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CHAPTER 1
My earliest memorywas of a conversation between my parents.
My dad was upset because he couldn’t sense my leopard at all, so my mom was explaining that I was already too powerful a witch, even at that age, for nature to also burden me with a beast.
“Controlling an elemental magic as strong as hers will be challenging enough as it is,” she’d said. “Imaginehow much harder it would be for Mikaela if she had to learn to control a leopard like yours at the same time.”
Somehow, from that conversation, I became convinced that my leopard was just waiting for me to gain control of my fire witch powers, and that once I did, she would finally come to me.
This was why I spent the majority of my childhood studying and working hard to gain control of my magic. More than anything, I wanted to make my dad happy, to see the pride on his face when he saw my leopard for the very first time.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t already proud of me. He was. It’s just that he’d always expected to mate another leopard and had imagined running in leopard form with her up until the moment they’d met and she’d turned out to be a witch. So,he’d adjusted his expectations, anticipating running with his children instead, except they only ever had me and I was not a leopard either.
To change that, I’d thrown myself into my studies, reading everything I could get my hands on about fire and magic and the history of fire witches.
Whether I’d have managed to gain control of my magic so early without that motivation is anyone’s guess, but I had that control by the time I was nine. When my leopard didn’t manifest, I convinced myself it was because my powers weren’t done growing yet.
What can I say? I was an optimistic child.
When my powers surged with puberty, testing the limits of my control, I knew I’d been right. Surely, if Imastered these new powers, my leopard would finally come to me.
So, I studied even harder, tackling every new challenge like my life depended on it, and within a few short years, had full control once more.
But still, my leopard didn’t manifest.
This was when I finally had to face the truth.
Up to that point, I’d truly believed my leopard was somewhere inside me, just buried deep, and one day, my ability to control my fire would unlock the cage imprisoning her and I’d finally be able to shift.
Now I had to accept that she simply didn’t exist. That the cage I’d always imagined at the center of my being was nothing more than a hole where my leopard should be. I had toaccept that it was exactly as my mother had always claimed—that I had no leopard because my fire powers were too strong.
By the time I went to Blackthorn Academy for Supernaturals at age nineteen, I’d not only accepted it, I’d learned to embrace what I actually was—a truly powerful, fire witch—and to let go of what I wasn’t.
Then, at the end of my second year at the Academy, a serial killer named Lydrel Zowen attacked me.
He yanked me into the Shadow Realm and held me prisoner there, wrapped in darkness for what seemed an eon, but was apparently less than a quarter of an hour.
Those endless moments changed me forever, dragging my leopard from me in a storm of darkness and frozen flames.
She was born in agony, in the Shadow Realm, where she came roaring to life, raking and clawing, maddened from the pain.
I had no idea whether the shadows had simply unlocked the cage I’d always imagined imprisoned her or if she’d never been there at all and the shadows hadcreatedher.
Whether she was a true shifter, made of flesh and bone, or a shadow-creature, made entirely of shadows, or something in between, didn’t really matter, for the result was the same.
I’d waited, it seemed, my entire life for my leopard to come to me, and now that she had, I was terrified of her.
Terrified of what I’d become.
And I wasn’t the only one whowas afraid.
I’d been transported home from Blackthorn Academy, unconscious, unable to finish my second year, and had spent nearly two months in a coma, my inner light smothered in shadows.
When I finally fought my way free and opened my eyes, my parents were so relieved, they both wept. Within days, though, that relief turned to dread and fear as it became clear that I’d come back immeasurably different.
It’d be easy to blame everything on my leopard, to blame the rage and the monster writhing within on the beast the shadows had dragged from me, but it wouldn’t be true.
The shadows had done more than just wake my leopard. They’d also changed the essence of who I was—both the witchandher magic—infundamental ways.
