Opening Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I closed my eyes, trying to get my bearings. Nothing made sense. My brain was foggy, out of focus.

Flashes of green light illuminated the darkness behind my eyelids. The unusual color pulled at me, reminding me of something. Something important. Hands full of crackling green lightning. An emerald amulet. A pair of irises of the exact same hue belonging to—

My eyes shot open.

“Lainey!” I lurched forward, stumbling. My stomach pitched and rolled in waves, much like the ground underneath my feet. The sky tilted toward me, and I staggered backward until my back hit the trunk of a tall cypress tree. I clung to the rough bark, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

As the world finally began to right itself, the ringing in my ears diminished, only to be replaced with a dissonant symphony of screams…

...Similar scenes were everywhere I looked. People stumbling around, disoriented and afraid. Others trying to help the injured. Hacking coughs from the thick grit in the air. Blood seeping into the ground. Many lying alone and still in the grass. It was exactly like a scene from one of those end-of the- world disaster movies. But this wasn’t a movie. It wasn’t the end of the world that had caused so much destruction.

It was a witch…

…Beads of sweat rolled down my neck, and I hissed, swatting at an ember that landed on my cheek. The sizzle of skin broke through the shock from the devastation, and I rushed forward, scanning the lawn. “Lainey!” I yelled again, searching the faces around me.

Then I felt it—the connection between us. A strand of feeling, a sense of knowing, a bond forged by magic—my magic. It was faint and growing weak, but it was enough to know that I wasn’t going to find her here on the lawn. I let out a deep breath, thanking the stars that my Praetorian senses were still working, that I could still feel her. It meant she was alive…

…I turned back to face the wasteland of the plantation. So many bodies on the ground, so much destruction. Was it possible that he had been swept up in it? Hope burned through me like a fever, fast and hot, as I scanned the crowd for the face that dominated my nightmares.

A discordant, yet familiar boom of thunder echoed across the sky. Potent and guttural, it filled the open space, erasing all other sound—and eviscerated my wishful thinking...

...Shadows—heavy and draining—surrounded the rest of us, slinking through the trees and blotting out even the emerald glow from the fire. I groaned as they wrapped around me, beckoning.

I stepped forward right as another wave of dizziness washed over me. I must have hit the ground harder than I thought when Lainey’s magic blasted apart the plantation. I put my hands on my knees and took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself.

Out of the corner of my eye, the last of the dying green flames tiptoed through the rubble, scattering ashes to the wind. I imagined what Lainey’s face would look like if she were here surveying the wreckage, the bodies in the grass.

The responding wrench of my heart made me squirm, reminding me of another look: the flash of hatred that burned in her emerald eyes as she spat in my face...

...The gnawing in my chest deepened as my father’s voice— preserved so perfectly in my mind—whispered in my ear, a conversation from long ago. “Pain is earned, son,” he said, “but you get to choose whether it limits you or reminds you of how hard you’ve fought. Win or lose, loss or gain, how we acknowledge our pain defines us. It is the tether that links us to who we really are, who we are meant to be.”

I used to think he was referring to physical pain only, but as a crushing weight—the truth of who Ty Marek really was—pressed against my heart, I finally understood.

If pain is a tether, then I am unbreakable chain—each link forged through blood and iniquity.