Chapter One

Gabriel paced the kitchen like a caged animal. His mother ignored him and kept her eyes on the cutting board, her knife moving with the steady, unhurried rhythm of someone who had learned long ago that her son needed space to find his words. She’d always been patient with him that way.

“Mum.” He stopped at the end of the island. “I know she’s out there. Two days ago I started to feel it. I started to dream of her.”

Sylvia’s knife went still. She looked up at her firstborn with an expression he hadn’t seen directed at him in a long time — something close to wonder. “Your mate?”

He dropped onto the stool across from her and nodded, the word hitting him differently when she said it out loud. “I’ve never felt anything like this before. But it’s so faint…” He pressed a fist against his chest. “Sometimes I think I’m making it up. That it’s just wishful thinking.”

“Tell me what you feel.”

“A pull. Right here.” He tapped his sternum. “Like something’s trying to get my attention from a very long way off.”

Sylvia set down her knife. “Does it ever feel stronger?”

He frowned, thinking back. “When I passed through Hattersville on my way home. It was stronger there.”

“Hattersville is north,” she said, in the casual tone she used when she wasn’t being casual at all.

Gabriel stared at her. “You mean it gets stronger the closer I get?”

She reached across the island and covered his hand with hers. “The pull is the compass the Goddess gave us — so that mates can always find each other, even across great distances. Even if they become separated.” She paused. “Usually it only comes after the bond is formed. In all my years, I’ve never heard of anyone feeling it before they’d even met.” She squeezed his hand. “Which tells me the Goddess has been paying attention to you after all.”

He was off the stool before she finished the sentence. “I can find her.”

“You can.” Sylvia raised a calm hand. “After you eat. Then you can go pack.”

He packed the truck with the focused efficiency of a man who’d spent years living out of a bag. He didn’t know if this would take days or weeks or months, so he packed for all three. Before he closed the tailgate he spread an old paper map across the hood, uncapped a marker, and put an X on Oakridge, Tennessee. He circled Hattersville. Everything else, he’d figure out as he went.

His parents came out to see him off. His mother stood with her arms wrapped around herself, eyes bright. His father stood slightly apart, jaw set, with the particular expression Gabriel had catalogued years ago as I think this is foolish but I know better than to say so. Alexander Shepherd was not a man who believed in chasing ghosts. But he knew his son, and he’d stopped wasting words trying to hold him back from things he’d already decided to do.

“Take care of yourself, son.” He pulled Gabriel into a hug that could have cracked a lesser man’s ribs.

His mother cupped his face in both hands, the way she had since he was small. “Go bring her home, Gabe.” Her voice was steady but her eyes were wet.

He kissed her cheek. “I’ll call. I love you both.” He climbed in the truck before he could make it weird.

The journey was harder than he’d expected, and he’d expected it to be hard.

His internal compass was imprecise at best — more a feeling in his chest than any kind of navigable signal. He’d drive to the next town and try to take stock. Stronger or weaker? Closer or further? If the pull dimmed, he backtracked. If it brightened, he pushed on. The first two weeks were slow and circuitous, full of wrong turns and dead ends. But gradually, as he worked his way north and east, the signal sharpened. He took fewer wrong turns. He backtracked less. The hope that had been quietly suffocating under years of disappointment began, cautiously, to breathe.

He slept where he could — motels when he had the patience for them, the truck seat when he didn’t, the bed of the truck under his sleeping bag on clear nights when the sky was enormous and the air smelled like whatever state he was passing through. He ate gas station food and diner specials and once, memorably, nothing at all for a full day because he’d been too locked onto the signal to stop.

The dreams intensified as he drew closer, and grew more maddening for it. She was always there — a shadow at the edge of the trees, a figure disappearing around a corner — close enough that he could feel her presence, never close enough to see her face. She wept sometimes. The sound of it did something ugly to his chest. And underneath the weeping, underneath all of it, was a fear so deep and persistent that he felt it in his own stomach when he woke. Why is she afraid? What was happening to her, out there in the dark beyond the tree line?

“I’m coming,” he told her shadow, in the way people say things in dreams without embarrassment. “Don’t be afraid. I’m coming.”

He was somewhere in the Catskills when the weather turned. Rain sheeted down the windshield and the roads went slick and treacherous, so he found a motel in the nearest small town and called it a night. He dumped his duffel on the bed — he needed a laundromat, the bag was getting critical — showered the road off himself, and stretched out on a mattress that had lived a hard life.

His phone had accumulated a small backlog of messages.

Where are you now, man?

Any luck?

And from his mother, predictably: Did you eat today?

But it was Ryan’s message that stopped him.

Hey, I was talking to Chrissy about this. Do you think maybe you haven’t found her yet because she just came of age? You know Chrissy is a few months younger than me — I saw her practically every day and felt nothing until her birthday. What if it’s the same thing?

Gabriel read it twice. Then set the phone down on his chest and looked at the water-stained ceiling.

If Ryan was right — and the timing fit with painful precision, the pull beginning in mid-August — then his mate had just turned eighteen. He was twenty-eight. He ran through the implications slowly, the way you probe a sore tooth. She could still be in high school. She would have had no idea he existed until a few weeks ago. She was eighteen, and he was a decade older, and she was somewhere frightened in the dark of their shared dreams, and he had no idea what he was walking into.

He called his mother.

“Ryan may be right,” she said, after he’d explained. “It makes sense.”

“It’s a disaster, is what it is.” He stared at the ceiling. “What do I do?”

