Novels by everettdelaney7

Clara woke braced for the cold.She had woken to it every morning for sixteen years: the damp stone of the scullery floor, the frost on the inside of the shutters, the bitter reek of lye that never quite left her hands. Some part of her was certain she would open her eyes to the river, the snow, the crimson stares of the Royal Lycans closing in. Or worse, to the cold iron of an executioner's block and the whisper of a blade.Instead, she woke to warmth.It wrapped around her like a living thing, thick and heavy and fragrant. Cedar smoke. Dry birch. Something sweet beneath it, honey and crushed herbs. For a long, disoriented moment she lay perfectly still, her lashes fluttering against the light, convinced she had finally died and this was whatever the Moon Goddess granted to the very tired.Then the pain arrived, dull and deep, a bruise behind her breastbone where something had been torn out by the roots, and she knew she was alive.Her eyes snapped open.The ceiling soared above her,

The snow parted like a curtain drawn by a giant hand.Clara stood swaying in the screaming dark, her ruined dress frozen to her thighs, and watched the pines give up their monsters.The first emerged on her left, so large that for one dizzy heartbeat she mistook it for a boulder uprooted from the earth. It was a wolf, but only in the way a mountain is a hill. Its shoulders rode higher than her head. Fur the color of wet slate bristled along a spine that rolled with muscle, and strapped across its chest and flanks was armor: black leather, laced and studded with threads of silver that glittered in the blizzard like frozen lightning. Claws as long as her forearm sank into the snow with a heavy, deliberate crunch.The second came from the right. The third from behind.Within seconds she was ringed by a dozen of them, a slow, silent circle of crimson eyes, each pair burning like a coal in the dark. Steam rolled from their jaws. The smell hit her next, ozone and iron and old pine sap, the

They did not let her walk.Two guards hauled Clara through the Great Hall by her arms, her boots scraping uselessly over the stone. The pack parted for her. Not one hand reached out. Not one voice rose. Women pulled their children back, as though what had happened to her might be contagious. Others stared with open, greedy fascination.At the hall's great doors, a guard ripped the gray pack coat from her shoulders, the only warm thing she owned. It was frayed, patched at the elbows, and she had worn it for six winters. He tossed it onto the floor like rubbish."Pack property," he sneered.The night air hit her in her thin servant's dress like a slap of ice.They dragged her down the castle steps, through the courtyard, and out through the northern gate. Every step sent fresh agony through her chest, where the severed bond throbbed like a torn muscle. Blood still dripped from her chin. Her wolf, so recently awake, was a thin, wounded whimper at the back of her mind, curled around its o

The scullery stank of lye and roasted boar, and Clara Vance had been scrubbing the same silver platter for ten minutes without seeing it.Through the archway, the Great Hall of Silvercrest blazed with a thousand candles. Banners of white and steel hung from the rafters. Three hundred wolves in their finest furs packed the stone floor, and their voices rolled together into one hungry roar. Tonight Ethan Vance would be named Alpha Heir in full and choose the woman who would rule beside him.Everyone in Silvercrest knew who that woman should be. Almost no one knew who he had promised her would be.You're the only one who sees me, Ethan had whispered eight months ago, in the hay loft above the stables, his mouth against her temple. When I take the dais, I'll find a way. Just wait for me, Clara.She had waited. She had waited through every cold dawn, through every cruel word from the pack women, through the years since her parents' bodies were dragged home from a rogue attack and she was l