They called me water. On the night of my mating rite, in front of four hundred wolves, the Alpha I had loved for three years looked at me and said my blood was water. The bond broke. The fever came. By morning I was walking north with a dead woman's gloves in my pack and a sickness in my spine that nobody survives. The Shadow Pack should have killed me at the boundary stone. Instead their Alpha gave me a cabin and a locked door - and then a boy lost his mind in the courtyard, and I opened my mouth, and every wolf there knelt. Now the Council knows what I am. Two hundred years ago they burned my bloodline alive under a black tree, and they have been watching for one of us ever since. Kael says he is protecting me. Rian says he is protecting a ghost. And Damon, the man who called me water, is camped outside the wall with a knife and a warning. The seal is breaking. And I am the seal.