Chapter 1
Alina
Job Site, New Jersey
The ground shouldn’t move like this.
Not here.
Not in a reclaimed marsh-turned-luxury townhome development in northern New Jersey.
Yet my seismometer disagrees.
“Don’t do it,” I mutter at the unit as another spike jumps across the screen. “We just talked about this. No more drama.”
The needle flicks again—hard—then settles like it’s pretending nothing happened.
I stand in the middle of the half-graded lot, wind whipping hair into my lip gloss, and take a slow breath.
The air smells like diesel, wet mud, and that weird chemical sweetness new asphalt always has. The ground beneath my steel-toe boots is a patchwork of compacted fill, exposed clay, and one very, very cranky fault line.
“Last reading before I go home, shower, and pretend this day didn’t happen,” I tell myself.
I glance back at my Jeep parked along the gravel access road—mud-spattered, dented, absolutely perfect—and then return my attention to the long, jagged crack running diagonally across the site.
They’ve already had two pieces of equipment partially sink in the last week. A skid steer listing at a thirty-degree angle like a drunk sailor, a drill rig that somehow tipped despite being on “stable” ground.
That’s why I’m here.
Environmental geology, foundation assessments, sinkhole risk surveys.
Translation: when the earth starts eating expensive toys, they call me.
I crouch at the edge of the fissure and run my gloved hand along the broken asphalt and fill. The crack isn’t just surface-level.
It’s deep.
I can feel the emptiness beneath, a hollow place that doesn’t match the boring logs, doesn’t match the bedrock maps, doesn’t match anything.
“Talk to me, sweetheart,” I murmur, staring into the dark cut in the earth. “What are you hiding?”
A faint tremor shivers up through my palm.
My instruments don’t lie—usually.
And I’ve been getting small, weird spikes here for days.
Micro-tremors with no traffic correlations, no blasting schedules, no nearby rail.
Sometimes the readings jump when I’m standing still.
Sometimes they jump when I’m dreaming.
I close my eyes just for a second.
Black feathers.
Obsidian wings blocking out a sky I’ve never seen.
Hands—huge, callused, inhumanly strong—catching me as the world cracks open.
And eyes.
Green-gold, inhuman, molten with something that should terrify me but doesn’t.
I snap my eyes open, shoving the images away.
I haven’t been sleeping. Not well, anyway.
The nightmares have been getting worse.
Shadows, storms, a voice like thunder saying my name. Alina.
I always wake up sweaty and shaking, heart pounding like I’ve just sprinted up ten flights of stairs.
The fact that my instruments are now acting like my dreams are contagious?
Yeah. Love that for me.
I straighten, dusting my gloved hands off on my cargo pants, and look over the site one more time. Rebar forests stab up from half-poured foundations. Plastic sheeting flaps in the wind. A forgotten coffee cup lies on its side near a stack of cinder blocks, its contents long frozen.
Just one more walk-through. One more look at the crack.
Then I can write the email that’s basically “hey, maybe don’t build a million-dollar cul-de-sac over an unstable void, just a thought” and go home.
I take three steps toward the fissure.
And stop.
Because I’m not alone.
Someone is there, at the very edge of the fault.
He wasn’t there ten seconds ago. I would swear on my geology textbooks he wasn’t there.
But now? He’s just there.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Dark coat whipping around his legs in the wind like he stepped off some dramatic movie poster.
Pale blond hair, almost white, long on top but cut to the nape of his neck in the back. Pale brows to match. Skin like carved alabaster, sharp jaw, straight nose, mouth that looks like it forgot how to smile sometime around the Renaissance.
He’s beautiful.
In that severe, imposing, probably a supervillain kind of way.
He’s staring down into the crack, one hand braced on his thigh, the other pressed flat to the broken asphalt like he’s listening. Really listening.
Something in my chest tightens.
He feels big. Important.
Like those eyes from my dreams got up, stole a body, and walked onto my job site.
“Nah,” I whisper. “Nope. Absolutely not.”
Still, my boots crunch forward, gravel and broken tar underfoot. Professional mode slides in front of the panic like a shield.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I call out. “That fault’s still active.”
I ask a few more questions.
He just stares.
Large. Imposing. Gorgeous in that completely unattainable way.
“Okay, Big Guy,” I murmur. “Do you speak? Or are you just here to commune with the asphalt?”
He lifts his head.
Our gazes lock.
And my world narrows to green-gold eyes that I have absolutely seen before—if not in this world.
The ground goes quiet.
Like, quiet quiet.
My brain stutters.
“I speak,” he replies, and oh my God—that voice.
