He crouched down beside her and wrapped her tightly in his arms. For a while, she lived in the darkness and the horror and the pain. He left her for a few moments and returned, his arms tightening around her again.

“I looked in the other rooms. Your brother isn’t here,” he said at last. “There’s still a chance he’s alive. We need to find him.”

“What makes you think Asa hasn’t found him already?” she asked, her voice breaking. Her heart breaking. She pulled herself out of his arms, the room springing to horrible clarity around her again. “He—he killed my parents. I can’t—I don’t—”

She couldn’t put herself back together.

A strange sight caught her eye, stopped her brain from spiraling further. A book, precisely centered on the floor in the middle of the room. It was open. No torn pages, not like the others. No bloodstains.

She crawled to it across the ripped and crusted carpet.

Why did it look so pristine?

When she saw what it was—the book of legends, it’s the reason for all of this, oh, help me—a moan curled up her throat. How cruel.

It was open to the first page, “The Lovebirds.”

Long before our ancestors’ ancestors were born, there was no land here.

There was no land beneath Nomi either. She was falling into darkness.

“Look,” Malachi said, crouching down beside her, pointing to a faint scratch of ink in the corner of the page.

Nomi held the book up to the light filtering through the dusty windows.

The moon loves a man, and a bird almost dies. A tattoo and a ghost, and a sister who lies.

Her brother’s handwriting, cramped and hurried, curving the tiny words along the letters printed on the page.

“What does it mean?” Malachi asked. “Is it some kind of clue?”

At first, Nomi had assumed the book was a message from Asa. But this was Renzo’s writing. One of Renzo’s riddles.

The moon loves a man, and a bird almost dies. A tattoo and a ghost, and a sister who lies.

He was talking about the stories in the book—the lovebirds, the moon and her lover, the tattooed woman who got revenge from beyond the grave. It wasn’t a clue. It meant nothing beyond that, nothing.…

A strange memory surfaced, one she hadn’t thought about in years. She and Renzo were twelve and had just read the book of legends for the first time. They’d had the brilliant idea to disguise Nomi in boys’ clothes and sneak down to the river on the night of a full moon, to see if they could attract the moon’s affections. So silly—