artist, and thirteen autopsy reports, all with one signature at the bottom: Liora Voss, M.D. The medical examiner's office had a nickname for her—"the woman who listens to the dead." It wasn't a metaphor, but she'd never told anyone the truth of it.

When she touched the dead, she saw things. Fragments. Images through frosted glass, like dreams that belonged to someone else.

Tonight was different.

The Thirteenth Body had a mark on its chest that wasn't in the file. It hadn't been in the intake photos, either. It was as if the mark had grown there in the past twenty minutes: a silver-grey rune crawling down from the sternum, shaped like an inverted star wrapped in thorns.

Liora frowned. She pressed her gloved fingers to it.

The world detonated.

Gunpowder. A black tide. Burning constellations. A sword driven through a heart—and the hilt was in her hand. On the other end of the blade, a pair of crimson eyes stared at her across twelve thousand years of blood and fire. The man didn't look angry. He looked relieved. His lips moved, forming three words.

Found me again.

She wrenched her hand back, staggered, and slammed into the instrument cart. Metal screamed. Marcus yelped. The mark on the corpse glowed like a brand—and so did something on her own body, right where her collarbone dipped into shadow.

The birthmark her mother had called her "lucky star." It was burning.

The door opened. More accurately: the door didn't open. The darkness simply stepped aside.

A man walked out of the shadows. Black suit. Black hair. Eyes that caught the fluorescent light and held it like twin embers. He was soaked to the bone, reeking of rain, as if he'd walked out of the storm's beating heart. He was very tall. He made the morgue look like a dollhouse.

He crossed the room in four strides, stopped a breath from her, and looked down at the mark glowing through her scrubs. When he spoke, his voice was low and raw, the voice of a man who had waited twelve thousand years to say one sentence:

"You finally found me again."

Liora's first instinct wasn't to scream.

It was to produce a scalpel.

The blade pressed against his throat. Her wrist was steady enough to engrave diamonds. "Stop right there. Which asylum did you escape from? Mr. Thirteen's schedule is full tonight."

The man glanced down at the scalpel, and something like fondness flickered through the crimson of his eyes. He raised two fingers, closed them around the blade as if it were a flower, and snapped it in half. The pieces rang against the tile.

"Good," he said. "That's fiercer than the last twelve times."

"Twelve times?" Liora's smile didn't reach her eyes. "Sir, we've never met."

"Thirteen times, little star." He leaned in, and his breath skimmed her ear—dangerous, almost tender. "Every time, you say that. Every time, you forget completely."

His fingertip touched the mark below her collarbone. It was hot. "This is the thirteenth rune. The other twelve are lying on your autopsy tables right now, waiting for you to finish the pattern."

Liora's spine went cold. Her mind raced through the files: thirteen bodies, all dead at 3:13 a.m., spaced thirteen days apart, marks that appeared after intake. The positions formed a constellation. An inverted star map.

And the center of the map was her.

"Those aren't serial killings," the man said, finishing her thought. "Those are a summoning circle. Someone used thirteen bodies to call me back to you."

"Who?"

"Someone afraid of us being in the same room." He took a step back, almost absurdly polite. "Allow me. Kael Ashveil. Current sovereign of the Shadow Dominion. The only man you've personally killed in the past twelve thousand years. A pleasure, Liora Voss. This life, you're called that."

Liora Voss. The three syllables rolled off his tongue with a familiarity that felt like old perfume on a coat you'd forgotten you owned.

She had a hundred questions. Professional instinct made her grab the hardest one: "How do you know my name?"

"Your name is the last word I say before I die." The crimson in his eyes dimmed, and for the first time something almost fragile crossed his face. "I have no heart… except for you. I've been keeping that promise for twelve thousand years."

The morgue's cold air had never felt louder.

Liora knew she should be afraid. The man was over six feet four, had snapped a surgical scalpel with two fingers, and spoke of ten millennia like a commute. Her rational mind was screaming. But her body was doing something entirely illogical.

She was feeling sorry for him.

As if her body remembered him before her brain did.

"You need to leave," she heard herself say, in a voice that was very cold. "You have three seconds before I call the police, file a restraining order, and phone your asylum."

"Three seconds." Kael nodded gravely. He produced a black rose from inside his jacket and tucked it into the pocket of her white coat. The petals were dry—as if the flower had been cut in a night that didn't belong to this world. "Tomorrow morning, I'll be at your door. The day after, as well. This life, I'm not letting another one slip through my fingers."