The Kidnap

Morning should have fixed it. That’s what mornings do—wash the night off, make the strange things look like dreams. The sky tried its best. Sunlight slid across the counter, turned the knife block into a small city with golden roofs. The necklace at my throat had cooled, quiet as if it hadn’t pulsed all night.

Mom stood at the sink, hands braced on the edge like the porcelain needed steadying. “Eat something,” she said, but she didn’t turn around.

I peeled an orange just to have something to do with my hands. “We talk now, right?”

“We do.” She dried her fingers and faced me. She looked like herself and not like herself—like Mom wearing a Mom mask a little crooked. “There are rules. Old ones. You were always going to hear them. I wanted you to hear them gently.”

“I’m very famously gentle,” I said. My voice sounded like someone else’s voice trying to sound like mine.

A sound cut through the morning—the softest scrape outside, like a shoe skipping a step. Mom’s head lifted. Every muscle in her went still in a way I’ve only ever seen on deer right before they run.

The necklace burned.

She moved faster than I’d ever seen her move. One hand grabbed mine; the other yanked open the pantry. From behind the flour tin she pulled a short blade in a plain leather sheath. Not dramatic, not movie—utilitarian. Promises of sharpness. She pressed it into my palm, and the weight felt familiar in a way that made no sense.

“Listen,” she said. Her voice had dropped low, deeper, something I’d never heard before—older. “If this goes sideways, you don’t argue, you don’t look back. You go to Selene.”

“What goes sideways?” The orange slid out of my hand and thumped on the floor, too bright.

Another sound. The front door clicked like someone tried the handle gently, politely, the way neighbors do when they forget which house is theirs. Except no neighbor smells like cold iron and wet fur and old leaves. The scent climbed through the house, sour at the edges. My mouth filled with a metallic taste.

“Basement,” Mom whispered, pushing me toward the back stairs.

The front door didn’t bother with pretending anymore. Wood split. A low growl swelled and vibrated in my bones, not sound so much as pressure. Mom stepped between me and the living room, blade bare, the silver edge catching light. She looked small and unarmored and terrifying.

“Clara,” she said without looking back. “Necklace.”

“It’s on,” I said, breath catching on the words.

“Good.” Her mouth softened for half a heartbeat. “Selene.”

The name wasn’t a word, exactly. It landed in the air and the air answered. The necklace went from warm to hot, a ring of heat that wasn’t burning. Light—no, not light, a bending—wavered around my edges. The kitchen room lurched sideways like the floorboats do on bad river days.

“Mom—”

“Go,” she said, and then everything folded.

I hit a chair with my hip and a desk with my knee and said something very un-angelic. The fluorescent buzz of Dad’s office hummed into focus, along with the smell of coffee that had been warm enough but just went cold. Papers. Pens. The old ficus in the corner pretending to be alive. The necklace cooled, but my skin still felt like it had been pressed under a hot stamp.

“Clara?” Miss Benny—Dad’s friend from Records—stood in the doorway with a stack of files clutched to her chest. Her lipstick was a red that could be seen from space. “Honey—how—how did you—? Are you alright?”

“I need my dad.” My voice shook, and I hated it. “Please.”

She softened like people do when they decide this is a story to be kind to. “He’s on patrol out by the ridge. Lot of calls came in last night—stray dogs, folks hearing things. He should be back by—” She glanced at the clock. “Soon.”

The word sat stupidly on the edge of a cliff.

“I have to go home.” I was moving before I finished the sentence. Miss Benny said something about waiting and about tea and about sitting down, but the hallway was already a tube of light and then the stairs and then the air outside—too sharp, too thin—and then streets that didn’t put themselves in the right order fast enough.

I don’t remember the run, just the stops. The places where my mind caught up to my body long enough to notice breath and pain. The necklace throbbed like a pace-maker. The house was too quiet when I reached it. The door hung open, one hinge pulled loose, wood splintered. The air inside was wrong, a cold that didn’t match the sun.

“Mom?” My voice went small and echoed back like someone else’s voice practicing fear.

She wasn’t in the kitchen. The pantry was open. The floor had a smear across it like something heavy had been dragged and then lifted. I followed the line down the hall and found her in the living room.

“Selene,” I breathed out, relief breaking over me so hard I had to catch the door frame. She knelt by the fireplace—wild hair, long skirt, bracelets up both arms like she always wore at Mom’s book club. Her hands shook.

“Oh, Clara.” Her face twisted, and she reached for me. “Thank the moon. Are you hurt? Where is the staff?”

The question landed wrong. Sharp and wrong. Like someone dropping a fork on tile.

