THE HOLLOW WOLF

Dirt fills my mouth before it fills my lungs, and that's how I know I'm alive. You don't choke on soil in the ground. You just rot in it.

I claw upward. My nails split against roots and stone, but I don't stop, because some animal part of me understands that stopping means dying again, and once was already too many times. My fingers break the surface first. Then my hand. 

Then my head, gasping, spitting mud, screaming into open air that tastes like pine and frost and nothing I remember.

I drag myself out of the earth and lie there, chest heaving, staring up at a gray sky through black branches.

"No," I whisper. My voice comes out wrong. Too high. Too soft. Not mine.

I push myself onto my knees. My hands are shaking, and when I look down at them, they're shaking wrong — smaller knuckles, paler skin, a thin white scar across the left palm that I never had.

"What—" I start, and stop, because that's not my voice either.

There's a stream nearby, I can hear it, and I crawl toward the sound on hands and knees like something newborn. When I reach the water I look down and a stranger looks back up at me.

Dark red hair, tangled with mud. A narrow face. Eyes the wrong color — not gray, but something closer to violet-blue, wide and terrified.

"That's not me," I say to the water. "That is not me."

I press my palms against my cheeks, my throat, the collarbone visible above the torn edge of a dress I don't remember putting on. Everything is unfamiliar and everything responds to my touch anyway, warm and real and breathing.

"Mara." I say my own name out loud just to hear it, just to make sure it still belongs to somebody. "My name is Mara Quinn."

The forest doesn't answer. Nothing answers. I sit back on my heels in the mud and I let myself shake, because there's no one here to see it, no one to judge whether Mara Quinn is supposed to be strong right now or allowed to fall apart.

Four years. I remember four years ago. I remember a courtyard full of my own pack, my own family, watching in silence while I was marched out to die. I remember Cassian standing at the front of them, jaw locked, eyes like something carved out of stone, saying nothing while they took me.

I remember the moment it stopped. The dark that came after.

And now this. Mud and cold water and somebody else's face.

"Okay," I say, and my breath fogs in front of me. "Okay. Think."

I press my hand flat against my sternum and feel a heartbeat that isn't racing the way it should be for someone who just tore herself out of the ground. It's steady. Too steady. Like this body has done this before, or like whatever's inside it has already made peace with impossible things.

I stand. My legs almost give out, but I catch myself against the trunk of a birch tree, bark biting into my palm, and I stay upright.

The cold finally catches up to me. It creeps in through the torn dress, through skin that isn't mine, and settles somewhere deep in my chest. I wrap my arms around myself and force my legs to move, one slow step at a time, away from the hole in the ground that almost held me forever.

"Somebody put me there," I say, just to hear a voice, just to fill the silence with something other than my own ragged breathing. "Somebody dug that hole and put me in it and walked away."

The trees don't answer. They never do. But saying it out loud makes it feel less like a nightmare and more like a fact, something I can actually hold onto and use.

There's a bag half-buried a few feet from the hole I climbed out of — canvas, mud-stiff, forgotten. I dig through it with fingers that won't stop trembling and find a torn strip of paper tucked in an inside pocket. Ink bled soft from moisture, but I can still make out three words.

Selene Voss. Grimwood.

"Selene," I say the name slowly, testing the shape of it in my mouth. It doesn't feel like mine. It doesn't feel like anything, actually. Just sounds. Just letters someone else answered.

But it's the only name I've got besides my own, and my own got buried with the body they executed. Whoever put me in the ground wearing this face wanted me erased. I wanted whatever answers I had.

They should've made sure I stayed down.

A branch cracks somewhere behind me and every hair on my arms stands up at once. I spin, crouched low before I even decide to move, some old instinct taking over faster than thought.

Nothing. Just wind pushing through the trees, just the stream running cold over stone.

I press my hand to my chest again, feeling for something under my ribs I'm almost afraid to find — a low, familiar pull, an ache that isn't quite mine and isn't quite gone.

"Nyx," I whisper. "Are you there?"

Something stirs, faint, distant, like a voice heard through a wall. Not gone. Just quiet. Just as lost as I am, maybe, trying to find its way back into a body that used to be somebody else's.

I laugh, and it comes out broken, half a sob. "Good. Good, at least I'm not completely alone here."

I look down at the strip of paper again. Grimwood. That's where I am, then — Grimwood Territory, the wrong side of two different borders from where I actually belong. Rook Territory is east. Cassian is east.

My throat tightens at the thought of his name and I hate that it still does, after everything, after he stood there and let them take me without lifting a single finger to stop it.

"You don't get to still hurt," I tell myself, wiping mud from my cheek with the back of my hand. "Not for him. Not anymore."

But I already know that I'm lying. I felt it the second I said his name in my head — that same old pull, stitched somewhere under the new skin, under the wrong face, under four years of being dead.

Whoever did this to me — buried me under somebody else's name, wiped whatever truth I had left — they're going to answer for it. And there's only one place to start looking for answers about a murder I didn't commit.

The place where it happened.

I tuck the strip of paper into my sleeve, pull the torn dress tighter around my shoulders, and start walking east, toward Rook Territory, toward the man who watched them kill me and never said a word.

The paper trembles in my hand, and I fold it once, careful, like it might fall apart if I'm not gentle with it. It's the only proof I have that this body belonged to someone before I woke up inside it. Someone with a name. 

Someone who maybe knew exactly what I'm only starting to guess — that whoever wanted me gone isn't finished, and that dying once wasn't the end of their plan for me.

"I'm coming back," I say, and this time the words come out steadier, more like the woman I used to be before all of this. "Whatever you did to me, whoever you are — I'm coming back, and I'm going to find out why."

I make it maybe twenty steps before I hear it — a low growl, close, too close, rising out of the tree line to my left.

I freeze. Whatever's out there isn't human, and it isn't friendly, and I am standing in unclaimed woods wearing a stranger's body with no pack, no name that means anything, and no idea whether Selene Voss knew how to fight.

The growl comes again, closer.

I don't run. I don't know yet if I even can.