Prologue

Alyssa struggled for another ragged breath, throat raw from dragging down desperate gasps of air between screams. Heavy rain drowned out her cries for help, but it mattered little anyway.

No one would hear her in the District of Bones.

The rain made it impossible to see beyond the several rows of gravestones ahead. The monuments clipped her sides, her knees and ankles, but she could not stop. She had discarded her black heels when she fled and now loose gravel, dirt and mud pressed through her stockings and stuck to the heels of her feet.

It was amazing what captured the brain’s attention when the body was about to die.

She had gotten so turned around in the chase she could no longer remember from where she came. The District of Bones was dizzyingly massive, an enormous city all on its own spanning across the entirety of the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-eighth precincts. Few would brave the cemetery alone – particularly alone in the dark.

The gravestones ahead disappeared from view, replaced by a gently sloping ridge and open space. Alyssa could not stop her momentum in time.

The fall was blissfully quick. There was a sudden terrifying weightlessness, then nothing but darkness. But she could not fall unconscious here. If she did, she was surely dead. When Alyssa forced her eyes open, forced her consciousness back to the surface, it was only then she felt the pain.

She groaned. The palms of her hands had been chafed raw, as had her knees and the skin of her left cheek. She tried to turn over but only managed a sharp gasp. Her ankle burned with liquid fire with the slightest twitch, sprained or perhaps broken. There was no way she could stand on it, let alone run. The Glass strapped to her left wrist would not bring up an image when Alyssa tapped on its metallic surface. It only managed a feeble wink of red light before dimming. She had landed on a main path – but it was one of hundreds, their destinations as twisted and convoluted as a maze. There was no way to tell which way would get her to safety without the aid of her Glass.

Although the pounding of the rain made it impossible to make out sounds with any certainty, Alyssa picked out a persistent hissing not unlike the sound of water hitting a hot surface. Something huge and heavy shook the dirt from the top of the ridge from where she had fallen, growing closer and bringing with it the hissing of a thousand serpents. Heat bloomed along Alyssa’s back, and the gravel before her grew suddenly bright with a devilish orange light that permeated the fog and glistened through the drops of rain.

The heat at her back grew warmer as the thing approached almost lazily, as though knowing its prey had been beaten. Its death inevitable.

Alyssa could feel the thing’s heavy, hot breath on her back; feel its bright, hungry eyes. Whatever happened, she did not want to die like this. On her stomach, prey for the taking. Alyssa’s palms stung and her ankle screamed as she forced her body to twist, a vicious scream escaping her lips from the effort. She would stare this thing down as it took her life.

Time slowed to a crawl. Alyssa gasped.

Losing her nerve, she closed her eyes at the last second.