Chapter 3

The voice came four nights before I left.

11:03 p.m. Singing. A woman's voice, low and warm, curling through my skull like smoke through a keyhole.

I sat straight up in the dark with my heart trying to climb out of my throat.

"Happy birthday, Wren."

"You're a week early," I said out loud. To my own head. Like an idiot.

"You were born a week late. Your father was in Oslo. Your mother told the doctor to write down the day the announcements had already gone out for." A laugh. "Eighteen years of the wrong birthday, and you've never once been on time for anything. Now you know why."

"Who are you?"

"Call me Vesper. I'm the part of you they buried."

Here's what you need to understand: I was seventeen years old and I had never shifted. Not once. The only Thorne in nine generations born without a wolf. My brothers shifted at twelve. I got nothing but silence and a family that watched me like a fuse.

I should have been terrified.

I was, for about ten minutes. Then something strange happened — I felt less alone than I had in a year, and that fact broke my heart more than anything my family ever did.

That's how low the bar had fallen. A voice in my head was better company than seven people who share my blood.

Vesper isn't imaginary. I need you to know that.

By the second night, I could hear the housekeeper's radio from four hundred yards, through two stone walls. I could hear the lake moving under the cabin floor. I could hear the gate guard's heartbeat change when he lied to dispatch about his cigarette break.

And once — just once — I heard a thought that wasn't mine.

The groundskeeper walked past the lodge and I heard, clear as a bell, poor kid, nobody's fed that girl in months, and his mouth never moved.

I threw up in the sink after that one.

"It settles," Vesper said. "By the end of the first week. It always does."

"How would you know?"

"Because you're not the first."

She wouldn't explain that. She still won't.

On my last night, she asked me for one thing.

"Give them one chance. One dinner. Sit at that table and let me look at them. If I'm wrong about what I'm seeing, you can spend your whole life hating them. But look first."

So I put on a clean shirt and walked into my family's dining room for the first time in four months.

Here's the part that finished me.

The housekeeper set a plate in front of me and she wasn't surprised. Not a blink. Not a lovely to see you, Miss Wren. Like a ghost at the table is just Tuesday in this house.

My father came in on a call. My mother came in with three binders. My brothers came in arguing about fabric samples, of all the stupid things — and then all six of them went abruptly, unnaturally silent and started tapping at their phones.

Six men. One woman. All quiet. All texting.

Talking around me. Over me. About me, maybe.

Never to me.

I ate every bite. I don't know why. Maybe I wanted to be able to say I gave them the full hour.

At minute fifty-eight, my mother looked up. Right at me. For one entire second, her eyes were on my face.

My whole stupid, starving heart lifted.

Then she said, "Theo, tell Kaden the west clearing's booked," and looked back down.

I stood up before dessert.

"I'm sorry, my girl," Vesper said quietly, as I walked out into the dark. "I looked. I don't understand them either."

I packed in nine minutes. Everything I own fits in one bag, because a girl who's been erased learns to travel light.

I left three things behind: the green dress, the pack crest ring, and a note on my mother's pillow.

I waited a year. Don't come looking. — W.

Then I crossed the county line at 12:14 a.m. on my real eighteenth birthday, and I did not cry.

I made it two hundred miles before I pulled into a gas station under a buzzing yellow light and did the one thing I'd promised myself I wouldn't.

I checked my phone.

Eight hours gone. A year invisible. I told myself even a Thorne would have noticed by now — the missing bike, the empty lodge, the note on the pillow.

The screen lit up my face in the dark.

No texts.

No voicemails.

Zero missed calls.

I stood in that parking lot and laughed until my ribs ached, and then I laughed until I was crying, and a trucker asked if I was okay and I told him I'd never been better.

Then I dropped the phone in the trash, got back on my bike, and rode toward the only people on earth who had ever put my name in writing.

I had six days to reach the Bloodguard.

What I didn't know was that on the eighth — the day they thought was my birthday — my mother would walk into an empty bedroom and start screaming.