Pursing her lips, she called back her power. “I can make anyone do anything I tell them to do. It’s called persuasion, but it should be called commanding.”

Years ago, when she’d first used it, she’d crossly told Sabine to shut her mouth. For an entire week, no one had understood why Sabine hadn’t been able to open it. Her sister had almost starved.

“That sounds impressive, lamb. So you’re as powerful as you are pretty?”

Her cheeks heated. He thought she was pretty? She gazed down at her frayed dress. Though faded nearly white from repeated washing, it used to have color. Sorceri loved color. Her feet were bare because she’d outgrown her boots. She didn’t feel very pretty.

“I’m sure you get called beautiful all the time,” he said confidently.

No. She didn’t. She rarely encountered anyone besides her family. If Sabine complimented her, she’d remark on Lanthe’s ability, not her looks. And sometimes her parents didn’t seem to see her at all—

The boy started striding toward her.

“Wait, wh-what are you doing?” She tripped back until she met a tree.

“Just making certain of something.” He leaned his face in close to her hair, and then he . . . he scented her! When he drew back, he wore a cocky grin, as if he’d just won a prize or discovered a new realm.

For some reason, that grin made her feel as if she’d run all the way up the mountain. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

“You smell like sky. And home.” He said this as if it was significant—a weighty and undeniable truth.

“What does that mean?” Gods, this boy confused her.

“To me, you smell like no one else in the world ever has, or ever will.” His gray irises glowed silver with emotion. A breeze ruffled his sandy brown hair. “It means you and I are going to be best friends. When we grow up, we’ll be . . . more.”

She focused on the words best friends, and ached with yearning. She’d always wanted a friend! She loved Sabine, but her sister was twelve and usually had grown-up stuff on her mind, like how to get warm clothing for the coming winter, or enough food to feed four.

Lanthe supposed someone had to be concerned with those things—since their parents were always preoccupied. When Lanthe had been a baby, she’d called for Ai-bee over their own mother.

But Lanthe could never be best friends with a Vrekener, despite how intriguing she found him. “You should go, Thronos Talos,” she said, just as her stomach growled, embarrassing her and deepening his amusement.

“You might be a great and terrible sorceress, but you can’t eat sorcery, can you?” He spread those spellbinding wings. “Will you stay here if I go find food for you?”

“Why would you do that?”

His shoulders went back, his silvery eyes alight—as if with pride. “That’s my job now, lamb.”

She sighed. “I don’t understand. We’re enemies. We’re not supposed to be like”—she waved from herself to him—“this.”

He winked at her. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

Four months later

Thronos . . . told.

And then Lanthe made him pay for it.

“Sorceri are licentious, gambling, paranoid hedonists; their love of wine-swilling and carousing is matched only by their delight in thievery. For Sorceri powers to go unchecked would be disastrous.”

—THRONOS TALOS, KNIGHT OF RECKONING, HEIR TO THE SKYE

“Meaningless sex is like eating the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle: fun in the moment, but not something you’d want to repeat over and over.”

—MELANTHE OF THE DEIE SORCERI, QUEEN OF PERSUASION

ONE

An island, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean

MODERN TIMES

As Lanthe sprinted down a shaking, smoky tunnel, she focused on her friends ahead: Carrow, a witch, and Carrow’s newly adopted daughter, Ruby. The witch was holding the seven-year-old girl in her arms as she ran headlong for an exit out of this godsforsaken maze.

Lanthe followed, gripping her sword with a gauntleted hand, her metal claws digging into the handle. She tried to smile for Ruby, who was frowning back at her.

Carrow—or Crow, as Ruby called her—and Lanthe had attempted to turn their dire escape into a fun-filled adventure for her. Snarky and adorable Ruby clearly wasn’t sold.

Charging into the tunnels had seemed like such a good idea at the time, a way out of the Order prison they’d all been jailed in—and an escape from other immortals. After tonight’s cataclysmic overthrow, Loreans stalked the fiery halls, hunting for prey. Carrow’s estranged husband, who might or might not be evil, hunted for her.

Another quake rocked the tunnel, grit raining down over Lanthe’s black braids. Unfortunately, Lanthe had her own stalker—Thronos, a crazed, winged warlord who’d been obsessed with capturing her for the last five hundred years.

But Vrekeners feared enclosed spaces; anything underground was a forbidding landscape, much less a failing tunnel. He’d never follow her into this subterranean maze.

Explosions sounded somewhere in the distance, and the tunnel rumbled. Seemed like such a good idea. She gazed up, saw the immense ceiling supports bowed from strain. No wonder. New mountains were sprouting from the earth all over this prison island, courtesy of Lanthe’s fellow Sorceri.

A boulder dropped in her path, slowing her progress. Rock dust wafted over her like a grainy curtain, spattering her face and Sorceri mask. Carrow and Ruby grew indistinct in the haze. The two turned a corner, out of sight.