Chapter One
At midnight on April seventeenth, Luisa Lopez silently celebrated her twenty-first birthday by looking into the future.
Her visions had begun five years ago, shortly before four men had attacked her as she came home from night school. They had dragged her into her own apartment, where she had been beaten, raped, and nearly burned alive. Luisa had foreseen the attack two days earlier, but until it happened she had thought her visions were only nightmares. It wasn't until she woke up in the hospital burn ward that she knew the strange things she saw in her mind were real.
At first Luisa didn't know the people in her visions. The one she saw most often, the beautiful, angry lady doctor, had been taken away to operate on a man with white-streaked hair and no face. She had also helped some of his strange friends: the crazed warrior, the golden-haired killer, the green man, the girl knight, the swan lord, and the smiling thief. Sometimes Luisa caught fleeting glimpses of two others, the feral king and the shadow prince, but their futures were never revealed.
Luisa had been frightened when she began meeting the people from her visions, but they had never harmed her. The lady doctor, Alexandra Keller, had come to the hospital to operate on her face, and had given Luisa's mother the money for her treatment. The swan lord, Valentin Jaus, had brought Luisa to this rehabilitation hospital to continue her medical treatments and to keep her safe.
It had not been easy living with the visions, as well as with what had been done to her. In the first, worst weeks Luisa had wanted to die, and tried several times to kill herself. It wasn't until she began to dream of the shadow prince that she found a reason to live.
As he struggled, Luisa had done the same, holding on to life, enduring what the doctors did to her in order to heal her injuries. Sometimes it seemed worse than the attack. She accepted the visions she had of the secret war between the immortals who called themselves Darkyn, and their enemy, the zealot Brethren, but that wasn't easy either. There were nights she woke up weeping, sometimes screaming.
The most pitiful part of having her gift was that Luisa couldn't warn anyone. Who would believe that a poor, ignorant girl from the projects saw the future? Even if she could convince the immortals who had helped and protected her that her visions were real, as was what she saw coming for them, they would try to change it before it happened. Luisa already knew the events could not be changed; any interference by her or them would bring about the end of the world.
So Luisa remained silent and watchful, and took what comfort she could from her faith. Each night she prayed to the God whom both the Darkyn and the Brethren had abandoned, and asked Him to watch over her and His lost children.
Tonight her vision was of the smiling thief with eyes the color of violets. He stood watching a red-haired woman sitting in a crowded room. In front of the people a man stood talking very fast and gesturing toward an old painting. The vision faded almost as soon as it had begun, but Luisa felt exhausted, as if she had watched it for hours.
She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Luisa saw the shadow prince walking through a forest, touching nothing, his dark face grim. She trailed after him as she did in every dream, watching and wondering but never trying to intrude on his solitude. She sensed his emotions, and knew that the only time he was at peace was when he was alone.
He stopped walking. You should be asleep.
Luisa froze. He had never acknowledged her presence. I'm not very tired. Then, very tentatively, she asked, Are you okay?
You have surgery tomorrow. He moved closer, his eyes never leaving hers. It's your birthday.
She shrugged.
Everyone forgets I still have them, too. He didn't smile, but his expression softened a few degrees. Happy birthday, Princess.
She would have laughed, hearing someone else call her that. Where are you?
In the mountains. He seemed to lose interest in her as he looked around him and saw a pool of violets growing alongside a fallen, lightning-struck tree.
He wouldn't touch them. Luisa knew from watching him all these months that he was afraid of touching anything. You won't hurt them. Unless you want to.
The sky turned as dark as his thoughts. I hurt everything I touch.
A blinding light filled Luisa's head. Visions hardly ever came to her when she was dreaming, but this one smashed through her thoughts like a bulldozer speeding out of control.
The shadow prince turned around. What is that light?
A vision. She couldn't keep him out of her head; he was seeing everything through her eyes. He saw the girl throw herself in the furnace, and the other immortals standing guard as she burned. The vision whisked them away from the glassworks and hurled them over the land to an old abandoned building, and through its empty corridors, and into a tiny room. A man in dirty clothes and a funny pointed hat was using a blade to saw through the covering of a grass-filled mattress on a bed of ropes.
The man pulled out handfuls of grass until he grinned and grabbed something inside the mattress. He pulled out a bundle of leather and, after glancing at the window, put it under his sweat-stained shirt. He ran out of the room, through the silent halls, and jumped onto the back of a crude-looking cart. An older man driving the cart slapped the reins on the back end of a donkey, which pulled the cart across the grass and onto a dirt road.
The book. Luisa closed her eyes to the images and held her throbbing head between her hands. They can't find it. Not yet. They're not ready.