“What?” I kept backing up and didn’t realize it until my shoulder hit the wall. “Why—why do you need—”

“Your mother told you everything, yes?” Selene pushed to her feet and stumbled, one leg dragging. “The staff is a beacon and a shield. We can’t let them have it, we can’t—”

“How do you know about the staff?” My voice came out small and stubborn. The necklace went hot again, a pulse that matched the flutter in my throat.

Selene’s gaze flicked to my chest, to the silver disk. For a second—half a second—her pupils stretched long and thin like a cat’s hit with light. “Clara,” she said slowly, carefully, like she was crossing a creek on slick rocks, “you have to give it to me, darling. Quickly.”

Every hair on my arms lifted. The room tightened; the smell shifted. The iron-cold-wet scent was back, layered with something sweet, like rotting flowers. I took another step sideways, toward the kitchen, toward the back door, toward any door—

A shadow slid across the hallway. The stranger stepped out of it, quiet and sudden as breath fogging glass.

Up close, he looked both older and younger than he had in the alley. Older because the set of his mouth said he’d chosen hard things before. Younger because for a split heartbeat his whole face softened when he saw me, like he’d found the thing he’d been sent to find.

“Clara,” he said. “Behind me.”

Selene’s head snapped toward him, mouth curling back from her teeth, and in the turn the light hit her wrong, and the wrong didn’t go away. Her skin seemed to pull too tight over her cheekbones, and her hair wasn’t hair for a blink but something dull and thick, and her eyes—her eyes weren’t eyes—

Steel flashed. The stranger’s blade was not like Mom’s; it was longer, a narrow arc, pale metal that drank light instead of spitting it. He moved like memory, no extra motion, no warning, and the thing wearing Selene’s face hissed—an animal sound and not—and leaped. He met it midair. The cut was clean, and the body hit the rug and un-made itself, skin sloughing, features smearing into something that didn’t want to be seen. A stink of old pennies and damp fur burst through the room.

I gagged. He didn’t look away until the last of the glamour burned off, ash-gray and greasy, and then he set the blade down very gently, like putting a child to bed.

“That wasn’t her,” he said, as if I could still hear anything. “I’m sorry.”

I nodded like that explained anything and like I might ever feel clean again.

He went to the window, nose lifting slightly, an inhale that sounded like a word I didn’t know how to spell. “They took your mother east,” he said. “Into the trees. They won’t harm her yet. They want you first.”

“For what?” The question came out shredded.

“To make a claim they have no right to.” He turned back to me, eyes catching on the necklace. “I’m Jasper.”

“I know,” I said before I could check the impulse. The name fit his mouth like it had been made for it.

Something quick lit his expression, half surprise, half something like relief. “Your father told you?”

“Some. Not enough.” I looked at the ash smear on the rug and immediately looked away. “Who—what—was that?”

“A Rogue under glamour. They can copy shape. Never scent.” His jaw tightened. “They’re bolder than they were last season.”

Season. Like this was weather. Like they came the way winter comes, inevitable and hungry.

“Where’s the staff?” he asked, and the word didn’t clang the way it had a minute ago.

“In my room,” I said. “I left it—”

“Show me.” He was already moving as if the house had been mapped into his muscles. We climbed the hall. I grabbed the staff from where it stood against my dresser, and my fingers shook. When he saw it, he let out a breath I didn’t know he’d been holding.

“Good.” He touched the carved crescent and flinched like it bit him. “It knows you. That’s good.”

“That’s a lot,” I said, somewhere between laugh and cry.

He nodded once, a small, almost shy gesture that didn’t match the part of him holding the blade. “We need to leave.”

“Leave where?”

“Where they can’t cross a threshold without paying for it.” He glanced toward the window, eyes unfocusing in that wolfish way. “The Holdfast.”

A floorboard downstairs complained. Not a house settling sound—footsteps. More than one. The smell hit us a breath later, and my throat closed. The necklace flared hot enough to hurt.

“Back,” Jasper murmured, and then, very softly, “Run.”

We ran.

The house blurred into corners and doorframes. The back steps, the yard, the fence that my jeans caught on for one spinning heartbeat—Jasper lifted me down like I weighed less than the air. We cut through the neighbor’s garden, knocked over a plastic flamingo that ricocheted into a rain barrel, and hit the alley behind the garage rows, breath coming in knifed-out pulls. Howls rose behind us, closer than they had any right to be at noon, and my body told me that noon had nothing to do with it.

“Clara,” Jasper said without turning, “who do you trust that isn’t here?”

The question was a knife in a softer way. “James.”

“Go.”

“The Rogues—”

“They followed your scent to your house.” His voice stayed calm but his fingers flexed on the hilt. “They’ll follow it to your friend if you stand still. Move.”

I moved. It wasn’t thought; it was instinct. I cut right, shoes skidding gravel, the staff banging my thigh. Jasper peeled left, drawing the smell like a stripe of lightning—if they tracked him they’d track teeth and iron and moonlight. He wanted them off me. I should have argued. I didn’t. I ran to James.

