Prologue #2
“Listen to me,” she exclaimed, words tight. “Go to the hollow by the birch line. You remember?”
The hollow. The emergency burrow behind the fallen tree, lined with old blankets and kept stocked with dried meat and water. The place they’d shown me when I was eight, when I’d asked why we needed hiding places if Haven was safe.
I remembered laughing back then.
I didn’t laugh now.
“I don’t want to—” My voice cracked and I hated myself for it.
My father stepped in close, hand cupping the back of my head, pressing his forehead to mine. He smelled like smoke and salt and oats.
“Tam,” he murmured, and the softness in his voice made my stomach twist. “You hide. That’s an order.”
Orders. I could do orders.
I nodded because I couldn’t speak.
Griff released me like he was forcing himself to. “Go,” he commanded, and his eyes flicked down to the knife at my thigh. “And if you have to use it… use it.”
My throat tightened around a sound that wanted to be a sob.
Then the first gunshot cracked across the wind from the southern inlet, loud as thunder.
The camp exploded into motion.
Humans grabbed bows and spears and anything that could become a weapon. Someone shoved Finn toward the north path with two smaller kids in tow, their faces pale and their voices silent.
Wolves shifted at the edges of the clearing, bones breaking with that familiar, awful music. Fur erupted. Bodies lengthened. Their eyes flared gold in the dim morning light.
No one screamed yet.
That came later.
I ran.
There was no room for thought, no room for anything, just wet ground and pounding breath and the weight of my new knife thumping against my thigh.
I sprinted past the racks of drying fish, past the smokehouse, past the shelter where Aunt Moira kept her herbs.
The wind snapped my braid against my neck. My lungs burned with cold air.
Behind me, the sea boomed with a deeper sound than the constant drum of waves. Engines.
When I reached the birch line, I risked glancing back.
The southern cliff edge had become a moving line of dark figures, spilling up from the beach like ants from a disturbed nest. Men in uniforms, rifles held high, bayonets glinting in the weak morning light. A flag snapped above one of the ships rocking in the wind, red and white.
It was the British.
Not the ragged scavengers we’d fought off years ago. Not the desperate bands that sometimes stumbled onto Skye and turned tail when they saw wolves standing beside humans. This was organized. This was planned.
This was an army.
A shot split the air and a man near the firepit jerked backward, arms flinging wide, and for a second my brain refused to name what I was seeing.
Then my mother’s voice rang out in the quiet.
“Tam! Go!”
I turned and ran harder.
The hollow waited beneath the fallen oak, its roots clawing up toward the sky like ribs. I dropped to my knees and crawled inside, dragging damp leaves and grit with me. My hands shook so badly I scraped my knuckles on the bark.
Inside, it smelled like old wool and earth. Someone had hung a small charm from the root ceiling, a crescent carved from bone. It was supposed to bring safe hunting. I prayed it would bring me safety now.
I pressed my palm over my mouth and listened.
Gunfire. Screams. The thunder of boots.
And above it all, the deep, furious roar of angry wolves.
I squeezed my eyes shut until sparks danced behind my lids.
Don’t think. Just breathe.
I tried to breathe.
Minutes passed, or maybe hours. Time turned syrup-thick, slow and choking. Every crack of a rifle felt like a physical blow. My knife was clutched in my hand without me remembering I’d drawn it.
A child sobbed somewhere nearby, but the sound was muffled, someone smothering the sound the way I was. Then that sob cut off, swallowed by distance or fear or something worse. I couldn’t be certain.
A heavy crash shook the roots above me, dirt raining down on my hair. Voices came closer.
“Search the tree line!” a man shouted. “They’ll try to run north!”
Another voice laughed, ugly and bright. “Bloody savages, living with beasts. Burn it. Burn all of it.”
Fire crackled somewhere outside.
Smoke seeped into the hollow, sharp and bitter. My eyes watered. My throat tightened.
I couldn’t stay here.
