A second later, I realized: he wasn’t.

He flew straight past the tower. Higher than its tallest rocky peak. Higher than the next, and the next. Moisture clung to my cheeks, the air damp and cold. The moon, a cloud-coated, pregnant gibbous, felt so close I could caress it.

“Look down.”

Raihn’s breath was warm on my ear.

I did.

The sea spread out before us, an endless expanse of rippling glass. Behind, the landscape of Lahor, tragic and beautiful in its disrepair, the ugly reality we had been walking through invisible from up here. Even Evelaena’s castle was so small from this distance, just a little child’s collection of bricks. Beyond Lahor, the deserts of the House of Night rolled endlessly on, smatterings of lights glowing in the far distance, consumed by the foggy mist.

My eyes stung—maybe with wind, maybe not.

Peaceful.

I hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

Raihn murmured, “It is.”

He hovered here, holding me tight. It was cold this high up, but I didn’t feel it. Perhaps I should have been afraid that nothing but his grip was keeping me from death. I wasn’t.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m down there, it seems like nothing about this place can ever be peaceful. But…”

But then, there’s this.

I swallowed. Nodded. Because I couldn’t even deny that I knew exactly what he meant.

Finally, he dipped. We soared back down, returning to the earth, and gracefully landed at the top of the stone tower. Half the wall had collapsed, leaving the uppermost room to be little more than a circular stone ledge against a crumbling semi-circle of brick. The place must have been even older than it looked from the ground. Even the suggestion of windows had been worn away by the elements over the years.

Raihn put me down, then turned to take in the view—a vast panorama of the land and the sea, Lahor on one side, the ocean on the other.

“Not as good as up there,” he said, “but still good.”

“Definitely not as good as up there,” I said.

He glanced over his shoulder at me. From this angle, the moonlight silhouetted him, painting a silver line along his face, catching a peculiar look in his eye.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.”

He didn’t stop staring at me. It didn’t feel like nothing.

Then he said, “It’s just that I should have guessed that you were half vampire. Right from the first time we flew together.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve never looked so happy as you do when you’re up there. Should’ve been obvious that you were made for it.”

Something about the way he just said that made my brow furrow. I shot him a quizzical look.

“Well,” I said. “I’m not made for it.”

“I disagree, princess.”

I scoffed and motioned to my back for emphasis—distinctly wingless. “I don’t know. I think I lack some important parts.”

But Raihn seemed unmoved.

“Wings are conjured,” he said simply. “You’re half Nightborn. You probably have the ability to use them.”

I blinked. It took a moment for his words to sink in.

“That’s—”

Ridiculous.

But…

The first time Raihn took me flying, I did feel like I had found a missing piece of myself in the sky. Like it was as natural to be there as it was to breathe air.

He’s wrong, I told myself, clamping down on the hint of hope.

He stepped closer. “You haven’t even stopped to think about all the things you might be capable of, Oraya.”

I scoffed. “This is ridiculous.”

Another step. His eyes sparkled with amusement.

I now had to tip my chin back to meet his stare. His lips curled as he leaned closer. His breath warmed my mouth.

“You want to find out?”

Time slowed, stilled. My heartbeat was fast. I should have moved away. I should have pushed him back. I didn’t.

The tip of his nose brushed mine. For a moment, the overwhelming—traitorous—urge to close that small distance between us seized me. A primal, nonsensical desire, low in my stomach. Desperate.

His gaze flicked down to my mouth. Back to my eyes.

“Do you remember,” he whispered, “that time you threw me out of the window?”

My brow furrowed. “Wh—”

He gave me a firm, forceful push, and then I was falling.

23

ORAYA

I was going to die.

I was going to die I was going to die I was going to die.

That one reality, a certainty, cycled through my mind with every heartbeat as the world rushed around me, nothing but smears of color and darkness and nothingness. My limbs flailed vainly.

One second. Two. Free fall. Might as well have been a lifetime.

Raihn’s voice rose over the rushing air. “You can do this, Oraya!”

He sounded so certain. I wanted to laugh at him.

He shouted, “Look at the sky!”

I forced my eyes open. Forced them up—to the starry velvet above. It was jarringly still. So close I felt like I could reach out and touch it.

I realized that the air, even while plummeting, did have a rhythm to it, like a pulse I could align with my own. I stretched out my limbs, drew in a breath—let the violent rush of the sky fill my lungs, even though the force of it burned my chest.

I let myself become a part of it.

And then, time seemed to stretch and slow. The direction of the air shifted. My stomach dropped, leveled out.

Behind me, Raihn let out a wordless whoop—a sound I barely heard over the rush of wind in my ears and my own thrumming heartbeat, a heartbeat that grew faster and stronger as I tilted my face toward the stars.

And then looked down.

The world was no longer rushing closer. Instead, it all spread out beneath me, ruins and sand nothing but abstract shapes in the moonlight.

“Mother,” I whispered. My voice was shaking.

Maybe I was already dead, and I was hallucinating. I didn’t want to move, in case it all shattered.

Raihn swooped down beside me, and I chanced a glance at him. He was grinning with pure, childlike joy. That smile—it made my stomach clench.

“Fucking amazing, right?” he said.

And it was his reaction that made it actually sink in.

I couldn’t do anything but grin and nod. Yes. Yes, it was fucking amazing.

I was fucking flying.

The reality of this hit me all at once, immovable and confusing, and suddenly I was thinking too hard about the wings that I swore I must have been hallucinating, and the air beneath them, and these new unfamiliar muscles that I had no idea how to control—

Raihn’s eyes went wide. He lurched toward me, hand outstretched.

“Oraya, watch—!”

Everything went black.

Vincent smelled like incense, a scent that was clean and old at once, elegant as preserved rose petals. It reminded me of very expensive things one shouldn’t touch, but it also reminded me of safety. My father, in his strange way, was both of those things—distant and comfortable.

Vincent rarely touched me. But now, he grabbed my shoulders and hoisted me up, holding me firmly as I shook away the fuzziness from my senses.

“What in the name of the Mother were you thinking?”

My head hurt. I rubbed my eyes, and opened them again to see Vincent’s staring directly into mine, silver ice-cold.

He shook me once, firmly. “Never do that. Never. How many times have I told you that?”

He was always calm and reserved, but I knew how to read my father. These rare moments when his fear for me slipped through his constant stoicism shook me down to my bones. I was only eleven years old. Vincent was the beginning and end of what I knew. When he was afraid, I was terrified.

I looked up at the balcony above.

“I was just trying to climb—”

“Never do that.” He grabbed my wrist and lifted it, as if for emphasis. His fingers were long, wrapping easily around my arm. “Do you know how breakable your bones are? How quickly your skin tears? It would be so easy for this world to take you away forever. Don’t give it reason to.”