Silver Bonds (Everpine Academy #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The letter sits on the kitchen table for three days before I open it.

I don't know why I wait. Aunt Rosa is dead. The house still smells like her, pine cleaner and stale air from rooms left closed too long.

Her reading glasses sit on the counter beside a half-empty mug of tea. Cold now. Three days cold. I keep meaning to pour it out and I keep walking past it instead, something in me unwilling to erase even that small ordinary evidence of her.

The glasses have a small chip on the left frame where she dropped them two summers ago and had them repaired badly. Every time I pass them I see it. The smallest most irrelevant detail in the world, and the one that makes my chest go tight.

The envelope is heavy cream paper, no return address, handwritten in ink so dark it looks like it bled through from the other side. My name. NOVA BARDOT. All capitals, like a summons. Like whoever wrote it knew I'd need the extra force to open it.

There are no stamps, which means someone left it here. Walked up to this door. Came to this house where a woman just died, in the days right after, while I was still moving through the rooms in the daze of early grief.

Maybe while I was asleep. While I was standing in the backyard staring at the sky, pulled outside by something I could never name.

I make coffee I don't drink. The smell of it fills the kitchen and fades. I'm still sitting at the table with both hands wrapped around a mug that's gone cold, staring at the cream envelope and not opening it.

I shower. I stand in the bathroom afterward with the towel around my shoulders, watching the fog clear from the mirror until my own reflection comes back to me, feature by feature.

Dark hair, wet and tangled, plastered against my neck.

Brown eyes that look too exhausted for eighteen, red at the rims, the circles beneath them deep enough that I look like I haven't slept in days. Which is accurate.

I've been doing that a lot lately. Disappearing myself in small ways, just to see if I come back.

On the third morning I sit down across from it, pull it toward me, and tear it open.

The first page is a photograph.

Two people, young, standing in front of trees I don't recognize, tall pines with snow at their feet and a sky behind them sharp and blue from high altitude. The woman has my cheekbones, my nose, that tilt of the head I've only ever seen on my own face in mirrors when something surprises me.

She's laughing at something outside the frame, her whole body angled toward it, completely unguarded. The man beside her has his hand resting at the small of her back, easy and certain.

My hands go still on the paper.

My parents died in a car accident when I was eight months old.

That's what I've always been told. That's what's on the death certificates Rosa kept in the fireproof box under her bed, the ones I found when I was eleven and she snatched from my hands so fast her coffee went sideways off the counter and she never explained why her hands were shaking.

She was grieving, I thought. I spent years convincing myself of things because the people you love keep secrets and you don't always have the vocabulary to name what you're sensing.

I didn't know what I was sensing. I just knew it was there.

I turn the photograph over.

On the back, in that same dark ink: They were alive in this photo. One week later, the Council found them.

My chest tightens. My breath goes shallow without my permission, something in my body understanding before my mind catches up, some animal part of me going quiet and cold and still.

There's a second page.

Nova,

Your aunt made me promise not to send this until she was gone. She thought she could keep you safe by keeping you ignorant. She was wrong, and I think she knew it by the end. The cough that took her wasn't natural. But you already suspect that, don't you? You found the marks on her door.

I stop reading.

My chair scrapes back so hard it hits the wall. The sound of it is too loud in the quiet house and completely wrong. My pulse is hammering in my throat as I cross the hallway in four steps and push open Rosa's bedroom door.

My palms press flat against the frame. I need something solid to hold onto. My body has gone cold from the inside out, cold from understanding something you can't ‘unfeel’.

The scratches are still there.

I found them two nights ago when I was boxing up her things. I was taking books off her nightstand, mechanically, moving through grief when it gets too large to feel directly, and I reached past the stack and my fingers caught the gouges.

Three of them, at shoulder height, cut deep into the wood at a downward angle like something dragged hard from high to low. Each one is about four inches long, too wide for a human hand.

A dog did it, I thought at first. There is no dog. There has never been a dog in this house, not in eighteen years, not once.