It’s deep. Like really deep. And it resonates within me.
A long moment passes.
“Uh.” I blink. “Hi.”
Wow. Incredible work, Alina. Truly poetic.
He studies me with an intensity that should make me uncomfortable.
It doesn’t.
It makes me hyper-aware.
Of my heartbeat.
Of the sway in the loose fence behind me.
Of how thin the barrier is between me and him and the crack yawning at his boots.
“You feel it,” he says.
His voice is amazing. Like gravel. Deep. Low. Has that rough edge like it was meant to be heard over storms.
“Feel what?” I ask, because apparently my mouth has decided we’re doing this.
“The wrongness beneath your feet.”
I bristle a little.
“I feel the unstable substrate that I’ve been hired to assess and the OSHA lawsuit waiting to happen if you don’t step back.”
One corner of his mouth almost—almost—ticks up.
“It is not your fault,” he says calmly. “This, at least, is not your doing.”
Wow, thanks, random trench-coated stranger. Ten out of ten, loved that cryptic reassurance.
I plant my hands on my hips.
“Look, I don’t know who you are, but this is an active construction site. You can’t just wander in and start communing with the fault lines.”
“I can.” He straightens to his full height.
He is enormous.
I’m five-seven in my boots and I have to tip my head back to meet his gaze.
He has to be at least six-four, maybe more.
His coat strains over thick shoulders, and his hands—when he lifts one—are broad and scarred.
He points, not at me, but at the crack.
“This is not your world’s doing,” he says. “These fractures run deeper. They connect to mine.”
I stare at him.
Then, at the crack.
Then, back at him.
“Right,” I say slowly. “So. You’re an out-of-state geologist? Because that’s not how tectonics work, buddy.”
He’s not offended.
If anything, he looks amused.
Or maybe impressed.
It’s hard to tell under all that intense.
“You are Alina Fawcett,” he says.
A cold rush skims down my spine.
“How do you know my name?”
“I have felt you—or rather the place where you are missed—for a lifetime,” he replies simply. “Dreaming beside fault lines that are not truly yours. Walking atop fractures that answer only to me. But also, you are wearing a nametag.”
“What? Oh! Geez, you had me going,” I mutter, embarrassment burning my cheeks.
“Finally, I have found you,” he whispers, inching closer. “I am Dagan.”
He says it like a title, not a name. Then he continues.
“Lord of Earth. Warden of the Rooted Marches. Winged Demon of stone and storm.”
I take a slow step back.
“Okay,” I say carefully. “So you’re one of those LARP guys, right? Wrong convention, dude. Newark Comic Con is that way.”
He doesn’t move.
Doesn’t blink.
“I come from Nightfall,” he continues, like I didn’t say anything. “My world is bleeding into yours. The SoulTakers gnaw at the seams. The tremors you feel are echoes of a war you cannot see. Yet.”
The wind gusts, rattling a loose sheet of Tyvek, flipping a plastic bucket on its side.
My seismometer on the tripod beside me ticks—three sharp jumps—then goes still again.
My heart is pounding now.
Not from fear.
From something else entirely. Recognition? Attraction?
“Nightfall,” I repeat softly.
The name tastes familiar.
Like a word I’ve spoken in dreams.
He takes a step toward me.
The asphalt under his boot heels doesn’t crack.
It settles.
“Alina Fawcett,” he says again, and my name in his mouth feels like the earth saying yes under a foundation test. “I’ve searched high and low, but the Fates have led me here. You are my viyella. My fated mate. The bond-key my brothers say I must find if I am to stand beside them in the final war.”
I blink.
“Okay. Right. Sure. Of course.” My laugh comes out a little high, a little wild. “This is, I mean, wow. This is a lot. Do you, like, practice this speech in the mirror first or—”
“I do not joke,” he says.
No, he definitely doesn’t.
He steps closer.
The air around us thickens, humming with something that makes my tattoos prickle under my skin.
My boots buzz like there’s a live wire buried somewhere nearby, but I know there isn’t. I checked.
“You have been feeling the tremors,” he says. “Seeing things that should not be possible. You’ve heard the storms of war from another world.”
My throat goes dry.
“Have you been spying on me? How do you know about my nightmares?”
“They are not merely nightmares,” he says quietly. “They are bleed-through. Your soul reaching for mine across realms. Nightfall calls to you. You answer. You are already half-stepping between worlds. I am here to bring you the rest of the way.”
I want to tell him he’s insane.
I want to tell him this is impossible.
That I’m just a woman with student loans and a cranky Jeep and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.
But the ground under my feet has gone very, very calm.
