The Dayborne Chronicles

She died in a hospital bed with sugar packets in her pockets.
Six months later, she woke up.

Alyssa Heart spent three years hiding under a Staten Island overpass from the family that broke her. Then an epidemic, an experimental drug and a needle she never chose ended her life. Now she walks in daylight, hungers for blood, and cannot read her own name.

Aric Voss has searched four hundred years for someone like her. The ancient Houses of the Nightbound want her burned. Her father wants her back in a locked room. And the friend she promised to come back for has woken up too. Changed. Furious. Waiting.

Everyone wants to own her.
No one has asked what she will choose.

She chose her sister.
Now everyone she did not choose wants her to pay for it.

Alyssa Heart walked a hundred yards through the spotlights and took Talia's hand. By morning the manor is ash, her father is on television, and a Writ from the ancient Council has begun to run: fourteen days for the Houses of the Nightbound to decide whether the girl who walks in daylight is a miracle or a plague.

Aric Voss carries her handprints in blue on his skin, and a trial in Geneva he may not survive. Elara Heartstedt has a memory card, a deadline, and a brother behind a steel door on an island in the East River. Talia has forty of the dead who woke up hungry, and a child named Wren. And into the middle of it drives Jessica Knapp, a tattoo artist with a sleeve of roses and no idea why the ink she puts on Alyssa refuses to heal away.

From a locked house on a Paris quai to the deepest water tunnel under Manhattan, the fight for Alyssa is no longer about who she belongs to. It is about what her blood can do, and who gets to pour it into the city.

Fourteen days. Seven verses.
One chair nobody has sat in for two thousand years.