Silverbreak (The Silverwake Series, Book 1)

The hum woke me before my alarm did.

I lay flat on my back in the dark, staring at the water stain on my ceiling that had always looked vaguely like a crescent moon, and I pressed my palms against the mattress to feel the familiar scratch of old cotton. Everything felt normal. Except for the hum. It ran along the inside of my skin like a live wire, low and insistent, vibrating somewhere behind my sternum as if my ribs had been replaced with tuning forks overnight.

Eighteen, I thought. I was officially eighteen years old.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed and reached for my glasses on the nightstand. The moment my fingers touched the metal frame, the hum spiked. I pulled my hand back. Tried again, slower. The glasses sat perfectly still. The hum settled. I put them on and told myself it was nothing, the way I always told myself things were nothing.

Silas had already been in the shop for two hours by the time I came downstairs. That was normal. He lived in the space between antiques the way other men lived in armchairs, surrounded by tarnished silver candlesticks and cracked leather trunks and clocks that hadn't told the right time in decades. I found him bent over the workbench, rewrapping the base of a ceramic lamp with new felt padding, his gold-rimmed glasses pushed up into his silver hair.

"Happy birthday," he said, without looking up.

"You forgot to buy a cake again."

"There's a very respectable lemon tart in the icebox."

"That's worse," I said, but I was already smiling a little as I grabbed a rag and started polishing the row of brass door handles he'd lined up along the edge of the counter. The moment my hand closed around the first one, a tremor ran up my arm. I set it down carefully and picked up the next. Same tremor. Fainter, but there.

I worked through it. That was what I did. I worked through things.

The tourists came in around noon, the kind that rolled through our coastal town every summer in clean SUVs with out-of-state plates, speaking too loudly and touching everything with zero respect for the price tags. Three of them. Two men and a woman who wore sunglasses indoors. They drifted through the shop like they owned it, picking up pieces and setting them down with careless little clicks.

Then one of the men spotted the glass reliquary on the center shelf. It was a small thing, hand-blown, the size of a lantern, with a pattern of interlocking spirals etched into the surface. Silas had spent six weeks restoring it. I had watched him do it, bent over a jeweler's loupe with a steady hand and a held breath.

"What's this supposed to be?" the man said, and he picked it up with two fingers like it was a piece of junk from a garage sale.

"Please be careful with that," I said.

"Relax." He turned it over, and the light caught the spirals wrong. "Looks fake. What do they want for it?"

The woman laughed. "Probably a fortune for a fancy paperweight."

The hum under my skin went sharp.

I gripped the edge of the counter. I told myself to breathe, to say something polite, to do what I always did and swallow it down. But the man set the reliquary back on the shelf with a careless thunk, and something in that sound, the casual dismissal of six weeks of Silas's careful work, split something open inside me.

The silver hit me like a wave breaking from the inside out.

I didn't feel myself move. I just felt the energy tear loose from my chest in one massive, soundless pulse, and then every window in the shop exploded outward simultaneously. Glass sprayed across the sidewalk in a glittering sheet. The heavy oak front door wrenched off its hinges and slammed flat against the cobblestones outside. The tourists screamed. The woman's sunglasses flew off her face. The two men stumbled backward into a shelf of old maps, sending rolled parchment cascading to the floor.

I stood in the center of the wreckage, breathing hard, glass crunching under my boots. My hands were shaking. The hum was gone. In its place was a ringing silence and a feeling like every nerve ending in my body had been lit on fire and then gone cold all at once.

Silas appeared in the back doorway.

He didn't look at the tourists. He didn't look at the destroyed door or the missing windows. He looked at me, and his face was the color of old ash. His eyes weren't wide with surprise. They were wide with something I didn't have a word for yet, something that looked too much like the expression a person wore when they finally heard news they had always been dreading.

"Elara," he said. Very quiet.

"I didn't mean to," I said. My voice came out strange. I looked down at my hands and my stomach dropped. A faint silver light was fading from my palms, like the tail end of a struck match.

The emergency sirens started before I could say anything else. Not the fire sirens. The other ones. The ones that sounded three short blasts and one long, the pattern the town used for a magical detection event.

Silas crossed the shop in five fast strides. He dropped to his knees behind the front counter and yanked up a loose floorboard. Underneath it sat a canvas bag, already packed, already zipped. My mouth went dry.

"You knew," I said.

"Walk with me." He was already moving toward the back door. "I'll explain everything. But right now we have about four minutes before they arrive."

"Who? Who is coming?" I grabbed his arm and made him look at me. "Silas. Who packed that bag?"

"I did. Years ago." He covered my hand with his and held it for exactly one second, and his eyes were full of something exhausted and sad and sorry. "I will answer every question you have, I swear it. But we have to go right now."

I looked back at the shop. At the glass on the floor. At the door lying flat in the sunlight outside, and the tourists already scrambling down the sidewalk with their phones out. At the life I had lived inside these four walls for eighteen years, small and quiet and completely, utterly ordinary.

The power was still humming back to life in my chest, low and patient, like it had always been there waiting.

I grabbed the rag off the counter out of habit, then dropped it. I followed Silas out the back just as the black SUVs rolled around the corner at the far end of the street.