Shadows of the Condemned

Chapter 1

The candles are supposed to be for Mara.

Twelve white pillars arranged in a perfect circle on the stone floor of our family's ritual room, each one lit with the kind of careful ceremony that takes twenty minutes and a steady hand.

I've watched my mother do it four times now, once for each of my older siblings when they came into their power.

The candles burn gold when the magic takes hold.

A warm, steady gold that means the Awakening worked and the bloodline holds true and another Fairmont heir has stepped into their inheritance.

Mara told me to stand in the center because she needs an anchor. Something to draw the ritual energy through. A focal point. She used the word anchor with the same tone she uses when she says useful and convenient and hold still.

Which is exactly the problem with this family. Everything is about what's useful to them.

"Don't move," my mother says from her position outside the circle.

Her hands are already raised, the words of the old invocation moving silently on her lips.

My father stands beside her, watching me with flat, assessing eyes.

Not watching Mara, who is supposedly the point of all this.

Watching me, because I'm the part that can go wrong.

Mara takes her place opposite me across the circle.

She's beautiful tonight, dressed in white, her dark hair loose around her shoulders the way the ceremony requires.

She looks like she belongs here. She always has.

Every Fairmont child is born with a thread of power running through them, and every Awakening is the moment that thread is pulled taut and made into something real.

Magic becomes theirs to hold and use and pass down.

No thread exists in me. Never has. I'm the null, the gap in the bloodline, the daughter my parents stopped bothering to explain to visitors after the third time a healer confirmed it.

But standing in the center of the circle where the energy has to pass through something on its way to Mara makes me useful.

My body is good at that, apparently. Good at being passed through.

I'm so tired of being useful.

My mother's invocation rises from silent to audible, and the ritual starts.

It always feels like standing too close to a fire.

A pressure behind the eyes, a warmth along the skin that doesn't come from anywhere visible.

The energy moves through the room in the way water moves through a pipe, looking for where it needs to go.

It finds me first, the way it always does, and I let it.

Then something changes.

The warmth stops moving. It stops passing through and starts settling in, sinking into the space behind my ribs like it's found somewhere it wants to stay. My breath catches. The energy isn't reaching Mara anymore. It's staying in me.

And for the first time in my life, something in this family is choosing me.

"Stop," my father says sharply. "Angelic, release it."

"I'm not doing anything." My voice comes out steadier than I expected. The thing inside my chest feels like swallowing a star, like heat and pressure and something pulling at the edges of my ribs from the inside. "I don't know how to stop it."

"Try harder," he snaps.

"Oh, excellent advice. Try harder. Why didn't I think of that?"

Mara's face has gone white. "What is she doing? Mother, what is she doing to my ceremony?"

"Angelic." My mother's voice drops to the register she uses when she wants to cut through to something essential. "You release that energy right now."

"I would if I could. But apparently nobody thought to teach the family null how ritual magic actually works."

The candles flare. All twelve of them, simultaneously, surging from a careful controlled flame to something that reaches the ceiling and throws wild shadows across the ritual room walls.

The magic inside me lurches, expanding outward in a pulse I can't contain, and then it all happens at once: the candles extinguish, the circle cracks along three of its carved lines, and every piece of glassware on the shelves along the far wall shatters.

Silence.

Mara is shaking. The white of her ceremony dress has a scorch mark along the hem where the nearest candle flared too close. She stares at me across the ruined circle with pure fury. "You did that on purpose."

"Right. Because I've always dreamed of ruining your special day and finally getting some attention in this family. You caught me."

"You've always been jealous—"

"Jealous of what, exactly? Your personality? Because that would be a reach."

My father crosses into the ruined circle and takes my arm. His grip isn't gentle. "What did you absorb?"

"Apparently your daughter's entire magical inheritance. You're welcome."

"How much of it?"

The honest answer is all of it, and from the way the heat in my chest shifts, he already knows. "Enough to make this interesting."

My mother pulls out her phone and dials. She speaks in a low, rapid voice, and I catch fragments. Anomaly. Disrupted. Absorbed the entire invocation. Then a pause. Then: Yes. Come immediately.

"Let me guess," I say. "Calling someone to fix the broken null?"

She doesn't answer me. Of course she doesn't.

My father's hand tightens on my arm. "Don't make this harder than it needs to be."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Am I being inconvenient? How terrible for you that your magical disposal unit is malfunctioning."

He lets go, but only because Mara has started crying, and my mother moves to her, and suddenly the room reorganizes itself around Mara's distress the way it always does.

Walking out right now is an option. I consider it, standing in the wreckage of the ritual circle with the taste of old magic at the back of my throat, glass dust settling on the floor around my feet.

But I stay, because I want to see who they called. I want to see what they think they're going to do about me now that I'm not just the convenient null anymore.

The knock at the estate's front door comes eleven minutes later. Eleven minutes is fast for someone coming from outside the city. Whoever my mother called was already nearby, or was already expecting this call.

My father opens the door. The quality of silence that follows is the kind that happens when someone walks into a room and changes the air pressure of it without doing anything at all.

Then he appears in the ritual room doorway, and the temperature drops.

Not gradually—all at once, like winter stepped inside wearing a man's form.

He's tall, lean in the way blades are lean, with black hair and the kind of terrifying beauty that makes you forget to breathe.

The death magic rolls off him in waves I can feel against my skin.

His eyes land on me.

"Angelic Fairmont." His voice is flat, precise, a scalpel passing through the silence between us. "You're the anomaly."

"I'm the person standing in front of you, actually. But anomaly works if you're into the whole dehumanizing thing."

Something flickers across his face. Not amusement, exactly. Interest, maybe. "How refreshing. Most people are more intimidated."

