Chapter 2
FIVE YEARS AGO – NEW ORLEANS
The first time I cried after leaving home was the moment I realised I’d missed my own birthday.
By five days.
I’d been running for a year.
Long enough for my feet to harden and my name to feel dangerous in my own mouth.
But not long enough to forget.
Eighteen had been champagne and sunlight, friends spilling out of my bedroom at noon with cake, glitter and cheap prosecco we pretended was vintage. Laughter so loud my father shouted up the stairs for us to keep it down, even though he was smiling when he said it.
That night, we’d gone with Hannigan tradition: dinner at Bellamy’s, Dad in the tuxedo he rarely wore, my aunt clasping my hands across the table and telling me the world was mine if I was clever enough to claim it.
Halfway through, Dad had slid a velvet box towards me. Inside, diamond earrings caught the candlelight and made me feel luminous.
Loved.
Protected.
I remember thinking eighteen was the beginning of everything. That adulthood would unfold like a red carpet. That the future would come eager and generous and wide open.
Instead, nineteen arrived in silence, shrouded in terror.
I was walking past a narrow restaurant just off Canal Street when I saw them through the window. A family gathered around a table. A girl a few years younger than me with balloons tied to her chair, her face alight as a cake was carried out glowing with candles.
Sweet Sixteen.
Laughter and love and off-key singing as a mother leaned in to kiss her daughter’s cheek.
I froze mid-step, watching in surprise, then in stark, agonising heartache as the glass showed me something else.
My reflection.
Thinner. Harder. Eyes too sharp for my age.
Nineteen had come and gone while I was watching train stations, counting exits and sleeping with a chair wedged beneath a doorknob.
No cake or candles or velvet box. No father raising a glass in my honour.
Just another day of running and hiding.
I pressed my palm briefly to the cold glass and wondered if anyone had remembered. If Aunt Fiona had called. If my friends had asked where I was. Or if my father had been too drunk, too distracted, too busy negotiating my future to notice the date at all.
My heart cracked in two right there on the pavement.
And I walked away before anyone inside could see me break.
Now I carry on walking through New Orleans’ humidity and brazen beauty.
The city is loud and alive in ways that make it easier to disappear.
Music spills from open doors. Sweat sticks to skin.
People mind their own business unless money is involved.
I chose it because it smells of rot and sugar and history.
Because creatures older than memory hide in plain sight here.
Because if you’re running from one monster, sometimes the safest place to land is among others.
I arrived with one backpack and a velvet pouch of my mother’s jewellery stitched into the lining of my coat.
That pouch is the only reason I’m still alive.
In the first month after I fled New York and my father’s house, I learned what desperation looks like to other people.
Prey.
A girl alone on a train platform, clutching a bag too tightly, who hasn’t slept properly in weeks.
I was robbed in Memphis. Pinned against a brick wall in Birmingham by a man who smelled of cigarettes, stale beer and very depraved intentions.
In my less horrific nightmares, I still remember the scrape of his teeth near my ear before I drove my knee up hard enough to break something important and ran until my lungs felt flayed raw.
I’ve lost weight without trying because apparently stress carves flesh faster than starvation. My cheeks are hollowed, my hips sharpened. My breasts have shrunk enough that men have stopped looking thrice, which I count as a blessing.
But the worst part isn’t any of the things I’ve endured since fleeing home.
The worst part remains my father’s face the night I confronted him.
I’d hoped I’d misunderstood and hoped for contrition.
I received neither.
‘You sold me,’ I said, hands shaking so hard I could barely form the words. ‘You offered me like I was cattle.’
He had been drunk, but not enough to hide the calculation in his eyes.
‘It’s not like that, Lyra,’ he insisted, reaching for me with the same hand that had signed my fate. ‘Valentin Moretti isn’t some alley thug. He’s the most powerful man in New York. Heck, in the whole Western Hemisphere, some say. You’ll live in unspeakable luxury. You’ll be protected.’
‘Protected?’ I remember screaming. ‘From what?’
‘From the world,’ he said. ‘From men worse than him.’
Men worse than him.
That was when I knew he didn’t understand.
Or worse.
That he didn’t care. Not enough to undo the future he’d condemned me to.
Not if the rumours about Valentin Moretti were true.
They travelled differently from other rumours. The kind that surrounded the powerful vampire who ruled both financial and underworld empires didn’t grow louder with repetition. They grew quieter. Sharper. You heard them in fragments, whispered in bone-rattling fear.
That his grip on the city was unyielding.
That he collected debts personally, kept what he claimed until he tired of it. Then a swift death was considered mercy.
Someone once told me he didn’t kill quickly. That he savoured the lesson.
Someone else said women who entered his orbit didn’t leave unchanged. That garnering Don Valentin Moretti’s attention was wishing for death, because even in vampiric bliss, death was always close.
I gathered those whispers like knives before I fled.
And by the time I reached New Orleans, I’d lobbed off my waist-length hair to my jaw with dull hotel scissors, stopped crying and armed myself with real blades.
I tell myself that means I’m stronger.
Maybe it only means I’m learning to survive the beats between torment and fear.
I find Selphine Rousseau by accident.
Or maybe she finds me.
Her shop sits on a narrow street just off Royal, wedged between a tarot reader and a bakery that smells permanently of hot molasses. The front is quaint enough to be overlooked by the less desperate, displaying a hodgepodge of crystals, candles and handmade soaps.
Tourists drift in and quickly drift out.