Maybe it was old damage, decorative molding gone rough, my grief working on me until ordinary things looked significant. I've been convincing myself of lies for eighteen years.

I press my fingers into the grooves now. The wood is splintered at the edges, raised, raw like recent damage rather than old. Something with significant force tore into this door, something with claws long enough to span four inches and strong enough to take the wood with them.

And then someone, after, painted over it. A color that was close but not exact, and I can see the seam of it if I look at the right angle, a clean line where old beige ends and slightly different beige begins.

The house is quiet around me. It has that silence where a person used to be and isn't anymore, a silence with texture to it, something almost audible in all the small sounds Rosa used to make that aren't happening.

My stomach drops through the floor.

I go back to the letter.

Your parents were not human. You are not human. I know that isn't what you want to hear. Rosa raised you to believe otherwise, and she did it because she loved you and because she was terrified. She was trying to protect what was left of you.

Your mother and father were Silverpelt wolves.

The last of a bloodline the Council spent twenty years hunting to extinction.

They murdered your parents, Nova. Tore them apart in front of witnesses.

You were eight months old and hidden in a neighbor's basement and they didn't find you.

That is the only reason you are alive to read this.

The Silverpelt wolves died screaming. Every single one of them. Your parents died screaming. That is not a detail I include to hurt you. It's a detail I include so you understand exactly what you're walking into.

You'll be next. You may already be marked.

I set the letter down and press both hands flat on the table.

The kitchen is quiet. Outside, a car passes, the sound of it impossibly ordinary, someone driving somewhere unremarkable while the world underneath me splits open.

The morning light through the window above the sink is pale and flat, hitting the ceramic glaze of Rosa's tea mug.

My hands won't stop shaking. I watch them and I don't try to make them stop.

I've healed fast my whole life. Faster than anyone I know, fast enough that I learned early not to mention it, not to let gym teachers or school nurses see how quickly a bruise faded or a cut closed.

I've always been slightly too strong for my size, slightly too steady in the cold. I ran faster than the boys in my grade when I was twelve and didn't understand why I wasn't supposed to.

I have dreams, vivid and sensory, of forests I've never been to, of running through moonlight on four legs, of a sound in my chest that isn't quite a heartbeat.

I thought I was strange, a little broken, something in me wired wrong.

Rosa knew. She knew all of it. The whole time she was holding me and feeding me and driving me to school she was carrying this.

Now she's dead. It might not have been natural.

There are marks on her bedroom door. The photograph on my table shows two people who were torn apart before I was old enough to understand what loss meant.

She kept this to protect me but it killed her anyway.

The tea mug on the counter catches the light. Small blue flowers on white ceramic. I remember the shop where she chose them, the smell of paint and something sweet. We got two. Mine broke the summer after and she gave me hers without making it into anything.

That was who she was. She just gave things.

My throat closes.

I pick the letter back up.

My name doesn't matter. What matters is that I've been looking for Silverpelt survivors for years, and you are the last one. I found out about you three months ago. The Council found out about you four months ago. You have a month, maybe less, before they come to wherever you are.

Staying is not an option.

There is a place. Everpine Academy, in the Colorado mountains.

A school for our kind. They'll accept you on my recommendation, late enrollment, no questions asked.

It's where your parents met. It's also where the Council has significant influence, which makes it the most dangerous place I could send you.

I'm sending you anyway.

The Academy has resources you need. Knowledge about what you are. People who knew your parents, who may remember them with something other than fear. People who, if they understood what you are, might have reason to protect you.

Might.

I won't lie to you. Going there is walking into the fire. But the alternative is waiting here for the Council to find you alone in the house where your aunt died, with no weapons and no knowledge and no one who knows what you are.

There is an enrollment packet at the bottom of this envelope. A scholarship already arranged. Housing already arranged. A bus ticket for Thursday.

You don't have to go. You could run. But they'll find you running.

I'm sorry I can't give you a better choice.