Cover

ALSO BY KIERSTEN WHITE

Paranormalcy

Supernaturally

Endlessly

Mind Games

Perfect Lies

The Chaos of Stars

Illusions of Fate

And I Darken

Now I Rise

Bright We Burn

Dedication

For Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whose creation still electrifies our imaginations two hundred years later

— and —

For everyone made to feel like a side character in their own story

Epigraph

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

Part One: How Can I Live Without Thee?

Chapter One: To Be Weak Is Miserable

LIGHTNING CLAWED ACROSS THE sky, tracing veins through the clouds and marking the pulse of the universe itself.

I sighed happily as rain slashed the carriage windows and thunder rumbled so loudly we could not even hear the wheels bump when the dirt lane met the cobblestones at the edge of Ingolstadt.

Justine trembled beside me like a newborn rabbit, burying her face in my shoulder. Another bolt lit our carriage with bright white clarity before rendering us temporarily deaf with a clap of thunder so loud the windows threatened to loosen.

“How can you laugh?” Justine asked. I had not realized I was laughing until that moment.

I stroked her dark hair where strands dangled free from her hat. Justine hated loud noises of any type: Slamming doors. Storms. Shouting. Especially shouting. But I had made certain she had endured none of that in the past two years. It was so odd that our separate origins—similar in cruelty, though differing in duration—had had such opposite outcomes. Justine was the most open and loving and genuinely good person I had ever known.

And I was—

Well. Not like her.

“Did I ever tell you Victor and I used to climb out onto the roof of the house to watch lightning storms?”

She shook her head, not lifting it.

“The way the lightning would play off the mountains, throwing them into sharp relief, as though we were watching the creation of the world itself. Or over the lake, so it looked like it was in both the sky and the water. We would be soaked by the end; it is a wonder neither of us caught our death.” I laughed again, remembering. My skin—fair like my hair—would turn the most violent shades of red from the cold. Victor, with his dark curls plastered to his sallow forehead, accentuating the shadows he always bore beneath his eyes, would look like death. What a pair we were!

“One night,” I continued, sensing Justine was calming, “lightning struck a tree on the grounds not ten body lengths from where we sat.”

“That must have been terrifying!”

“It was glorious.” I smiled, placing my hand flat against the cold glass, feeling the temperature beneath my lacy white gloves. “To me, it was the great and terrible power of nature. It was like seeing God.”