Page 1

Chapter

One

They called it the Shadow War, and it had raged for centuries. Magical families pitted against each other, vying for dominance and power, tearing artifacts and powerful spells from each other’s death grips. It was brutal, and it was fought in secret, away from human eyes.

My family, the Ethera, are one of the four great families that remain in the city of Boston, along with the Divergents, the Recondites, and the Diaboli. There are no minor families left—they were all destroyed during the Shadow War.

Destroyed, or absorbed.

Those who didn’t kneel to the Diaboli were sacrificed to their dark masters, or worse, bound by their infernal magic and twisted into demonic monstrosities. The Divergents pillaged and burned all they didn’t take and slaughtered whoever stood in the way of their lust for conquest and power. And the Recondites… they were the worst of them, because they hid their immorality behind masks of good intentions.

To this day, they insist they were touched by some celestial being and told to lay waste to others of their kind, all in the name of some greater good. They thought they were purging the unworthy, and in doing so, purifying the magic we all used, bringing us all closer to their celestial patron.

These days, a tentative peace has fallen over the streets of Boston. My family wrote up the Codex Magica Treaty, the accords were struck, and the city’s magical families have kept their hands and their offensive spells to themselves since.

For thirty long, quiet years, there has been peace.

When I was old enough to ask the question, what about our family, my parents told me we had blood on our hands as well, only we never took what didn’t belong to us or killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.

It was a convenient story which painted our family as having had a mostly defensive part in the Shadow War, culminating in our writing of the very treaty that called an end to centuries of violence. It was too clean a story for me to believe, not when faced with cautionary tales of demonic beasts and holy crusaders.

Having said that, I had yet to see one of either, so maybe the stories I had been told as a child were exaggerated, or at least embellished a little.

If the Diaboli, the Divergents, and the Recondites were so bad, why would we want peace with them? More importantly, why would they want peace? It sounded to me like what these magical families wanted was to be the last one standing, so something must have happened to bring an end to the fighting.

That story, weirdly, was out of my reach—tucked away under lock and key.

I had to admit, it made me a little uneasy sometimes, to think there was something my family wasn’t telling me. The older I got, the more I was starting to lose sleep over it, to wonder, to question. Tonight was another sleepless night, but this time, it was for a different reason.

“We’re going to get caught, Bee,” Max hissed.

Maxwell, my younger brother, was the only person in my family who called me Bee. To everyone else, I was Beatrice Patricia Aurelian Ethera, and I hated it.

“Not if you keep quiet,” I said, as I prepared to make my next move.

Max was turning twenty-one at the stroke of midnight. My parents had thrown him a party with candles, and cake, and dull music. There had been an exchange of gifts; a fancy pen, a bathrobe with his initials engraved into it. Old people gifts. I hadn’t given him one. Later, when he asked why I hadn’t gotten him anything, I pulled him aside, shoved him out of a window, and dragged him out into the night with me.

“This”, I told him, was my gift to him—though I had yet to tell him exactly what this was.

It was already late. A shining, fingernail moon hung high in the sky, which was clear of clouds. The coast was clear, the garden was empty, and the topiary allowed us to move from one piece of cover to another to avoid detection.

The only thing I would need to contend with on the way out and back into the grounds were my family’s defensive spells.

It was worth it for a night on the town, though. Max had barely been to the city. We generally weren’t allowed out of the mansion except on official, family business, and even then, only under strict supervision. My twenty-first birthday had sucked worse than Max’s.

I was determined to buy him his first drink.

“How are we even going to get out of here?” asked Max. “And even if we did get out, how are we going to get back in without being detected?”

“Will you relax?” I asked, throwing him a cocky grin. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”

“A hundred?!” he shrieked.

I wrapped my hand around his mouth. “See? That’s exactly the kind of thing that’ll get us caught. Just follow my lead, and keep quiet, okay?”

Max looked more than a little unsure. He tried to mumble, but I didn’t release his mouth.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.