LITMIR.BIZ

       Prologue

       Fifteen Years Ago

      Moira Connor remembered the fire.

      The dark sky, the ash that rained down, soft and hot, choking her with every breath until she wanted to rip open her own throat, just to get some blessed relief.

      The fire had been all consuming—the unnatural emerald and amethyst flames devouring everything in its path. Its light had all but blinded her as she cowered in the corner of what had once been an alley between buildings.

      The entire city of Jackson was being annihilated by the fire.

      But she hadn’t been blind enough to miss seeing what had been done to her parents. The witches had burned them alive, right before her eyes, and Moira hadn’t been able to save them. Hadn’t even tried, because she been so paralyzed by fear that she’d run.

      Not that she could have done anything. She knew that now, and yet it haunted her every waking moment—and sometimes the sleeping ones as well.

      It was guilt of the survivor. But she should have died with them. And the only reason she hadn’t was because of a man—a man with a pair of bright blue eyes.

      If she ever found that man, she would kill him. Moira would rather be dead, after all.

      Instead, she was still alive when, numb with grief, she and the other survivors of what the world had come to call the Great Witch War struggled to pick up the pieces of their existence, to save the last of their race. She scavenged on the streets, seeking out bits of treasure to barter for food while those who were able tried to protect their kind from the witches who would leach the energy from every last one of them.

      And now she was a prisoner in one of these shelters. Those who lived in the enclosed villages called them havens, but she knew better.

      They were prisons. Incarceration for those who had done nothing more than act on the basic human instinct to survive.

      And so Moira existed, helping those who couldn’t help themselves as a way of making amends to the parents she hadn’t helped. And all the time, she dreamed of the man who had saved her life. Over the years, her hatred for the witches slowly bled over until it focused entirely on him. Why had he let her live but not saved her parents?

      It was because of him that she was still here, trapped in the numbness of her grief.

      Because of him she could commit the most cardinal sin of the survivors—she could kill. Kill him.

      The kicker of it all?

      She wouldn’t even know him if she saw him. For all she remembered was the color of his eyes.