Chapter One
Yara
The thing nobody warns you about raising a werewolf in a town full of humans is that the secret is not the hard part.
The hard part is the socks. My daughter ran hot enough to fog the diner windows in February, and she went through socks like a wood chipper, so I had given up on matching them somewhere around her third birthday.
Maeve’s opened at six, and six in the morning was the only hour I trusted the place to behave.
The griddle was warm and the coffee was honest and the regulars had not yet arrived to report on their hips.
I had flour up to my elbows and a five year old asleep in the back booth under my coat, and for about nine good minutes the whole world felt like something I could actually carry.
Then the bell over the door went off, and Bill Hax came in stamping snow off his boots as if the floor had insulted him.
"You're early, Bill," I said.
"Couldn't sleep," he said. "Celia snores like a chainsaw with opinions. Coffee, Yara, before I commit a crime."
"Sit down before you commit a crime," I said, and poured it.
Bill was seventy-one and had eaten breakfast at this counter every day for the four years I had owned it, which meant he was either my most loyal customer or a man with nowhere better to be.
I had decided not to ask which. He wrapped both hands around the mug and gave me the particular squint that meant he was about to say something he thought was helpful.
"You look tired," he said.
"You look old," I said. "We've both got problems."
"I'm serious," he said. "You run yourself ragged. A young woman like you, raising that little one alone. Where's her daddy, anyway? You never say."
I kept my face exactly where it was, which was a skill I had paid for.
"He's not in the picture, Bill," I said. "Eat your eggs."
"I didn't order eggs," he said.
"You're getting eggs," I said, and went to make them, because the kitchen was a good place to be when people asked questions I had spent six years not answering.
The coat in the back booth stirred, and a small voice said something I couldn't make out, and then a little louder.
"Mama," Lily said, thick with sleep, "is it morning or is it still the cheating kind of dark?"
"It's morning, baby," I said.
"It looks like the cheating kind of dark," she said.
"That's because it's February and the sun is also tired," I said. "Come sit at the counter and I'll make you the good pancakes."
She came padding over in mismatched socks, one purple and one with a cartoon frog, dragging my coat behind her like a king's robe. Five years old and already negotiating the terms of every single morning of her life.
"How many pancakes?" she said, climbing onto the stool.
"Two," I said.
"Four," she said.
"Two," I said. "And if you eat both of them without arguing, I will consider three."
"That's still not four," she said.
"You're correct," I said. "It's a trap. Eat."
Bill laughed into his coffee.
"She's got your mouth," he said.
"God help her," I said.
I set the plate in front of her and she went still and reverent, the look she saved for carbohydrates alone. Then she found the syrup and tipped half the bottle out before I could stop her.
"Lily," I said. "That's enough."
"It's not enough," she said. "It's an emergency. The pancakes are dry in the middle."
"They are not dry in the middle. Give it here," I said, and reached for the bottle.
"No," she said, and held on.
It was a small thing, a stubborn child holding a bottle, and then all at once it was not a small thing at all.
Her knuckles went white and her eyes flared a hot liquid gold for half a breath, and the thick glass bottle cracked clean down the side under her fingers as if it were an eggshell.
Syrup oozed over her hand and onto the counter.
For one suspended second none of us moved.
"Whoops," Lily said.
"Whoops," I agreed, very calm, and swept the bottle into the trash.
"Butterfingers. That one was cracked already, I've been meaning to toss it. Bill, you want a warm up?" I said.
"That glass just-" Bill started, frowning.
"Cheap glass," I said. "Everything's cheap now. You want that warm up or not?"
"I want that warm up," he said slowly, and let it go, because he was a kind man and the world had taught him not to look too hard at the things that frightened him.
I cleaned the syrup off my daughter's hand and held it a beat too long, checking for cuts that were not there and never would be there, because she healed before she could bleed. Her eyes were brown again. Ordinary, warm, brown.
"Mama," she whispered, "did I do the thing again?"
"You did a little thing, bug," I whispered back. "It's okay. We'll practice."
"I didn't mean to," she said.
"I know. I know you didn't. Eat your pancakes. We're okay," I said.