Mrs. Juliet opened the door with flour on her hands, eyes crinkling. “Birthday girl,” she said, and I almost collapsed into the way she said it. The smell of baking—sugar and vanilla—tried to overwrite the smell in my lungs.

“Is James—”

“Upstairs,” she said, already turning, “pretending he’s studying. You want juice? Tea? I have—”

A sound strangled the sentence. A high scrape on the roof. The chandelier tinkled like someone had tapped the crystals with a spoon. Every nerve in me bristled.

“Mrs. Juliet,” I said, and the way I said her name made her face change. “We need to—”

The back window exploded. Not shattered. Exploded—glass in, wood splintering out, a dark shape folding itself through the opening with dreadful grace. Another at the kitchen door. Another at the top of the stairs, the hall light throwing their shadows too long.

“What are you—” Mrs. Juliet began, and then her eyes went wide with a fright I will spend years trying not to remember.

I grabbed her hand and pulled; she pulled back to grab the phone; the phone clattered across tile. The first Rogue dropped low, shoulders rolling under skin like a wave under sand. Where the face should have been wolf or human, it was both and neither—teeth too long, eyes too bright, a wrongness stitched of hunger and anger and something empty underneath.

“James!” I screamed. “Run!”

He came out onto the landing, saw, and didn’t freeze. Bless him, he didn’t freeze. He moved toward the attic crawlspace like we’d practiced for storms, and he grabbed his mom’s arm and shoved her ahead, and I loved him so much in that second that it cracked something open in me.

The first Rogue lunged.

The necklace burned. The staff moved. I don’t remember deciding. The wood hummed, old and pleased, symbols flaring like they’d been written in light not ink. I swung badly—too wide, too high—and the crescent head caught the Rogue across the shoulder. It snarled, recoiled, and where the staff had touched, skin hissed and went black as if frost-burnt.

Second Rogue. Third. This wasn’t a fight you win with one good swing. I was a girl with shaking knees holding an heirloom she barely understood. They were built for tearing.

A shape blurred through the kitchen like a storm finally hitting. Jasper. He hit the first Rogue mid-lunge; his blade sang and then did not sing because it was busy being inside something. A second fell, kicking, and Jasper’s boot pinned its throat the way you pin a snake that’s still deciding whether to be dead. “Up!” he barked, and James hauled his mother toward the attic door, shoving as the trap ladder stuck, shoving again, swearing, finally getting it.

A third Rogue came out of the hall and dove for me, and I did not step back. The staff found the arc by itself, or something in me found it, I don’t know. The crescent smashed its snout sideways and teeth clacked shut on air. My arms shook with the impact. I pivoted, clumsy, almost fell, didn’t. The Rogue reared, and then a fourth took its place, and a fifth, and this was math we could not out-count.

“Clara—” Jasper’s voice and then a sound like metal hitting bone and then nothing but noise.

“Go!” Mrs. Juliet sobbed from the hatch. “Clara, baby, go!”

Another window shattered—to the left this time, near the dining room—and the house jumped under my feet. I tried to grab James’s hand and missed it by a finger. He looked at me, eyes huge, and mouthed something I didn’t catch, and then there was too much blood and too much not-blood and the noise stuttered into silence and then back into too loud again.

I remember fragments. Jasper’s blade like a white curve. My breath making a thin, wheezing sound like a teakettle. The staff weight, absolute. The smell, oh God, the smell. And after—after there was only one voice in the room, Jasper’s, saying my name like he was coaxing me back from under a river.

“Clara.” He had one hand on my shoulder and one hand on my wrist, and he was careful with both like I was glass he wanted to carry a long way. “Look at me.”

“I—” My mouth was full of cotton. “James—”

His jaw worked. There are things even the brave don’t say, not in the moment. His eyes flicked up toward the hatch and then away quickly. “We have to move.”

“I can’t.” It came out small. “I can’t leave them.”

“You can and you will.” He didn’t raise his voice. Somehow that made it firmer. “If you stay, you hand yourself to the man who sent this— you give him exactly what he crossed your threshold to take.”

“The man—” I swallowed. The name I didn’t know sat at the back of my tongue like a seed. “Who?”

“Ronan,” Jasper said, like spitting out a thorn. “Alpha of the Broken Pine. He wants a bloodline he didn’t earn.”

A howl rose outside, close. Jasper’s head turned a fraction toward it, calculating the way men do in math class, very fast.

“Clara,” he said again. “Choose. Live now. Mourn later.”

I hate choices that are really just one choice wearing a costume. I nodded, once. He pulled me, and I let him, and the house fell away behind us, and with it the last hard shape of how yesterday had looked.

