Chapter 2 - The First Pulse"Evangeline, no!"
Arthur Vance dropped to one knee beside the wheelchair, his large, calloused hand hovering over his daughter’s wrist, desperate to pull her back, yet terrified that touching her might break the fragile spell hanging over the room. "Sweetheart, don't do this to yourself. Remember what the specialists in Vienna said. Remind yourself of the pain..."
"Father," Evangeline whispered, her voice trembling so hard her jaw shook. She didn't take her eyes off Julian’s face. "He isn't lying."
"He's a beggar boy!" Arthur rasped, his voice desperate, stripped of all his iron authority. "He’s a street child trying to steal a purse or win a silver coin from a grieving father!"
"Look at his hands, Father," she whispered. "He isn't asking for coins."
Julian didn't move his hand. He kept it perfectly still, holding his breath, feeling the faint, wavering heat of her fingers hovering an inch above his skin.
He knew what they saw when they looked at him. They saw dirt. They saw trash swept out of the city sewers. They didn't know about the secret locked inside his blood—the terrifying, painful gift his grandmother had warned him never to use in front of the rich. “The rich don't want to be healed by us, Julian,” her voice echoed in his mind from a warmer time, before the winter took her. “They want to own the healing. If they see what you can do, they will put you in a cage and drain you until you're dust.”
Julian swallowed the dryness in his throat. He knew his grandmother was right. He knew that stepping onto this marble floor meant he might never walk out of this city alive.
But he had seen Evangeline through the kitchen window two hours ago, sitting alone while a hundred wealthy people danced around her, and he had recognized the cold inside her. It was the exact same cold he felt when he slept under the dock planks.
"Take my hand," Julian murmured softly. "Just for three seconds. If you feel nothing, your father can kill me."
Arthur Vance gasped, his hand snapping toward his waist where a small silver-plated pistol rested in his inner coat pocket.
Evangeline didn't hesitate any longer. She dropped her fingers into Julian’s palm.
The moment skin touched skin, a low, silent tremor rippled through the floorboards beneath them.
To the crowd watching from twenty feet away, nothing seemed to happen. A dirty street child was simply holding the tiny, pale hand of a railway heiress.
But to Evangeline, the universe suddenly inverted.
It didn't feel like heat. It felt like a flood of liquid gold pouring directly out of Julian’s cracked skin, rushing up her knuckles, climbing her thin wrist, and slamming into her chest like a physical strike. Her eyes went wide, her lips opening in a silent gasp as her back arched against the velvet cushion of her chair.
Down inside her body, beneath the velvet layers of her light-blue dress, deep within the dark, dead silence of her spine where four years of cold numbness had reigned—something woke up.
It hurt.
It hurt with a wild, white-hot blinding intensity, like a thousand sharp needles plunging into frozen soil. A deep, jagged ache throbbed in her lower back, traveling down through her thighs, down into her knees, all the way into the soles of her feet resting on the silver footplates.
"Aah!" Evangeline cried out, her head snapping back.
"Get your hands off her!" Arthur roared.
The lord leaped to his feet, grabbing Julian by his thin grey collar and lifting the ten-year-old completely off the ground with one massive arm. He slammed Julian violently back against the hard edge of a marble pillar.
"Guards! Arrest this imposter!" Arthur yelled, his face dark with panic.
Four heavy-set men in black suits and golden security badges surged out from the shadows of the ballroom entrance, their leather batons drawn.
"Father, wait!" Evangeline screamed.
The entire room froze once more.
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Evangeline wasn't looking at her father. She wasn't looking at the guards. She was staring down at her own legs in utter terror and disbelief.
Her left big toe—trapped inside the tiny silver leather shoe resting on the footplate—had just twitched.
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