Cover

ACE BOOKS BY ILONA ANDREWS

The Kate Daniels Novels

MAGIC BITES

MAGIC BURNS

MAGIC STRIKES

MAGIC BLEEDS

MAGIC SLAYS

MAGIC RISES

MAGIC BREAKS

MAGIC SHIFTS

MAGIC BINDS

The World of Kate Daniels

GUNMETAL MAGIC

The Edge Novels

ON THE EDGE

BAYOU MOON

FATE’S EDGE

STEEL’S EDGE

NOVELLAS

MAGIC MOURNS

MAGIC DREAMS

MAGIC GIFTS

MAGIC STEALS

ALPHAS: ORIGINS

Dedication

To Uncle Gene. We miss you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our agent, Nancy Yost, and the wonderful crew at NYLA for their dedication, professional expertise, and friendships. We appreciate you very much.

We are deeply grateful to our editor, Anne Sowards, for steering us through this project and once again taking a mess and through careful guidance turning it into a book. Our work is so much stronger because of you.

Thank you to all of the wonderful people who worked to bring the manuscript to publication: the production editor, Michelle Kasper; the assistant production editor, Jennifer Myers; the art director, Judith Lagerman; and Juliana Kolesova, the artist responsible for the image on the cover.

Thank you to Stephanie Mowery, Shannon Daigle, Sandra Bullock, and Kristi DeCourcy for early feedback.

The following people generously donated their time and effort to read the book early: Robin Snyder, Valerie Hockens, Ronnie Buck, Kathryn Holland, Susan Hester, Jennifer Whaley, Ying Dallimore, Julie Krick, Carrie Harlan, Paroma Chakravarty, Lisa Louk, Jill Woodley, Jessica Haluska, Beatrix Kaser, William Stonier, Omar Jimenez, and AMW. Special thanks to Becky Slemons for coming up with a title for this book.

CHAPTER

1

THE SKULL GLARED at me out of empty eye sockets. Odd runes marked its forehead, carved into the yellowed bone and filled with black ink. Its thick bottom jaw supported a row of conical fangs, long and sharp like the teeth of a crocodile. The skull sat on top of an old Stop sign. Someone had painted the surface of the octagon white and written KEEP OUT across it in large jagged letters. A reddish-brown splatter stained the bottom edge, looking suspiciously like dried blood. I leaned closer. Yep, blood. Some hair, too. Human hair.

Curran frowned at the sign. “Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?”

“I don’t know. He’s being so subtle about it.”

I looked past the sign. About a hundred yards back, a large two-story house waited. It was clearly built post-Shift, out of solid timber and brown stone laid by hand to ensure it would survive the magic waves. But instead of the usual simple square or rectangular box of most post-Shift buildings, this house had all the pre-Shift bells and whistles of a modern prairie home: rows of big windows, sweeping horizontal lines, and a spacious layout. Except prairie-style homes usually had long flat roofs and little ornamentation, while this place sported pitched roofs with elaborate carved gables, beautiful bargeboards, and ornate wooden windows.