Chapter 2

I don't sleep.

I sit on my bedroom floor with my back against the door and that crayon drawing in my lap, waiting on the sun like it owes me money.

Somebody kept this fifteen years.

Somebody held onto a thing I made when I was six, hauled it around all that time, then climbed my steps in the dark to nail it where I'd see it first thing.

I found you.

Found me. Like I was ever hiding. Like I'm worth the trouble of looking.

Bly's no comfort. She's been curled up small and quiet since the woods — since the Alpha stepped back from us like we were something with a mouth full of teeth.

He said we've got no scent, she says once, near dawn. Frankie. Do we really not have one?

I don't have an answer for her. So I don't give one.

When the light finally comes up gray in the window, I go downstairs, because sitting still one more minute is going to make me scream.

Marla's passed out at the kitchen table. Cheek stuck flat to the wood, empty bottle tipped over by her hand.

I ought to let her lie there. I've got no idea why I don't.

"Ma." I shake her shoulder. "Ma. Wake up. Whose eyes do I have?"

She surfaces slow and mean, the way she always does. "The hell's wrong with—"

"Last night. You said I've got her eyes. Whose eyes, Ma."

And here's the part I'll be turning over in my head for a long time after.

She opens her mouth to answer me. I watch her start. I watch her decide — actually decide — to tell me.

Then something reaches into her and shuts her throat like a fist.

Her jaw keeps working. Nothing comes out. Her eyes go wide and wet and scared, and her hand flies up to her own neck like she's choking on air.

"Ma?" I grab her arms. "Ma, breathe—"

She drags in a breath the second I quit asking. Whatever had her lets go all at once.

"Don't." Her voice is wrecked. "Don't you ever ask me that again. It isn't that I won't tell you, Frankie. I can't. You understand the difference? I'm not allowed."

"Allowed by who?"

"Go to work." She won't look at me now. "And whatever happens today — and something's coming today, I feel it in my back teeth — you don't let them see you scared. Your father never did."

Twice now in one night she's talked about my dead father like she misses him.

My father. The man she's spat on every day for seven years.

I go to work, because I don't know what else to do with my hands.

The Blue Spoon's empty at ten in the morning. Just Dot, the smell of the fryer, and a pot of coffee nobody's coming in to drink.

She takes one look at the cut on my cheek and sets down her rag.

"Sit."

"Dot, I'm okay—"

"Sit down, baby."

I sit.

She pours me a cup I don't want and holds onto it a second before she lets go. "You know I've never once been able to smell you? Three years you've worked my counter."

She says it careful. Like it's a thing she's been sitting on a while, deciding whether to spend.

"Figured that was just my old nose giving out. But it isn't my nose, is it. An Alpha put his eyes on you last night."

I don't ask how she knows. Dot always knows.

"He found me," I say. "Then he told me to go home and forget I ever smelled him."

"'Course he did." She lowers herself into the booth across from me, slow, her knees narrating the whole trip down. "Let me tell you a thing that got told to me. Girl to girl, all the way back."

Her eyes don't leave mine.

"Long while ago, this pack got handed a mate it didn't want. Wrong blood, was how they put it. So the Alpha of the day turned her out. Ran her off into the cold to keep his pack clean and tidy."

"Dot—"

"That winter, half of Coldwater went in the ground. Grown wolves. Healthy pups. Gone between one moon and the next, and no sickness anybody could put a name to." She lets it hang. "That Alpha never said her name again as long as he lived. Night he finally died, they say it was the only word left in his mouth."

My coffee's gone cold in my two hands.

"Why are you telling me this."

"Because you walked in my door this morning wearing the same wrong-blood look she must've worn." Dot reaches under the counter. "And because whatever the Vane boy does to you up in that house today — you keep in mind the council's got a hand up his back, working his mouth like a puppet. Don't you let it break you."

Then she sets a thing on the table between us.

A box. Small, black iron, heavier-looking than any box that size has a right to be. A mark burned deep into the lid, and no keyhole anywhere on it.

"Your daddy left this with me the year before he passed. Said if his girl ever came in looking like the whole world was after her, I was to put it in her hand and tell her to run." Dot's mouth goes thin. "You've got the look, Frankie. So here it is."

I reach for it.

My fingers are almost on the iron —

And the summons slams into my chest like a fist closing around my heart.

The Alpha's call. Come. Now. It hauls on that leash I never asked to wear, and my feet are already shoving me up out of the booth before I've decided a thing.

Across the table, every last bit of color drops out of Dot's face.

"They're calling you up there already?" she whispers. "Then it's decided, girl. They've decided." Her hand closes hard over mine, folding my fingers shut around the box. "Take it. Take it and don't you dare open it inside that house."