The bus rattled across the bridge into Mistwood. Metal groaned beneath the floor as the frame flexed. Ember pressed her forehead to the cold glass. Below, a narrow black river divided the woods, still and silent under the gray sky.
Tall, brittle trees crowded both shoulders of the road. Their tangled branches formed a black lattice overhead. She counted trunks until they blurred, trying to ignore the nausea working through her stomach.
Her mother had sent her away. Her father—a man she barely remembered—was now her legal guardian.
And this strange little town in the middle of nowhere? Home.
The bus hissed to a stop in front of the only gas station for miles. “End of the line,” the driver grunted without looking back.
Ember stepped off, her boots sinking into the gravel. Damp air pressed cold against her face. Her first breath carried dust and stagnant water.
A lone figure stood near an old pickup truck, arms crossed. He was lean, mid-forties maybe, with the same ice-blue eyes she saw in the mirror every morning. Her father.
“Ember,” he murmured with a nod. His hands stayed at his sides. Her name came clipped and awkward, the whole of their reunion.
“Hi… Dad,” she said. The word came out dry and wrong.
* * *
From the roof of the abandoned pharmacy, Kael watched the bus pull away from the gas station. The driver did not look back. Outsiders rarely did once the fog released them, and by morning he would remember Ember Wynter as one more sullen teenager delivered to one more dying town. Mistwood was good at making itself forgettable. It had survived a century by perfecting the insult.
Below, Ember crossed the gas-station lot toward the father who had failed to meet her halfway. Kael could not hear their words, but he saw the stiffness in the man’s shoulders and the distance Ember maintained between them. That distance mattered. Affection was leverage in Mistwood, and the houses had made an art of measuring it.
A cane tapped once against the roof behind him. Thorne Vael had arrived without using the fire escape. He wore a charcoal coat over ash-colored robes, an attempt at blending in that achieved a distinctly funerary effect.
“You left the eastern ward,” Thorne said.
Kael kept watching Ember. “It held. I counted all three scouts.”
Thorne joined him at the ledge, favoring the knee that had never healed correctly. “Nightshade crossed the river first. Venari’s physician arrived before breakfast. Karis opened the gate she denies exists.”
Kael finally looked at him. “All that movement for one girl?”
“For what they intend to make of her.”
Across the street, Ember’s father lifted her suitcase into the truck with both hands and set it down carefully. Nothing in his expression explained the care. The ward around him flashed when Ember passed through it: a thin silver seam, visible for less than a heartbeat. Kael felt the answering ache in the scar beneath his ribs.
The Bloodlight had recognized Mistwood—and the fixed Hinge sleeping beneath it.
He stepped away from the ledge. Thorne caught his sleeve before he could leave.
“There is one more instruction,” the old man said. His voice had lost its dryness. “If the Hollow Crown answers her, you keep her from the houses until the Mirrorwell can judge her.”
Kael looked at the hand on his arm. “And if I can’t?”
Thorne released him. For several seconds, the town made all the noise: a truck engine turning over, ravens in the church steeple, the old mill dragging its dead machinery through another useless day.
“Then you keep the Crown from everyone else.”
End of this online sample.