Chapter 2

Death was still coming for me.

I could feel it moving through this body — fast, cold, certain — the same way it had moved through my own an unknown number of minutes ago, on the far side of a closed gate. Then Nyra was there.

I can heal this much. My wolf's voice came thin, already fading. Hold still.

Warmth spread out from the center of me. The wrists knitted closed. The water went on darkening around my knees, but the bleeding stopped, and somewhere under my ribs I felt Nyra fold herself down small and go quiet. She had spent everything she had left to keep this borrowed body breathing. Then she slept, and I was alone in it.

I got my hands on the rim of the tub and pulled.

It was harder than it should have been. My arms shook. I came over the edge onto cold tile on my hands and knees and stayed there a moment, dragging in great ragged pulls of air — because breathing was suddenly a thing I had to think about again.

I made myself stand. There was a mirror.

The face in it was not mine. Young — sixteen, maybe seventeen. Thin to the point of breaking, brown hair plastered dark against a pale throat, two eyes far too large for how little was left behind them.

Armies had once answered my call. Three kings had died trying to keep my crown from me. I looked at this stranger's face and did not recognize one line of it.

Your mission is not finished. You will have another chance.

The Moon Goddess had kept her word, in her way. I had died. And I had woken somewhere else, inside someone else — alive again in a girl who was not me.

A knock. Three soft raps against the door.

"Selah?" A woman's voice, warm and worried. "You've been in there so long, sweetheart. Are you all right?"

Selah. The name landed, and her memories came pouring in with it — not mine, hers, all at once, like water into a dry riverbed.

"I fell asleep," I said. The voice that came out of me was light and young. "Sorry. I'll be right out."

I knew her now. All of her.

Selah Ellowen. Sixteen. Raised by an omega mother named Helen, who loved her fiercely and had no idea what school had done to her daughter.

I drained the water. I scrubbed the tile clean and wound the thin wrists in a towel so she would never have to see them. Then I followed Selah's memory down a short hall to a small bedroom that was, it seemed, mine now.

It was full of things I had no name for.

A hot bath meant an hour of hauling and boiling in my time. Here it came from the wall as though it were nothing.

I was more tired than I had ever been. I lay back, and I was gone before I chose to be.

I dreamed of him.

Valerius, in the dark behind the gate, opening his eyes. I felt it the way you feel a rope in your hands begin to slip — one strand, then another. The seal I had died to set was loosening.

I woke with my heart slamming and the certainty already fixed in me. That was no ordinary dream. It was a warning. He was coming back, and the peace I had bought with my life had an expiry date I could not yet read.

Morning light. A new day, and work to do.

I found Helen in the kitchen. She was small and worn through, with the same too-large eyes her daughter had, and when she saw me her whole face opened up.

"You're up early." She reached me before I could step back and smoothed my hair down at the crown, tucking a loose strand behind my ear as if I were still small. Then she pressed a ten-dollar bill into my palm. "Buy yourself something to eat today. Please. You're all bones."

I had lost my own mother at six. No one had touched my hair like that in two hundred years, and I did not know what to do with my hands or my face.

"Thank you," I said. I meant it, and I left before she could see how much.

The school was called Silvermoon Academy.

Two great stone pillars flanked the gate, each carved with the totem of a running wolf. Beyond them a road climbed under ancient oaks toward a black building half-lost in morning mist. Young wolves streamed past me, laughing, shoving, groaning about homework — a whole generation that had never heard a war horn, never buried a pack-mate, never gone hungry through a siege winter.

I stopped and watched them a moment.

And for the first time, I understood that maybe this was what I had fought for.

"Well. Look who actually showed up."

The voice cut across the courtyard, sharp and delighted with itself. A blonde girl planted herself in my path. Behind her stood a tall boy, dark-haired and bored, handsome in the careless way of someone who had never once had to be anything else.

Selah's memory offered up the name before I asked for it. Delilah Corvayne. An alpha's daughter. The one who had spent a year teaching a child to want to die.

"I honestly thought you'd be too ashamed to come in," Delilah said, pitching it loud for the crowd already gathering. "After that little diary of yours. Your big Callan love-confession." She wrinkled her nose. "God. It was so, so gross."

I looked at her.

"Sorry," I said. "Who is Callan? I don't remember writing any diary."