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CHAPTER ONE

WILLIAM

The explosion tears through my essence like wildfire, scattering me across dimensions I never knew existed. For one terrifying moment, I feel myself dissolving completely, a century of ghostly existence unravelling into nothing.

Then Isolde's power slams into me with the force of a cosmic storm.

I'm yanked back together, reformed, but different. Solid. Corporeal. Fully and completely whole. The sensation of having a physical body again after a hundred years of ghostly wandering is overwhelming. Blood pumps through my veins, lungs drawing breath, skin that can feel temperature and texture. This isn’t like the shower, where it was a half existence. This is real.

A wicked grin spreads across my face. “I’m fucking back.”

I turn to look around, clenching and unclenching my fists as I feel everything. The destruction within a circle around us is pure, absolute. CJ and Cassiel are on the ground but otherwise unharmed.

“What the fuck was that?” CJ growls.

“Who cares?” I say, staring down at him, wondering what runs through his veins.

His eyes narrow as he rises swiftly, gracefully, the movement predatory and terrifying. “You look different,” he observes dryly.

“No shit,” I say, but then I falter. Something isn’t right. “No!”

In an instant, I fade away, back to the ghost I was for longer than I was alive. “No!” I roar, the magic that is still zinging through me, creating a backlash of power that brings blood rain pouring down. “No!”

CJ wipes the blood rain from his face, his amber eyes flashing as he stares at my rapidly flickering form. "Harrington, what the hell just happened to you?"

"I was alive again," I snarl. "For thirty seconds, I had my body back. I could feel everything… then it was ripped away."

Cassiel pushes himself up from the rubble, his wings flapping as he surveys the devastation around us.

SilverGate is still standing in all its glory.

The power surge seems to have been isolated, stopped before it imploded back in on itself.

"The nexus explosion must have temporarily restored your corporeal form. "

“Is that what it was?” CJ asks.

“Probably,” I say glumly, my rage fading like my body.

“But what caused it?” Cassiel asks, looking around. “And we still need to find Isolde.”

"Isolde," I whisper, the name cutting through my self-pity like a knife.

The memory hits me with crushing force. Whatever just happened involved Isolde. The same power that temporarily restored my physical form had her signature all over it. Something that resonated with my own forgotten magic.

"She was at the centre of it," I tell the others, my spectral form stabilising as I focus. "That explosion came from Isolde."

CJ's eyes darken, a muscle working in his jaw. "How do you know?"

"Because I felt her, tasted her. When the energy hit me, when I became corporeal, it wasn't random. It was her power. Her blood."

"Blood Magic," Cassiel says quietly, his wings folding away as he studies the wreckage around us.

The courtyard is devastated. Stones are cracked and blackened, trees uprooted, the ground itself scorched in a perfect circle radiating outward from where we stand.

Yet somehow, the main structures of SilverGate remain intact, as if the explosion had been contained or directed away from the buildings themselves.

"If that was Isolde," CJ says, his voice dangerously calm, "then where is she now?"

I scan the courtyard, reaching out with senses that extend beyond the physical.

After a century as a ghost, I've learnt to recognise energy patterns invisible to the living.

But now, with the residual power of Isolde's explosion still coursing through my spectral form, those senses are heightened to unprecedented levels.

“I can’t sense her.”

"That doesn’t mean she isn’t here," Cassiel points out. "We need to search systematically."

“But where?”

I remain floating above the epicentre of the explosion, processing what I've just experienced. For those precious seconds, I was alive again. Not half-corporeal, not temporarily solid, but fully restored to life.

Blood Magic in the right hands can restore the dead. In Isolde’s hands. That can only mean one thing. She is either a creator, a god, or something more menacing.

She is one of my kind.

The thought reverberates through my consciousness like a thunderclap. In all my years of research, in all my experiments, I never achieved anything close to resurrection. Yet Isolde's power, unleashed in that cataclysmic moment, had done what my mastery of Blood Magic could not.

"She's a Sanguinarch," I murmur, the words tasting of revelation and dread. "Like me."

CJ and Cassiel both stare at me, their expressions full of disbelief and then dawning horror.

"That's impossible," Cassiel murmurs, his now silver eyes wide. "Sanguinarchs are… they were thought to be extinct. You were the last one."

"Clearly not," I retort. "Only a Sanguinarch could channel that kind of power. That wasn’t just any Blood Magic; that was primal creation, raw life force. She didn't just cause an explosion; she rewrote reality for a moment."

"And that's what made you solid?" CJ asks, his gaze intense, trying to piece it together.

"Her magic resonated with mine, with the Sanguinarch blood that still defines my essence even in death.

It temporarily bridged the gap, anchoring me back to the physical plane.

To her. My dark fate." The thought of her kiss, the taste of her magic, her response to my touch, why she can see me, it all starts to make a disturbed kind of sense.

She is mine, and I am hers. "If she can do that accidentally, imagine what she could do with control.

" The brief taste of life has ignited a fire in my desperate soul, an urgent hunger to reclaim what was lost, and Isolde is the key.

"The Collectors," CJ grits out. "If they suspect what she is…"

“Don’t,” Cassiel says, shaking his head. “A female vampire twin and a Sanguinarch…” He gulps, his fear rippling through every cell in his body.

I ponder his fear. I was a Sanguinarch, and they killed me, not for anything other than to remove me from the board. Unless it wasn’t them that killed me. Or was killing me an unfortunate accident? Did they mean to merely incapacitate me… on a spike of death magic?

I growl. This train of thought is not getting me closer to Isolde, and I need to get to her. If I thought I wanted her before, this is a game-changer. She is my fucking salvation.

"It changes everything," I say, my voice raw with a century of longing condensed into this single, burning hope.

"A Sanguinarch can manipulate the very essence of life and death.

If The Collectors even suspect she has this power, on top of being a female twin vampire.

.." I don't need to finish the thought. The potential is horrifyingly clear.

They wouldn't just want to make her a living grimoire; they'd want to dissect her very soul while keeping her alive.

"Then we find her before they do," CJ states, his voice a low growl that vibrates with barely suppressed violence. "This academy is crawling with monsters out to get her. If Blackridge knew, I will rip his limbs off one by painful one."

"Blackridge has been playing games with her from the start. He knew she was different. He might even have triggered this." The Headmaster’s actions, or lack thereof, during the courtyard brawl suddenly take on a more sinister light.

Cassiel nods. "We need to consider the source of the explosion.

It felt contained, almost intentional, despite the devastation.

As if the power was directed or absorbed.

" He glances around the ruined courtyard.

"If Isolde caused this, where did the energy go? And where is she? And why can I see you again?” His gaze zeroes in on me.

I shrug. “The answer, I suspect, lies deep beneath SilverGate, at the nexus.

Isolde didn't just explode; she became a conduit.

And I, for a fleeting, glorious moment, was caught in the torrent of her becoming.

I need that again. I need her and not a single creature is going to stand in my way.

" Isolde is my only chance to get back what I lost, to reclaim the future that was ripped away from me. It all makes sense now why I’m still floating around on this godforsaken realm.

I was waiting for her, and I will not lose her.