Windswept

PrologueI have lost myself. My blood is no longer my own. What now pumps through my body is a thousand years old and not human. My soul has memories of another life neither my mind nor my body experienced. If blood and soul and memories are what make a person, I no longer belong to myself. If they aren’t, then what else is there? I once heard our bonds are what make us. I hope that’s not true. I don’t have any left. My father’s body was swallowed by the river. My mother’s spirit was smothered by whiskey. My friends are not my friends, and I am not even myself—not really. A thousand-year-old soul has made a home inside this body. They say she’s me, that we are one and the same—not two souls fighting for territory. One. So why does that girl—her life, her loss, her love, her sacrifice—feel more like a bedtime story recalled from childhood, and nothing like something I once lived through? Something I once died for? I used to think having something to fight for made a person strong. So I fought. I fought against the belief that my father was dead—the dive team never found him, after all, and even magic couldn’t recover his body from the water. I fought for my mother, forfeited Wildwood and college, the world beyond the walls of our house, and every ounce of my happiness for her, and she still abandoned me. I fought for Vanessa. I trusted her. Trusted Dana and Lucas, and all of them betrayed me. Over and over I fought and fought, and I didn’t gain strength. I didn’t win. I broke. All this time, I’ve been wrong. Dead wrong. Having something to fight for doesn’t make a person strong. Our bonds, our empathy, our very humanity . . . they’re vulnerabilities. Weaknesses. We become most dangerous when we have nothing left to lose.