Mira's POV
I can't stop shaking.
My hands won't work right as I lock the flower shop door behind me. The roses I sold to the mystery man are still sitting on the counter where he dropped them after our fingers touched. After I felt his emotions crash into me like a tidal wave.
After he asked what I was.
Nobody's ever asked me that before. What am I? I'm just Mira. Boring, forgettable Mira who talks to plants and feeds stray cats.
Except I'm not, am I?
The walk upstairs to our apartment feels like climbing a mountain. My legs are heavy. My head hurts. And I can't shake the feeling that something huge is about to happen—something that will change everything.
"You're late," Aunt Vivian snaps when I walk in. She's washing dishes, her back to me. "I don't pay you to daydream."
"Sorry," I whisper automatically.
She doesn't respond. She never does when I apologize. I'm just supposed to be quiet and grateful that she took me in after my parents died. That's what she tells me, anyway. Every single day.
I head to my tiny bedroom and collapse on the bed. My whole body aches like I've been running for miles. The potted plants on my windowsill seem to lean toward me, their leaves rustling even though there's no wind.
"Not tonight," I tell them softly. "I'm too tired for whispers."
But they don't stop. If anything, they get louder.
I close my eyes and try to sleep.
That's when the dream comes.
At first, it's the same as always. I'm a baby in someone's arms. A woman with silver hair sings to me in a language I don't understand. Her voice is beautiful and sad. A tall man with kind eyes holds us both, and his smile makes me feel safe.
But tonight, the dream doesn't end there.
Tonight, it keeps going.
The door explodes. Dark figures pour into the room like smoke. The woman screaming. The man shouting words that make the air crackle with energy. Shadows—living shadows with claws and teeth—tearing through everything.
Fire. So much fire.
"Hide her!" the woman screams. "Please, Vivian, save her!"
A younger version of my aunt appears, grabbing baby-me from the woman's arms. But her face—something's wrong with her face. It shifts and changes like water, and underneath—
The shadows attack. The woman tries to fight them off with silver light pouring from her hands, but there are too many. The man falls first, his scream cutting off suddenly. The woman collapses next, reaching for me with bloody fingers.
"Remember," she whispers with her last breath. "Remember who you are, little spark. Remember—"
A shadow swallows her whole.
I try to scream but no sound comes out. I'm still a baby, helpless, watching my parents die while my aunt—no, not my aunt, something else wearing her face—carries me away through the flames.
I wake up screaming for real.
My room is wrong.
The walls are covered in vines—thick, green vines that weren't there when I fell asleep. Flowers bloom everywhere, bursting from cracks in the ceiling, spiraling up from the floorboards. My twenty-three potted plants have grown into massive trees, their branches touching the ceiling.
I scramble backward on my bed, heart hammering so hard I think it might explode.
"What's happening?" I gasp. "What did I do?"
"You didn't do anything wrong, little spark."
The voice comes from my windowsill.
Shadow the cat sits there. Except he's not a cat anymore.
He's a man.
A beautiful, terrifying man with amber eyes that glow in the darkness. His skin is covered in scars that look like claw marks. His hair is black and wild. And when he smiles, I see fangs.
"You," I breathe. "You're—"
"Leo," he says gently. "My name is Leo. And I've been waiting eighteen years for this moment." He stands, and I realize he's tall and muscular, nothing like the skinny stray cat I've been feeding. "I'm sorry, Mira. So, so sorry. But your eighteenth birthday breaks the final seal."
"Seal?" My voice comes out as a squeak. "What seal? What are you talking about?"
"The one keeping your power locked away. The one your mother placed on you before she died." His eyes fill with grief. "I tried to protect you. Tried to keep you hidden. But tonight, everything changes."
The dream flashes through my mind again. The fire. The screaming. My mother's last word: Remember.
"That wasn't a dream," I whisper. "That was a memory."
Leo nods slowly.
"My parents—they didn't die in a car accident, did they?"
"No."
The word hits me like a punch to the stomach. Everything Aunt Vivian told me was a lie. Everything.
"What am I?" I ask, echoing the mystery man's question from earlier. "What am I really?"
Before Leo can answer, the apartment door explodes inward.
Three figures in dark hooded cloaks rush in, moving faster than humans should move. Leo snarls—actually snarls like an animal—and throws himself in front of me.
"Get back!" he shouts.
The first attacker raises a hand, and shadow-blades materialize from thin air—the same shadows from my dream, the ones that killed my parents.
They're here.
They're here to kill me too.
And then I hear Aunt Vivian's voice from the hallway, cold and amused: "Happy birthday, Mira. Time to stop playing pretend."
Her face appears in the doorway.
It's shifting.
Changing.
Just like in my memory.
"Who are you?" I scream.
The woman wearing my aunt's face smiles with too many teeth. "Someone who's been waiting a very, very long time to meet the real you."
The attackers lunge forward.
Leo roars and transforms—bones cracking, muscles rippling—into something between man and cat, huge and deadly.
And my hands start glowing silver, the same color as the light my mother used in the memory.
Power floods through me, wild and terrifying and completely out of control.
The last thing I think before the world explodes is: I don't know how to stop this.