Chapter 2
ROWAN
The itching. Oh, God. It’s horrendous. Like my entire body’s been coated in poison ivy, dipped in glitter, and rolled in fire ants. Worse, I can’t move. Not my arms. Not my legs. Not even my stupid twitchy toes.
If I could, I’d scratch the skin right off, peel myself like an orange, just to make it stop. Yet, none of that compares to the sounds.
A howl shreds through my mind, haunting and desperate. It reverberates deep inside me, not through my ears, but in my bones before repeating again. And it’s not just echoes. It’s a constant cry, almost like a summons. A sorrowful plea from something that shouldn’t exist inside me.
This can’t be real. That gas-station burrito had to have been laced with some crazy shit. There’s no other possible explanation as to why I’d be hallucinating the sensation of a freaking wolf passing through my head, demanding to be set free.
A groan escapes me as ice-cold hands grab my shoulders, pinching the muscles beneath my skin like live wires.
“Rowan? Can you hear me?” Iris demands, the panic in her voice clear.
“What if…” I think Liz starts to speak, but she’s cut off.
“Not now.” The sharp tone from Iris tells me everything I need to know.
I shouldn’t be surprised she’s pissed. I broke her only rule and… Holy shit. Did a bomb go off inside the manor?
Flashes come back in strobe-light like bursts—roaring heat, alcohol flying, the door disintegrating in a rush of fire and force. My body slamming back into the hallway. Then nothing.
My throat burns, dry and raw, like I’ve been screaming and inhaled gallons of smoke. “Wa…water,” I rasp, barely more than a breath.
“I’m going to sit you up, Rowan,” Iris says. “Don’t try to move on your own yet.”
Cool fingers brace my back. A glass presses to my lips, and I drink greedily, gulping down the icy liquid like I’ve just crawled out of the Sahara. Each swallow burns, then soothes. By the time I finish, I’m gripping the cup like it’s sacred.
“She’s already healed, Iris,” Liz murmurs, but I hear her like she’s breathing in my ear.
Which is strange, because when I pry my eyes open, she’s standing a good ten feet away, hands loose at her sides like she’s not completely freaking out about me being blown up.
Fried to a crisp for dinner and brought back to life for dessert. Sure, that tracks with how I’m feeling.
My gaze snaps to her, and something… inhuman growls in my chest. The sound bubbles up before I can stop it, thick and low and wrong.
Yeah, I’m just going to ignore whatever that is.
I’m in a room, maybe one of the guest rooms, and lying in bed, covered by floral blankets. The lights are too bright, making me blink as I try to adjust. I inhale sharply, then regret the action as I gag.
I can smell them. The sharp bite of Iris’s perfume is layered with lavender and citrus. Liz smells like copper and…death? I must have hit my head pretty damn hard.
“What happened?” I demand, my voice a husky growl.
Iris meets my gaze with a sigh and mutters, “Well, it seems you took a detour through the third circle of hell and came out wearing someone else’s skin.”
My eyebrows raise. “What does that even mean?”
“It means,” Iris says with a tight smile, fiddling with the belt of her blue flannel robe—something she definitely wasn’t wearing the last time I saw her, “you opened a door you shouldn’t have, and we’ve been waiting hours for you to wake up.
We’ll soon be having a very serious conversation about boundaries, once you’re not growling at people like a feral dog. ”
“I wasn’t—” I stop, realization dawning. “Okay, fine. Point made. Wasn’t I hurt? Where are my injuries?”
“Depends on your definition of injuries,” Liz says with a shrug.
I look down at my hands. They’re perfect. Smooth and unmarked. Not even a speck of soot or a blister. Maybe I’m not remembering what happened clearly. Or this place has a world-class ER department I wasn’t told about. Either way, they’re hiding something.
My brain glitches, trying to reconcile the image of flying fireballs and pain with the pristine condition of my limbs. I was definitely blown up.
Wasn’t I? Wait…
Panic tightens in my chest as my thoughts shift to Archie. I twist, searching wildly until I see a familiar streak of brown fur poking out from under the blanket at the foot of the bed. My breath rushes out.
Still breathing. Thank God.
“It might not feel normal, but this is your reality now, Rowan,” Iris says, and I swear I hear excitement in her voice.
Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve been rebooted into a different operating system, and someone threw away the user manual.
Everything is louder. I can hear Liz’s heartbeat.
The soft tick-tick of a clock somewhere outside the room.
