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.

She walked into the sun for her sister.
Now she has to find out what walked out.

Aric Voss has thirty-nine days under Geneva before the Council burns him at the equinox dawn, and the seventh chair, empty since the last Dayborne burned, is empty no longer. To reach him, Alyssa Heartstedt must do the one thing no Nightbound can guard against: come in through the courtyard, at noon, in daylight, and let five ancient Houses read her blood aloud.

What they read is not a cure. It is a translation.

Back in New York, half a million people drank the blue water, and the sick among them are waking with noon-colored eyes. The city puts a fence around them and calls it Daybreak. Elara Heartstedt holds the fence with a federal court order and a notebook; Jessica Knapp holds it with ink; Talia holds the water with forty of the dead who are learning to be people. And on an island that is already a crime scene, a brother who kept his pulse only inside his sister's light has gone to be king of the things that hum in the dark.

Alyssa is changing shape. She heals what she touches and keeps what she heals: a stranger's kitchen, a dying man's Tuesday, a hive's tune. Every hand she lays on someone costs her a little more of who she was. And the man who loved her first is waiting, with a question she will not answer and a key on his hand he did not ask for, for the night the whole world comes to St. George to watch her decide.

Thirty-nine days. Thirty-seven names.
One step at the top of the stair that is not bare anymore.

She vanished under the ramp at St. George.
Her father knows exactly where she is.

Fourteen months. Divers under the terminal, a pair of shoes nobody will move, and a search for Alyssa Heartstedt that everyone but her sister has quietly given up. The Houses of the Nightbound are at open war on American soil, Helena Voss is selling forever by subscription, and something in the mountains has learned to sing in a dead boy's voice.

Caleb counts the piers of every bridge he crosses and checks his sister's location every hour. Aric stands in a different doorway every dawn with one hand in the sun. And in the basement of a shuttered hospital, Victor Heartstedt sits in a chair in front of drawer nine, and waits, the way he waited twenty-two years for his son.

The drawer is a door.
He is going to open it from the wrong side.

Her father climbed into a drawer to reach the top of a stair.
She is the only one who can follow him.

A stone under a bridge in Maryland carries forty-one marks no one alive can read. A father lies warm in drawer nine, climbing. And at the top of a stair made of every life in her line, an empty chair is waiting for whoever comes up to sit in it.

Alyssa Heartstedt can read the oldest language in the world only by singing it. To end what began on the longest night, she will climb with her sister holding the pen, Aric beside her and not a step behind, and the dead she promised to ask what they want. Everyone who ever wrote about the top of the stair said she would ascend. Everyone who wrote it was standing in the light.

The last book of The Dayborne Chronicles.
Life was only the beginning.