Prologue

I was born with one foot in this world and one in the next. “You’re a Grimaldi,” Marietta would always tell me. I’m a Grimaldi, yet no matter how many times I repeated the mantra, the man in the corner of my room refused to go away. He was curled up in my reading chair with his knees pressed to his chest. 

“Don’t cry,” I whispered under the paper white moonlight streaming between us. I’d learned not to fear the ghosts who would come to me and kept them as my secret. But there was something different about this one, fading in and out like a poor picture on a TV. His lips were glacier blue and his hair as white as an Arctic wolf. And his eyes …

His eyes were demonic. Cold. A starless galaxy.

And terrified.

I pushed the thick quilt off my legs and slid my feet to the cold wooden floors. “What’s your name?”

His frosted brows pulled together as he looked up at me under thick wet lashes, trembling. He didn’t remember his name, which only meant he was new.

But he seemed so real, blurring between dimensions.

He wasn’t like the rest of them.

The floorboards creaked as I inched forward.

Then paused halfway to him when I heard Marietta’s footfalls echoing off the hollowed stairs.

“Y-y-ou have to help me,” he said through a desperate plea. “F-f-find me.”