Hell, even the fluttering just beyond the windowpane is like tiny wings of chaos when I focus.
Awesome. Super hearing. Maybe next I’ll get X-ray vision and can finally find where Archie hid the car keys that cost me hundreds of dollars to replace last year.
“Why can I hear…everything?” I ask, not sure I actually want the answer.
She punctuates the sentence by rummaging in her robe pocket and pulling out a peppermint with lint already stuck to it. “Want a mint? Helps with the existential dread.”
I blink once, then twice. “Excuse me?”
She offers me a look of forced sympathy, the kind people give right before they say something truly unhinged. “You died, Rowan. And then you came back to life.”
I stare at her like she’s grown a second head. “That…that’s not how dying works.”
“For most people, no. But for you? Let’s just say fate has a twisted sense of humor.”
I turn to Liz, silently pleading for a lifeline. For someone—anyone—to say, “Ha, just kidding!” But she only offers me an apologetic shrug.
Archie stirs and crawls toward me, slower than usual. I lift him gently, cradling his warm body against my chest. The soft press of his fur grounds me more than anything else in this room ever could. My eyes drift closed, blocking out this conversation and the strangers leading it.
We’re okay. We just got knocked around a bit, and my brain is misfiring. As soon as my head stops pounding, we’ll leave. Pretend this never happened.
I didn’t die. I didn’t come back to life. Iris is just a crazy old woman who has spent too much time in this gothic mansion.
“How about I go make us some drinks?” Liz offers, but I don’t answer her.
“You might want to bring a few bottles back instead,” Iris titters. “I think I’ve got some emergency brandy hidden behind one of the dead animals on the first floor. This feels like a taxidermy-drink kind of day.”
My gaze snaps toward Iris, but I stop short. There’s a wry grin on her face, laced with amusement and—unexpectedly—a flicker of warmth. It brings a youthfulness to her features that, for a heartbeat, mirrors my mother so precisely I can’t breathe.
My throat closes. I look away fast, swallowing the grief like a pill too large to go down. Archie stirs against my chest, his tiny heartbeat thrumming like a drum against mine. Just me and him. That’s all I need now.
Mom was right. I never should’ve come here.
“Jocelyn really never told you about NightShade, did she?” Iris says, her voice filled with more compassion than I’ve yet to see from her.
“Mom didn’t like talking about her past.”
Iris lowers herself into the chair beside my bed, letting out a long breath as she leans back like the weight of memory is too much to carry standing up.
“I guess I can’t be too surprised. This was never the life she wanted.
But I tried like hell to show her the importance of it.
Maybe I pushed too hard, and I lost her because of it.
” She blinks rapidly, lashes fluttering.
“She was stubborn as hell. Just like you seem to be.”
A lump forms in my throat, but I ignore it. “You don’t know me.”
“Maybe not,” she admits, “but I know your blood. And blood never lies unless you’re a vampire. Then all bets are off.”
This woman really has lost her mind.
She leans forward, eyes sharp now, like crystal blue daggers locked onto mine.
“You come from a long line of Hollowborn, Rowan. Women who have safeguarded the supernatural world for generations. We don’t take sides.
We don’t wage wars. We help keep the balance.
We are the line between what the world believes and what it should never know. ”
The words hang in the air between us. I wonder if Hollowborn means secretive and clearly terrible at communication, because nothing she’s just said makes any sense.
Yet, her eyes peer into mine with such intensity that I start to wonder if I’ve accidentally joined a cult or some sort of cryptic book club. Still, something tells me she won’t let me leave until she thinks I understand. So, I play along.
“Hollowborn? Hollow how?” I laugh to myself because clearly, they’re all missing their sanity. That, at least, I can see for myself.
Her lips twitch, and she waggles her brows. “Hollow as in unkillable. At least by supernatural means. Magic, claws, fangs—none of it sticks. Like Teflon. If we die by their hands, we bounce back. Think of it as nature’s version of a reset button. Or a really inconvenient party trick.”
“That’s not a thing. None of that is. How long has it been since you’ve left NightShade, Iris?”
She narrows her eyes and gestures with a hand over my body. “You’re sitting upright, without a scratch on you, after being blown to kingdom come, sugar plum. Unless you think I’ve got a miracle med kit stashed under the floorboards, I’d say my version of things deserves a little airtime.”
I match her annoyance. “I think I had a near-death experience, and now you’re trying to sell me on some twisted fairytale cult recruitment speech.”