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SEVEN YEARS AGO Lancashire, England The first thing you learned on the job as a Hollower was to never trust your eyes. Nash, of course, had a different way of saying it: All sorcery is half illusion. The other half, unfortunately, was blood-soaked terror. In that moment, though, I wasn’t scared. I was as angry as a spit­ting cat. They’d left me behind. Again. I braced my hands on either side of the garden shed’s doorframe, drawing as close as I could to the enchanted passageway without en­tering. Hollowers called these dark tunnels Veins because they carried you from one location to another in an instant. In this case, to the vault of a long-dead sorceress, containing her most prized possessions. I checked the time on the cracked screen of Nash’s ancient cell phone. It had been forty-eight minutes since I watched them disappear into the Vein. I hadn’t been able to run fast enough to catch up, and if they’d heard my shouts, they’d ignored me. The phone screen blinked to black as the...

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