Page 1 of This Ravenous Fate
Prologue: The First
She was remade with spite. The first of her kind, her humanity stripped away and pumped full of poison and depravity in a laboratory. She was pushed to the brink of death, but pale hands, thorny and unkind, kept her from tipping over the edge.
Death had become her.
She searched for a familiar face in the darkness and cried when she could not find it. Once a giver of life, now a breeder of death. Carnage was now her only child. The one she had borne had succumbed to the venom, would never feel sunlight on her face again.
Death would have been kinder.
Blood trailed in her wake like the veil of death’s bride. She was as new as America, a reincarnation of its greatest evils, comfortable in corporeal sin.
Death would kneel to her.
She took the name of the doctor who had taken her life and drained him of his blood. She liked the way theVname rolled off her tongue, sharp like vengeance. But her spite remained. She was a victim to the curiosity of the New World, which ground out mercy and reason. They bred beasts with their tools and made monstersout of men, then left the illness of ignorance to fester, century after century.
First there were multiple beasts, but their numbers dwindled in just a few days once they showed their strength. The colonists put their guns to the mouths of the beasts or burned them at stakes, claiming to eliminate original evil with them. Only she remained, sticking to the shadows, never to be found. As colonists hunted her, they spread stories that spun into folklore the longer she evaded them.
For years she hid and became a myth, but she never forgot the taste of human blood.
Eventually, she grew ravenous.
A pit of hunger opened within her as the New World folded into steady colonies. The Revolution left bodies behind, but they only satiated her for so long. She wanted new blood. The Civil War unleashed new traumas, and she nursed the victims of more physicians who tore women’s bodies apart. Her venom spread and new beasts arose. She was no savior, but instead a mother who sought an end to her anger and pain. As the years passed, she and other reapers learned to control their hunger to avoid a second gruesome death at the hands of fearful humans.
After the Great War, the world clung to debauchery while soldiers returned home empty and politicians grappled with solutions for the universal suffering. People scrambled for distractions from the chaos, lighting their houses up with parties, spilling illicit liquor into open throats, all while jazz rose like a spiritual symphonyaround them. Thrill seekers flowed into cities, and corruption reared its ugly head. Gangsters fed the greedy hands in New York, but the hunger for more never ceased. They celebrated being alive despite the devastation that surrounded them.
The mother reaper watched, her hands curling into fists. A promise of violence spilled from her lips like blood.
Act One
The Prophecy
1
August 1926
Elise found the world more beautiful when she closed her eyes.
Melancholic jazz music rode the soft sea breeze around the pier, each note lingering like a clandestine kiss. Quiet and unseeing, Elise felt the most herself. Her other senses opened up and softened the edges of her anxieties, making her feel grounded.
Then she opened her eyes. Chelsea Piers came into view around her, the massive docking ocean liner just beyond the piers’ entrance ablaze with the glow of the setting sun. Her pulse thundered in her ears and the jazz notes grew fuzzy. Trying to purge the clamminess from her earlier panic, she wiped her hands across her skirt, then stepped toward the waiting car.
Once finished loading Elise’s luggage into the trunk, Colm, her family’s driver, helped her into the automobile. “Your ship dockedlate. My apologies, Miss Saint, but we’re in a race against the sunset. Your father is already in a mood.” He glanced at her through the rearview mirror as the engine roared to life. “Welcome home, by the way.”
Elise thought facing her father again sounded worse than being out after the sun went down. As far as she was concerned, the house in Harlem was no longer her home. Not in a city full of monsters who craved the taste of her blood. Monsters like the one her best friend had become.
The car turned north, and though the sky over Manhattan darkened, the streets were still full of people, hats held down against the evening breeze and faces twisted with fear.
Colm stepped on the gas. To settle her nerves, Elise peeked into her bag for what she knew was the fifth time that hour. The letter with the lovely golden seal of the Paris Conservatory was still there, staring back up at her. Her fingers plucked at the loose threads on her coat seven times, her chest growing tighter while the residential buildings of Riverside Drive whipped past her window. They quickly neared Sugar Hill. Elise wondered how much had changed in five years. Whether Layla was even still alive—
Colm cursed in the front seat as he hit the brakes. Pedestrians rushed the intersection the car was trying to cross. “Everyone wants to be close to Saint territory at night,” he explained.
Elise nodded. When she was younger and word had spread about her family’s reaper-hunting services, it seemed like new neighbors introduced themselves to her father every day. Some wanted tobargain with him for more of his steel bullets; only the ones made with the alloy he’d devised could reliably kill the reapers. Others wanted protection. The empire went from just distributing Saint steel to hiring ex-military who needed jobs and training young men around the neighborhood who were brave enough to hunt reapers. Back then, Elise enjoyed the fullness of their home. People who desired to enter the Saint inner circle brought with them some of her lifelong friends. Though none, not even Mrs. Gray, with her scientific advancements and a tentative hope for a better future, were as special as the Quinns, who had been the ones to welcome the Saints to New York. But friendship wasn’t enough to keep people safe.
The business grew larger every year, though the number of reapers seemed to keep up. Elise almost couldn’t believe her father had gone from a steelworker in Texas to a top steel manufacturer and distributor in New York.
The car crossed Amsterdam Avenue into the Sugar Hill neighborhood, the noisy traffic fading. The Saint mansion stood on what had once been a block of brownstones, which had been leveled on Mr. Saint’s order. Now the iron gates of the Saint estate rose before them, guarded by two of the Saint security officers, their silver badges and guns glinting in the dying light as they moved to let the car in.
Elise waited while Colm opened her door. But he suddenly shoved it shut again as one of the guards called out, “Miss, this is private property—”
