THE WOLF WHO REMEMBERED MY NAME

Chapter 2: Ghosts

My six-year-old bedroom was exactly as I left it — including the claw marks on the inside of the closet.

I didn't remember going upstairs.

After Kieran disappeared, I stood in the black doorway for a full minute, listening to the house tick. The thirteenth chime had left a ringing in my teeth. My hand was still on the cold iron handle, ready to run.

But the door behind me had closed. No wind. No slam. It just... was closed.

"Kieran?" My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be.

Nothing. Only the house breathing. Old houses do that. They settle. This one was inhaling.

I should have left. I should have called Mr. Hale and said, there is a man in my mother's house and his eyes are silver and he knows my name.

Instead I stepped inside. Because the smell hit me.

Pine soap. And cinnamon. And that sweet, almost-rotten smell of old books left in the sun.

My mother's shampoo. I hadn't smelled it in eighteen years. My body knew it before my brain did.

The foyer was stone and dust and dead ivy that had grown in through a broken window. A staircase curled up into darkness. At the top, a hallway. Four doors. Three open. One closed.

The footsteps had come from behind the closed one.

I went up. My boots left prints in dust that was an inch thick, but there were other prints too. Large. Barefoot. Going both ways.

The closed door had no handle. Only a name carved into the wood, at my eye level, in a child's frantic handwriting.

ELENA'S ROOM. KEEP OUT.

I wrote that. When I was six. The night before she left.

I pushed. It opened.

The room was a museum.

Small bed, white sheets yellowed with time but perfectly made. A stuffed rabbit with one ear. Crayons melted into a rainbow puddle on the windowsill where the sun had caught them for eighteen summers. And the closet.

The closet door was closed, and from inside it, there were marks.

Not scratches. Claw marks. Four deep gouges, from the inside out. At my height now, but lower then. Like something small had been locked in and tried to get out.

Or something small had been hiding and something big had tried to get in.

My knees gave. I sat on the floor of my own childhood and the dust came up around me like smoke.

There were glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. Someone had arranged them into constellations. Not the real ones. A wolf. A moon. A little girl holding a wolf's face.

I remembered that. I remembered lying on this bed and my mother pointing.

"That one is us, love. The Moonborn never get lost. We always find our way back."

My mother didn't abandon us. That's what my father always said. She left because she didn't want this life.

But if she left, why was her house full of a child's things? Why were her clothes still in the closet downstairs? I had seen them. Same dress in every size.

Footsteps behind me. Not upstairs now. Right behind me.

I spun.

Kieran stood in the doorway of my room, too big for it. He had to duck slightly. He wasn't breathing hard. He looked like he belonged in this house more than I did.

"You shouldn't be in here," he said quietly.

"It's my room."

"It hasn't been your room for eighteen years."

"Who are you?" The question ripped out of me. "You were at the funeral. You were in the cemetery. You know my name. How?"

He didn't answer. He looked at the claw marks. His jaw tightened until that scar went white.

"Did you do that?" I whispered.

"No."

"Did my mother?"

"No."

"Then who locked me in a closet?"

Silence. Then, so soft I almost missed it:

"We did. To keep you alive."

The floor tilted. I grabbed the bedpost. It was sticky with old sap.

"We?"

"The night they came for you. You were six. You wouldn't shift. You screamed. So Luna put you in here and told you to be quiet, and you were so brave, Elena, you didn't make a sound even when the house burned."

"My house never burned."

"It did. You just don't remember because he made you forget."

"He who?"

Kieran looked at me then, really looked at me, and for the first time his silver eyes weren't cold. They were wrecked.

"Your father."

"My father is dead."

"Jonah is dead," he corrected. "Your father died long before him."

The words didn't make sense. They stacked wrong.

"Jonah was my father."

"Jonah was your uncle. He raised you because your real father couldn't. Because we killed him."

The rabbit fell off the bed. I didn't touch it.

"Get out," I said.

"Elena—"

"Get OUT of my mother's house!"

He didn't move. Then he reached into his black coat and pulled out something small and wooden and placed it on the floor, sliding it toward me like you would to a cornered animal.

A small, hand-carved wolf. The paint chipped. One blue eye.

I had owned this. I had taken it everywhere until the night my mother disappeared and I couldn't find it. I cried for a week.

My throat closed.

"Where did you get that?"

"You gave it to me," he said. "The night I was supposed to kill you. You said, 'Keep him safe for me until I remember.'"

He turned then. He walked out of my room, down the stairs that shouldn't have held his weight, and out the front door that had closed by itself.

It didn't open for him. It opened before he touched it.

I sat alone in a room that wasn't supposed to exist, holding a toy wolf with one blue eye, listening to claw marks inside a closet that no one had opened in eighteen years start to scratch again from the inside.

Softly. Patiently. Like something that had been waiting.