Chapter 1

I'd have bet my entire collection of matchstick towers (hope it's doing okay without me) that the walking pile of evil dust was up to something seriously bad. Every pass of that bony, mummified hand over the newborn did something to him. Black energy—wrong, evil, and so cold I could almost feel it—was seeping into the little body and gathering into an even tinier knot at the center of his tiny chest.

And to round out the atmosphere of evil for its unwilling witness-slash-participant, all of this was happening in the lavish chambers of some rich, vaguely Asian woman. Hard to say exactly: the snow-white hair and slightly narrow eyes threw me off. I'd have pegged her as some kind of half-blood, but with all the ancient-China architecture around, probably not. The evil dust was even harder to read. A black robe of sorts, hands that were literally bones with skin stretched over them, a slight hunch, a face lost in the shadow of the hood. I couldn't change my viewing angle, either. Or didn't know how. What do you expect from a disembodied clump of consciousness?

It didn't take a genius to figure out that the owner of these chambers had stopped being alive ten or fifteen minutes ago. With my emotions switched off, I'd had the best seat in the house for her final moment: a big red stain on the sheets, and a face frozen in pain and horror, pale and strangely shriveled. She'd survived the birth, which the old dust heap clearly hadn't appreciated. Tradition, probably. A peculiar one. The midwife's body nearby hardly deserved a mention. Given the general vibe, it was just more grim set dressing.

I was pretty sure that a minute earlier, the set dressing had still been making death rattles.

Oh, great start. Just radiating good vibes. Fan-freak-ing-tas-tic!

And the grand finale: the baby on the receiving end of all this evil business was me. The only reason I could see straight and not lose my mind from sheer terror was a strange state of… being out of my body. It was like I was standing (or just existing) beside my new little body, watching it from the outside. I barely felt anything. Somewhere at the edge of my mind I registered that I was scared—not as a loss of control, but as a piece of information I could ignore. Which I was doing. Valiantly.

There was also a trickle of cold, mostly around my heart. I could have slipped back into my new body and felt that alien energy in full, but…

Hell no. I'd start shrieking on the spot, and annoying the ancient mummy who just murdered your mother isn't exactly a smart move. Okay, fine—I loved annoying people. But only when I knew I'd get away with it, or at least have room to maneuver. Right now I was a good, law-abiding hostage who couldn't resist even in theory. I'd keep my mouth shut.

I could barely keep up with what was happening. A couple of minutes earlier I'd been chilling on a bench outside my building, and then…

Something had happened, and it had killed me. I didn't doubt that for a second. It erased me from reality, split me into atoms, annihilated me, ripped apart the very structure of my body—the list goes on. Luckily, I didn't have time to process any of it. My brain probably never got around to, ahem, "delivering" the news, which is why I took it all relatively well. Thanks, brain. Good guy. Bit glitchy, but good.

The relic croaked something nasty in what I can only call "Asian" (no clue which language—it just sounded very… Asian), which dragged me out of my thoughts.

I winced inwardly, grateful to this strange state for keeping me in control. Because it stung. It really, really stung. Sure, I'd had no family, but I'd had plans. Lots of plans. And now a living heap of bony dust was running experiments on me. The more it did, the more clearly I could feel something changing, even through the detachment. Something cool had gathered in my chest, wrapping around it and—absurd as it sounds—warming me.

The surrealness of it only made things worse. The kicker was that in this strange state, I could somehow see that equally strange energy. I don't think I need to explain how it feels when an evil old wreck, fresh off murdering your brand-new mother, pumps black stuff into you against your will.

Fortunately or not, it couldn't go on forever. Eventually the relic, visibly tired, made one last pass with its hand and pressed down hard on the baby's chest. A stream of energy, scorching and freezing at once, flooded the little body. It hit so hard that it knocked me out of the observer state and slammed me back inside.

In that instant, I felt everything the evil dust had been doing to me.

With no way to hold back—not even in theory—I screamed my lungs out. Something was pulsing in my chest in time with my heartbeat. Energy coursed through my arms, my legs, my whole body to the rhythm of that metaphysical second organ, filling me with something completely new. An orgasm? Paying off your mortgage? Finding out you're doing better than the rich kid from high school? Nope. Not even close. All of those were pale shadows of what I felt.

It was cold, and fierce all the same. It was agony, like being dunked, completely unprepared, into water cold enough to freeze your soul. And at the same time it was a twisted kind of pleasure, as if that water were the first spring you'd found after days of trudging through the desert with no hope of making it out. Like the orgasm, the mortgage, and running into the rich kid from high school who turned out to be a total loser—all at once!

…for some reason, I feel like I just summed up the entire cycle of Samsara…

I could already feel myself drifting off into merciful sleep (which, as it turned out, was a filthy lie) when something was poured over my face. It didn't take me long to figure out what. I was swallowing it, practically soaking it in through my skin, and something inside me shifted. That metallic, burning taste was hard to mistake. They were pumping me full of blood! A baby whose mother had just been killed!

And it wasn't hard to guess whose blood it was. As my mind slipped under, I heard the vaguely Asian geezer cackle, and somehow I knew for a fact that this would come back to bite me.

If I could have, I'd have grinned from ear to ear, which surprised even me. Some irrational thrill was rising inside me, a giddy kind of anticipation.

Or maybe it would come back to bite the evil dust.

Those were my last thoughts before I blacked out completely. Only I didn't land in sweet, temporary oblivion. I landed in a sea of blood my own mind had cooked up.

Honestly, whoever's running this party—I'd like to speak to the manager…