chapter 6 Frost on Glass

The door didn't open. It exploded inward.

I know it was locked because I locked it myself. I also know Rhys Calloway doesn't believe in locks when a girl says nothing and the silence on the other side of a door sounds wrong.

Three bodies burst into the room. Kieran came in low and fast, eyes sweeping every corner. Rhys came in straight and silent, his gaze landing on me and not leaving. Sable was last, and he stopped in the doorway like he'd hit a wall.

Nobody said anything.

I was standing at the window with my hand still flat against the glass, and the silver frost was still spreading, branching outward from my palm in delicate, impossible lines. The crescent moon. The ring of wolves. It glowed faintly, like moonlight trapped under ice.

"Don't touch it," Rhys said sharply.

"I'm already touching it."

"Then stop."

I pulled my hand back. The pattern stayed. It pulsed once, soft as a heartbeat, and then began to fade, thread by thread, as if it had only wanted to be seen.

"What was that?" Kieran asked. He sounded almost normal. Almost. "Tell me you've seen that before. Tell me it's a school thing. A very rare, very poorly advertised school thing."

"It's not a school thing," I said.

"I was afraid you'd say that."

Rhys had crossed the room. He stood beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat of him, and studied the last of the frost with a face that gave away nothing.

"Where were you," he said, very quietly, "when it started?"

"Here. At the window." My voice was unsteady. "I heard someone singing."

Silence.

It was a different silence from before. Heavier. I looked up and found all three of them looking at me, and on one face in particular, something had cracked wide open.

Sable.

He hadn't moved from the doorway. He was white to the lips, his dark green eyes gone enormous, and one hand had come up to grip the frame like he needed it to stay standing.

"What did it sound like?" he asked.

It was a full sentence. Seven words. Nobody in that room breathed.

"A woman," I said slowly. "Low. Sad. It was a lullaby, but not one I knew. Except..." I swallowed. "Except I did. I knew every word."

"In what language?"

"I don't know. I've never heard it spoken."

"Can you say it?"

"Sable," Rhys said warningly.

"Can you say it?"

I looked at him. Something in his voice, an urgent, trembling hunger, made me answer without thinking.

I opened my mouth and the first line fell out.

It wasn't a language I could translate. It wasn't one I could even spell. But it came out smooth and certain, a low, liquid phrase that sounded like water over stones, and the moment it left my lips, the fire in the grate flared bright and went still.

Sable made a sound I had never heard a person make.

It was half a breath, half a sob. His hand slid down the doorframe and he sank, slowly, to one knee on the stone floor, like someone whose strings had been cut.

"Sable!" Kieran lunged for him.

"I'm fine." The words were raw. "I'm fine. Give me a moment."

"You are clearly not..."

"I heard it once," Sable said.

Kieran stopped.

"I was seven." Sable's voice was hoarse and very quiet, and he was looking at the floor, not at any of us. "My grandmother took me to the old gate at the edge of our land. The one we're forbidden to open. She said every Thorne child had to stand there once, in the dark, and listen. She wouldn't tell me why." A long breath shook through him. "I stood there for an hour. And then, from the other side of the stone, someone began to sing."

My skin prickled.

"A woman," he went on. "I never saw her. My grandmother put her hand over my eyes, but I heard it. That exact melody. Those exact words." He lifted his head at last, and the look in his face made my throat close. "She said: Remember this, child. One day it will come looking for someone, and you must not be afraid."

"Come looking for who?" I whispered.

He didn't answer. He didn't need to. His eyes said it for him.

"That's not possible," Kieran said.

"I know."

"A gate that's been shut for hundreds of years doesn't sing."

"I know."

"And it certainly doesn't sing to a girl who's never been south of the Ashfen border."

"Kieran," said Rhys.

"I'm just saying..."

"I know what you're saying." Rhys hadn't taken his eyes off the window. "I'm saying it too. I'm just not saying it out loud yet."

I looked from one of them to another. The fire crackled. My wolf was awake and alert in the back of my mind, ears pricked, trembling like a plucked string.

"Someone tell me," I said. "Please. Whatever it is. I'd rather know."

Rhys closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they were steady.

"Three nights ago," he said, "I dreamed of a woman in a white dress standing at the edge of a frozen lake. She was singing. I couldn't hear the words, but I woke up with my heart in my throat." He paused. "I thought it was nothing. I told no one."

"I dreamed it too," Kieran said, so quietly I almost missed it.

His face was bare. No joke, no smile, no armor. Just a boy staring at the floor.

"Two weeks ago. Exactly the same." He cleared his throat. "I thought it was stress."

All of us turned toward Sable. He nodded once.

"A month," he said. "Every night."

The room went very, very still.

Three heirs from three territories, hundreds of miles apart, raised by three different packs under three different laws. Three boys who had never once, in four years of academy life, shared a secret.

All three of them had dreamed the same woman, the same lake, the same song.

And all three of them had started dreaming it in the week before my eighteenth birthday.

"It's me," I said. My voice sounded very far away. "Isn't it? It's me. She's been calling me. She's been calling all of you, to find me."

"Not calling," said Sable. "Guiding."

"What's the difference?"

"A call asks someone to come." He met my eyes, and his own were fierce and unguarded. "A guide makes sure they don't get lost on the way."

A chill rolled over me. The little room suddenly felt much too small.

"Who is she?" I asked.

None of them could answer.

My wolf could.

Mara, she said, very softly. You already know.

I did. That was the horror of it. A cold, quiet certainty had settled in the base of my skull, and I didn't want to look at it, because looking at it would make it true.

Don't, I whispered.

She sang to me, said my wolf. Before I was born. Before I was asleep. She sang to me from the inside.

My knees went weak. Rhys caught my elbow before I fell, and I let him.

"She's my mother," I breathed. "The woman at the gate. The one who sings. She's..."

I couldn't say the rest.

"She's dead," said a thin, dry, unfamiliar voice from the doorway. "Or at least, she was supposed to be."

Four heads snapped around.

An old woman stood on the threshold, small and straight-backed, in a gray Council robe with a silver clasp at the throat. Her white hair was twisted into a knot. Her eyes were the sharp, pale blue of winter sky, and they were fixed on the faded frost on my window with an expression I can only describe as grief wearing a mask of scholarship.

Brenna Oake. The examiner who had looked at me too long in the training yard and said nothing.

"I've been waiting twelve years for that pattern to appear," she said softly. "And I confess, child, I did not expect it to be so beautiful."

She stepped into the room and shut the door behind her.

"Now," she said. "Sit down, all of you. We have very little time. And I'm afraid I need to tell you who killed your mother."