Chapter 1

I woke up screaming.

Zombie teeth sinking into my shoulder. Damian's face hovering above me, his hands still frozen in the motion of shoving me away. His voice echoing in my ears—"Help me here! You're dead meat anyway!" Then came my mother's sobbing. She just stood there watching, not lifting a finger to help.

I bolted upright.

I was in the driver's seat of my pickup. Outside the window was the parking lot of the Millstone Lottery Claim Center. The sunlight was crisp, the hood of the truck reflecting a clear blue sky. I looked down at my hands—long fingers, clean knuckles, completely free of the scars left behind by five years of the apocalypse. Resting on the passenger seat was a winning lottery ticket. Twenty million dollars, after taxes.

I took thirty seconds to process. The date on my phone screen confirmed it: five days before the end of the world. Out on Main Street, the local hardware store was still open for business, and a line was spilling out the door of Old John's Bakery. The lottery ticket in my hand... in my past life, I had bought it, only for Damian to con me out of it with a web of lies.

My temples throbbed as the memories flooded back. Five years in the apocalypse. A lightning-element Awakened. The lone wolf mercenary of Millstone. I had survived countless zombie hordes, only to be shoved into a pack of the undead by my own flesh and blood.

Reborn.

I folded the ticket, shoved it into my pocket, and fired up the truck. My mother, Martha, called me by the time I hit the third intersection. Her tone dripped with forced concern.

"Vic, your dad and your brother want to talk to you. It's really important."

"About what?"

"Just be home before dinner."

Damian was already holding court in the center of the living room when I walked through the front door. Twenty-two years old, he had inherited our dad Frank's tall build and our mom's sharp cheekbones, along with a silver tongue. He wore an expression I hadn't understood in my past life, but now I recognized it instantly—it was the look of a hunter watching his prey step right into a trap. My dad stood behind him, arms crossed. Mom was bustling between the kitchen and the living room, pouring everyone a cup of coffee.

"Vic, have a seat." Damian pointed to the couch across from him.

I sat down, ignoring the coffee.

He pulled a small object from his pocket and set it on the coffee table. A ring. The silver band was heavily tarnished, almost black, and set with a piece of obsidian the size of a thumbnail. The stone's surface was dull and cloudy, lacking any sort of shine.

"There's more to this than meets the eye," he said, lowering his voice. "I've been having the exact same dream for days now. In the dream, this ring is like a pocket dimension. You can store things inside it. Great-grandpa brought it back from the war. Mom remembers."

Mom nodded right on cue. "It's true. We've kept it boxed up in the attic for years."

Damian slid the ring across the table toward me. "I was originally going to keep it for myself. But you just hit the jackpot, and as your big brother, I should chip in. You take the ring, I take the ticket. We're family. We look out for each other."

I stared at the ring. In my past life, I thought it was just cheap flea-market junk. Later on, Damian used it to rise to power and become a warlord.

And I died in a horde of the undead, shoved into their jaws so he could save his own skin.

But now, I was back. And this time, he was the one left in the dark.

He had no idea the ring was actually real.

He just had a vague hunch that something was weird about it, and he was using that "weirdness" to scam me out of my money.

"Deal."

Damian blinked. He hadn't even gotten through half the bullshit speech he'd prepared.

I slapped the lottery ticket down on the table. His hand instantly slammed down on top of it. He let out a fake cough to cover his eagerness and pushed the ring closer to me. Mom slid a transfer of ownership agreement across the table; I skimmed it and signed my name.

"You agreed to this. No take-backs," Damian said, a smirk hidden in his voice.

I ignored him. I grabbed the ring and walked right out the front door. Behind me, I could hear muffled laughter and my mom shushing him. They were celebrating how they’d just traded a piece of junk to a total sucker.

Once I was back in my truck, I bit down hard on my thumb and squeezed a drop of blood onto the obsidian.

The second the blood touched the stone, it lit up. A dark crimson glow pulsed from deep within the gem. The ring suddenly constricted around my finger. My knuckle went numb, and a shock like a jolt of electricity shot from my index finger straight up to my shoulder. My consciousness was yanked into a void. When I opened my eyes, I was standing in an empty space roughly ten thousand square feet in size. The ground was a pale gray, the sky was completely colorless, and the borders stretched out further than the eye could see. A cool, refreshing energy flowed from my finger and coursed through my veins. It felt exactly like the moment my lightning powers had Awakened in my past life, only far gentler and much deeper.

I pulled my consciousness back out. The ring was no longer dull and tarnished. Deep inside the obsidian, something was slowly swirling, like a smoldering dark fire.

My phone buzzed. Damian had just updated his social media status—a picture of a brand-new Range Rover with the caption: "Today is a good day."

I locked my screen and fired up the engine. I couldn't wait to see the look on his face when he finally realized exactly what he had just handed over to me.