I sheathed my knife, crawled backward and found the narrow gap at the back of the hollow, the escape tunnel that led to the ravine.
Griff had helped dig it years ago, cursing the roots the whole time.
I’d complained about the mud, and he’d flicked it at my face and told me survival wasn’t tidy and clean.
I’d made a face at him and flicked some right back.
It had turned into an all-out mud fight by the end of the day, but we’d gotten the job done anyway.
Now I shoved myself through it like a worm, scraping my shoulders on packed earth. The tunnel opened into the ravine, and I pushed out into gray daylight and froze.
The ravine wasn’t empty.
A British soldier stood at the top of the slope, rifle swinging as he scanned back and forth. He was young. I could see that his helmet was too big for his head, and his mouth was twisted in irritation.
I accidentally stepped on a twig and his gaze snapped down, locking onto me.
For half a heartbeat, neither of us moved.
Then his lips curled into a grin.
“Well, what’s this?” he called out, clearly amused. “Found a pretty one.”
My body went cold and hot at the same time.
Run, my instincts screamed.
But the ravine was a bowl. The only way out was past him and there was no path I could take where I would be out of the trajectory of his gun.
He lifted his rifle, aiming at my chest like it was nothing.
I didn’t think.
My hand went to my thigh.
Steel whispered out of leather.
I moved the way my father had taught me to move when stalking rabbits, low, fast, and quiet. I darted sideways, slipping behind a boulder as the rifle cracked.
Stone exploded where my head had been.
My ears rang. My heart tried to crawl out of my throat.
He cursed and started down the slope, boots skidding on wet dirt.
“You little—!”
I clutched the knife with both hands, forcing myself to breathe through the panic.
He rounded the boulder too fast, too confident, his rifle swinging down to club me and I stepped in before I could think of anything else.
I drove my blade forward into the gap beneath his ribs. It sank in deep. His eyes went wide, shocked more than anything, like he couldn’t understand how a young girl in a braid and muddy boots had become dangerous all of a sudden.
He dropped the rifle.
I snatched it before it hit the ground, hands clumsy around the metal. I staggered back, clutching the rifle to my chest, and the soldier collapsed to his knees, one hand pressed to his side, breath ragged. He stared at me like I was a monster.
Maybe I was.
My stomach lurched. My mouth filled with spit. I swallowed hard and forced my feet to move.
I scrambled up the opposite slope, slipping on mud, the rifle heavy and wrong in my arms, the knife still in my fist. Behind me, the soldier wheezed one last time and then stopped breathing.
At the top of the ravine, I gasped at the horror of what was waiting for me.
Smoke curled up from our shelters in thick black ribbons. The firepit had been trampled into ash. The fish racks were splintered. Bodies lay scattered—some human, some wolf—dark shapes in the wet grass. I couldn’t make my eyes stop counting the corpses.
I saw Aunt Moira’s shawl, torn and half-burned, caught on a bush.
My legs went weak.
I pushed forward anyway, because the only way through grief is movement, and because I couldn’t let myself stop.
Then I saw my father.
He was on his knees near the birch line, one hand braced against the ground, the other clutching his side. Blood soaked his shirt. His face was gray with pain, but his eyes were open.
He looked up and saw me.
“No,” he mouthed silently, and the word hit me harder than a bullet.
I staggered toward him. “Da—”
A crack split the air.
My father’s head jerked.
He slumped forward like a puppet with cut strings.
I made a sound I didn’t recognize. Something animal. Something broken.
I dropped the rifle and lunged, catching his shoulders, trying to hold him upright like I could force him back to life by sheer force of will.
“Da, no—no, no—”
His eyes stared past me at the smoke-filled sky.
Someone grabbed the back of my coat and yanked hard.
I whirled, knife flashing as I drove it upward.
Griff.
I diverted the blade at the very last second.
He was covered in blood, some of it his. His face was slashed open along one cheek. His eyes were wild. Furious. Terrified.
“Tamsin!” he roared, voice cracking. “Move!”
