The dead girl had no name.

No skin.

No bones.

No shadow.

She lay in the center of an abandoned sugar mill on the edge of Savannah, Georgia, her body nothing but an echo—shapeless, scentless, and still. Her blood had crystallized into black salt, her soul swallowed whole.

And where her heart should have been… there was a mark.

A spiral made of ash.

When Zariah Baptiste arrived, she didn’t speak.

She knelt in the dust beside what was left of the girl, fingers brushing the ashes. Her markings flickered with unease—less light now, more heat. The blood didn’t recognize what had happened here. And that was the first warning.

Darius stood behind her, scanning the room. “No witnesses. No scent. Not even an echo.”

Lucien crouched near the edge of the blood circle. “This wasn’t a vampire kill.”

“I know,” Zariah said softly. “This was something else.”

The three of them had left New Orleans quietly, traveling by night, investigating what the Houses had dismissed as isolated anomalies. But this was the fifth body in two weeks. Five different cities. Five different bloodlines. All erased.

Not murdered.

Erased.

Lucien stood and turned to her. “You saw it again, didn’t you?”

Zariah nodded. “The spiral.”

She didn’t need to say more.

The same symbol had appeared in her dreams for the last seven nights—etched in smoke, whispered by a faceless voice that spoke in lost dialects. It wasn’t from Nyah. It wasn’t from any of the Seven Houses.

It was something older.

Darius glanced around the mill. “So what do we do now?”

Zariah rose to her feet. “We follow the spiral.”

She turned to the wall behind the body—where a child’s drawing had been scrawled in blood and soot. Stick figures. A red moon. A figure with no face, standing in a field of screaming mouths.

And below it, a message:

“She remembers. But we don’t.”

Zariah stepped closer.

And for the first time since claiming her throne, she felt it—

not power… but fear.