Frozen Constellations

The night was sharp with cold, the kind that bit at your skin and made the stars look like shattered glass against the black. Alina shouldn't have been on the rooftop-princesses weren't supposed to climb trellises in the dark, weren't supposed to care more about the sky than their own gilded cages. But rules had never stopped her before.

Then the sky fell.

Not a shooting star. A boy.

He landed hard in the snow, his body too graceful for the violence of the impact. Moonlight clung to him like a second skin, his edges shimmering as if he wasn't quite solid. And his eyes-god, his eyes were silver, liquid silver, the kind that made her stomach drop like she'd missed a step.

But it was the wound at his ribs that really caught her. Not red. Not human. A swirling, living bruise of nebula-blue and dying-star gold, pulsing like it had its own heartbeat.

"You're hurt," she said, because it was the only thing her brain could latch onto.

He laughed, rough and humorless. "Not in a way you can fix."

And then the world screamed.

Not the wind. Not the earth. Something worse.

Something hunting.