EMBERBORN

Chapter one

LARKIN

Every wolf in Ashwood Hollow is born knowing exactly what they are. I was the only one who had to be told, over and over, until I believed it the way you believe the sky is blue — not because you checked, but because everyone around you agreed on it first.

You're a wolf, Larkin. You just run late.

I'd clung to that sentence for eighteen years. Tonight, under a moon so full and white it looked freshly carved, I was about to find out whether it was true.

"Stop shaking," Del muttered beside me, elbowing me in the ribs hard enough to leave a bruise. Delphine Ashcroft had been my best friend since we were six years old and she'd bitten a boy for putting mud in my hair; some things about her had never softened. "You're making me nervous, and I already shifted last spring. I have nothing to be nervous about."

"I'm not shaking."

"You're vibrating. It's worse."

Around us, the Hollow's entire bowl-shaped amphitheater had filled with pack — hundreds of bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder in the firelight, all of them dressed in the pale ceremonial grey that meant witness, all of them here for the same reason I was, though none of them were sick with it the way I was. The Hallowmoon Rite happened once a year, on the one night when the veil between a wolf's human skin and their wolf soul went thin enough to tear. You stood in the circle. You let the moon in. You shifted, or you didn't, and if you didn't, it meant you were about to turn eighteen and never would.

Nobody in Ashwood Hollow had ever not shifted. Not in four generations.

"He's looking at you again," Del said, in the particular voice she used when she was trying to distract me and failing spectacularly at picking a good distraction.

I didn't have to ask who.

Knox Ravenscroft stood at the edge of the platform where the Alpha's family always stood, arms crossed, dark hair pushed back from a face that had never once, in the entire time I'd known him, looked at me like I belonged in the same room as him. He was twenty, all coiled muscle and inherited authority, next in line to lead the largest pack territory in the Ashwood Reach, and he had made it a personal hobby since we were fifteen to remind me that I did not, in his estimation, belong here.

Late bloomer, he'd called me once, in front of half the training yard, in a tone that made the word sound like an insult instead of a fact. Or maybe just broken.

I still hated him for it. I hated it more that some traitorous, illogical part of me had spent three years cataloguing every time his eyes found mine anyway, like my body had decided his attention was a kind of gravity I wasn't allowed to opt out of.

"He's not looking at me," I said. "He's looking at the fire behind me. Big difference."

"Sure. That's why he's been doing it for four years."

The Alpha's voice cut through the crowd before I could argue — Knox's father, Councilman Ravenscroft, tall and silver-templed, raising both arms to call the Rite to order. The noise of the crowd folded into silence so fast it felt like the whole Hollow had inhaled at once.

"Tonight, the moon claims her children," he said, the old words, the same ones spoken every year. "Come forward and be known."

One by one, the eighteen-year-olds of Ashwood Hollow walked into the circle and shifted. It happened the way it always happened — a shudder, a snap of bone reshaping itself, fur rolling out across skin like water finding its level, until a wolf stood where a person had been, and the crowd roared its approval, and the next name was called. Twelve names. Twelve wolves. I watched every single one and felt the sick, shaking thing in my chest get worse and worse and worse.

"Larkin Vale."

My name landed in the silence like a dropped stone.

I walked into the circle because my legs remembered how to do it even though the rest of me had gone somewhere very far away. The firelight was too bright. The crowd was too quiet. Somewhere to my left, I felt Knox's attention land on me the way it always did, but this time it didn't feel like gravity. It felt like a held breath, like even he — even Knox Ravenscroft, who had spent four years being certain about exactly what I was — had a flicker of doubt about what was going to happen next.

I closed my eyes. I reached for the wolf I'd been promised was inside me, the one Del had, the one every person I'd ever loved had. I reached the way I'd practiced reaching my whole life, in secret, in the woods behind my house, in the mirror at 3 a.m. when no one could see me fail.

Nothing answered.

No shudder. No snap of bone. No fur.

Just me, standing very still in a circle of firelight, entirely and undeniably human, while four hundred wolves realized, in the same horrified heartbeat, that I wasn't one of them at all.

The silence didn't last. Silence never does, in a crowd that size, once it finds a reason to break.

"She's not shifting —"

"Eighteen years and nothing —"

"That's not possible, no wolf has ever —"

I heard Del's voice somewhere in the noise, sharp and furious, telling people to shut up, and I heard none of it land, because I was watching Knox. He'd come off the platform. He was walking toward the circle with the particular stillness he got right before he did something decisive, and for one absurd, humiliating second I thought — he's going to help me. I actually thought that.

He didn't.

"Get back," he said, not to me — to the crowd pressing in, close enough now that I could feel the heat of a dozen half-shifted bodies, teeth already lengthening on instinct, the animal in every one of them recognizing a wrongness in the circle and wanting, badly, to correct it. His voice carried the flat authority of a future Alpha, and the crowd obeyed it instantly, stepping back, giving me room I hadn't asked for and didn't know what to do with.

Then he looked at me. Really looked, for the first time in four years, like he was seeing something he hadn't accounted for.

"What are you," he said. Not are you okay. Not even a real question — a demand, low and rough, like the words had been dragged out of him against his will.

"I don't know," I said, and it was the first completely honest thing I'd said all night.

That was when the fire behind me — the great ceremonial bonfire that had burned steady and orange through twelve shiftings — surged without warning into a column of white-gold flame twice its previous height, and every single wolf in the amphitheater, Knox included, staggered back from the circle like they'd been struck.

I felt it too. Not heat. Hunger. Something ancient and starving waking up beneath my sternum, uncoiling for the first time in eighteen years, and beneath the roar of the crowd and the c***k of the flames I heard — I swear I heard — a voice that wasn't mine at all, low and old as mountains, saying a single word into the marrow of my bones.

Finally.

My vision went gold at the edges. Somewhere very far away, Councilman Ravenscroft was shouting an order I couldn't make out, and Knox was moving toward me again, faster this time, reaching for my arm like he meant to pull me out of the circle by force —

And that was the exact moment the mark bloomed across the back of my hand: a spiral of ink-dark scales, spreading from my wrist to my knuckles like something was being born under my skin.

The last time anyone in Ashwood Hollow had seen that mark, it had ended in a war.

(To be continued...)