We ran until the streets straightened themselves into the familiar strip past the school. The halls were dim and hollow, echoes doubling back. We cut through the side door that loses its latch when it rains. The gym smelled like dust and lemons and all the P.E. classes no one ever wanted to take. I folded onto the bottom row of the bleachers and put my head in my hands and tried, very quietly, to stop shaking.

Jasper stood at the door, listening. His back looked breakable and unbreakable at the same time.

Footsteps clicked on the tile in the hall. Not hurried. Too measured. A figure slid into the doorway with a smile welded on. “There you are,” he said warmly. “Jasper. I’ve been looking everywhere.”

Everything in Jasper went still, and in the stillness I could see the wolf under his skin the way you sometimes see lightning behind clouds. “Jason?” he said, but not like a greeting, like a question you ask when you already know the answer.

“Missed you,” the boy said, and his grin showed one tooth too many.

It happened in the space between breath and breath. Jasper moved. The blade moved. The boy’s face peeled like paper, not blood, not scream—just a ripple, and then the glamour sloughed away, and the Rogue under it snapped and writhed and then lay very quiet.

I choked. “Is the real Jason—?”

“Alive,” Jasper said, curt and certain. “With Vivian, sweeping the south ridge.” He wiped the blade on a rag he pulled from a pocket that hadn’t been there when I looked earlier. “He’ll like you. He won’t admit it.”

“Your friends have terrible timing,” I said, because my mouth doesn’t know how to stop when my heart is breaking.

Jasper’s mouth shifted, almost a smile, then didn’t quite get there. “They’ll meet us at the Holdfast.”

“What is that?” I sounded like I was five asking why the sky is blue.

“A place that remembers its promises.” He offered a hand. “You’ll be safe there. Safe-ish.”

“Is my mother—” The question tasted like rust.

“She’s alive,” he said. “Ronan will keep her breathing as long as he thinks he can trade her for you. He wants the rite done under the Blood Moon. Three nights.”

“Three,” I repeated, and the number was too small to hold all the things that had to fit inside it. “That’s not enough.”

“It never is,” he said, not unkindly.

We left by the north door. The sky had gone thin with late afternoon already, clouds dragging shadows across the field. The woods were a wall. The necklace warmed, not warning this time, just… present, like a hand on my shoulder steadying without asking for thanks.

“Clara,” Jasper said as we reached the fence line. He didn’t touch me, but the space between us felt held. “They will lie to you. With faces. With voices. With things you want to hear. There is one thing they can’t borrow.”

“What?”

“Scent,” he said simply. “Trust your nose over your eyes. If something looks right but smells wrong, it’s wrong.”

“That’s a terrible metaphor for dating,” I said, because that’s who I am even now.

“You won’t be dating anyone for a while,” he said, deadpan, and I almost laughed, which felt like treason and medicine.

We slipped under the fence where it had buckled. The trees took us in and the town let us go, and the light changed the way light changes under pines—thinner but also thicker, filtered and full. The path wasn’t a path. It was a way you know if you’re meant to know it. The staff hummed in my hand, quiet as a cat.

I looked back once. Rooflines. A scrap of blue tarp on a neighbor’s shed. The line of road that brought you home on days you were late and didn’t want to be. I thought about Mrs. Juliet’s flour hands and James’s eyes and a blade that sang and stopped singing, and something inside me tightened and also steadied.

“Don’t,” Jasper said gently, not looking back. “Part of the glamour is grief that sticks and blinds.”

“I’m not glamorous enough for that,” I said, and he huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh if the day had been kinder.

We walked until the air went colder without going colder, like stepping from room to room in a house where a door stays open. A river’s hiss came up on the left. Jasper touched the necklace through my shirt and the metal warmed, answering, and somewhere far above a flock of birds lifted and turned in one mind.

“The Holdfast is over the next rise,” he said. “Once we cross, they can’t scent you as easy. We’ll talk about training. About shifting. About what your body will want and what you can ask of it. Vivian will feed you and make terrible jokes. Jason will scowl. You will sleep, some, even if you don’t think you will.”

“And my mother?”

He didn’t lie. He didn’t promise things not his to promise. “We’ll take her back.”

I believed him, because the other option was to lay down in the leaves and let the forest cover me over, and I am not that girl. Not now. Maybe never was.

The ridge rose. The trees leaned in, old and listening. Somewhere, far behind us, the town went on pretending at normal, and somewhere ahead a place that remembered its promises breathed once, as if it had been holding a breath just for me.

Three nights. That’s what the world had given us. It wasn’t enough. It would have to be.

I tightened my grip on the staff. The necklace throbbed, answering. Jasper glanced at me, and for a heartbeat we were two people in a clearing between before and after, and the wind moved and so did we, forward, into whatever the shadows of the Alpha had been waiting to show me.