BLACKSTONE

The Dark Energy hummed beneath my skin like a live wire — waiting, coiled, desperate to be unleashed. I'd spent seventeen years trying to pretend it wasn't there. Seventeen years of normal schools, normal friends, normal everything.

But normal was over. It had been over the moment they came for Mrs. Caldwell.

"You can't run from what you are, Eliza," Marcus had told me. At the time, I thought he was being dramatic. Now, standing at the edge of the Wend with the stars screaming overhead, I understood what he meant.

I was the last Keeper. And they knew it.