Drop Dead Gorgeous (Theatre of Shadows #1)

Prologue

It began, as all sorrows do, in the hush between heartbeats—that silent, sucking pause before a scream is born.

The boy was beautiful once.

Now, beneath the jaundiced streetlamp’s glimmer, he resembled a marionette discarded by a wrathful God: limbs arranged with too much reverence, too much rigor, as if the killer had choreographed the soul’s eclipse.

His skin, still warm, was drawn taut with the sheen of death, moonlight pooling in the hollows of his throat.

A fly circled one lidless eye, then settled, feeding.

The face was gone.

Not torn. Not hacked. Removed. Peeled away with a grace so cruel it bordered on adoration, skin and muscle lifted clean, as if excising a mask from flesh. The bare skull shone pale in the cold night air, grinning its final blasphemy: a smile carved in bone.

The alley was a narrow gash between stone buildings, the kind of place light came to die.

Trash spilled from broken bins. A cat, spine sharp under its black fur, watched from a windowsill with a gaze older than mammals.

Steam coiled from a sewer grate in tendrils, the breath of nameless things sleeping below, not yet hungry enough to rise.

On the wall above the corpse, written in stain far too dark for paint, hung a single symbol: crooked, looping, ancient. It throbbed faintly with some unnatural, droning pulse.

He watched it thrum and felt the power stir within him. Two more faces. Two more weeks. Then the work would be complete, just like the Book promised.

Footsteps halted at the alley’s mouth. A gasp held. Then fled.

The city did not stir. Calgrave, mistress of fog and filth, carried on, her gutters full of ghosts, her veins choked with rot. Somewhere far off, a siren rose like a bird with a broken wing. Somewhere nearer, laughter—drunken, lewd, alive.

But here? Only silence.

And the body with no face.

And the one who took it, already melting into shadow.