Maelis Rose is supposed to be a village healer like her father, but when he dies and a letter summons her to an academy she never applied to, she leaves behind everything she knows.

Her departure comes at the worst-possible time. The Cycle rips through Valen every hundred years, unleashing twisted creatures that decimate entire villages.

A BRUTAL ACADEMY.

Ashwell Academy trains Veilguards: battlefield surgeons who fight to save lives while war rages all around them. Most don’t survive training.

Maelis is human in a school full of vampires, fae, shifters, angels, and demons. They see her as weak, disposable, already dead. The headmaster sees something else entirely, and his attention might be worse than their contempt.

A DANGEROUS OBSESSION.

Then there’s Draven Alucard, a vampire with blood on his hands and a black wolf that watches her almost as much as he does. He tells her she doesn’t belong and pushes her until she breaks, yet when danger finds her, he’s always there first. She doesn’t understand him but can’t stop thinking about him either. He’s hiding something.

So is she, though she doesn’t know it yet.

A SECRET IN HER BLOOD.

Everyone at Ashwell has an agenda, but Maelis is fighting a war no one else can see. Her hands won’t stop shaking, and her father’s death haunts every cut she tries to make. If she can’t learn to hold a scalpel steady, the Cycle won’t be what kills her.

But the real question is—why did Ashwell summon her in the first place?