The night your parents sold your soul, the sky over Charleston was clear and ordinary, and you were still a secret curled inside your mother's womb.

Twenty-one years later, the mark on your inner left wrist begins to burn like a brand pressed fresh from the fire.

It happens without warning. Not in a dream, not in a church, not at midnight. It happens while you are living your life — walking, working, breathing, being wholly and unremarkably human.

Until you are not.

The pain is sharp enough to fold you in half. A five-part sigil blooms across your skin, each line burning with a different color: crimson, gold-violet, amber, icy blue. It pulses like a second heartbeat. Like four heartbeats, none of them your own.

And for the first time in your life, you are not alone inside your own body.

You are being dragged, gently and terribly, into the awareness of something vast and ancient. Somewhere impossibly far away, four crowns have just settled onto four heads. Somewhere impossibly far away, four princes have just felt you for the first time.

They know where you are.

They are already moving.

The sky outside does not change. The ordinary world continues — car engines, distant music, the smell of rain on asphalt. But the mark on your wrist keeps burning, and the air around you tastes like smoke and salt and something older than the world.

The first thing you notice is the sound of your own breathing, ragged and too loud. The second thing is the cold. The third thing is that the shadows in the room are no longer staying where shadows belong.

Welcome to the beginning.