PROLOGUE

Anaya

BOSTON

PATRIOTS’ DAY, 2013

Death’s threshold overwhelmed me in a swell of instant silence and intense heat. The minute before the flash of white and loud pop, pop, pop, I’d been pushing the burning muscles of my legs forward in a last throttle of energy, my eyes on the blue finish line of the Boston Marathon. I’d heard my sister’s cheers from behind the nearby barricades that separated the racers from the spectators. I knew my niece was with her, and I searched them out, spotted them. Lydia in a Red Sox cap, her daughter, Grace, bouncing with excitement beside her. An insatiable urge to hug them now, in this moment, overwhelmed me. Especially Grace, who trained with me the last four months but would have to wait a few more years to be eligible for the race. Grace, who I knew expected me at the finish line at least fifteen minutes earlier.

I ignored the burning in my lungs and lifted my arms to reach over the barricade to hug my niece, her eyes bright and dancing.

I never touched her.

I was late. Too late.

Now the foggy quiet fell over me in a thick cloak. I lay on the road, marveling at the blue sky through the sulfur-scented haze. I opened my mouth to cry for help but could not hear my own screams. I lifted my head to see a blur of mangled limbs and blood and glass on the pavement of Boylston Street. The crush of hurting people transformed the celebratory race finish into a hot, smoky place of torture. The scent of burned flesh assaulted my nostrils. Sour bile pooled in the back of my throat. I didn’t allow my eyes to roam my own body but let my head fall back on the street.

I would die. Here, alone.

I ordered my harried thoughts to grab an assurance, a sense of peace, about dying. None could be found. Truth was, I hadn’t given the afterlife much thought until now.

My eyelids grew heavy, and I knew if I succumbed to their pull, I would be in eternity—whatever that held—in the next moment.

Only thoughts of my sister and niece made me fight. They’d come to support me. What if one of the distorted limbs or lumps of flesh I saw belonged to them? What if they lay somewhere . . . dying?

I cried for help again, my voice faint this time. Muffled sound—animalistic screaming—faded in and out, and then he was beside me.

In a place where I questioned whether I’d ever feel human touch again, his warm hand found mine and squeezed. I pressed back and clung with the dregs of my strength.

“You’re going to be okay.” The words sounded through the muted fog, but I latched on to them as if they were life.

He wrested his hand from mine and then his arms were under me, lifting me. My eyelids fluttered and I was only conscious of the feeling of security against the blue Red Sox sweatshirt, of pressing my nose into it and smelling something spicy and woodsy to replace the smog of sulfur and singed flesh clinging to my nostrils.

I must have blacked out, for when I woke, an EMT pushed a needle into one of the veins in the back of my hand. The tightness of the ambulance confines tugged a surge of rebellion through my belly. My rescuer would leave me.

“Don’t go!” I didn’t know what I was saying, and I did. I grabbed for the stranger’s hands, and he pressed something cool into my palm, placed my fingers around it, and then laid my hand on my chest. His words faded in and out. Others needed help. Like Lydia. Like Grace. He’d find me.

He said he’d find me.

Some time later, I woke in a hospital bed to hazy thoughts. I tried to comprehend that I’d been in some sort of explosion, that I still didn’t know the fate of my sister and niece. In my loosened palm lay the object the stranger had pressed into my bloodied fingers.

A gold signet ring. The flat oval bore an engraving of a shield. An anchor was set in gems at the bottom left of the shield, and at the top right, the symbol of a horn. I skimmed over the Latin inscription on the top and read the name Smythe written in dark-green jewels beneath. The weight of the ring and the worn edges whispered of stories of long ago, stories that had lain dormant for generations.

It felt like a holy relic of sorts, one that had whisked me away from terror and explosions and mangled limbs and broken people.

My arms burned with a sudden longing to hold Grace as the explosion hadn’t allowed me to do. I curled the ring in my fist and pressed the call button for the nurse with my other, trembling hand.

In a moment I heard the slight shuffle of rubber shoes against linoleum, coming toward my room. I inhaled a tight breath, pushed aside the horrifying visions from the finish line, and prayed the nurse would have good news of my family.