Eclipsed Heart

For sixteen years Akari Ren has seen things no one else can see. Shadow creatures in the alleys. Darkness that moves with intention. Eyes in the corners of rooms that vanish the moment he looks directly at them. For sixteen years the doctors called it a disorder, his classmates called it strange, and Akari called it Tuesday. Then the night a shadow speaks his name — everything changes. A silver-haired girl appears from nowhere, cuts the darkness apart with a blade of cold blue light, and moves into the apartment next door without explanation. Her name is Shirayuki Noa. She is seventeen years old and she fights like someone who stopped being afraid a long time ago and never went back. She tells him the shadows are real. She tells him the charm his mother left on his pillow eight years ago — the night she walked into the dark and never returned — is the only thing keeping every monster in the city from finding him simultaneously. She tells him it has three months left. What she does not tell him — not yet — is why she was really sent to find him. What his mother truly was. What is sealed inside his chest that the darkness hunts so desperately. And what it means that the barrier between the human world and the Shadow Realm, maintained for three hundred years by blood and sacrifice, is finally breaking. Akari has spent eight years telling himself he imagined the night his mother disappeared. He is about to find out exactly how wrong he was.