The bell went again, and Anna blew in on a gust of cold, coveralls half unzipped and grease on her jaw and a thermos she refused to let me fill because she said my coffee was terrible.
"Morning, sunshine," Anna said, and then, "Morning, demon," she added to Lily.
"I'm not a demon," Lily said. "I'm a girl."
"You're a demon shaped like a girl," Anna said. "It's a compliment. Demons get stuff done."
She dropped onto the stool next to Bill and stole a piece of his bacon, and Bill, who would have bitten anyone else, only sighed.
"You're a menace, Anna," Bill said.
"And yet here I am, your favourite," Anna said.
Bill finished, left two crumpled dollars under his plate that I would put back in his coat pocket later, and went out into the cold telling me to get some rest. The bell stopped swinging.
Anna waited until his truck pulled away, and then she turned to me, and the jokes were gone off her face.
"What happened? And don't tell me cheap glass. I've been smelling your fear since I walked in," Anna said.
I glanced at Lily, who was building a syrup lake and ignoring us with the focused dedication of a child who knows the grownups are about to talk.
"She flared," I said, low. "Cracked a bottle. Eyes and everything. Second time this month."
Anna swore under her breath.
"She's five," Anna said.
"I'm aware of how old my kid is," I said.
"That's too young, Yara. I didn't shift till I was eleven. Most don't manage a real flare till they're teenagers. A bottle? With her bare hand?" Anna rubbed her face. "Okay. That's not even the worst of it, and I hate that it's not the worst of it."
"Anna," I said.
"There's talk on the rogue lines. I didn't want to tell you because you get a look. You're getting the look right now. Stop it," Anna said.
"What talk?" I said.
"There are trackers working the county," Anna said. "Pack scouts, maybe Council men, maybe worse. Word is somebody picked up a power signature out here. Unregistered. Unbonded. A kid, Yara, reading way over what a kid should read."
She looked at Lily and lowered her voice further. "They're hunting a signal. And we both know whose signal it is."
The griddle hissed. Somewhere a clock ticked. I felt the floor tilt very gently under six years of careful work.
"How long?" I said.
"Days," Anna said. "Maybe a couple of weeks. The bigger she gets, the louder she gets. You can't hide a bonfire under a dish towel forever, hon."
"I've kept her safe this long," I said.
"You've kept her hidden this long," Anna said, not unkindly.
"It's different, and you know it's different.
A rogue can hide. A power like hers can't, not as she grows.
The minute one of those trackers gets a clean read, she stops being your secret and starts being everybody's prize.
Packs would go to war over a pup that strong.
And there's no pack standing behind her. No name. No teeth. Just you."
"I have teeth," I said.
"You have great teeth. You have my favourite teeth. You're still one wolf with a diner and a kid, and they will take her, Yara, and they will not ask nicely," Anna said.
I wiped the same clean spot on the counter three times.
"There's only one pack near here big enough to scare off Council trackers," I said.
"Yeah. There is," Anna said.
"Don't say it," I said.
"Ashfall," Anna said anyway, because she had never once in her life done what I told her. "The true alpha line. The biggest teeth in four hundred miles. If anybody could claim her and make the whole world back off, it's that pack."
"No," I said.
"Yara," Anna said.
"No, Anna. Not there. Anywhere but there," I said.
She studied me for a long moment, and I watched her decide not to ask the question she had been politely not asking for six years, which was where exactly I had come from and what exactly had put the flinch in me whenever a black truck with pack plates rolled through town.
"I don't know what Ashfall did to you," Anna said quietly.
"You've never said and I've never pushed.
But that little girl cracked a syrup bottle with her fist this morning, and there are men in this county trying to find her right now.
So whatever it is, whatever happened there, you might have to walk back into it. "
She nodded at Lily. "For her."
Lily chose that exact moment to look up, syrup to the eyebrows, and grin at me with her whole entire face.
"Mama," Lily said, "I made a lake."
"You sure did, bug," I said, and my voice only shook a little.
And that was how I decided, over a syrup lake and a cracked bottle and a friend who loved me enough to tell me the truth, that I was going to drive my daughter straight into the territory of the man who had thrown me away.