KISS OF THE DEATHBRIDE

Nineteen-year-old Damaris has spent her entire life seeing what no one else can see: black threads rising from people's chests, stretching toward the place and moment of their deaths. She has never been able to cut a thread or prevent what waits at its end. To the world, her gift has made her strange, frightening, and unwanted.

Then a mysterious scholarship takes her to Hollowmere Academy, an ancient school overlooking the rain-soaked city of Sospira and its black, tidal lake. Almost immediately, Damaris discovers that Hollowmere is built upon secrets older than the school itself. Students obey strange rules about water, bells, and voices calling from the lake. At midnight, the school's bells seem to hold something invisible together, while beneath the waters lies a drowned cathedral that should have been lost three centuries ago.

At the heart of Sospira's history is the legend of the Deathbride: a young woman supposedly sacrificed three hundred years earlier to seal a supernatural force beneath the city. The people of Sospira believe that the bride is long dead.

They are wrong.

At low tide, Damaris discovers a young woman standing outside the drowned church. She has silver hair, violet eyes, and no thread of death.

Her name is Nerezza.

She has been trapped beneath the lake for three hundred years, bound to an ancient vow that protects Sospira from a force known only as the thing beneath the world. Every generation, the town has maintained the bargain by sacrificing another girl. But Nerezza is not merely a victim. Her grief is part of the seal, and everything she touches costs her something — and sometimes costs the living their precious hours.

As Damaris returns to the drowned church again and again, an unlikely bond develops between the girl who can see death and the bride who cannot die. But Damaris soon discovers that her admission to Hollowmere was never a gift.

She was chosen.

The Founder's Promise is a centuries-old arrangement designed to keep a Fatespun girl — someone capable of seeing the threads of death — close to the school, ready to become the next bride if the current one falters. Ancient ledgers already contain Damaris's name, and someone — or something — has begun writing in them again.

Meanwhile, Severina Vasváry, heir to a legendary family of exorcists, is preparing for the possibility that Nerezza must be killed and the ancient seal renewed. Her family's charter gives them the right — and the duty — to cut the bride's thread when the door beneath the world begins to fail.

But Nerezza has no thread.

And the bells have begun to ring for Damaris.

As the November Crimson Waltz approaches, Damaris must uncover the truth behind the Founder's Promise, the drowned city beneath the lake, and the real purpose of the Deathbride before Hollowmere chooses her fate for her.

Because the greatest secret beneath Sospira may not be why the bride was sacrificed.

It may be why she was never allowed to die.