“I can’t—” I choked, clutching at my father.
Griff grabbed me by the shoulders, shaking me once, hard. “You can. You fucking will.”
My knife trembled in my hand. My throat burned.
“My mum—” I tried and couldn’t finish.
Griff’s gaze flicked past me.
I followed it.
My mother lay near the firepit, half-hidden by smoke. Her hair was spread like spilled ink. One of her hands was outstretched as if she’d been reaching for me and I wanted to reach back. There was a puddle of dark blood pooling beneath her.
My vision narrowed until the world became a tunnel.
Griff’s hand closed over my wrist—not the knife hand, the other one—and he wrenched me up off my knees.
“Tam,” he said, and his voice was suddenly terribly quiet. “Listen to me. They’re sweeping. They’re rounding up anyone left. If you stay, you die.”
“I don’t care,” I spat, because the words were easier than the truth.
He leaned in until his forehead nearly touched mine, breath harsh. “I do.”
His eyes flicked down to the knife in my hand.
“You used it?” he asked, and there was a strange pride buried under the horror.
I nodded once, numb.
“Good,” he rasped, and then his expression hardened. “Now we run.”
A shout rose from the southern slope.
“Over there! I see two more!”
Griff shoved me behind him like he could shield me with his body alone. Then he shifted into a wolf.
Bones cracked. His spine bowed, shoulders broadening, hair erupting into fur. In a blink, the man was gone and a massive wolf stood in his place, dark-coated, powerful, eyes bright with intelligence and rage.
He didn’t hesitate.
He launched himself toward the incoming soldiers with a snarl that shook the air.
The report of a rifle took my breath. Then another.
Bullets bit into dirt and bark as Griff moved like a storm, slamming into one man and knocking him sprawling.
He snapped his jaws, not to tear, not to kill, but to drive them back, to make them flinch, to buy us precious seconds so we could get away.
Seconds. That was all we got.
“Tam!” someone screamed—maybe Rowan, maybe Eira—somewhere in the smoke.
I didn’t answer.
I ran.
I sprinted toward the northern path, toward the cliffs, toward the narrow goat trail that only locals knew. My lungs burned. Tears blurred my vision until the world smeared into gray and black and flame.
Behind me, Griff’s howl ripped through the air. Then he was beside me again, shifting mid-stride in a way that made my stomach flip. One moment he was a wolf, the next, a man.
He grabbed my wrist and hauled me onward, dragging me through trees and rock as bullets cracked behind us.
“Don’t look back,” he panted.
I did anyway.
Smoke swallowed our camp. In the haze, I saw soldiers moving like shadows with guns. I saw a wolf fall and not get back up. I saw a body I couldn’t name because if I did, I’d stop running.
A scream cut off too quickly.
My legs almost buckled.
Griff’s grip tightened like a vise. “Tam,” he snarled, voice thick with panic and fury, “move!”
I moved.
We plunged into the rocks above the inlet, scrambling up a narrow cut in the cliff face where sea wind whipped hard against my face. Griff shoved me ahead, shielding me with his body whenever the path opened to the shoreline.
We climbed until my hands bled and my knees shook.
And when we finally dropped into a hidden crease between boulders—a place where the trees grew thick and the rocks blocked sightlines—Griff pressed a hand over my mouth and held me still.
We listened.
Boots passed by above us. Then there were voices. A dog barked.
Then the sound faded, swallowed by wind and distance.
Griff’s forehead dropped to my hair, his breath shaking.
I was still holding my knife.
My hands were smeared with blood that wasn’t mine.
I swallowed hard and forced the words out through Griff’s palm, muffled and broken.
“They killed them.”
His eyes shut. His jaw clenched until a muscle jumped. When he finally spoke, his voice was a rasp that sounded like it scraped his throat raw.
“Aye,” he whispered. “They did.”
In the silence that followed, with smoke still staining the sky behind us, I realized several things at once.
Skye was gone.
My parents were dead.
And my world was never going to be the same again.