“You go slowly. You don’t arrive and announce yourself and expect her to fall into your arms. She’s young, Gabe, and apparently already frightened of something. You build trust. You prove you’re safe.” A pause. “The Goddess paired you for a reason. The age difference is not the obstacle it feels like right now.”

“She’s a kid, Mum.”

“She’s your mate. And you’ve been waiting ten years for her.” His mother’s voice was gentle but firm. “Don’t you dare let pride get in the way of that.”

He lay awake for a long time after he hung up, listening to the rain against the window. She was out there. Young and scared and his. He wasn’t going to rush it. But he wasn’t going to stop either.

The rain eventually coaxed him to sleep.

The dream forest was familiar now. He’d walked it so many times it felt like a place he actually knew — the ancient oak standing alone in the white pines, the blackberry hedge along the western edge of the clearing, the collapsed cellar hole and the old orchard gone wild. The great finger of rock at the northern tip pointing skyward like a landmark. He always had the sense it was a real place. The detail was too specific, too consistent, to be invention.

Tonight something was wrong.

The pain hit his shoulder like a hammer blow — a sharp, wrenching agony that dropped him to one knee before he understood it wasn’t his. He clutched the shoulder instinctively, panting, and scanned the tree line. There — a shadow at the far edge of the clearing, barely visible, moving wrong. Her shoulder was hanging at an angle that made his stomach turn.

He watched, frozen in horror, as she grabbed a low branch with the injured arm and used it to wrench the joint back into the socket.

The scream that tore out of her tore out of him too. He felt the grinding, nauseating pain as if his own bones were moving. She folded to her knees in the dirt and he went with her, the shared agony dropping him into a crouch, hands braced against the cold ground. By the time the worst of it passed he was already moving, cutting across the clearing, closing the distance between them for the first time.

She heard him. She was on her feet before he reached her, spinning toward him, eyes wide and wild in the half-dark.

“Who’s there?”

Her voice stopped him dead. He’d heard her cry before, heard her weep — but never speak. It was the kind of voice that caught in the chest, clear and frightened and real.

She felt him. She was looking almost directly at him and the terror in her face was the worst thing he’d ever seen. I’m not the thing to be afraid of, he wanted to say. Whatever you’re running from — it’s not me.

But she was already gone. She turned and ran — fast, faster than he expected, swift and light-footed as a deer — and the shadows swallowed her before he could follow.

He checked out at four in the morning. He sat in the truck in the empty motel parking lot with the engine running, the rain finally easing off, and tried to get his bearings.

She was hurt. She was frightened. Something, or someone, was hurting her.

And somewhere ahead of him, the thread in his chest pulled north.

He put the truck in gear.

Vermont announced itself subtly — a shift in the light, a change in the quality of the hills. The pull by now was less a gentle tug and more a physical compulsion, like a hand on his collar steering him off the highway and onto roads that got smaller and quieter and more winding until he arrived, almost bewildered, in a town so small it seemed to exist mostly as a suggestion.

Mount Tabor. Population: apparently not many. A gas station and mini-mart. A garage with a tow truck so battered and characterful it could have had a name. A snack bar with picnic tables. A regional high school sitting at the southern edge of town like it served three counties worth of kids who had nowhere else to go. A slate quarry beyond that. And to the north, the only thing resembling lodging: a cluster of small cabins arranged around a sagging farmhouse, with a hand-painted sign reading Caty’s Cottages and a vacancy notice dangling from one hook.

He sat in the truck for a moment looking at it. Then he got out.

The farmhouse door opened into a converted foyer that served as an office — counter, worn chairs, guest register, keys on a wall-mounted board. He knocked and waited.

The woman who appeared was magnificently unconcerned with making a good first impression. Blue hair. Pink muumuu. Glasses she produced from somewhere and deployed to peer at him with open suspicion.

“Can I help you?”

“I’d like to rent a cabin.”

“Are you lost?”

“No, ma’am.” And then the idea arrived, quietly perfect. “I’m interviewing for a teaching position at the high school.”

She studied him for another moment, recalibrating. “Huh. Thought you might be one of those drug runners from the city.” She shot a hand across the counter. “Caty Haskings.”

He shook it. Firm grip, gnarled fingers. “Gabriel Shepherd.”

“Most of my cabins aren’t worth sleeping in, to be honest with you. But I keep a couple decent. Week by week suit you?”

“Perfectly.”

“Cash. In advance.”

He paid. She handed him a key. “Number seven. There’s a kitchenette. For actual food you’ll want to drive back to Rutberg — forty-five minutes east. No ATMs here either, so plan accordingly. And I don’t cook.” She said this last part with the finality of a woman who’d been asked.

Cabin seven was humble in the specific way of places that had once tried and stopped trying sometime around 1974. Shag carpet. Wood-paneled walls. An avocado bathroom that was aggressively ugly but clean. A kitchenette in the corner with a mini-fridge, two-burner stove, and microwave. A porch that sagged philosophically under the weight of the years.

He set his bag down and stood in the middle of it for a moment.

The pull was so strong here it felt like standing next to a speaker — a low vibration in his sternum, a constant, insistent pressure pointing somewhere into the town beyond the window.

She was here. Somewhere in this tiny, unlikely place, she was here.

He sat on the edge of the bed and thought about what his mother had said. Go slowly. Build trust. Prove you’re safe.

The teaching job hadn’t been a lie, exactly. It had been an improvisation. But it was a good one. It kept him in town without explanation, gave him proximity without urgency. And if she was a student at that high school — if she was walking those halls five days a week —

Well. He’d find out soon enough.

He lay back on the lumpy mattress and let out a long, slow breath.

He was here. She was here.

He could wait a little longer.