Two Bloodlines

There are two kinds of power in this world: the kind you inherit and the kind that inherits you.

Aiyana Beaumont understood neither on the morning of her sixteenth birthday, when she woke to find her bedroom ceiling covered in symbols she had never seen but somehow recognized. They were drawn in something that looked like charcoal but smelled like the sea — spiraling patterns that pulsed with a faint luminescence, as if the darkness itself was breathing.

Her left hand was black to the wrist. Not bruised. Not dirty. Black, as if she had plunged it into a vat of midnight and the midnight had decided to stay.

Her right hand was glowing. A soft, warm light that emanated from beneath her skin, tracing the paths of her veins from fingertip to forearm in lines of liquid gold.

Two hands. Two powers. Two bloodlines that should never have met, colliding in the body of a girl who, until this morning, had thought she was ordinary.

Aiyana stared at her hands — one dark, one bright — and said the only reasonable thing: "Mom is going to kill me."

Her mother, Celeste Beaumont, did not kill her. She sat on the edge of Aiyana's bed, looked at her daughter's transformed hands, and said, with the calm of a woman who had been expecting this moment for sixteen years: "It's time you knew about your father."