Prologue

The dead keep their names in the backs of their teeth.

That was what my mother taught me before the Ashen Court erased hers. A vampire’s face can be glamoured, voice copied, memories purchased or stolen, but a true name settles into the jaw at death. If you know where to press, the final syllable rises like blood from a cut.

I had stolen twenty-three names by the night the eclipse train arrived.

The twenty-fourth belonged to a princess.

She was waiting for me in a shuttered chapel beyond the eastern rail yard, alive enough to be angry and royal enough to believe anger was a weapon no thief could counterfeit. Princess Aurelia Sain wore a bridal gown sewn with river pearls and a silver veil designed to burn any werewolf who touched it. Her twelve attendants waited outside under orders not to enter, even if they heard screaming.

They heard none.

“Turn around,” she commanded.

I obeyed, because the easiest way to rob royalty is to let them believe obedience has begun.

Behind me, silk whispered. A clasp opened. The air filled with the dry mineral scent of old vampire blood.

“You were recommended as a woman who can disappear,” Aurelia said.

“People usually hire me to make someone else disappear.”

“Tonight you will do both.”

I glanced at the chapel window. The train waited beyond the graveyard wall, eight black carriages plated in treaty silver. No engine smoke rose from its stack. The Eclipse Line burned blood instead of coal, and only during the eight hours when the moon covered the sun. Each carriage existed in a different hour. The first remembered the past. The final car had already arrived tomorrow.

At dawn, Aurelia was supposed to exchange her true name with Ronan Vale, prince of the northern werewolf kingdoms. Their marriage would end a war neither court could afford and both courts were too proud to admit they had lost.

“You want me to take your place,” I said.

“For one hour.”

“On a train that locks its passengers inside until the bride and groom surrender the only names magic cannot return?”

“You will leave before it departs.”

There it was: the lie. Small, polished, expensive.

I turned.

Aurelia had removed her veil. We shared the Ashen Court’s black eyes and winter-pale skin, but little else. Her hair was silver, mine dark. Her posture had been trained by tutors who struck her spine whenever she relaxed. Mine had been trained by locked windows and men who checked their pockets too late.

Between us rested an open rosewood case containing a mechanical heart.

The device was no larger than a fist. Brass chambers contracted around a core of eclipsed glass, pumping a thin black radiance through silver veins. I recognized the sigil engraved into its base.

The train’s sovereign seal.

“That is not a copy,” I said.

“No.”

“You stole the engine heart.”

“I removed the instrument that would make my marriage binding.”

Outside, a werewolf howled from the rail yard. The sound passed through the chapel stones and pulled every candle flame north.

Aurelia flinched.

Not at the howl. At the heart.

For one instant its eclipsed glass reflected a different room: a bridal cabin, pearl curtains, blood across the floor. Aurelia lay beneath a bed with two perfect punctures under her jaw.

She saw it too.

“The final carriage showed me tomorrow,” she whispered. “Someone murders me before the treaty. The train then carries my body backward until every passenger has had the chance to become my killer.”

“And your answer was to invite a professional identity thief?”

“My answer was to choose who wears my death.”

The chapel doors exploded inward.

Her attendants did not scream. They fell in silence, struck by silver darts that pinned their shadows to the walls. A figure in a conductor’s mask stepped through the smoke.

Aurelia shoved the rosewood case into my hands.

“Car One,” she said. “Hide the heart beneath the bridal berth. Trust no future version of anyone.”

“Including you?”

“Especially me.”

The masked conductor raised a weapon made from two mechanical fangs.

I moved first. I threw the heart through the colored window, followed it into the graveyard and landed in a rain of saintly glass. Behind me came a wet sound, then a body striking stone.

I did not look back.

The eclipse had begun. The rail yard lay beneath a silver-black twilight. Vampire courtiers crowded one platform in mourning silk while werewolf soldiers occupied the other in leather and moon-steel. Between them waited Ronan Vale.

He was broader than the portraits, with gold eyes that caught every movement and a scar crossing his mouth like a second, less forgiving expression. He turned toward me before anyone shouted. The wolf inside him had already caught Aurelia’s blood on the air.

I pressed the princess’s signet against my tongue.

Her public name opened for me.

Silver glamour swept across my skin. My hair paled. My face narrowed. The pearl gown re-formed around my body in a blaze of stolen memory, leaving my shoulders bare beneath the torn veil.

The true name remained locked behind Aurelia’s teeth somewhere inside the chapel.

I would have to survive without it.

“Bride approaching,” called the stationmaster.

Ronan descended from the platform. He offered his hand, but his nostrils flared once. His gaze moved from my borrowed face to the blood drying on my wrist.

He knew.

Behind me, the conductor’s mask appeared in the chapel doorway.

Ahead, the train opened its iron doors.

I placed my hand in the werewolf prince’s.

His grip closed around mine, warm enough to hurt.

“Your Highness,” I said in Aurelia’s voice.

Ronan bowed over my knuckles. The tips of his wolf fangs showed when he smiled.

“Thief,” he whispered, too softly for either court to hear.

Then he led me aboard the wedding train, and the doors locked behind the wrong bride.