I go inside because it’s raining, I’m tired, and the air smells a fraction cleaner than the street.
Ma?tre Selphine is behind the counter, skin the colour of old bronze, eyes too sharp to belong to someone her age.
She looks up once. Then goes very still.
‘You’re carrying death,’ she says.
My hand tightens around my coat, torn between affront, bone-deep weariness and the unfortunate acceptance that I can’t slap an old woman for terrible customer service.
‘Everyone is,’ I reply. ‘Eventually.’
She snorts. ‘Not like that.’
I don’t ask what she means. In the past year, I’ve learned not to ask questions I don’t want answered.
She glances past me, and the few lingering customers hightail it to the door.
When it shuts, I’m sure I imagine the ominous click that follows.
Her rheumy eyes dart back to me. ‘You’re running. Not fast enough but you’re running.’
The word lands like a stone dropped into water.
I take one slow step closer to the door, then gasp when a cold wall meets my back.
Did the room move?
Did I?
‘Everyone is,’ I repeat, tilting my chin to hide the alarm building inside me.
Her gaze narrows and she leans forward on bony elbows. ‘You’re running from a creature with old blood.’
My heart stutters. ‘N-no. You’re… I don’t know what you’re talking about. And if this is one of those scammy fortune-telling things, I didn’t sign up for—’
She lurches forward, eyes no longer rheumy as they drill into me. ‘A vampire who thinks he owns you.’
I don’t speak.
Or can’t.
My jaw feels wired shut.
She nods once, satisfied. ‘I can smell him on you.’
Ice crawls up my spine. ‘That’s impossible,’ I whisper through gritted teeth.
She cackles, her fingers tinkling through a bowl of beads that seems to have appeared from nowhere. ‘The impossible is my speciality, girl. Ask anyone in The Quarter.’
The pressure at my back intensifies. I don’t feel my feet moving, but somehow I’m closer to her now. ‘What… what are you?’ I ask.
Her mouth curves downwards. ‘Someone who survived a great many things and lived to tell a tale or two.’ Her gaze rakes me up and down. ‘Perhaps I’ll yet live long enough to tell yours too. If you don’t die before you’re twenty that is.’
The air between us changes.
‘How do you know h-how old I am?’
She points a ringed forefinger at me. ‘You don’t have long, child. If you intend to survive what’s coming, start by asking fewer foolish questions and listening harder.’ Before I can rebut that, she continues. ‘You can’t outrun blood,’ she says quietly. ‘Therefore you must rewrite it.’
I don’t understand then.
But I stay.
Probably… okay, definitely because of the cold wall that pushes me back every time I try to head for the door. But also because my instincts, muddled as they are, don’t think she’s about to kill me.
Not immediately, anyway.
The first night, she lets me sleep in the back room.
The second night, she asks my name.
‘L-Lyra,’ I say, my tongue twisting around the name I fear more than I want to admit.
She tilts her head and sips a brew from the ugliest mug I’ve ever seen. ‘That name is an albatross that will drown you in your sleep if you carry it around much longer.’
I swallow at the stark truth, but say nothing.
‘What would you call yourself,’ she asks, ‘if you weren’t afraid?’
The question sits in my chest like something fragile and dangerous. I think of cold. Of clarity. Of distance.
‘Eira,’ I say slowly.
She hums. ‘Snow.’
I shake my head. ‘I want… need to be untouchable,’ I reply.
She hums again. ‘Yes. Then you must become something that does not melt easily. Now, show me what you’re hiding in that coat.’
My heart thuds with a thousand screaming warnings as I hand over Mother’s emerald necklace.
Selphine reaches for it, her eyes gleaming, and immediately the screams grow muted.
‘Tomorrow, we will get started.’
The first scent-masking ritual burns my insides for what feels like days.
It’s crude and vile compared to what she will eventually craft for me, although the evolution isn’t much better over the years. Oils pressed into skin sliced open with tiny paper cuts. Herbs steeped and swallowed. A charm sewn into the lining of my bra.
‘This won’t erase him entirely, but it will mute the trace. For now.’
It’s enough.
I stay in New Orleans because it’s a crossroads. Because Selphine tells me powerful creatures pass through here and learn to look past one another unless challenged.
And because if I’m going to survive, I need to learn their rules.
I sell one of my mother’s bracelets to fund my first month and a better set of knives. I cry afterwards for the second time, quietly and alone.
Then I make a vow to stop.
I begin training with anyone who’ll teach me self-defence against man and monster. I learn to throw a knife, break a wrist and bury my flinches until they become background noise. I learn fear can be harnessed if you face it, name it and cut it down into pieces small enough to swallow.
Selphine tracks my progress without praise.
‘You think you’re becoming harder,’ she says one night as I wrap my bruised knuckles. ‘You’re not. You’re becoming sharper.’
‘Isn’t that better?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she snaps. ‘But it’s necessary.’
By the end of the year, I stop flinching at every shadow. Only the ones that deserve it.
Lyra Hannigan fades slowly, erased beneath something leaner and more deliberate.
On my twentieth birthday, I join the Revenant Agency.
There are no candles this time either. No off-key songs or promises of a coddled future.
Just a stark grey room and a stern man who points to the line on the piece of paper.
‘Sign there.’
When I sign my first contract, my hand doesn’t shake. There are no tears as I watch the ink dry on the name I’ve taken for myself.
Eira Cross.
This is who I am now.
The girl who ran from her father’s house, heartbroken and petrified, is gone.
What remains is colder.
And far more dangerous.