Prologue

Las Vegas — Eclipse Night

I know I have lost something important because I can no longer remember my mother’s laugh.

The realization comes while I am holding a straight flush beneath the employee lights of the Casino Beneath the Moon. Five cards. One impossible win. Around the staff table, three dealers curse and push bone chips toward me, but their voices recede beneath the sudden blankness in my skull.

My mother had a laugh.

Of course she did.

I remember her mouth opening beneath desert stars. I remember one gold canine catching the moon. I remember wanting to laugh with her.

The sound is gone.

"Rhea?" asks Milo, the ash-skinned croupier across from me. "You collecting or dying?"

I look down at the chips. My Jackal Moon gift tastes the victory in the air: copper wire, hot rain, the sweet electrical bite of probability forced to kneel. I nudged one card. Barely. A harmless staff wager before the eclipse doors opened.

Luck does not care whether a wager is harmless.

It always collects a memory.

I sweep the chips into my apron. "Collecting."

Nobody notices my hand shake. Everyone who works below Las Vegas learns not to ask what the house has taken. Milo lost the ability to see blue. The woman at baccarat traded away the names of her children. I keep my losses in a ledger hidden beneath my mattress because written facts survive even when love does not.

MOTHER: ISABEL KNOX.

LAUGH: LOUD. RUDE. BEAUTIFUL.

That is what I will add after my shift. Three adjectives guarding an empty room.

A bell sounds through the staff level.

ECLIPSE TOTALITY IN SIXTY MINUTES.

The walls breathe awake. Velvet panels draw back from mirrors that reflect no one honestly. Gold veins ignite beneath the floor, carrying stolen years, blood, and memory toward the gaming pits. Far overhead, beyond bedrock and hotels and millions of tourists staring up from the Strip, the moon begins to cross the sun.

The Casino materializes fully only during an eclipse. For six hours, monsters with dynasties and mortals with nothing left to lose descend through doors that were not there yesterday. By dawn, the doors vanish. The debts remain.

I stand, and the artificial neon crawls over my arms. Fur threatens along my wrists. My nails sharpen against the cards. Fake moonlight encourages the jackal-wolf to pace without giving it enough power to break free.

Real moonlight is worse.

Real moonlight makes me hungry for blood.

"Knox." The pit boss waits at the end of the table, his gold teeth arranged in a smile. "High-roller roulette. Table thirteen. The Owner wants his lucky dealer visible tonight."

"The Owner can admire me through a camera."

"He wants you on the floor."

He slides a glass chip across the felt. Inside it floats a tiny red spark.

A memory.

Mine.

I touch the chip and see a flash of bare feet on hot pavement, my mother’s hand around mine, both of us running from something with silver bullets. Then the image seals itself again.

"Where did you get this?" My voice changes. A growl threads beneath it.

"Advance payment. Deal until closing, and perhaps the Owner returns another piece of your past. Refuse, and this one joins the battery."

He nods toward the wall.

For the first time, I smell what runs through the gold veins beneath the Casino. Not years. Not abstract power. Millions of thin human memories, siphoned from the tourists above as they watch the eclipse and make small unconscious wishes.

The Casino is feeding before the doors even open.

"What happens at totality?" I ask.

The pit boss’s smile widens. "A permanent night, if the final table performs as designed."

Permanent night would make the Casino permanent. It would make the Owner a god and everyone above us a battery with a pulse.

I close my fingers around the chip.

The lights go out.

Every employee freezes.

Not from fear. Time itself catches.

A falling card stops edge-first above the table. Milo’s cigarette smoke hangs in a silver coil. My heart slams once, twice, while a man walks through the motionless room.

He wears no dynasty colors. Black coat, open collar, gloves soft enough for relic work. A vampire, unmistakably—too still between movements, eyes red in the dark, fangs visible when he smiles at me.

In his right hand swings a silver pocket watch.

In his left, he carries my crystal heart.

I have seen the heart only once, through six inches of warded glass. The Owner keeps every memory my gift has taken inside its facets. My first shift. My father’s face. Every promise I made before I learned better.

The vampire stops on the other side of the table.

"Rhea Knox," he says while the seventh heartbeat approaches. "If you want your past, deal table thirteen exactly as if you haven’t seen me."

"Who are you?"

"Dante Vale."

"Thief?"

"Tonight."

His gaze drops to the memory chip in my fist. "By dawn, perhaps your executioner."

Time releases.

The card falls. Milo coughs smoke. The lights return. Dante is gone, and so is the chip the pit boss gave me.

But a silver pocket watch now rests beside my cards, ticking backward.

The pit boss does not seem to notice. "Do we have an agreement, Knox?"

I close my hand over the watch.

Probability floods my senses. Every possible answer smells like loss. In one future, the Owner keeps my memories. In another, the vampire destroys them. In a third, the permanent eclipse opens above Las Vegas and never closes.

Only one path carries the scent of a storm.

"We have an agreement," I say.

The elevator rises toward the high-roller pit. Artificial moonlight sharpens my teeth. Beneath my feet, millions of stolen wishes begin to burn.

When the doors open, I put on my dealer’s smile and step into a Casino already rigged to end the world.