And when I look into his eyes—those green-gold, impossible eyes—I feel steady.
Aligned.
Like when you finally find bedrock under twelve meters of garbage fill.
He lifts a hand—not touching me, not yet—just holding it out, palm up.
“Come with me,” he says. “Your world will not survive if mine falls. Nightfall feeds every realm with dreams. Hope. The SoulTakers want to unmake it. To strip all worlds down to barren stone. My brothers have found their viyellas. They stand stronger with their mates beside them. I have searched alone long enough.”
“This is insane,” I whisper.
“Yes,” he agrees. “But it is also true.”
My heart is beating so hard I can hear it in my ears.
I stare at his hand.
At the fault line.
At my seismometer, now utterly, eerily quiet.
“You can’t just walk up to a woman at a job site and say, ‘Hi, I’m a Demon Lord thingy from another world and I’ve come to collect you,’” I tell him. “That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works.”
“I can,” he says. “I just did.”
I snort despite myself.
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Yes.” A glimmer of something like dry humor flickers in his gaze. “Your world has many rules. Most of them are inefficient.”
“Oh my God,” I mutter. “You’re arrogant and weirdly literal. That’s great.”
“I am also running out of time,” he says quietly.
That hits something.
The tired lines around his eyes. The way his shoulders carry weight that has nothing to do with muscle.
The distant rumble I can feel more than hear—a resonance deep in the earth that doesn’t belong to New Jersey.
“What happens if you fail?” I ask, because I’m an idiot who needs to know.
His jaw clenches.
“Nightfall fractures,” he says. “The ore mines dry. The dream forges go cold. Hope dims across every world touched by our magic. Including yours. Earth’s children will sleep without dreaming.
Its artists will create without inspiration.
People will live without wonder. The SoulTakers want the silence that comes after. ”
Silence.
Every instinct I have rebels.
“No dreams?” I echo. “No hope?”
“Only bare survival on dead worlds,” he says. “I will not allow that. I cannot. But I am not enough alone. I have never been enough alone.”
Something in his voice cracks on that last word.
Lonely, my brain supplies.
This massive, terrifying, too-beautiful man is lonely.
“And you think I can what?” I ask softly. “Fix that? Just because I can read a seismograph and have weird dreams?”
“The bond would give me what I lack,” he says. “Ground me where I split. Anchor me where I break. Your strength is not just in your hands, Alina. Not just in your degrees or your machines. It is in the way you stand when everything under you moves.”
My throat tightens.
He has no right to sound like he knows me.
I open my mouth to tell him so.
He exhales.
And the world changes.
At first, I think the floodlight on the nearest pole blew. The edges of him blur, crackling with faint light. The air shimmers, heat-haze on a summer road. The smell of wet concrete and diesel is suddenly overlayed with something else—rich soil after rain, lightning, stone dust.
“What are you—” I begin.
Then the glamour drops.
His coat melts into nothing.
His boots, his jeans, the whole carefully human package tears away like smoke.
Wings erupt from his back in a rush of sound—a fourteen-foot span of obsidian feathers, each one edged in faint green light. His hair curls wild and wicked in an invisible wind, sweeping the pale locks back from his temples.
His skin is still fair, but shot through with faint lines of glowing stone, like cracks in marble filled with molten gold.
His eyes burn.
Not metaphorically.
They burn.
Green-gold irises lit from within, stormlight and wildfire and something older than this world.
He is massive.
He is terrible.
He is breathtaking.
“Oh,” I say faintly.
Power rolls off him in waves, bending the air, making the rebar vibrate, sending hair lifting along my arms and neck.
I should run.
I should scream.
Instead, I sway.
The earth rises up to catch me.
No, not the earth.
Him.
He moves faster than thought, wings snapping wide to shield us from the wind as his arms scoop me up like I weigh nothing.
One hand cups the back of my head, the other braces under my thighs, holding me snug against a chest that feels like warm stone.
I blink up at him.
My head swims.
The world tilts.
He looks down at me with those impossible eyes, and for a second, the battle lines of exhaustion and grief around his mouth soften.
“Mine,” he rumbles, the word more vibration than sound.
I want to argue.
I want to say I belong to no one.
But the fault line is quiet. The tremors are gone. My heartbeat syncs with some deeper pulse I can’t name.
The darkness rushes up to meet me, soft and enveloping.
I pass out with the feel of his arms around me, the scent of rain and stone in my lungs, and one last ridiculous thought.
Of all the ways I thought my night could go—being claimed by a Demon Lord with wings?
Yeah, that was definitely not on the list.