"Most people probably have something to lose."

My mother steps forward. "Professor Ashford, thank you for coming so quickly. As I said, there was a disruption during the Awakening ceremony. Our null absorbed the ritual energy. All of it. We don't know what she—"

"I heard you the first time." He hasn't looked away from me. "I don't need the summary."

My mother closes her mouth. Professor Ashford crosses the room without asking permission and stops two feet away from me. Up close, the cold has a signature to it. Death magic. I've read about it in the household's reference texts, the ones I wasn't supposed to touch. Reaper magic.

"How do you feel?" he asks.

"Like my family just tried to use me as a magical conduit and it backfired spectacularly. So, pretty typical Tuesday, honestly."

"That's not what I asked."

"Then ask better questions."

His eyes narrow slightly. "Hold out your hand."

"Why?"

"Because I'm trying to assess what you've absorbed before it kills you."

"Oh. Well, when you put it so charmingly." I hold out my hand. He doesn't touch it, just passes his own hand two inches above my palm. The air between us shifts, darkening briefly.

"She's holding a full ritual invocation," he says, to no one in particular. "Unprocessed. A null body with no channels to move it through." He looks at me again. "You should be dead."

"Sorry to disappoint you."

"You will be if you keep this up. She needs to come with me."

"Excuse me?" I step back. "Nobody asked what I need."

My father says: "Of course. Whatever you think is best."

"Oh, fantastic. Just hand me off to the first stranger who shows up. That's definitely going to end well."

Professor Ashford tilts his head. "Would you prefer to stay here and die when the magic burns through your system? Because that's your other option."

"How do I know you're not going to kill me?"

"Because if I wanted you dead, you'd be dead already."

The casual way he says it should be terrifying. Instead, it's oddly reassuring. At least he's honest about being dangerous.

"Where exactly are you planning to take me?" I ask.

"Nocturne Academy."

I know the name. Everyone knows it. The academy for supernatural students. The place where the children of reapers and dragons and vampires go to learn what they are. "I'm a null. I don't belong at an academy for supernaturals."

"You were a null this morning. That appears to have changed."

"And you're what, the magical taxi service?"

"I'm the professor who gets called when something unprecedented happens and needs to be contained before it becomes a problem."

"Contained. How flattering."

"Would you prefer eliminated?"

When I look at my mother, she's looking at Mara. When I look at my father, he's checking his watch. When I look at Mara, she's glaring at me like this is all a personal attack against her.

"I don't have a bag packed," I say.

"You won't need one," Professor Ashford says.

"Right. Because nothing says 'this is temporary' like not needing belongings."

"Would you like to argue about luggage, or would you like to not die tonight? Because those are your choices."

I look around the ritual room one more time. At the shattered glass, the cracked circle, the scorch marks on the walls. At my family, who called a stranger to take me away and won't meet my eyes.

"Lead the way, Professor."

We leave through the front door. My family doesn't follow us out.

The car parked outside the estate is sleek and black and wrong in the way things built for practical purposes and then modified with magic are always wrong. The proportions are slightly off. The windows are too dark.

He opens the rear door. "Get in."

"So commanding. Do you practice that in the mirror?"

"Daily. Get in the car."

The leather is cold under my palms. He gets in on the other side, and the door closes, and the car starts moving without anyone appearing to drive it.

"Self-driving cars. How modern of you."

"It's warded, not automated."

"What's the difference?"

"One uses technology. The other uses magic that will trap you in here if you try to do anything stupid."

The estate shrinks through the too-dark window. My reflection stares back at me, brown hair disheveled, blue eyes wide in a face that's always been determinedly average. Nothing special to look at, which has always suited my family just fine.

The lights are on in the ritual room. My mother and Mara, already turned toward each other, already in the process of moving on.

"So that's it?" I ask. "Eighteen years of being the family disappointment and I get shipped off without so much as a goodbye?"

"Did you want a goodbye from them?"

The question catches me off guard. "No. But it would have been nice to be asked."

"People rarely ask what nulls want."

"Former null, apparently."

"We'll see."

I look at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means magical awakenings at eighteen are unheard of. Null bodies absorbing full ritual invocations without dying is impossible. You're either a medical miracle or something else entirely."

"And you're hoping for something else entirely."

"I'm hoping you survive long enough for us to figure out which one you are."

Outside the window, the city slides away and the road narrows into something older, lined with trees that press too close. The car's headlights catch the spaces between the trunks and turn them briefly into doorways.

"This academy," I say. "What makes you think I'll fit in any better there than I did with my own family?"

"I don't."

His honesty is brutal and somehow refreshing. "Then why take me?"

"Because unprecedented magical anomalies don't get to live quiet lives. You're going to be powerful or you're going to be dangerous, and either way, you need to be somewhere that can handle what you become."

"And if I don't want to become anything?"

He looks at me for the first time since we got in the car. "What you want stopped mattering the moment you absorbed that ritual. Magic doesn't care about your preferences."

"How comforting."

"It's not meant to be comforting. It's meant to be true."

The trees get denser, and the road gets darker, and somewhere ahead of us through the windshield there are lights burning steady and cold against the black of the sky.

"Those lights," he says, following my gaze. "That's Nocturne Academy. Your new home."

"Temporary arrangement, you mean."

"We'll see about that too."

The gates appear out of the dark, massive iron and older than anything has a right to look. The car passes through them without slowing.

"Welcome to Nocturne Academy, Miss Fairmont," Professor Ashford says as the academy closes around us. "Try not to burn it down on your first night."

I look at the imposing stone buildings rising around us, at the windows glowing with warm light, at the students I can see moving through the corridors.

"No promises," I say.