Chapter 1
The carved likeness of Fenrir stares down at me as I slip my hand beneath the furs, first against my lancing abdomen and then lower, to my soaked center.
Though I’ve no doubt my fingertips will come away crimson, I still inspect them before I let hope run wild and free. It’s only when the dragon-fire crackling in our open hearth catches on the gloss of red that I breathe out my trapped inhalation.
Heart hot with emotion, I whisper a hushed thank-you to the carving of the Wolf God that graces every timbered beam in our village, then twist on my cot.
My lips curve as I decide to rouse my mother, not with words, but with a flick of my tongue once my transformation is complete.
How she will startle.
How she will rejoice.
Gently, I peel the heavy hide off my body and get onto all fours.
And then I wait.
And wait.
I reassure myself that it’s not always instant, that the change only swept through my cousin Saga when a howl vibrated the air. It may be the same for me.
As the brisk morning winds itself around my bare arms and swoops beneath my shift, I picture myself streaking through the frostbitten streets of our village toward Saga’s house and pouncing on her cot. I can already hear her irritated mutterings at being awakened before the stars have all gone out.
I crane my neck toward Fenrir’s likeness, encouraging him, through prayer, to awaken my beast. My skin pebbles, and I think the change is upon me, but it’s only goose bumps triggered by the damp chill carving through the thatched roof of our pit house.
I grip my bedding with my scarred fingers, willing white fur to pour from the waxy skin I keep cloaked under gloves almost always. What if my coat doesn’t extend to my paws? What if my hands—in wolf form—remain hideous?
I shake my head to stave off the vision and implore Fenrir to come for me…to make me his, like he’s made every pointy-eared person in our pack his.
The fire snaps, its glow swaying against the hides we string up to our walls in the fall and take down in the spring.
You made me wait eighteen years. Please do not make me wait a minute longer. I beg you, Fenrir.
My abdomen spasms, ejecting more viscous blood. I feel it sluice down the insides of my thighs and pool in the crook of my bent knees.
Please…
“Zaskja?” My mother’s brusque inflection whirls my head. She scrambles out of her cot with the same urgency as when she’s called to birth a pup. “What are you doing?”
“My time has come, Mor.”
My mother’s complexion turns wan as she absorbs my soiled nightgown. For someone whose hands are so often in contact with fluids, she looks like she’s about to empty her stomach.
“Don’t worry. I won’t be leaving the den anytime soon.” I may yearn for Nordin to make me his, but pack law prohibits mating ceremonies before one’s twenty-first year.
After eighteen years of waiting to shift, what is three more to become an immortal’s mate?
When my reassurance fails to carry blood back into my mother’s cheeks, my amusement at her discomfiture begins to fray, and then it withers entirely when her hazels turn glassy with tears.
I sit back on my heels. “Why do you look as if you’re about to weep?”
“I—I…” She bites her lips to quell their tremble before releasing them to murmur, “Oh, Zaskjalill.”
My heart hushes so fast that my ribs clench, as though caving in on themselves. “What?”
“You won’t shift.” Her brisk words lash me with the ferocity of our northern blizzards.
“You mean, right this moment or ever?”
“Ever. You’re not…” Shadows scurry over her cheeks as her lashes flutter. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve told you sooner. I should’ve prepared you.”
“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t I shift? My ears are peaked like yours.”
“I know, my darling.”
My ribs clench again. “Only humans don’t shift.”
Her throat moves over a worrying swallow.
“Why are you so convinced that Fenrir won’t reshape my body and color my spine?”
“Because you’re not a wolf!” My mother’s shouted confession reverberates through the dark, knocking into every exposed beam and weathered floorboard.
“I know I’m not your biological daughter, but I thought…I thought—” I lick my lips. “Wasn’t I abandoned by another pack?”
The skin around her eyes puckers.
“If I’m not a Daughter of Fenrir, then…what am I?”
“You’re a Daughter of…of…” She heaves in a ragged breath. “You’re a Daughter of Freyja.”
“Freyja?” I breathe out as the stories recounted long ago around the longhouse’s firepit swirl through my mind. “I’m a valkyrie?”
The elders had depicted the twelve mothers of valkyries, otherwise known as the Empresses, in such vivid and gory detail that, for months, I’d woken up drenched in sweat from night terrors.
I’d dreamt of battlefields littered with corpses. Of larger-than-life shieldmaidens wielding golden spears and silver swords—the first, to pierce vampyr hearts, the second, to scalp wolves.
I’d pictured their hands dripping with their enemies’ blood. Some nights, I swore I could even hear them roar their battle cry: Aheeva!
I’d yelled it once in my sleep, startling my poor mother awake. She’d made me repeat it out loud, her complexion mottled with an emotion I couldn’t put my finger on at the time, but which I soon learned was rage.
Gods, how angry she’d been with the elders for telling stories of the notorious Daughters. She’d even gotten her brother, the Alpha and Jarl of Clan Vale, to decree that the whispering of any more valkyrie tales would result in immediate expulsion from the pack.
Though I no longer dream of them, the elders’ stories cling to the corners of my mind like cobwebs.
I give my lips another swipe. “Am I a changeling?”
“No. We didn’t trade you.”
My bleeding core has become the only warm spot on my body. “Did Nordin steal me from Ljosam?r then?”
“No, he didn’t kidnap you from their realm.” My mother’s waist-length black locks frolic around her ageless face. “Nordin would never do such a thing. None of us would ever steal a child.”
“Then how did I end up in Isam?r, Mor?”
Her restless stare plummets to my blistered hands. “We believe that you might’ve walked through a portal.”
“A…portal?”
“The Empresses can open doors between realms.”
My jaw slackens at the sort of power they hold. Yes, I live among beings that can shape-shift into majestic beasts. Nevertheless, using magic to move bodies through time and space? Now, that’s of a different caliber.
My tongue darts over my lips as I take it all in. “Was I pushed through a portal, or did I step into one by mistake?”
“We don’t know.”
“Did no one ever come looking for me?”
My mother’s lashes flutter once more, hooding her troubled stare.
“Did—”
“No.” She gets up and pads over to me, then kneels on my cot and reaches for my scarred hands, enclosing them between her smooth ones. “No one ever came. This is how I got to keep you. This is how you became mine.”
My throat feels packed with river rocks. “My whole life has been a lie.”
“I’m sorry,” she croaks. “Forgive me. Please forgive me.”
I snatch my hands back and tuck them out of her reach. “To think I waited on my cycle for nothing.”
The look that crosses her face is pure heartbreak. “It’s not nothing to become a woman.”
“I wanted to be a wolf, Mor!”
She attempts to bracket my face between her palms, but her body trembles so hard that her fingers slip at the merest twist of my head.
“You might not be able to shift, but that doesn’t make you any less one of us.
You are my daughter. You are part of this pack.
You are—in all the ways that count—a wolf. ”
A howl echoes outside our pit house. It’s tauntingly cruel—a reminder of everything I’m not.
I scrabble onto my feet and stride toward the door, my hands clenched into tight fists. I don’t bother with a cloak, boots, or even gloves. Anger rides me so hard that I cannot bring myself to care if the whole godsdamn clan lays eyes on my wrecked appearance and grotesque hands.
“Zaskja, wait!”
I pause at the door. “For what? Do you have more brutal confessions for me?”
She wrings her fingers in her lap, her eyes brimming, overflowing. “I love you,” she chokes out.
Though my heart doesn’t pound with hate for her or for this werewolf clan that offered me shelter when I had none, my throat throbs too hard to echo her words.
I bleed, but I am not a shifter.
I will never be a shifter.